Archive for the ‘Gun Laws’ Category

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

Posted: February 4, 2013 in Fox News, Gun Laws, Guns, NRA
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

Posted by coolelegans

Just to show how much LaPierre has been boxed into the fringe, Fox News host Chris Wallace destroys him on his show, watch the whole thing, it’s great!

Wallace pointed out that the president’s children face a larger threat than most.”Tell that to the people at Newtown,” LaPierre replied, referring to the town where an armed shooter killed 20 young children at an elementary school in December.

“Do you really think that the president’s children are the same kind of target as every schoolchild in America?” Wallace asked. “It’s ridiculous, and you know it, sir.”

For LaPierre to justify his abhorrent political ad by bringing up the children of Newtown is just despicable, and Chris Wallace rightly put him in his place.LaPierre also lies about gun registry and Chris Wallace smacks him down:

He predicted a universal gun registry is next — a measure that, as Wallace reminded him, has not been proposed.”Forgive me, sir, but you take something that is here and you say it’s going to go all the way over there,” Wallace said. “There’s no indication — I mean, I can understand your saying that’s the threat, but there’s nothing that anyone in the administration has said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.”

“And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax,” he said.

The argument that Obamacare is a tax was made, primarily, by the conservative Justice John Roberts, so LaPierre is using a conservative argument to show that Obama is a liar. My mind is officially blown at this man’s insane logic. Many Kossacks have also pointed out that Obamacare has nothing to do with guns, so now he is just reduced to parroting Tea Party talking points. And look at how fast Wallace points out

“well it was the supreme court that said that [Obamacare is a tax]“.

Chris Wallace is not having this nonsense on his show! And all LaPierre can do, is ignore that statement, since he doesn’t have a retort, and say  ”I don’t think you can trust these people.” He then tries to pivot to his talking points, but Wallace says “forgive me sir, I’m going to conduct this interview”. Wow. Brilliant stuff!When, Chris Wallace says that Obama “is not taking away shotguns”, LaPierre, lies and says that the Feinstein bill does include such a clause. NO ONE is taking away shot guns or hand guns. This man is LYING.

And finally, offered without comment, since it’s been beaten into the ground:

“If you limit the American public’s access to semi-automatic technology, you limit their ability to survive,” LaPierre said.

But I would also like to point out that with main stream conservatives like Chris Wallace distancing themselves from this nonsense, we may be winning the debate.

Related articles

The Hitler Gun Control Lie

Posted: January 17, 2013 in Gun Laws, Gun Nuts, Hitler, Right Wing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

The Hitler gun control lie

Gun rights nuts who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong

By Alex Seitz-Wald

The Hitler gun control lie
This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.

Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous.  “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

             

            Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon’s political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Related articles

Strict Gun Laws Have Saved Thousands Of Australian Lives!

Posted: December 17, 2012 in Adam Lanza, Australian Gun Laws, Gun Control, Gun Laws, Guns, Mass Killings
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Our Strict Gun Laws Have Saved Thousands Of Australian Lives

[By correlation, how many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, could be saved in America?!] 

    The two graphs below show how the rates of firearm homicide and firearm suicide have varied in Australia over the period 1915 to 2006. More recent figures (up to 2009) suggest that the rates remain near 0.1 per 100,000 of population for firearm homicide and 0.8 per 100,000 of population for firearm suicide. It is clear that the declines in death rates are associated with the list of stricter gun laws introduced, as shown on the right hand side of each graph.

Several Australian gun clubs are deceiving the public by claiming that the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 has not been successful. The Sporting Shooters Association (SSAA) and the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting are two examples. We believe that soon our politicians will realise that it is often unwise to trust gun club leaders on gun law matters.

The two graphs shown below use Australian Bureau of Statistics data, they show how the number of deaths by firearm homicide and firearm suicide have been greatly reduced since stricter gun laws were introduced after 32 people were murdered in six massacres by legal gun owners in 1987, and 41 people were murdered by non-criminal gun owners in two massacres in 1996.

The improved gun laws after 1996 are usually called the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) or sometimes referred to as the Howard gun laws.

From the graphs it can be seen that the reduction in yearly rates of firearm homicide and firearm suicide are approximately two thirds of what they used to be in the days before improvements were made to the laws (The long period of approx 30 years between 1956 and 1986). Thousands of lives have been saved: why do the gun clubs deny this? Are they ashamed of their stance that more Australians would die?

It took over a decade for the full worth of the post-1987 and post-1996 gun laws to be revealed, but the facts are known now and have been known for several years.

In our opinion, over a decade’s examination of gun incidents has also revealed that there were two weaknesses in the NFA, the superficiality of shooter training and insufficient rigour in several of the regulations relating to gun storage. These could be addressed now, and should be, without any major changes to the successful structure of the NFA.

Rate of Firearm Homicide (click for fullsize)

Rate Of Firearm Suicide (click for fullsize)

 

Related articles