01/28/11 - VCDL Update 1/28/11 - Part 3

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14. Face the facts: Gun control laws don't save lives
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A VA-ALERT reader emailed me this:

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From The Baltimore Sun:
http://tinyurl.com/4m7cznq


Face the facts: Gun control laws don't save lives
Ron Smith
12:34 p.m. EST, January 20, 2011

I wasn't surprised to see letters to the editor about last week's column from people who cling to their heartfelt notion that if we just had more sensible gun control laws, the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that resulted in six deaths earlier this month might not have happened.

My comments on the rush to condemn Sarah Palin and conservative commentators for somehow encouraging the alleged gunman by fostering a "climate of hate" made no mention of the gun issue.

However, just as the commentariat on the left couldn't resist trying to tie its political opponents to the Tucson massacre, however farfetched the hypothesis, so too are the believers in gun-control laws unable to avoid trotting out their discredited theories -- the ones rebuffed by reality and rejected by voters outside of Democratic bastions like New York, California and, yes, Maryland.

Being a reasonable person, I will make a concession later in this column, so keep reading.

First, the heart of the matter: Laws making it difficult or impossible for ordinary citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights do not work as their proponents assume they do.

They do not save lives. The cities in this country with the most stringent gun laws are the ones with the highest murder rates and levels of other violent crime. If such laws worked in achieving their ostensible purpose, Chicago would be a model of nonviolence. Instead it is quite the opposite.

Filmmaker Michael Moore was obviously perplexed by this earlier in the week, during a visit with fellow lefty Rachael Maddow on her TV show. A column by Jack Wheeler alerted me to this appearance. After musing about how America is number one in the world in gun ownership (which may be true on a total number basis but certainly is not on a per-capita basis), Mr. Moore said, "the vast majority of these guns are owned by people who live in safe parts of town or mostly in suburbs and rural areas, places where there are very few murders."

What puzzles Mr. Moore and people who think like him is the connection between wide gun ownership and low murder rates/safe neighborhoods. They have it backwards, thinking that people like the surgeons at the Tucson hospital, many of whom carry concealed weapons, are crazy to arm themselves in the safe environments they occupy.

It seems never to dawn on them that the relative safety in cities like Tucson is the result of an armed population, not despite it. And they have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the gravely wounded congresswoman is a fervent Second Amendment supporter who herself owns a Glock, similar to the weapon that Jared Loughner used in his slaughter.

When the liberals puzzle over why crime rates fall as prison populations increase, or why widespread ownership of guns should be the reality in areas of low criminal activity, they seem unable to come to grips with the facts:

First, if you imprison more of the people prone to commit felonies, there will be fewer crimes. Second, as the title of Professor John R. Lott's definitive work boldly declares: "More Guns, Less Crime." In his study of gun laws and crime rates in more than 85,000 American jurisdictions, the picture is clear. The book title summarizes the statistical data.

In a piece on his Campaign for Liberty website, Congressman Ron Paul dispatched the renewed calls for gun control thusly:

"Our constitutional right to bear arms does not create a society without risks of violent crime, and neither would the strictest gun control laws. Guns and violence are a fact of life. The question is whether it is preferable to be defenseless while waiting for the police, or to have an option to arm yourself. We certainly know the criminals prefer the former."

Now for the concession: Even as a passionate defender of Second Amendment rights, I wouldn't object to a ban on extended magazines for semi-automatic pistols, such as the 30-round magazine young Mr. Loughner had purchased along with his gun. They seem to serve little purpose outside of gang-banging or actual combat.

Now that I've angered the purists on both sides of the gun argument, I consider this to have been a good day.

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15. How the numbers shifted against gun control
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From MSNBC: http://tinyurl.com/6fduptq


How the numbers shifted against gun control
A look at where the votes are and what's changed since the '94 bill

By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
updated 1/21/2011 3:34:50 PM ET

Six people shot to death, including a federal judge, a U.S. representative gravely wounded -- then a flurry of rhetoric about the need to change gun laws.
But Congress seems unlikely to do that in the aftermath of the Tucson killings.

Even last year and in 2009, when Democrats had control of both houses, Congress showed more support for protecting and expanding the rights of gun owners than for restricting them.
Why? Look at the numbers.

Reacting to the Tucson shooting which left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D- Ariz., with a traumatic brain injury, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. has proposed to ban magazines or clips with a capacity of more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

McCarthy's bill has 57 co-sponsors. Almost all are from California, from big cities (Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Denver, etc.) or from suburbs in the Northeast. No members from rural parts of America have yet signed on to her bill. Nor have any Republicans.

The rural/urban split

Exemplifying the rural/urban divide among Democrats is Minnesota, where two Democrats from the Twin Cities districts, Rep. Betty McCollum and Rep. Keith Ellison, are co-sponsoring McCarthy's bill, while their rural counterparts, Democratic Rep. Tim Walz and Rep. Collin Peterson are not.

McCollum and Ellison both hold very safe seats. Not Walz, who won last November with less than 50 percent of the vote.

"Walz had a relatively close reelection in a largely rural district. Peterson represents one of the most conservative districts in the state, and the most rural such district," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. "Both know they are at potential electoral risk with some of their votes with the Democratic leadership and thus do not want to cross the energetic pro-gun constituents in their districts."

With 64 fewer Democrats in the House than last year and with GOP leaders now deciding what bills get brought to the floor for a vote, it would be enormously difficult to pass a bill opposed by the National Rifle Association, the chief gun owners' lobbying group.

The NRA argues that the magazines which McCarthy seeks to ban are "standard equipment for self-defense handguns and other firearms owned by tens of millions of Americans. Law-abiding private citizens choose them for many reasons, including the same reason police officers do: to improve their odds in defensive situations."

Last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a long-time supporter of gun control measures, said, "Let's be honest here, there haven't been the votes in the Congress for gun control," although he noted the Senate did defeat a proposal to allow people with concealed carry gun permits in one state to enjoy the same right when they visited other states.

Support for gun owners in 2009-2010

Even in the last session of Congress when the Democrats controlled the House, there was strong support for legislation protecting or favoring gun owners.

Take, for instance, a measure to allow visitors to national parks and wildlife refuges to carry guns. It was attached to a bill to tighten regulation of credit card issuers in 2009. President Barack Obama signed the measure into law.

On the decisive vote in the House, the tally was 279-147. In all, 105 Democrats, including Giffords, Peterson and Walz, voted for it. Only two Republican voted against the measure: Mike Castle of Delaware, who was defeated in his bid for the GOP Senate nomination last year by (the ultimately unelected) Christine O'Donnell, and Mark Kirk, now the Republican senator from Illinois.

Both Peterson and Walz got support in last year's election from the NRA.

In addition, NRA-supported candidates won close Senate races last year in Nevada, Wisconsin, Missouri, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and another race in Ohio that wasn't so close.

To some extent, the NRA was bipartisan: it backed two Senate Democrats, Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and House Democrats such as Walz, Peterson, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania.

In all, the NRA contributed to 54 Democratic House candidates in 2010. Half of them won, including Donnelly, Altmire, and Walz, all of whom survived close races.

In its summary of the 2010 election, the NRA Political Victory Fund said, "Of the 282 candidates endorsed by the NRA-PVF for the U.S. House, 227 were victorious, for an 85 winning percentage."

'Pro-gun election upgrades'

Referring to its rating system that scores members of Congress, the NRA added, "In the 111th Congress, there were 226 A-rated and 151 F-rated Representatives. The 112th Congress will contain 262 A-rated (+32) and 133 F-rated (-18) Members.There were pro-gun election upgrades in 27 House districts."

Why were the Democrats able to pass landmark gun control legislation -- including a ban on high-capacity ammo clips -- in 1994? And what has changed since?

"The pro-gun forces have superior resources and votes at election time," Schier said. "Democrats can only keep their congressional majorities by winning elections in pro-gun districts and states. The overall decline in crime rates over the past 20 years has also assisted the pro-gun forces."

There's another factor: the 1994 gun control measure wasn't standalone legislation, but was wrapped inside a massive anti-crime bill which passed only after months of tortuous deal-making. It included other provisions such as an expansion of the federal death penalty -- that picked up some support from centrists and conservatives -- and items such as a hate crime statute to deter crimes against women -- that won support from liberals.

Again the numbers tell the tale: there were more pro-gun-control Democrats in the House in 1994 than there were last year, or than there are this year: 188 in 1994, roughly 145 last year, and fewer than that today.

In 1994, in the crucial final action in the House, it was centrist Republicans -- with Mike Castle in the lead -- who made the deal with Democratic leaders that allowed the bill to pass.

In the final tally, 46 Republicans voted for the anti-crime bill, including John Kasich, now governor of Ohio, Jon Kyl, now senator from Arizona, and Olympia Snowe, now senator from Maine, as well as five Republicans who are still serving in the House. Voting "no" were 131 Republicans and 64 Democrats.

In the decisive vote in the Senate, again it was a small group of Republicans who made the difference in 1994: John Chafee of Rhode Island, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, John Danforth of Missouri, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, and William Roth of Delaware voted with the Democrats to push the bill over its final procedural hurdle -- it did so by a two-vote margin.
Such Republicans are now either defeated (Castle), long since retired from politics (Danforth), or dead (Chafee).

There are also new legal hurdles for gun control advocates to negotiate. Any bill that Congress might pass would need to stay within the bounds set by the Supreme Court's 2008 Heller decision which declared that the Second Amendment "confers an individual right to keep and bear arms." However the court was careful to note that its ruling didn't cast doubt on "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill" or laws imposing conditions on arms sales.

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16. The Arizona shootings, gun violence research and the facts vs. the New York Times
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Jim Kiser emailed me this:

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From Fox News:
http://tinyurl.com/5sksc5e


The Arizona Shootings, Gun Violence Research and the Facts vs. The New York Times
By John Lott
Published January 14, 2011
| FoxNews.com

You know you're doing something right when two New York Times columnists, Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristof, attack your research on the same day. Kristof followed up on criticism leveled earlier in the week by others writing for The Times. I must have said something substantial enough to warrant this attention. Let us check the facts. Gail Collins worries that law-abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns can't be trusted:

"One can only hope that Saturday's horrible attack in Tucson encourages more citizens to carry concealed handguns," wrote John Lott, Jr. . . . on Wednesday. As a model, he pointed to Joseph Zamudio, . . . Lott's theory was that Zamudio was able to lend a hand "because his legally carried 9 mm semiautomatice offered him protection." He neglected to mention that while Zamudio never fired at the gunman, he almost drew on an innocent man by mistake.

No, it was not my mere speculation. Zamudio himself told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" that he though that carrying a gun made him willing to run towards the shots while almost everyone else was running for cover. As to the possibility of shooting an innocent man, that possibility didn't occur because Zamudio used caution and observed from the gun's slide that it was out of bullets. While gun control advocates like to view his composure as extraordinary, it actually happens again and again.
Of all the multiple victim shootings around the country in public schools, the Appalachian Law School, on city streets, churches, or in malls that have been stopped law-abiding citizens with concealed handguns, none, not a single one has resulted in innocent bystanders being shot. Indeed, rarely do the citizens with the concealed handguns actually pull the trigger, simply brandishing the gun stops the attack. Permit holders do not endanger others.

Take Arizona, since that is where all the focus is. As of December 1, 2007, there were 99,370 active permits. During 2007, 33 permits were revoked for any reason -- a 0.03% rate -- cases that did not involve using the gun to harm others. And this is true in state after state. Between October 1, 1987 and December 31, 2010, Florida issued permits to 1.9 million people. 168 permit holders had their permits revoked for any firearms related violation, a rate of 0.009%.

Some writers -- Mr. Kristof as well as earlier pieces by John Donohue and James Alan Fox from Tuesday's New York Times website -- argue that the academic literature disagrees with the my claim that concealed handguns deter crime.

Kristof wrote: "One scholar, John Lott Jr., published a book suggesting that more guns lead to less crime, but many studies have now debunked that finding (although it's also true that a boom in concealed weapons didn't lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast)."

And John Donohue claimed: "while some early studies by John Lott and others suggested that state policies providing greater freedom to carry guns would reduce crime, empirical evidence refutes this view."

When my original findings were published in the mid-nineties, there was a widely held belief that right-to-carry laws could result in blood baths and see increased deaths. Ample empirical evidence has shown this not to be the case. The debate is rather over whether there is no effect, a small benefit, or a large benefit.

Despite the above assertions, most of the academic research, including recent research on right-to-carry research by economists and criminologists do indeed show that the laws reduce violent crime (see the table here from the third edition of "More Guns, Less Crime").

Among peer reviewed studies in academic journals, 16 studies examining national data find that right-to-carry laws reduced violent crime, 10 claimed that they found no discernible effect, and zero studies found a bad effect from the law. Five other non-refereed studies were more divided, with three finding drops in crime, one claiming to find no effect, and two saying that there were either no effect or possibly small increases in crime. But even "no discernible effect" is usually not the same as "debunking" or "refuting" a hypothesis. Rather it often means that the evidence is not sufficient to draw a conclusion.

Both Kristof and Donohue link to a paper by Ayres and Donohue that supposedly "debunks" my research. That is hardly true. Even if we were to fully accept the wording of the research paper, which is questionable, they claim to have found a small temporary initial rise in crime, followed by a long sustained drop. Yet, even the initial increase is a result of a mistake in how they set up their regressions and even their own more precise estimates of the yearly changes in crime never show that increase.

James Fox points to research on multiple victim public shootings: "criminologists Grant Duwe, Tomislav Kovandzic, and Carlisle Moody [that] found the effect of various right to carry laws on the incidence of public mass shootings to be negligible." Alas, unlike my own work with William Landes, the research restrict their sample to attacks where four or more people were killed. These cases are sufficiently rare that one cannot expect to find anything from such a small sample. Landes and I found significant results when we examined more common cases where three or more people killed or four or more people killed or injured.

It is flattering to have the New York Times spend so much space discussing my work this week (and even CNN got into the discussion), but it would be even better if The Times could accurately report on the debate.

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17. VIDEO: Lawrence O'Donnell gets in angry debate with GOP over gun control
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A VA-ALERT reader emailed me this:

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From theblaze.com:
http://tinyurl.com/47k8chs


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18. 'Project Gunwalker' sources talking to Senate staff
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A VA-ALERT reader emailed me this:

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From the Gun Rights Examiner:
http://tinyurl.com/2eh334k


[SNIP]
ATF source confirms 'walking' guns to Mexico to 'pad' statistics
January 5th, 2011 4:40 pm ET


David Codrea
Gun Rights Examiner

"Coming next will be more info on what the agents refer to as the Phoenix ATF office 'walking across' ARs and AKs to pad their statistics," this column reported on Monday, citing a December reference to allegations made on the CleanUpATF.org forum that approval/direction was given for "more than 500 AR-15 type rifles from Tucson and Phoenix cases to be 'walked' to Mexico."

As we've previously discussed, CleanUpATF is run by a group of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives employees who formed "a non-profit organization dedicated to returning integrity, accountability and decency to the management of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE or "ATF")."


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From the Gun Rights Examiner:
http://tinyurl.com/49fftdr


[SNIP]
'Project Gunwalker' sources talking to Senate staffers
January 21st, 2011 3:42 pm ET

David Codrea
Gun Rights Examiner

Insider sources claiming they can provide testimony and documentation to confirm allegations raised in the "Project Gunwalker" story reported previously in this column are now in contact and/or have been placed in touch with Senate staffers


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19. Martin Luther King and his guns
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James Durso emailed me this:

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From Instapundit: http://tinyurl.com/4vzxydt


MLK and His Guns
Adam WinklerProfessor of Law, UCLA
Posted: January 18, 2011 08:25 AM

One issue on everyone's mind this Martin Luther King Jr. day was gun control. King's calls for resolving our differences through peaceful nonviolence are especially poignant after Jared Loughner gunned down six people and wounded several others in Tucson. Amid the clamor for new gun laws, its appropriate to remember King's complicated history with guns.

Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King's parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King's home as "an arsenal."

As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King's house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.

Ironically, the concealed carry permit law in Alabama was promoted by the National Rifle Association thirty years earlier. Today, the gun rights hardliners fight to eliminate permits for concealed carry, as Arizona has done.

Eventually, King gave up any hope of armed self-defense and embraced nonviolence more completely. Others in the civil rights movement, however, embraced the gun.

One of the most indelible images of the 1960s is a photograph from Life magazine of Malcolm X looking out a window with a long M-1 carbine in his hands, the rifle pointed up to the sky. For blacks unhappy with the progress achieved by King's marches, the gun became a symbol of the "by any means necessary" philosophy.

The Black Panthers took Malcolm X's approach to the extreme, openly carrying guns as they patrolled for police abuses on the streets of Oakland. They even made guns part of their official uniform, along with the black beret and leather jacket. Every member learned about Marxism and firearms safety.

California passed a law to disarm the Panthers and then Congress, after King was assassinated by James Early Ray, passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 -- the first major federal gun control since the 1930s. These laws fueled the rise of the modern gun rights movement, which self-consciously borrowed tactics from the civil rights movement.

One lesson the gun advocates took was from the early King and his more aggressive followers: If the police can't (or won't) to protect you, a gun may be your last line of defense. Inspired by that idea, the gun lobby has grown so strong that even after the Tucson mass murder there is almost no likelihood of new gun laws being passed.

Whether a broader acceptance of the King's later pacifism would have made us safer than choosing guns, we will neever know.


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From reason.com: http://tinyurl.com/5tcsttc


Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and Armed Self-Defense
Damon W. Root | January 19, 2011

Via Instapundit, here's UCLA law professor Adam Winkler reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "complicated history with guns":

Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King's parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King's home as "an arsenal."

There's nothing unusual about this. Many civil rights activists--including those who publicly engaged in non-violent forms of resistance--kept guns for self-defense. T.R.M. Howard, the Mississippi doctor and mutual aid leader who founded the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership, slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. During the murder trial that followed the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Howard escorted Till's grieving mother and various others to and from the courthouse in a heavily-armed caravan.

Similarly, John R. Salter, one of the organizers of the famous 1963 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, said he always "traveled armed" while working as a civil rights organizer in the South. "I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms," Salter said.


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20. Man in Arlington, Mass. loses guns and CHP over thought crime
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Leave it to Massachusetts to really infringe on gun rights. The gun owners comments were in poor taste, but well within his right to free speech.

A VA-ALERT reader emailed me this:


From CBS News: http://tinyurl.com/4n8h5gn


[SNIP]
Arlington Man Loses Gun License Due To Blog About Tucson Shooting
By Beth Germano, WBZ-TV
January 18, 2011 11:59 PM

ARLINGTON (CBS) - A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man.

It was the headline "1 down and 534 to go" that caught the attention. "One" refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.

Police are investigating the "suitability" of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license


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21. N. Las Vegas robbery victim fires gun at suspect
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Ken Martin emailed me this:

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From 8newsnow.com: http://tinyurl.com/622hwra


[SNIP]
Man Thwarts Robbery by Shooting at Suspect
POSTED: JAN 18, 2011 3:31 PM
UPDATED: JAN 19, 2011 7:23 AM

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Police say a shot was fired the parking lot of a Walmart in North Las Vegas, but nobody was hit or hurt. Police say the shooting happened as a result of an attempted robbery.

The suspect thought he picked an easy target to rob, but the 57-year-old victim had a gun of his own.

"He was demanding the wallet, watch, jewelry, anything of any value from the victim, at which point during that physical altercation, the victim did pull out a weapon," said North Las Vegas Police Officer Chrissie Coon.