Tell the Truth About 'Gun Violence' Numbers

One would get the impression listening to gun control advocates or, indeed, to President Obama and those Democrats vying to succeed him that the United States is in the midst of an epidemic of violence; awash in blood with murderers and mass killers roaming the streets carrying guns they've bought at gun shows, over the Internet or from crazed neighbors. In fact, many Americans share this view. A recent Pew poll asked respondents if they believe the U.S. homicide rate has gone up or down over the last twenty years. Fifty-six percent of those polled said it has gone up and only twelve percent believed we are safer today than two decades ago.
The perception here and abroad has little to do with reality and a lot to do with political grandstanding. In fact, over the last twenty years or so the U.S. homicide rate has not just receded, but has been cut in half. The United States does indeed have a higher homicide rate than some industrialized nations in Europe and Japan, but is very, very different in size and complexity to those nations usually cited by those who wish to blame guns for the differences.

Here is one simple fact for those who blame firearms ownership and availability in this country for the murder and violent crime rate that plagues some of our major cities: while crime and violence were being cut in half, gun ownership was doubling.
It is too simple to claim that there is less violence in the United States today because more of our citizens are armed, but it is clear that there is no correlation between the number of guns in private hands with either the murder or violent crime rates as claimed by most gun control advocates.
The president likes to talk about ‘gun violence’ which is something that includes firearms accidents, suicides and those killed with guns. There are statistically very few firearms accidents in this country thanks to safety training and common sense. Two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides and while some claim that making it more difficult for potential suicides to get guns would decrease the total number of suicides, international data suggest otherwise. That leaves two additional categories although former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's groups lump those killed by police and even the death of the Boston Marathon Bomber as a firearms homicide. They are criminal gun violence and so-called mass shootings.
Criminals using firearms are the biggest problem, but it is a problem we as a society know how to handle. If a thug walks into a convenience store with a gun and robs it, he has committed both a state and federal crime. Robbery is a state crime, but committing a felony with a firearm is a federal crime and prosecutable as such with a five year minimum sentence. A felon in possession of a gun is also prosecutable and can get five to ten years for having one in his possession.

Back in the nineties, the NRA partnered with law enforcement officials and prosecutors in Richmond, Virginia, which was at that time listed as America's murder capital. The message was simple. Use a gun to commit a crime and you will get five years in a federal penitentiary with no possibility of a plea bargain. The murder rate dropped 32 percent the first year and another 20 percent the next, but the U.S. attorney who participated in what came to be known as “Project Exile” was criticized by Eric Holder, then Deputy Attorney General, for wasting prosecutorial resources.
Today felons or criminals using firearms are rarely prosecuted by the federal government. In fact, today's U.S. murder capital is Chicago, the jurisdiction with the lowest rate of such prosecutions. Before President Obama issued his recent series of “Executive Orders” on gun violence, it was suggested that they would include instructions to U.S. prosecutors to begin charging gun criminals under existing law. That idea was dropped in favor of actions that don't target criminals, but will make it harder for non-criminals to buy firearms.
The final category involves mass shootings such as the killing at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Washington Navy Yard. These tragedies rarely if ever involve criminals. They are invariably perpetrated by the severely and dangerously mentally ill. This category of violence is the most difficult to deter or prevent, but beefed up school security, getting the states to put the most potentially dangerous into the background check system and rebuilding the U.S. mental health system are the keys to dealing with them.
The American people are lucky in that the nation's founders wrote the age old right of self defense into our Bill of Rights. Many nations don't recognize such a right, but Americans do. It is estimated, in fact, that as many as 200,000 crimes are deterred in a typical year by armed potential victims. It's why in every jurisdiction that has legalized what we call ‘concealed carry’ has seen a drop in violent crime. Burglars don't break into a house with a Rottweiler in the yard and are reluctant to use violence against a man or woman who just might be able to fight back.
source

Rise in accidental gunshots by L.A. County deputies follows new firearm

One sheriff's deputy shot himself in the leg while pulling out his gun to confront a suspect.
Another accidentally fired a bullet in a restroom stall. A third deputy stumbled over a stroller in a closet as he was searching for a suspect, squeezing off a round that went through a wall and lodged in a piece of furniture in the next room.
Accidental gunshots by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies have more than doubled in two years, endangering bystanders and occasionally injuring deputies. The jump coincides with the department's move to a new handgun that lacks a safety lever and requires less pressure to pull the trigger.

Sheriff's officials say that the increase in accidental discharges — from 12 in 2012 to 30 last year — occurred because deputies were adjusting to the new gun. They expect the numbers to fall in the years ahead. So far this year, the department has recorded seven accidental discharges, five of which involved the new weapon.
But the problems may not be over, as more deputies switch to the Smith & Wesson M&P9. In response, department officials have imposed extra training requirements.
The M&P has obvious benefits. It is easier to shoot accurately, can be fired more reliably under stress and is a better fit for people with small hands. The switch was prompted in part by the threat of a lawsuit by women who had failed the Sheriff's Academy. More recruits — including more women — are now passing the firearms test, and veteran deputies are also logging better scores at the firing range.
But the sharp increase in accidental discharges has prompted an investigation by the Sheriff's Department's new inspector general. Critics say this type of semiautomatic, which is widespread in law enforcement and includes the Glock used by many agencies, is too easy to misfire.


At the New York Police Department, a rookie officer is facing criminal charges, including negligent homicide, in a fatal shooting in a housing project stairwell. An attorney for the officer says he accidentally fired his department-issued Glock.
A former Los Angeles Police Department officer who was paralyzed when his 3-year-old son shot him with a Glock has sued the gun manufacturer and others, alleging that the light trigger pull and lack of a safety mechanism contributed to the accident.
Bob Owens, editor of BearingArms.com, says the design of the Glock and the M&P makes such tragedies more likely. "I don't think, with the amount of training most agencies have, that a gun that has so few tolerances for mistakes is the best choice," he said.
An adjustment
For two decades, L.A. County sheriff's deputies carried the Beretta 92F, a heavy metal gun with a large grip.

If you still have your finger on the trigger when you put it in your holster, you'll end up with a stripe on your leg. - Richard Fairburn, a firearms expert

People with small hands often have trouble flipping up the Beretta's safety as they prepare to fire. The first shot requires 12 to 15 pounds of pressure on the trigger, forcing some to use two fingers and reducing shooting accuracy for many. Subsequent shots take about 4 pounds of pressure.
The M&P is made of lightweight polymer, with a hand grip that comes in three sizes. Firing a round is as simple as pulling the trigger with a consistent 6 to 8 pounds of pressure.
Sheriff's deputies have the option of sticking with the Beretta, and some have, saying they are used to it. But many who have switched to the M&P say their shooting has improved.
"At first, I thought, 'No way, I'm keeping my Beretta forever,'" said Sgt. Mike Rafter, a firearms instructor. "Then I started shooting, and it's a lot nicer. I can shoot better, and I'm more confident."

Read the rest @ http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sheriff-guns-20150614-story.html#page=1

DSM-5 – Psychiatric manual targets internet users as mentally ill, grounds for gun confiscation

No matter how many threats the left makes about taking our guns from us, our Constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms, much to their chagrin. But Obama and his communist regime will stop at nothing to do just that. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-5, which was published in 2013, targets certain internet users as mentally ill – allowing gun confiscation.
Many practitioners point out that the new DSM-5 also makes a pathology out of simple and normal behaviors such as grieving for the loss of a loved one, as the bereavement exclusion was removed in this version of the manual.

Targeting free speech

This constitutes a  subjective approach in diagnosing of mental illness in that it promises to end free speech and any form of political dissent. The federal government has already declared anyone who opposes its unconstitutional policies as having “political paranoia,” which is now diagnosed as a type of mental illness. So if you disagree with the corruption, subversiveness, and lawlessness of Obama and his cabal, you deserve a straight jacket, and it is, once again, grounds for taking your guns. Example here from a previous article.

Vague criteria

If someone is judged, by some vague set of criteria, to spend too much time on the internet, they could be judged to be mentally ill and ineligible to own a gun. The alternative media, which is a fancy way to say conservative media like Uncle Sam’s Misguided  Children, is predicated on internet readership and listeners.

Gun ownership

These groups would be among the first groups to oppose a martial law crackdown, and now they are the first to be targeted. This is a backdoor method to disarm citizens who would oppose the abject tyranny being imposed upon America. And these facts sum up what is truly behind the Obama administration’s latest attack upon gun ownership because they want to prey upon the citizens of this nation by disarming as many of us as possible.
And if you thought it would be any different with some other leftist in power, VP Biden feels that they can violate HIPAA privacy regulations in requiring the states to report who has been treated for a mental illness. Therefore, in the name of confiscating your gun, this administration thinks it is acceptable to violate federal privacy laws.
In the eyes of the Obama administration, all mental illnesses are created equal. A person with a phobia is just as dangerous as a sociopath. One in six Americans have a “diagnosable anxiety disorder.” Under the new proposed guidelines, all of these people would be ineligible to have a gun, even though there is not a shred of research which indicates this population would be inclined towards gun violence any more than any other population.

ODD

But it doesn’t stop at internet users. The Statistical and Diagnostic Manual (DSM-4r) defined Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) as a highly controversial mental illness used to describe children and teens as mentally ill if they exhibited disobedience and defiance.
Most practitioners do not take this diagnosis seriously and mistakenly believed that it would fade away because defiance and oppositional behaviors are hallmark traits of healthy rebellion exhibited by children and teens as they seek independence.
Rather than ODD fading away, the diagnosis has become the tool of the ruling elite. The new DSM-5 has expanded the definition of ODD to include adults who exemplify “paranoid ideation” about the government and frequently express these delusional ideations on the internet.

Political abuse

In its analysis of the political abuse of psychiatry in both the Soviet Union and China, The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, stated that “Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a deep affront to human rights with deception and fraud…”
In psychiatric terms, we have become the old Soviet Union… where we can be incarcerated and stripped of our rights for having the illness of “political schizophrenia.”
There are many things we have to fight within our own government, but this is one of the scariest things I have come across. Not only will they use this as a way to disarm us, but what will come next? Will they use it as an excuse to lock people away? Speak out against your government and it suddenly becomes grounds for incarceration. This is the most blatant attempt to strip us of our 1st and 2nd amendment rights I have seen yet. We, as a free people, had better start doing something to ensure our freedoms before Obama and his evil regime take them all away from us.

http://misguidedchildren.com/health-human-services/2015/01/dsm-5-psychiatric-manual-targets-internet-users-mentally-ill-grounds-gun-confiscation/36487

Anti-Gun Groups: Even Their Names Are Lies

Advocates for gun control are liars. They specialize in taking some little snippet of fact and presenting it in a way that totally misrepresents reality. Statements like “3000 children are killed with guns every year,” don’t inform people that most of those “children” are late-teen gang-bangers who are actually killed by adults, or that accidental firearm deaths among children and youths have been falling for decades and are currently at historic lows, despite the fact that guns and gun ownership are up dramatically. The claim that “gun deaths exceed traffic deaths” in this or that state, conceals the fact that two thirds of those deaths are suicides, and that suicide rates in “gun friendly” states are comparable to rates in “gun restrictive” states. Still these misleading “factoids” are unquestioningly parroted by “journalists” based solely on press releases from professional anti-rights lobbyists.
Advocacy organizations like Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Gun Violence Policy Center, or the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, all have “gun safety” or prevention of “gun violence” in their names, but even their names are lies. All of them focus exclusively on restricting firearms – gun control – while ignoring the fact that gun control laws have no impact on gun violence and no relation to gun safety.
They don’t just lie in their names and about their objectives, they also lie about who and what they are. They present themselves as grassroots organizations – some claiming as many as two million “supporters” – or as research foundations, but they have few, if any, actual members, and they don’t do any actual research. None are funded primarily by contributions of regular concerned citizens, though they will take some misguided rube’s $20. These not-for-profit corporations are funded primarily by huge grants from “charitable foundations” like the Joyce Foundation or the deep pockets of billionaires like Mike Bloomberg and George Soros. A little digging reveals that their “supporters” include anyone who ever “signed” one of their on-line petitions, signed up for their email alerts, or “Liked” their page on Facebook, and many are probably counted two or three times. I, like many gun owners I know, am probably counted as a “supporter” because I signed up for their email alerts as a way of monitoring their activities. And the “research” these charlatans put out could be compared to me calling my columns research papers. The only difference is that my columns are more factual and less biased.

Back in December of 2012, shortly after the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, columnist and Obama sycophant Jonathan Alter wrote a piece for Bloomberg View in which he laid out a blueprint for advocacy operations wishing to advance a gun control agenda. The piece was titled "To Get Better Gun Control, Don’t Use the Phrase." In it Alter called for the building of a “smarter, more effective movement for commonsense gun laws” to counter the intimidating influence of the NRA. He compares such a movement to the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage, noting that “every great stride forward in U.S. history has come from ordinary people defying the odds and bringing organized pressure to bear on politicians.”
He advises the retirement of the phrase “gun control,” in favor of more appealing terms like “gun safety,” “anti-violence regulation,” and especially, “common sense.” The Brady campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the National Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which changed their names from Handgun Control, Inc., and the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, respectively, apparently figured some of this out decades ago, but Alter insists that lack of funds kept these groups from being able to reach “moderate, compassionate people” in the suburbs.
Alter’s solution to the problem of ordinary people not rising up in righteous indignation to demand that the government repress their constitutional rights, take away their means of protecting themselves, their families, and the Constitution, and make criminals of them should they dare to swap guns with their shooting buddies, is to further obfuscate the language of the debate and inject massive funding – which he intimates is on the way – into the coffers of those who advocate for further restrictions.
One year later, the guy who signs Alter’s paycheck, Mike Bloomberg, rolled out his new and improved gun control gun safety advocacy conglomerate, Everytown for Gun Safety, which incorporated his previous gun control common sense advocacy group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and a floundering new group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Bloomberg, who was already propping up other gun control gun violence prevention agencies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, promised to fund the new effort with at least $50 million of his personal fortune to take on the NRA head-to-head.
This past November he did just that and was trounced at the polls nationwide. It wasn’t because he didn’t spend enough money, or because his sophisticated social media campaign didn’t burn up the internet; the reason was, unlike his astroturf organizations, the pro-rights movement has actual grass roots organizations with real, live members who refuse to be swayed by his impressively deep pockets and his deceptive marketing.
The only real win Bloomberg and his minions managed to pull off was in Washington state where NRA made little effort, and fellow billionaires like Bill Gates and Paul Allen gave Bloomberg an 8 to 1 spending advantage. With that he managed to dupe a majority of voters into believing that forcing all firearm transfers – even swaps with buddies or loans to friends – through federal dealers, with all of the associated paperwork and expense, isn’t gun control.
Now Bloomberg is bringing his lie machine to Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, and Maine, while already pushing additional restrictions in Washington State. Let’s hope voters are smart enough to realize that any organization that is unwilling to openly disclose their full agenda to the people cannot be trusted to be working for the benefit of the people

http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/anti-gun-groups-even-their-names-are-lies

The Surgeon General’s Gun Problem

In his confirmation hearing, he promised he wouldn’t preach gun control, but his record suggests he might not keep his word.

 

Will America’s new surgeon general preach for gun control, as three of his predecessors did? Early signs nurture cautious optimism that he won’t, but nagging doubts remain. Two days after his confirmation, the website of Dr. Vivek Murthy’s eagerly progressive organization Doctors for America (formerly Doctors for Obama) was updated to reflect his new status as America’s doctor. The advocacy group’s multi-page gun-control campaign was scrubbed from the home page and buried in a menu that doesn’t even mention firearms (click on the “Learn” dropdown menu heading). And Murthy promised wary senators during his February Senate-confirmation hearing (at 50:54 in this video) that he would not use his new position as a bully pulpit for gun control.

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Still, one wonders. What else would he say to a room full of legislators who know from experience not to tangle with gun owners? And the Doctors for America website leaves no doubt at all what Murthy would like to see happen to gun owners. Let’s take a look at some of the main goals of the group Murthy co-founded:

1. Remove military-style guns and ammunition that are designed to be able to kill large numbers of people quickly. There may be a place in war for such weapons, but they represent a threat to public safety in our neighborhoods. . . .  Specific approaches should include: A federal ban on the sale of assault weapons and ammunition — to stop weapons from being added to the existing stock.

For a doctor as dedicated to rigorous scientific method as Murthy claimed to be in his confirmation hearing, he seems singularly unconcerned with the facts about modern sporting rifles. These rifles, as Murthy and everyone else should know by now, have become the standard type of rifle for hunting, sport, and self-protection in America. He must know that in 1994 the public went along with the Clinton administration’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban, championed by former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders. But because the promised crime-stopping benefits of the law proved questionable at best, Congress allowed the law to sunset in 2004.
It was known even when the ban was enacted that rifles of any kind, including so-called assault weapons, account for less than 3 percent of murders, and that banning them was purely symbolic. By advocating a repeat of this massive failure, Murthy indicates either that he is ignorant of it or that he simply doesn’t care that it failed.
Murthy’s Doctors for America letter to Congress continues, listing its second goal:

2. Strengthen safety measures and regulations for guns used for hunting, sport, and self-protection. . . . Specific approaches should include: Universal background checks and licenses for anyone purchasing guns and ammunition.

Again, Murthy seems undeterred by President Obama’s spectacularly embarrassing failure only last year to get mandatory background checks passed. Murthy even wants to go a huge step further than background checks and mandate licensing, a possibly unconstitutional measure and one that is certainly a non-starter politically.
And here is Doctors for America’s next stated goal:

3. Remove prohibitions and barriers that keep health professionals from protecting our patients from harm. . . .  Specific approaches should include: Prohibit laws preventing physicians from discussing gun safety with patients.

Doctors for America is still trying to trying to promote the erroneous notion that the legislature wants to prevent doctor-patient discussions of gun safety. That was not the intent of the Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act. The intent of this bill, which the legislature approved, was to stop doctors from invading their patients’ privacy to push anti-gun politics. The public-health gun-prohibition faction is still in a state of angry disbelief that Florida’s legislature prohibits doctors from advocating gun control in their exam rooms. Oddly, these medical gun-control zealots have never explained why they believe doctors are at all qualified to advise patients about guns, nor have they so much as acknowledged proven firearm-safety-education programs, such as the NSSF’s Project ChildSafe or the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program.
The leaders of medical organizations long ago and with much fanfare kicked off a crusade for gun control. The centerpiece of their agenda is official policy urging doctors to use patient visits as an opportunity to preach that guns are bad and that patients should get rid of theirs. Despite resistance from patients, leading to such roadblocks as Florida’s law and its recent affirmation in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Doctors for America wants to continue pressing our medical professionals into service as gun-control drones.
No one who has followed the public-health gun-prohibition movement should be surprised by Murthy’s hoplophobic leanings. The tradition of surgeon generals’ pushing gun control goes back as far as C. Everett Koop, who served under Ronald Reagan. Considered very conservative on most issues, Koop nevertheless shared the academic elites’ view of gun ownership. He advocated universal gun registration and licensing, and decried “a vast lobby of special interests [that] supports the utterly unfettered ownership and use of firearms.”
As did Murthy, Surgeons General Joycelyn Elders (under Clinton) and David Satcher (under Clinton and G. H. W. Bush) both went on record fuming against the NRA — Elders in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on March 23, 1994, and Satcher in a Washington Post editorial on November 5, 1995. Both came from public-health backgrounds, a milieu that considers gun-control advocacy a pillar of its mission. Murthy, also nominated by a liberal president, brushes off any opposition to his agenda as uninformed or worse. Nor, as he famously tweeted, is he patient with the political process when it gets in the way of his wish to ban guns. That’s curious in a doctor whose proposed remedies are nothing but bare politics.
And all of this is entirely consistent with the public-health community’s gun-control mission since its inception in the late 1980s. They carry on with a self-satisfied doggedness in their convictions despite contrary experience, and they are impatient with legitimate opponents who also happen to constitute a political majority. American gun owners can hope that Dr. Murthy was telling the truth when he renounced gun-control advocacy. But given his history, they should be skeptical.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395842/surgeon-generals-gun-problem-timothy-wheeler 

It's the Politics, Stupid

"When the same groups constantly squawking about "protecting the children" when the subject is making firearms illegal, refuse to OK a good idea specifically designed to protect children, you can clearly see their use of the word "protect" as a synonym for the word "disarm".

The latest manifestation of this curious behavior is a decision by officials at Reagan National Airport not to permit the display of Project ChildSafe's "Own It? Respect it. Secure it." billboard. It is, FYI, the same sign you can see displayed in other airports, including Hartford-Springfield, Las Vegas, Little Rock, Providence and St. Louis ."

http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/229124