Common myths spouted by anti-gun nuts
Myth #1: The availability of guns increases opportunity for crimes
"In the late 1990s England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands were confiscated from owners law abiding enough to turn them in. Without suggesting this caused violence, the bans' ineffectiveness was such that by year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England had the developed world’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the U.S." — Gary A. Mauser and Don B. Kates, "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence" (August 17, 2006). bepress Legal Series. Working Paper 1564.
http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/1564
Myth #2: America is suffering from an epidemic of gun violence
"...health leaders see violence as a public health crisis and the firearm as something akin to an infectious disease. For example, one author characterized guns as "a virus that must be eradicated." Their views receive wide exposure because, unlike criminology and other social scientific journals, medical and health periodicals announce the appearance of their articles on firearms with press releases describing their anti-gun conclusions. This follows the health advocate sages' avowed intention to promote the idea that firearm ownership is an evil and that its elimination is a desirable and efficacious means of reducing violence....
This indictment of the anti-gun health advocacy literature is extremely troubling in an era in which research and data are often sought as a basis for debate over guns and formulation of public policy. When emotionally based anti-gun, pseudo-scientific advocacy is presented in the guise of research, ill-founded policy decisions may ensue, wasting public resources and harming many people. The medical and public health journals need to eschew their emotionally based advocacy role in favor of presenting scientific research results." — Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D., John K. Lattimer, M.D., George B. Murray, M.D., and Edwin H. Cassem, M.D. "Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda?", 1994, Tennessee Law Review, 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596 (1994).
"After research disclosed that mosquitos were the vector for transmission of yellow fever, the disease was not controlled by sending men in white coats to the swamps to remove the mouth parts from all the insects they could find. The only sensible, efficient way to stop the biting was to attack the environment where the mosquitos bred.
Guns are the mouth parts of the violence epidemic. The contemporary urban environment breeds violence no less than swamps breed mosquitos. Attempting to control the problem of violence by trying to disarm the perpetrators is as hopeless as trying to contain yellow fever through mandible control." — James D. Wright, "Bad Guys, Bad Guns", National Review, March 6, 1995
Myth #3: The writers of the Second Amendment never intended people to own modern guns
"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty .... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." — Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803), St. George Tucker (Tucker was a lawyer, a Revolutionary War militia officer and was appointed by James Madison in 1813 as U.S. District Court judge)
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."—Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Story, 1833 (Story was also a contemporary of the Founding Fathers, appointed to the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice by James Madison in 1811)
Myth #4: The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined.
This "statistic" is attributed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but with no link to any specific data that actually says that. No reference to this statistic on the internet, links to the actual data itself. A search of the CDC's web sites provided not one page of data supporting this statistic. The CDC actually has little data regarding firearm violence toward children of that age range. Most statistics they provide are for "children" 20 and under or "youths" 25 and under, both groups would include urban gang members.
However something those spreading the above myth seem to have missed on the CDC's web site is the conclusion by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services in their First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws...
The systematic review development team identified 51 studies that evaluated the effects of selected firearms laws on violence and met the inclusion criteria for this review. No study was excluded because of limitations in design or execution. Information on violent outcomes was available in 48 studies, and the remaining three studies, which provided information on counts or proportions of regulated firearms used in crime, were used as supplementary evidence. Several studies examined more than one type of firearm law...
The Task Force's review of firearms laws found insufficient evidence to determine whether the laws reviewed reduce (or increase) specific violent outcomes.
Funny how they spread a mythical statistic with no actual reference, while ignoring another that has a reference, tables illustrating the finding and was conducted by a team of highly educated, respected experts.
Posted by Danny Carlton at March 20, 2008 10:33 AM