The Practical Result of “Gun Control”

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Just over 17 years ago I wrote a two-part post, Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection?  In it, I discussed a couple of cases that proved that there is no “Duty to protect” on the part of the government — municipal, county, state or federal.  The second example was of Linda Riss, a New York City resident who was stalked by a jilted lover.  She tried to get police protection, but could not.  Until an attacker hired by her ex threw lye in her face, scarring and blinding her.  THEN she got round-the-clock protection.  She sued the NYPD – and lost. 
The dissenting judge in the case wrote this:
Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?
Linda’s reasoning seems so eminently sensible that surely it must come as a shock to her and to every citizen to hear the city argue and to learn that this court decides that the city has no duty to provide police protection to any given individual. What makes the city’s position particularly difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense (former Penal Law, § 1897). Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.” (My emphasis)
As I wrote at that time, this is the practical result of “gun control.” Denial of the means to defend yourself, while not providing any other layer of real protection.

This situation has raised its head again in many places, but New York in particular.  Read the New York Post piece Worse than War:  My Night Besieged by Looters and Thugs in New York.  Excerpt:

Every minute brought some new shock and a fresh surge of adrenaline: more and more of those roving gangs, some sticking around for minutes. Squad cars racing down in convoy, sirens blaring. The smashing of windows (a hair salon on the block, I learned in the morning, had been smashed in). The screeching of tires. The shouting of men: “Stop, you motherf–ker!”
Why won’t the men in blue stay in front of our house?
At two in the morning, it couldn’t be denied that one particular roving gang was roving no more; its members were obviously staking out our building. Now cackling, now going ominously silent. Should I race upstairs and bring a kitchen knife? How would this scenario play out? Would they just smash our lobby and leave? What could stop them if they wanted to take the elevators up to our homes?

Not a damned thing.  It’s a meme, but it’s a fact:

See also Joe Huffman’s Quote of the Day.

“Our first purpose was not to be noticed.”

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A long time ago I read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the first of many, many times.  I’m pretty sure I was twelve or thirteen at the time. 
For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, the Earth is governed by a United Nations of sorts, and has turned the moon into a penal colony much like England did with Australia.  Subtle difference, though, without certain drugs and strenuous exercise, spending too long on Luna will result in irreversible physiological changes that prohibit living on Earth again except as an invalid.  The moon, through hydroponic farming using water from lunar pockets of ice, has become the breadbasket of humanity.  A massive linear accelerator is used to send cargo packages of grain down the gravity well to feed Earth.
The population of Luna is only partially convicts as the story begins.  Most of the residents have either served their sentences or been born there as “free people.”  Free being a relative term.  The Authority runs the colonies, and there are several. 

The crisis is that if projections are accurate, Luna is going to run out of water soon, and Earth doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know.  And they want “the convicts” to just do their jobs and feed Earth.

So a small group decides that the only way to save Luna is to have a revolution.  Here’s the passage that struck me so many years ago:

Our first purpose was not to be noticed.  Long distance purpose was to make things worse as much as possible.  Yes, worse.  Never was a time, even at last, when all Loonies wanted to throw off Authority, wanted it bad enough to revolt.  All loonies despised Warden and cheated Authority.  Didn’t mean they were ready to fight and die.

This popped up over on FB a day or two ago, a Tweet from Jeremy Boreing, one of the producers of Ben Shapiro’s podcast and other Daily Wire things, I think:
  1. Instill fear
  2. Lock people in their houses
  3. Drive tens of millions out of work
  4. Remove the pressure valves:  sports, concerts, bars, theaters. lunch with friends
  5. Close the churches
  6. Dehumanize through masking the healthy
  7. Wait
  8. Strike match
I don’t think this was orchestrated, any more than I think the WuFlu was a bioweapon, but the groundwork had already been laid and full advantage is being taken.
Marx defined revolution as violent overthrow of state and economic system when workers would come out of their false consciousness and would realize their exploitation done by the capitalist society. According to Marx, capitalism will eventually dig its own grave but the working class should not wait for it to happen on its own and rather catalyze the process to end their misery through revolution.
The next stage after revolution would be Socialism.  We have had more than one generation “educated” in our places of “higher learning” that Capitalism is Bad and Socialism is Good:

I’m not saying that this is that “revolution.” I think it’s another “wet firecracker,” but there will be more of this, more often, until the entire system collapses, because a significant portion of the population, many working in government and media, want it to and are actively, quietly working towards it.  Things have to get worse before Joe Sixpack will be willing to fight and die.
Thing is, I don’t think the Socialists are the ones expecting to die.

Quote of the Day – Sarah Hoyt Edition

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From a post at Instapundit:

Two things, before my calm gets damaged further.
a) most businesses are not insured against civil unrest. Most will get nothing.
b) when you say “are your possessions worth a human life?”  Most people’s possessions are their lives. They spent days of their lives and strength and health to acquire them.
As for their being “worth” a human life…  Humans who think it’s okay to hurt people and take their stuff are only going to cost more lives in the long run. The right to be secure in your possessions is part of what made America great. Who will work, invest, innovate, if at any minute the government can decide their work is non-essential and brownshirts at the service of the democrats can burn it all down?
You allow this to continue, you have Mogadishu, not the US.

More Quora Content

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I posted a link to this story of a 70 year old man defending his wife from an attacker who broke through the front door of their home.  He retrieved a firearm and shot the attacker several times.  I received a comment on the piece, to which I responded.  Here’s the thread so far:

Peter Collins: When are you going to post all of the stories of people shooting their kids, or their wives or husbands, or themselves.

You are 9 times more likely to be killed with a gun you own than to kill an intruder or mugger or other criminal.

So, this man killed an intruder – that means nine other gun owners were killed by their own guns.

The odds are against you, 9 to 1. Only a fool bets that longshot with his life.

KB: I don’t have to. ABCNNBCBS and all the other major news outlets already take care of that. What they DON’T typically report are successful defensive gun uses, leading to the illusion that they seldom happen. Even the CDC recently admitted, however, that they happen far more often than most people think.

That news was also not carried by the media beyond a very brief mention.

Now as to your 9:1 ratio assertion, do you have a citation for that, or do you “just know it’s true”? Because the last time I heard something like that, it was 43:1 from a thoroughly discredited “study” performed by a Dr. Arthur Kellerman many years ago.

PC: The media don’t cover so-called ‘defensive gun uses’ very much because they are relatively rare events. The only study, and it is on-going, of this, using actual evidence and verifying the events, finds that guns are used about 2000 times per year in the US to prevent, stop, or mitigate a violent crime. The group doing the study is not a gun-control group, and their definition of ‘defensive gun use’ is broader than I think is justified, but they follow a data-based approach and they are willing to do the hard work to find an accurate figure. If guns were used regularly to prevent or stop crimes, it would be all over the news – when it does happen, the “good guy with a gun” scenario gets huge coverage.

The figure you question came from the Miller study, a peer-reviewed and unassailable study published in one of the trauma journals.

The Kellerman study, far from being “thoroughly discredited,” is a model of excellent methodology combined with careful use of data. I am aware of no serious critique of the study from any qualified source. The conclusions from that study, though, do not really bear on the question at hand. Kellerman was studying intentional homicide only, and that doesn’t provide an answer to the question of whether gun ownership generally confers more or less safety than risk. If the results of a perfectly good study are applied to aquestion that the study did not ask, it is not likely to provide valid or valuable information.

KB: “The only study, and it is on-going, of this , using actual evidence and verifying the events, finds that guns are used about 2000 times per year in the US to prevent, stop, or mitigate a violent crime.” Which study is this? I noticed you didn’t provide a citation.

How about this one? Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control that states:

“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, [my emphasis – ed.] although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey [my emphasis – ed.] (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use. [Again, my emphasis.]

“A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” [Emphasis, well, you know.]

The LOWEST estimate of defensive gun use from a credible source that I’ve EVER seen was from the National Crime Victimization Survey at 80,000 DGU’s per year, 28,000 fewer than noted in the excerpt above. That’s still over 32 times your estimate. That’s on average 219 per day. What is a defensive gun use? Any time a person defends himself or someone else by so much as THREATENING to use a firearm to stop an attack. No shots need be fired, and in the overwhelming majority of these cases, none are. No blood, no news story. But tell the people who defended themselves that they didn’t need a gun. Go ahead, I’ll wait. But The Other Side™ seems to believe that if the defender did not shoot, or more accurately, kill the offender, then it doesn’t count.

Also, I noticed that you still haven’t cited your source for the 9:1 ratio from your first comment. Got a link to that “unassailable” Miller study? I think you misunderstand what “peer reviewed” actually means.

Oh, and Kellerman? He revised his own estimate down to 2.7 times more likely. Basically debunking himself.

PC: Your “study” is a piece of paid-for propaganda that relies on nothing that anyone could conceivably call evidence.

And your slur on Kellerman? No, he revised the application of his conclusion to a different set of circumstances.

If you actually read the study, rather than the claims made by gun fundy websites, you would know that.

And when you claim the number to be between 80,000 and 3 million, you lose all credibility. If you cannot even narrow it down within 2 orders of magnitude, your numbers are clearly phony.

KB: I really enjoy these discussions. So a piece produced by the National Academies of Science is “a piece of paid-for propaganda” because you say so. Interesting. But your uncited, “peer-reviewed” “Miller study” isn’t, because reasons. Kellerman’s 43:1 conclusion is gospel, but when he revised it to 2.1:1 it’s because he used a different set of circumstances – DUE TO THE FACT THAT HIS ORIGINAL CIRCUMSTANCES WERE LAUGHABLE. He’s already been proven unreliable. Why should I trust his revised numbers?

You object to the fact that the estimates between 80,000 and 3 million defensive gun uses means they’re not credible, but ignore the fact that the absolute low end, from United States Bureau of Justice surveys that DO NOT ASK EXPLICITLY ABOUT DEFENSIVE GUN USE still represent almost 220 defensive gun uses a DAY. You simply dismiss these as superfluous.

If you’d actually read the literature — all of it, not just the stuff you agree with — you would conclude that defensive gun usage is real, it’s effective, and it’s far more common than the general public is led to believe.

And that’s why I post these stories. The New York Times certainly won’t.

At this point I expect one or more of three things in descending order of likelihood:

1) He’ll respond with more mouth-frothing
2) He’ll report me for violating the “Be nice, be respectful” Quora policy
3) He’ll go away

4) He’ll delete his thread.
That didn’t take long:

Kellerman revised the conclusion when the model for the study was revised – that’s akin to revising the number when you revise from mph to kph. If the ratio remained identical under different parameters, that would be questionable. Sorry you don’t understand how statistics work.

Your claim that the “absolute low end” is 70,000 ignores so many studies that show much, much lower numbers. I specifically cited the on-going GVA study which showed around 2000 verifiable cases per year. That’s lower than you claim is the “absolute low end.” Now, what did you say about only reading studies that support your position?

Here’s a challenge – you provide evidence of 110 defensive gun uses, in the USA, on any day in the last 10 years. That’s half what you claim is the ”low end,” so it shouldn’t be hard at all for you to prove. Not a survey, not some poll – actual evidence. I’ll accept if you provide the date, the time, the place, and the name of the victim or the person who used the gun.

So, how about it? Can you prove half your claimed l ”low end,” for any day in the last 10 years?

Oh, we’re still playing? OK. What was Kellerman’s initial model, and what were the objections to it? What was the revised model? I’m quite aware of how statistics work. I’m an engineer by trade.
The “absolute low end” is 80,000 by a survey that doesn’t specifically ask about defensive gun usage. You keep skipping right over that. Don’t you trust your government?

Your “GVA study” again is without a link to the source. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, the “verifiable cases” were media reports of defensive gun uses. Which kind of makes my point – the media doesn’t report on DGUs unless someone is shot or killed. And — if they’re covered at all — most of these reports end up on page B7 of the local fishwrap, not on the national nightly news.

Can I cite 110 defensive gun uses in a day? How am I to do this if the media doesn’t report them? If the people who stopped a crime in progress without firing a shot didn’t report it to the police? For example, the woman at the highway rest stop who confronted a man holding a coil of rope and convinced him that she was not going to be his next victim by showing him her pistol? Tell her she didn’t need it, and she was far more likely to have it used on her than to use it to protect her life. Tell that to the people standing outside a store in Minneapolis armed with rifles protecting it from rioters. It wasn’t looted or burned. Is that one DGU or twelve?

How many defensive gun uses is so low that it makes it OK to disarm the victims? Tell that 70 year old man that it would have been better to have let the attacker beat his wife to death rather than use a gun to defend her, or he could have tried to stop the man and there would be two old people dead or in the hospital. Tell him that the presence of that gun in his house made it 43 times more likely that he or his wife would be killed — not shot to death with his own weapon, but killed by any means — which is what Kellerman’s initial model did.

It’s been fun playing with you, but I think we’re done now.

It’s still going. And going.

“The last time I checked Illinois citizens are also Americans and Americans don’t get ruled”

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Judge Mike McHaney for Appellate Court

Mike McHaney is a judge on the Illinois Fourth Judicial Circuit Court. He was appointed to fill the vacancy left by Kathleen P. Moran and was elected to the seat in 2010. McHaney was retained in the general election on November 8, 2016.

On April 27, 2020, Clay County Circuit Court Judge Michael McHaney granted a restraining order against Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s (D) 30-day extension of the state’s stay-at-home order.  Judge McHaney has overseen two suits against Illinois governor Pritzker’s stay-at-home order, in both cases issuing a stay for the individuals who brought suit.  In the latest one, however, is the language that I think qualifies him for the Federal Appeals courts:

Since the inception of this insanity, the following regulations, rules or consequences have occurred: I won’t get COVID if I get an abortion but I will get COVID if I get a colonoscopy. Selling pot is essential but selling goods and services at a family-owned business is not. Pot wasn’t even legal and pot dispensaries didn’t even exist in this state until five months ago and, in that five months, they have become essential but a family-owned business in existence for five generations is not.

A family of six can pile in their car and drive to Carlyle Lake without contracting COVID but, if they all get in the same boat, they will. We are told that kids rarely contract the virus and sunlight kills it, but summer youth programs, sports programs are cancelled. Four people can drive to the golf course and not get COVID but, if they play in a foursome, they will. If I go to Walmart, I won’t get COVID but, if I go to church, I will. Murderers are released from custody while small business owners are threatened with arrest if they have the audacity to attempt to feed their families.

Our economy is shut down because of a flu virus with a 98 percent plus survival rate. Doctors and experts say different things weekly. The defendant cites models in his opposition. The only thing experts will agree on is that all models are wrong and some are useful. The Centers for Disease Control now says the virus is not easily spread on surfaces.

The defendant in this case orders you to stay home and pronounces that, if you leave the state, you are putting people in danger, but his family members traveled to Florida and Wisconsin because he deems such travel essential. One initial rationale why the rules don’t apply to him is that his family farm had animals that needed fed. Try selling that argument to farmers who have had to slaughter their herds because of disruption in the supply chain.

When laws do not apply to those who make them, people are not being governed, they are being ruled. Make no mistake, these executive orders are not laws. They are royal decrees. Illinois citizens are not being governed, they are being ruled. The last time I checked Illinois citizens are also Americans and Americans don’t get ruled. The last time a monarch tried to rule Americans, a shot was fired that was heard around the world. That day led to the birth of a nation consensually governed based upon a document which ensures that on this day in this, any American courtroom tyrannical despotism will always lose and liberty, freedom and the constitution will always win.

Bravo, Judge. Bravo.

Quote of the Day – Larry Correia Edition

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From Facebook:

If you want to have an economy it is because you want grandma to die, except when Cuomo signed off on an order that actually literally killed thousands of grandmas that is okay because they were going to die anyway, so nobody should be held accountable, and while we are at it should run Cuomo for president because he looks more presidential than Biden, who is senile, and quite possibly a rapist too, but the rapey bits don’t count anymore because we only hash tag believe all women when they accuse republicans, because everything is okay when we do it and nothing is ever our fault, even when things directly under our watch spiral terribly out of control, but also how dare you politicize these tragic events, you cold hearted republican bastards who love money more than people, unless that money is being donated to democrat causes, because then it’s good again. – sincerely the Party of Science, Morality, and Goodness.

I’m going to call this kind of train-of-logic stream a Walshing, after Matt Walsh who wrote the first one I came across:

Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus – no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil.

A Golden Oldie

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Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™.  It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she’d orally service Bill Clinton “just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”  Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago – aka “Mordor on the Lake,” and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School.  She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek.  And, of course, she’s not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and “substantial damages” paid to the person she slandered – Melania Trump.  That was her second retraction.  In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn’t support her allegations that “Russian bots” were responsible for Sen. Al Franken’s downfall.

So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York.  Must be nice.

Let me give you a taste of that older post:

Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:

“I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?”

Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: “My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?”

I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.

Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.

Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:

If you’ve got a few minutes, go read it.  See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me.  This is the Left today.  Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.

Nasim Nicholas Taleb

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I first heard about this man on a Joe Rogan podcast where a guest mentioned him in relation to this quote:

With my family, I am a Communist.  With my friends, I am a Socialist.  With my community, I am a Democrat.  With my State, I am a Republican.  With the Federal government, I am a Libertarian.

That got my attention.

Talib is the author of the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Looking into him a little deeper brought me these quotes:

Only the autodidacts are free.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

I think I need to read his book.

I Can Find Nothing to Disagree With in This Piece

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I am a pessimist by nature, shocking admission, I know.  But being a pessimist I am very seldom disappointed, and occasionally pleasantly surprised.

I do not expect to be pleasantly surprised by the fallout from this:

Forget About Seeing Any Justice For Obamagate

Excerpt:

Allow me to disabuse you of your naïve delusion that we still live in a country with a justice system and break it to you that no one is going to jail for what was done to Flynn, or for the unmasking business, or for the Russia hoax or, for that matter, for any of the corrupt Dem/foreigner collaborations exemplified by the payoffs received by stripperphile and Bolivian folk medicine enthusiast Hoover Biden.

No one.

To quote David Burge, aka Iowahawk: “We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on ‘Hoarders’ live in houses of cat food boxes.”