From: Thomas A Chandler, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thomas Sowell The Million Lies March http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE "MILLION MOMS MARCH" for more gun control laws was not a march, nor were there a million moms. But these were only the first of the lies from that event - - and by no means the worst. Virtually every argument for more gun control laws is either based on lies or is grossly misleading. First, there is the argument that our murder rates are higher than in some other countries because those other countries have stronger gun control laws. There are countries with both higher murder rates and lower murder rates than ours. In both cases, some countries have stronger gun control laws than we do and others have weaker gun control laws. The phony appearance of a correlation is created by cherry picking which countries to use as examples. Those who are advocating more gun control laws cite the countries with stronger gun control laws and lower murder rates, such as Canada or Britain. But there are other countries with tougher gun control laws than ours, and whose murder rates are several times what ours are -- Brazil and Russia, for example. But you are never going to hear about those countries from gun control advocates. John Lott of Yale University, who has done more empirical studies of guns and violent crime rates than anybody else, points out that Israel has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, and yet its murder rate is lower than that of Canada. But far fewer people will hear the conclusions of this scholar, who has researched the subject for years, than will hear the ignorant emotional outbursts of Rosie O'Donnell. The biggest emotional argument for gun control is the shooting of children. Many sincere people are for gun control for this reason. But leaders of the gun control movement have twisted the facts beyond recognition for political effect. When statistics are thrown around about how many children are shot or killed by guns, we conjure up images of little kids who accidentally kill themselves or others with loaded guns that they find around the house. But actual gun deaths among people under 20 are far more often among gangs of teenage hoodlums, who shoot it out over turf or drugs or other things. Such deliberate killings are not going to be stopped by child locks. What will be stopped by child locks and various other impediments to using guns will be self-defense. Some people who have received death threats, and then applied for a gun permit, have been killed during the waiting period. This is only one of the ways in which gun laws restrict only law-abiding citizens. Gun control advocates are forever painting a picture of guns being dangerous to family members or close friends, when in fact even murders of people who know each other are far more likely to involve criminals who know each other -- including rival gang members -- or criminals who happen to know law-abiding citizens, even if they are not friends or relatives. The statistics can even include a taxi driver shot by someone he has "known" for a few minutes after taking him into his cab. Facts are what matter. Yet there is remarkably little interest in the hard facts about this life-and-death issue, either by politicians or by the media. Emotional outbursts or melodrama are what the media want and votes are what politicians want. If there are more uninformed or misinformed voters, then these are the ones the politicians will play to. The fact is that communities which have allowed law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms have experienced a reduction in shootings -- not an increase. Conversely, state laws forcing law-abiding citizens to store their weapons unloaded, or with various other restrictions, have been followed by increases in violent crime -- not decreases, as predicted. Even when the national crime rate has been going down, states imposing such restrictions on guns have seen violent crime increase. What has actually happened has been the direct opposite of what the gun controllers claimed would happen. Sincere people may believe gun control theories and bogus claims, but the leaders of the movement know better. They have their own political agendas. People who get all their information from the TV tube may well get the impression that the only reason for anyone to be against gun control is the influence of the National Rifle Association. Yet hard data show that, on net balance, gun control costs more lives than it saves. That is why John Lott titled his book, "More Guns, Less Crime." MADD: Moms Against Data and Deduction By Ann Coulter A few weeks ago, while taping a TV pilot hosted by John Stossell, I found myself sitting between a housewife for gun control and the incomparable John Lott, author of the book, "More Guns, Less Crime." During a break, the gun control advocate advised as how her elderly mother had recently purchased a handgun. This development horrified her because she said she "knew" a criminal would wrest control of the gun and use it against her mother someday. Lott, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA, gamely told the woman that she needn't worry, that his studies showed that guns used defensively in crimes are turned against their owners less than one percent of the time. Lott's facts 'challenged' As Lott has pointed out on similar occasions, the statistics are these: "98 percent of the time when people use guns defensively, simply brandishing a gun is sufficient to cause a criminal to break off an attack. In less than 2 percent of the time is the gun fired, and most of those -- about three-quarters of those -- are warning shots." The housewife retorted -- and I quote: "Well that's not my opinion." Somehow, the economics and law departments of UCLA, University of Chicago, and Yale University had not prepared Prof. Lott for dazzling logic like that: My opinion is different from the facts. Now we have an entire movement of babbling idiots demanding that their opinions be accorded equal standing with facts on the basis of their stunning achievement of having borne children. Self-described "Moms" are using their exalted stations to march on Washington and browbeat the nation into adopting gun control laws that are not only unconstitutional (as if anyone cares about that), but will inevitably lead to more violence against the innocent. But don't question their logic or facts -- they're moms. Liberals use motherhood like an enfeebled child who hits his siblings and then calls on his parents to protect him when they retaliate. "Mom" demands our guns, but when you try to argue the facts with her, she holds up a hand up to hush you: Talk to the womb. Being a "Mom" means never having to say you're sentient. The Moms' web page begins the analysis with this observation: "We, the mothers, know that life is the first inalienable right promised by our Constitution." In point of fact, the Constitution says nothing about an inalienable right to life or anything else. It's the Declaration of Independence that proclaims, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But these are "moms." Don't tell them what the Constitution says. Their opinion is "different." Mom's startling discovery The "Moms" have a flair for expressing their tenuous grasp of the obvious with great fanfare. They say the march is dedicated to "educating our children and our country about the life-threatening danger of guns." Perhaps you were hoping for some fact supporting the Moms' theory that the gun restrictions they propose would reduce the "danger of guns." They have none. There is none, and that's not even what they mean. What they mean by "educating" citizens about the "danger of guns" is that they plan to unveil their startling discovery that -- hang on to your seats here -- guns can kill people! Uh, yeah. We know that. That's why we like them. Guns wouldn't be much help in the face of a dangerous predator if all they did were to shoot a spray of flowers. Teddy bears vs. guns The organizers of the Million Mom March have been loudly claiming that guns are the leading cause of accidental death for children, after cars. Mom Gail Thorson, whose son was shot and badly wounded by a lone gunman (in a state that unfortunately does not permit citizens to carry concealed handguns) proclaimed: "There are four categories of regulations for teddy bears and none for guns." Ironic, huh? Except that, it turns out, in the harsh light of facts, gun accidents do not even come close to being the leading cause of death for children. In fact, teddy bears and other toys actually do kill more children every year than gun accidents do. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, toys typically account for over 140,000 injuries and a minimum of 22 deaths each year. (Teddy bears -- with their swallowable button eyes, and strangling bow ties -- are a particular menace.) Meanwhile, gun accidents claimed the lives of 20 children under the age of five in 1997 -- the latest year for which data is available. To put that in perspective, more children under the age of five die every year drowning in buckets. I didn't even know it was possible to drown in a bucket. Clearly, what we really need is a march on Washington to educate "children and our country" about the life-threatening danger of buckets. To pump up the numbers of children killed in gun accidents, gun control advocates include "children" aged 15-19, which of course, includes gang members, drug mules and common criminals. But even including "children" who are old enough to be gang members, guns still account for only 2 percent of all accidental deaths. Here are some random comparisons of accidental deaths for all "children" under the age of 20: Cars -- 8,113 deaths Drowning -- 1,269 deaths Smoke and fire -- 723 deaths Mechanical suffocation -- 529 deaths Guns -- 306 deaths The Moms further informed the New York Times that guns "remain the only consumer product that is not federally regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission." Go out right now and try to buy a gun and a teddy bear and see which you think is easier. Moreover, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission can't even test all the toys on the market (of the approximately 150,000 toys that come out on the market each year, they test about 900) much less all products. Gun-owners test guns, and they have been getting safer all the time. Since 1945, the total supply of guns has more than doubled, while the rate of fatal gun accidents has fallen by an astounding two-thirds. There are roughly 240 million guns in the country and the total number of non-fatal gun injuries is about 2,000 per year. Toy injuries: over 140,000 a year. Guns: 2,000. Evidently, the government is not regulating teddy bears tightly enough. One of the Mom marchers was quoted in the New York Times as saying: "There is no reason for anyone to own a handgun" -- in contradistinction, apparently, to teddy bears and water buckets. Alluding to the voting power of the stupid, she said, "I hope the march will get women to find out which of their legislators supports gun control. And then they need to vote for them. I hope the NRA is terrified." I wouldn't be losing much sleep over the Moms' electoral threat if I were a legislator. The Moms may also have their own "opinions" about what day the election is, an opinion different from the facts. Mona Charen Moms yes, gun control no http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IT MAY PERHAPS SOUND STRANGE coming from a conservative, but I am somewhat cheered by the Mother's Day Million Mom rally on the mall. Though many of my conservative brethren (sisteren?) were predicting a disappointing turnout, I was not surprised when they turned out to be wrong. The march had gotten women's attention -- which is no small accomplishment in this time of political disengagement. Callers to Dr. Laura's radio program mentioned it. So did fellow mothers from my son's preschool class. And a synagogue friend mentioned on Saturday that she had gotten into an argument about it the previous week. So I suspected that a great many moms would show up. Estimates of the crowd's size ranged from 500,000 to 750,000, and there were satellite rallies in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and other cities. There was plenty of teeth-grinding fodder in the speeches, along with a liberal amount of gratuitous NRA bashing. And yet I'm glad they came, even though I believe their solution cannot possibly succeed. I'm glad they came because each new shooting in a previously sacrosanct place -- a high school, a first-grade classroom, a preschool (what next a hospital nursery?) -- has left me feeling frightened, horrified and impotent. And this march signifies that millions of other Americans feel the same. The gun control that they propose -- registration and licensing -- is hardly the "controlled burn of the Second Amendment" decried by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre. But neither is it the answer to what ails America. So while I applaud their concern, I fear that in gun control the Million Moms have chosen the wrong horse to ride. Let's start with the earnest Rosie O'Donnell. She radiates sincerity. She has some facts at her command. And yet, when Cokie Roberts asked about Paramount's role in producing entertainment that glorifies violence, O'Donnell stashed her halo and resorted to a staunch defense of the industry that butters her bread. People all over the world see our movies, she countered, but suffer nowhere near the level of gun violence we do. So it's the guns. <Picture>Rowdy Rosie screaming obscenities Yet O'Donnell does not explain why this nation, which has always had ready access to guns, did not suffer the kind of gun violence it now does 50 or 75 years ago. Most men over 50 can recall learning to shoot when they were barely into adolescence. Yet they would no more have taken a gun to school and shot their classmates than they would have gone to school naked. Besides, while O'Donnell and other advocates of gun control insist that they seek only to deny "bad guys" access to guns, their reforms would only inconvenience the law-abiding. If gun controls really worked, that inconvenience would be well worth it. But the data suggest that they don't work. In fact, the opposite is the case. The only sort of gun law that seems to inhibit violence is the "concealed carry" law. John R. Lott Jr., an economist at the University of Chicago Law School, did a longitudinal study of all 3,054 counties in the United States between 1977 and 1994. He looked at the whole panoply of responses to violence, including mandatory sentences for gun crimes, gun registration, education and so on. His conclusion was that only concealed carry laws produced a demonstrable reduction in crime. "When state concealed-carry handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell by 5 percent and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent," he writes. And concealed carry states have not experienced random shoot-outs over fender benders. Most gun owners are entirely responsible. Do I wish America had never stockpiled millions upon millions of guns in the first place? Yes. Do I wish it were possible to keep guns from criminals through licensing and registration? Emphatically yes. But public policy cannot be based on wishes. The key to Columbine and the other acts of savagery in modern America is, to borrow a Vietnam-era phrase, a matter of "hearts and minds," not guns. We have a huge job of soul-searching to do as a nation. Is it the flaccid morality we've preached? Is it the entertainment we permit? Is it the collapse of the family? Is it the sunset of the traditional, religious understanding of life? These are not answers. But they seem good places to start. <Picture> Ann Coulter For womb the bell tolls http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE LAST TIME liberal women got the idea to use their wombs as an argument for gun control, Representatives Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., Nita M. Lowey, D-N.Y., and Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., were uttering such prattle as "women find they have a maternal instinct" for gun control. A reporter for The New York Times observed at the time that the congresswomen "seem(ed) to miss the irony that the same political party that claimed ownership of the position that women could be more than mothers is, in this instance, casting them primarily in that role." The Million Mom March (which infected the nation's capital on Sunday) was poised to set women's workplace gains back about 100 years. (The Moms' Web page adorably notes that the time for planning this event was nine months -- and "(a)s a mother, I know what can be created in this amount of time.") I'm all for motherhood, but as Bill Maher, host of "Politically Incorrect," is forever pointing out, it's not that hard to become a parent. (In fact, it is because having children can be accomplished by the weak-minded and incompetent that Maher is constantly lobbying for a licensing requirement for parenthood.) But somehow, merely the status of being a "mom" is supposed to trump facts and linear thinking. That was the theme of the Million Mom March: I don't need a brain -- I've got a womb. The Moms' Web page idiotically explains: "While we acknowledge that guns may be necessary for hunting, law enforcement and national security, the proliferation of firearms intended for one purpose only -- killing another human being -- has become untenable." It's sporting of them to allow the military and cops to have guns and all, but -- how does one put this? -- the reason the military and police have guns is precisely because their guns are intended for "killing another human being." That's why cops and soldiers carry guns, rather than, say, daisies. (And just for the record, a gun that can kill a deer can surely kill a human, too.) The fact that guns can kill another human being is the whole point. That's why they're so darn good at deterring violent criminals. By analyzing 18 years of data for more than 3,000 counties, the inestimable professor John Lott found that violent crime drops significantly when citizens are permitted to carry concealed guns. The greatest beneficiaries of concealed carry laws -- whether they personally choose to carry -- are women and the elderly. Economist David Friedman explained the economic theory supporting the statistics in his book "Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life." (Of course, Friedman is not a "mom," only an economist, so take his crazy linear thinking with a grain of salt.) Friedman begins by accepting the hysterical, counterfactual claims of the anti-gun crowd that 90 percent of the time criminals will wrest guns from law-abiding citizens (which, for the record, is false). "Suppose," he says, "one little old lady in 10 carries a gun. Suppose that one in 10 of those, if attacked by a mugger, succeeds in killing the mugger instead of being killed by him -- or shooting herself in the foot." Even though the mugger will come out better on average than the little old lady, Friedman notes that "also on average, every hundred muggings produce one dead mugger." Mugging becomes an unprofitable profession because "not many little old ladies carry enough money to justify one chance in a hundred of being killed." Thus, even on implausible anti-gun assumptions, muggings will decline because muggers will have "rationally sought safer professions." Indeed, without a gun, crime victims may as well take the advice of Peter Shields, former head of Handgun Control Inc., who recommends that women faced with a rapist or robber "give them what they want." Maybe it's my womb talking, but I'm tempted to say, I don't care what the statistics are; I'm not sitting back and taking it. As luck would have it, the statistics do not support passivity in the face of a criminal assault. As John Lott has pointed out, studies purporting to show that women are more likely to be injured in a crime if they resist do so only by lumping all forms of "resistance" together, from bare-knuckled fighting to brandishing a gun. The most dangerous action a woman can take when faced with a criminal is to resist with her fists: That tends to annoy violent criminals, and the woman will very likely be seriously injured. But a woman who takes the advice of Handgun Control Inc. and passively submits is 2.5 times more likely to be injured than a woman who resists with a gun. So if you don't want to lie back and enjoy it, get a gun. Otherwise you may never become a mom. -------[Cybershooters contacts]-------- Editor: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website & subscription info: www.cybershooters.org
