Excellent Response

I missed this until just now, but if you don’t regularly read Clayton Cramer’s blog, so did you.

Clayton responds to a gun control supporter’s e-mail with calm, reason, and fact. Excellent read. Excerpt:

My experience is that most gun control advocates (as I used to be, 20+ years ago) don’t fully understand the issues involved, for the same reason that I didn’t: they haven’t researched the subject, but have relied on the impressions gathered from reading newspapers and popular magazines. At first glance, a lot of the measures that you talk about seem to make perfect sense–but that’s because you are applying very middle class values to a problem that is largely not middle class.

Violent criminals in America are very atypical; they are disproportionately minors coming from severely dysfunctional homes; disproportionately mentally ill people who have been deinstitutionalized; people who are intoxicated, and for whom intoxication is a way of life; and adults with long felony conviction histories behind them. The values that you and I share are completely irrelevant to the vast majority of murderers.

And there’s a lot more.

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