By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--October 2, 2015
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Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.As Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News Channel after a previous Obama gun-control push:
We have a 200-year history and culture of gun ownership. And we have a Second Amendment and we have a system that believes that the rights, the Second Amendment, in other words, predate the republic and the point of having a government, as in the Declaration [of Independence], is to secure the rights. In Britain you have no such right, the government will control gun ownership so unless you're willing to confiscate, which would be unconstitutional and that would cause an insurrection in the country -- Australia did -- these things are not going to have an effect, except at the margins and that's the tragedy here.But none of this matters to our president whose disdain for gun ownership rights is unparalleled in the modern era. There are never enough restrictions on firearms to satisfy Obama. As author David B. Kopel has said, guns are already "the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale."
We don't yet know why this individual did what he did. And it's fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months. Earlier this year, I answered a question in an interview by saying, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws -- even in the face of repeated mass killings.” And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day!He added, "We've become numb to this." "We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don't work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence." This cherry-picking Chief Executive's statement is at best a half-truth or misleading, or at worst, a lie. The issue is not how many "gun deaths" there are. The issue is how many deaths there are that were a result of murder. As Newsmax previously reported, some of the states with tough gun laws have lower-than-average homicide rates. Some have higher-than-average homicide rates. The news website took the seven states that both Guns & Ammo magazine and the gun-grabbing Brady Campaign consider to have the most stringent gun laws. The Brady bunch characterized those states as having the "strongest gun laws," while the pro-gun magazine called them the "worst states for gun owners." Cross-referencing those select states with data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 2011, yields interesting results. According to the federal agency the national, or average, rate of "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" is 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants. Maryland, a state whose constitution, Guns & Ammo notes, "does not guarantee a right to keep and bear arms," has a murder rate of 6.8 per 100,000 people. California's rate is 4.8 murders. Slightly below the national average is New Jersey at 4.3 murders. Farther below the 4.7 average rate are New York (4.0), followed by Connecticut (3.6), Massachusetts (2.8), and Hawaii (1.2). Incidentally, the District of Columbia, which even after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in the celebrated Heller case, still has near-draconian gun laws designed to make it very difficult to own or carry a gun, has an appalling murder rate of 17.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. So the veracity of Obama's claim that "states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths" is hardly self-evident -- and again, even if he's right, the overall homicide rate, not "gun deaths," is what is actually important. Nor is Obama's mass-shootings fetish meaningful. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), all the hubbub about mass-shootings is nonsense:
No other type of homicide generates such public fear or stupefaction at its meaninglessness as that involving multiple victims. Due to its often shocking and sensational nature, particularly of so-called “rampage killings”, mass murder also captures the attention of the public, the media and policymakers the world over, which no doubt colours perceptions of the prevalence and patterns of such events. [... Mass homicides may have a high profile, but they are actually low-frequency events, accounting, for example, for less than 1 per cent of all homicide cases in the United States and less than 3 per cent in Finland and Sweden.
I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more your're [sic] in the limelight.Barack Obama never praised Flanagan, but if the president had a son, in many ways he'd look a lot like mass-murderer Chris Harper-Mercer.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.