Helpless people must find something to think about

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

I guess that I am not surprised that after the initial reporting on Newtown, the next topic was gun control,  Never waste a tragedy.  While we should pray for the victims and their families, including the Lanza family, we will (if we read the news) continue to be bombarded by stories on gun control.

My initial observations lead me not to guns but to SSRI ((selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat, ), fluoxetine/Prozac, sertraline/Zoloft, and venlafaxine/Effexor XR) and psychiatry. Antidepressants and Violence.  It appears that most of the recent mass shootings have a strange connection to individuals that are in some way affected.  In Newtown, the evil is linked to guns, goths, and video games.  Pretty quick for the media to pick that up, ya think?

I haven’t heard recently about Aurora, CO.  What was the real story on James Holmes? 

Both shooters have been described as bright and into video games.  Both appear affected in some way.  I bet that SSRI’s will be the common link.  In time we will probably find out that it was a ‘Fast & Furious’ operation.  By the way, how is it that we haven’t heard about the US Government involved in Operation Fast & Furious where 1,000 guns walked and 48,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered in gun related drug violence.  CNN

We’re Number one!

While the US leads in gun ownership and 60 percent of U.S. homicides occur using a firearm, the US is ranked 26 in the world. Sounds pretty high but, most gun crime is criminal to criminal.  In other gun-permeated countries, such as Finland (number 8 at 45.3 guns per 100 people), only about 19 percent of homicides involve a firearm.

Number of guns per capita.  Click on graphic for link to WP.

Gun related homicide by country.  Click on graphic for link to WP.

If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
Dalai Lama XIV

A few excerpts from Daniel Greenfield’s post Guns, Guns, Guns…

Mass death isn't the issue. After September 11, the same righteous folks calling for the immediate necessity of gun control were not talking about banning planes or Saudis, they were quoting statistics about how many more people die of car accidents each year than are killed by terrorists. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; three thousand deaths can always be minimized by comparing them to some even larger statistic.

The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.

We'll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We'll never know how many were killed by Obama's regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.

Daniel Greenfield - Sultan Knish

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
Jeff Cooper

And now from a conservative, Jay Trope

Whenever I discuss or argue about limited government, I try and get back to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. The Commonwealth that Hobbes described is about as bare bones a government as any modern person can justify, so it's usually a good place to start the conversation. To give an unsatisfactory summation: the primary role of the Commonwealth (the sovereign government we all give some of our freedom to) is to end the state of war that is man's natural state. Governments exist to create peace. They prevent our individual freedoms from infringing on one another, and preserve our right to live free from harm.

Our governments state and federal, despite all of their resources and power, are abjectly failing to do this. What we're trying right now isn't working. We have exceptionally high gun ownership rates in this country. We have stellar law enforcement, a powerful and talented FBI, and the most powerful military in the world: combined expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the name of keeping our citizens safe. And. They. Fail.

I don't believe we should ban guns. But the current situation is untenable. We simply cannot forge ahead without a reasonable legal framework to try and prevent criminals and killers from acquiring weapons. Will that prevent some innocent, good-hearted individuals with crazy-eyes from getting the guns they love? I'm sure it will. The legislation will be controversial, difficult to define, and will likely be only marginally effective, but it is a desperate, critical need.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/20847/the-conservative-case-for-gun-control-in-america

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.
Alan M. Dershowitz

And a final argument

The effect of the increasing ease with which Americans can buy ever more deadly weapons is also obvious. Over the past few decades, crime has been declining, except in one category. In the decade since 2000, violent-crime rates have fallen by 20%, aggravated assault by 21%, motor-vehicle theft by 44.5% and nonfirearm homicides by 22%. But the number of firearm homicides is essentially unchanged. What can explain this anomaly except easier access to guns?

Confronted with this blindingly obvious causal connection, otherwise intelligent people close their eyes. Denouncing any effort to control guns, George Will explained on ABC News that he had "a tragic view of life, which is that ... however meticulously you draft whatever statute you wind up passing, the world is going to remain a broken place, and things like this are going to happen." I don't recall Will responding to, say, the 9/11 attacks--or any other law-and-order issue for that matter--with a "things happen" sentiment.

The other argument against any serious gun control is that it's unconstitutional, an attempt to undo American history. In fact, something close to the opposite is true.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021998173

Now let’s look at some facts:

90% of all violent crime in the U.S. does not involve any gun of any type.

1998 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

Less than 1% of all guns will ever be used in the commission of any type of crime (much less violent crime).

FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, 1994

Two-thirds of the people that die each year from gunfire are criminals shooting other criminals.

FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, 1994

The National Research Council, the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences, claims to have found "no credible evidence" either supporting or disproving Lott's thesis [that concealed carry reduces crime]. However, James Q. Wilson wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that all of the Committee's own estimates confirmed Lott's finding that right-to-carry laws had decreased the murder rate and most of Lott's statistical analysis was inscrutable and survive virtually every reanalysis done by the committee. On the Ayres and Donohue hybrid model showing more guns-more crime, the NAS panel stated: "The committee takes no position on whether the hybrid model provides a correct description of crime levels or the effects of right-to-carry laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States

The basic premise of the gun control movement, that easy access to guns causes higher crime, is contradicted by the facts, by history and by reason.

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/gun-control-myths-realities

It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.
Fred Rogers

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

Joseph Stalin