Humankind; "Epidemic of Gun Violence"

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barnbwt

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That's the name of the propaganda product that filled a full half-hour of broadcast on my local NPR affiliate this evening;

http://www.humanmedia.org/catalog/program.php?products_id=394
There's no transcript for it that I can find, but anyone in the DFW area was exposed to it for a full thirty minutes around dinner time. I can't recommend anyone pay for a listen ;)

As you'd expect, biased, emotional, uninformative, blah blah blah -- same stuff you'd expect to see. What I found interesting was the various rhetorical and persuasive devices employed to create the one-sided depiction of the topic, with its inevitable gun control solution. Maybe because the narrator talks more slowly and monotone than Diane Rehm (i.e. stroke victim), maybe because there were some rather gaping holes in their arguments/solutions left more unattended than usual, but these methods you see elsewhere stood out a lot more than usual.

The whole premise of the tale is naturally that gun violence is a disease (even using terms like 'contagion load' and the like to describe how poor minorities are disproportionately likely to be involved). The disease angle is brilliant in that it simultaneously absolves everyone involved (the victims, the perpetrators, the police, the doctors, and the viewer) from any moral scrutiny, and forces the audience to accept the premise of gun violence exactly as presented (as an occurrence that just 'happens' because of the presence of certain factors, much like a bread mold). These two aspects make it very easy for the narrator to present only one side of the data, and only their solution, without even having to pay lip service to opposing viewpoints not founded in medical-sounding theory. No need to discuss civil liberty and self defense when all that's being discussed is how gun violence magically appears whenever guns are present ;)

A large portion of the story centered around how an urban trauma center deals with gun shot injuries. Not only was there not even a hint of discussion about how these injuries are incurred (obviously by either committing or responding to crime in nearly *all* urban gunshot cases) they made a point of insisting that these clearly pertinent facts do not matter. Ostensibly because all sufferers of gunshots are morally equal in the eyes of a doctor (which makes professional sense), but the program clearly seeks for the viewer to find empathy with this (again, professionally necessary but obviously short-sighted and naiive from a policy solution standpoint). The purpose is to separate everyone actually involved with 'gun violence,' from the causes/solutions of 'gun violence.' Laughable on its face, except you are hearing this in a matter-of-fact manner from a bonafide trauma doctor, who an ignorant or pro-gun-leaning listener will naturally see as an authority on the subject (even though a surgeon is about as far removed from actual crime-control as anyone else). Perhaps unintentionally ironic, they say all this immediately after stressing the importance of ending the 'cycle of violence' (another device for artificially limiting discussion to a course of causes & events of the propagandists' choosing alone). Even more ironic, considering the whole point of background checks is to place myopic focus on one's past acts (to the exclusion of all other pertinent facts)

Another stand-out tactic was a sequence where they informatively walk through the process of induction & treatment for gunshot wounds...from the perspective of the viewer as a gunshot sufferer! As in, "Next, you would be seen by nurses and prepped for emergency surgery..." type of narration. The goal here is of course to put as much sympathetic fear & angst into the viewer as possible without outright offending them so they will be receptive to the inevitable "sell" by the propagandists during the conclusion, and too emotional to apply proper scrutiny. I'm no doctor, but while it's mildly interesting to hear how emergency triage procedures work for a bad trauma case like a serious gunshot or how nurses whisper sweet nothings to gang bangers awaking from surgery, it really has nothing at all to do with 'gun violence,' or really even any supposed 'contagious epidemic' aspect founded in distorted disease theory.* It's just naked pathos to make the listener vulnerable.

Toward the end of the program, they finally start talking about the policy angle of 'solutions.' Naturally, they once again carefully avoid any discussion of causes for the problem, instead focusing on promised solutions. As we all know, this is an intentionally dishonest scheme for limiting discussion to only the solutions being 'sold' as opposed to any kind of earnest attempt at resolution. Here is where I thought the program began to turn a bit surreal. Perhaps as a way to make the listener more receptive to their solution, most of the 'experts' interviewed (medical folks, not law enforcement, naturally) seemed to have a somewhat helpless/fatalistic attitude. Odd, since they were selected specifically to bolster the arguments for AWBs and background checks, you'd think you would want people who sound convinced; instead, they hemmed, hawed, and hedged, then finished by 'supposing' that these gun control measures would help. It really sounded like they actually had no personal idea how to address these issues, but circled around at the end to the same tired old cue-cards of assault weapons, gun proliferation, background checks, and etc.

At one point, they address the mental health angle**, and have two conclusions; that nutjobs we associate with the big headline-grabbing shootings constitute a tiny fraction of gun violence and are actually quite unlikely to shoot others on the whole (which is a fact; the mentally ill are just about as unlikely as anyone else in their demographic to harm others), and that mental health policy is an impossible way to solve gun violence since it is generally committed by 'normies' or nutjobs previously indistinguishable from 'normies.' Almost the next sentence, assault weapon bans are suggested as a better alternative (yup, the very same assault weapons used in but a fraction of that tiny fraction of violence committed by the mentally ill), and nonsensically keep bringing up the major mass shootings they'd just hand-waived away as insignificant.

Facts & figures do not feature as prominently as you'd expect for the 'scientific' discussion they are going for, and when they did appear they seemed counterproductive (but perhaps that's just because I'm so familiar with the unspoken context behind the most common gun control stats); I can see why they stuck to emotional arguments for the most part. By accident, they do mention that suicides are the lion's share of the 30,000/year statistical chestnut and disproportionately fall on whites outside the minority demographics largely impacted by/responsible for all other violent crime involving guns. They do not mention (at all) how many gun charges are bargained away or never pursued by prosecutors. In fact, law enforcement was not mentioned once that I can recall. Also presumably by accident, the narrator asks what makes a doctor qualified to ask whether gun are in the home or to give advice on their storage; a very unconvincing answer about how doctors also promote automobile safety to patients is the response (I've never had a doc ask if I owned a car & warn me about CO poisoning, nor has anyone else, I'd think)

At the very end, they close with a lengthy monologue (I believe by one Dr James Feldman who did most of the interviews) where the MD rather emotionally (i.e. unprofessionally) opines that keeping a gun around cannot be used for anything but bad outcomes. That it will be inaccessible in the case of an attacker, but recklessly accessible to children. That it will inevitably be the chosen course of action in the event of even minor misfortune. He states he does not understand how others can see firearms as a means of defense against violent attack. A quick search suggests he's a cardiologist from Houston, whose high crime rate and location inside 'shall-issue' Texas results in a large number of documented firearm defense stories, and an even larger share of undocumented ones.

So, TL/DR/DL; the bullet-points of this episode are the same stuff you see in every other anti-gun hit piece following this 'public health' kick, but used some rather interesting emotional tactics in its persuasion that stand out more than usual. That's really bad for the propagandists since when a viewer becomes aware of such dishonest manipulation they stubbornly turn against the speaker, but good for someone trying to examine exactly how they go about sculpting the "feels" of their audience. I still imagine that for ignorant or sympathetic listeners without context for the assertions of the piece, that it is quite compelling in favor of gun control.

TCB

*The fundamental basis of contagious disease theory is that there is something tangible causing the disease, that is transmissible; guns are neither transmissible in any logical sense, nor is there any mechanism by which they can cause the violence of their wielders (any levels of violence due to accident or negligence are minuscule and obviously not the topic of discussion)
**Oddly enough, an actual disease and health problem accepted and studied by the legitimate medical community, quite frequently with actual documented solutions to help those afflicted.
***I didn't catch the opening credits of the program, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say Plowshares, Bill & Melinda Gates, Annenberg Foundation, John Hopkins (Bloomberg School of Health), and the Joyce Foundation paid for everything, same as every other anti-gun puff piece pimped. And of course the CPB supported by no small measure of state/federal tax money.
 
That's the name of the propaganda product that filled a full half-hour of broadcast on my local NPR affiliate this evening;

http://www.humanmedia.org/catalog/program.php?products_id=394
There's no transcript for it that I can find, but anyone in the DFW area was exposed to it for a full thirty minutes around dinner time. I can't recommend anyone pay for a listen ;)

As you'd expect, biased, emotional, uninformative, blah blah blah -- same stuff you'd expect to see. What I found interesting was the various rhetorical and persuasive devices employed to create the one-sided depiction of the topic, with its inevitable gun control solution. Maybe because the narrator talks more slowly and monotone than Diane Rehm (i.e. stroke victim), maybe because there were some rather gaping holes in their arguments/solutions left more unattended than usual, but these methods you see elsewhere stood out a lot more than usual.

The whole premise of the tale is naturally that gun violence is a disease (even using terms like 'contagion load' and the like to describe how poor minorities are disproportionately likely to be involved). The disease angle is brilliant in that it simultaneously absolves everyone involved (the victims, the perpetrators, the police, the doctors, and the viewer) from any moral scrutiny, and forces the audience to accept the premise of gun violence exactly as presented (as an occurrence that just 'happens' because of the presence of certain factors, much like a bread mold). These two aspects make it very easy for the narrator to present only one side of the data, and only their solution, without even having to pay lip service to opposing viewpoints not founded in medical-sounding theory. No need to discuss civil liberty and self defense when all that's being discussed is how gun violence magically appears whenever guns are present ;)

A large portion of the story centered around how an urban trauma center deals with gun shot injuries. Not only was there not even a hint of discussion about how these injuries are incurred (obviously by either committing or responding to crime in nearly *all* urban gunshot cases) they made a point of insisting that these clearly pertinent facts do not matter. Ostensibly because all sufferers of gunshots are morally equal in the eyes of a doctor (which makes professional sense), but the program clearly seeks for the viewer to find empathy with this (again, professionally necessary but obviously short-sighted and naiive from a policy solution standpoint). The purpose is to separate everyone actually involved with 'gun violence,' from the causes/solutions of 'gun violence.' Laughable on its face, except you are hearing this in a matter-of-fact manner from a bonafide trauma doctor, who an ignorant or pro-gun-leaning listener will naturally see as an authority on the subject (even though a surgeon is about as far removed from actual crime-control as anyone else). Perhaps unintentionally ironic, they say all this immediately after stressing the importance of ending the 'cycle of violence' (another device for artificially limiting discussion to a course of causes & events of the propagandists' choosing alone). Even more ironic, considering the whole point of background checks is to place myopic focus on one's past acts (to the exclusion of all other pertinent facts)

Another stand-out tactic was a sequence where they informatively walk through the process of induction & treatment for gunshot wounds...from the perspective of the viewer as a gunshot sufferer! As in, "Next, you would be seen by nurses and prepped for emergency surgery..." type of narration. The goal here is of course to put as much sympathetic fear & angst into the viewer as possible without outright offending them so they will be receptive to the inevitable "sell" by the propagandists during the conclusion, and too emotional to apply proper scrutiny. I'm no doctor, but while it's mildly interesting to hear how emergency triage procedures work for a bad trauma case like a serious gunshot or how nurses whisper sweet nothings to gang bangers awaking from surgery, it really has nothing at all to do with 'gun violence,' or really even any supposed 'contagious epidemic' aspect founded in distorted disease theory.* It's just naked pathos to make the listener vulnerable.

Toward the end of the program, they finally start talking about the policy angle of 'solutions.' Naturally, they once again carefully avoid any discussion of causes for the problem, instead focusing on promised solutions. As we all know, this is an intentionally dishonest scheme for limiting discussion to only the solutions being 'sold' as opposed to any kind of earnest attempt at resolution. Here is where I thought the program began to turn a bit surreal. Perhaps as a way to make the listener more receptive to their solution, most of the 'experts' interviewed (medical folks, not law enforcement, naturally) seemed to have a somewhat helpless/fatalistic attitude. Odd, since they were selected specifically to bolster the arguments for AWBs and background checks, you'd think you would want people who sound convinced; instead, they hemmed, hawed, and hedged, then finished by 'supposing' that these gun control measures would help. It really sounded like they actually had no personal idea how to address these issues, but circled around at the end to the same tired old cue-cards of assault weapons, gun proliferation, background checks, and etc.

At one point, they address the mental health angle**, and have two conclusions; that nutjobs we associate with the big headline-grabbing shootings constitute a tiny fraction of gun violence and are actually quite unlikely to shoot others on the whole (which is a fact; the mentally ill are just about as unlikely as anyone else in their demographic to harm others), and that mental health policy is an impossible way to solve gun violence since it is generally committed by 'normies' or nutjobs previously indistinguishable from 'normies.' Almost the next sentence, assault weapon bans are suggested as a better alternative (yup, the very same assault weapons used in but a fraction of that tiny fraction of violence committed by the mentally ill), and nonsensically keep bringing up the major mass shootings they'd just hand-waived away as insignificant.

Facts & figures do not feature as prominently as you'd expect for the 'scientific' discussion they are going for, and when they did appear they seemed counterproductive (but perhaps that's just because I'm so familiar with the unspoken context behind the most common gun control stats); I can see why they stuck to emotional arguments for the most part. By accident, they do mention that suicides are the lion's share of the 30,000/year statistical chestnut and disproportionately fall on whites outside the minority demographics largely impacted by/responsible for all other violent crime involving guns. They do not mention (at all) how many gun charges are bargained away or never pursued by prosecutors. In fact, law enforcement was not mentioned once that I can recall. Also presumably by accident, the narrator asks what makes a doctor qualified to ask whether gun are in the home or to give advice on their storage; a very unconvincing answer about how doctors also promote automobile safety to patients is the response (I've never had a doc ask if I owned a car & warn me about CO poisoning, nor has anyone else, I'd think)

At the very end, they close with a lengthy monologue (I believe by one Dr James Feldman who did most of the interviews) where the MD rather emotionally (i.e. unprofessionally) opines that keeping a gun around cannot be used for anything but bad outcomes. That it will be inaccessible in the case of an attacker, but recklessly accessible to children. That it will inevitably be the chosen course of action in the event of even minor misfortune. He states he does not understand how others can see firearms as a means of defense against violent attack. A quick search suggests he's a cardiologist from Houston, whose high crime rate and location inside 'shall-issue' Texas results in a large number of documented firearm defense stories, and an even larger share of undocumented ones.

So, TL/DR/DL; the bullet-points of this episode are the same stuff you see in every other anti-gun hit piece following this 'public health' kick, but used some rather interesting emotional tactics in its persuasion that stand out more than usual. That's really bad for the propagandists since when a viewer becomes aware of such dishonest manipulation they stubbornly turn against the speaker, but good for someone trying to examine exactly how they go about sculpting the "feels" of their audience. I still imagine that for ignorant or sympathetic listeners without context for the assertions of the piece, that it is quite compelling in favor of gun control.

TCB

*The fundamental basis of contagious disease theory is that there is something tangible causing the disease, that is transmissible; guns are neither transmissible in any logical sense, nor is there any mechanism by which they can cause the violence of their wielders (any levels of violence due to accident or negligence are minuscule and obviously not the topic of discussion)
**Oddly enough, an actual disease and health problem accepted and studied by the legitimate medical community, quite frequently with actual documented solutions to help those afflicted.
***I didn't catch the opening credits of the program, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say Plowshares, Bill & Melinda Gates, Annenberg Foundation, John Hopkins (Bloomberg School of Health), and the Joyce Foundation paid for everything, same as every other anti-gun puff piece pimped. And of course the CPB supported by no small measure of state/federal tax money.

We should urge our congressional representatives to stop funding NPR and PBS.
 
More importantly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that's basically a big slush fund that supplies them even more money than direct grants. There's a bill in congress to that effect right now, so hit up your reps. Ad-council, too, which is just a slush fund for administrations to kicks the backs of their campaign media operations during the off season.

But again, the primary purpose of my post wasn't necessarily the hypocrisy or corruption of the anti-gun effort, but the tactics employed in this particularly shameful bit of propaganda (not sure what else you could call it; I was remarking throughout the whole piece that a similarly one-sided argument masquerading as science could be convincingly made for eugenics and all sorts of other horrible things...and probably has been)

TCB
 
Some of us like and appreciate NPR and PBS. Government de-funding public TV and radio isn't the answer, its like saying the answer to gun violence is to ban guns instead of understanding the underlying causes of violence and crime. The cause of a so-called theory of "epidemic of gun violence" is the same thing that causes an "epidemic of meth/heroin/opioid drug use" in rural America: lack of good-paying, low-skilled jobs. Both the inner cities and the rural areas are suffering, and violence and drug addiction are just different symptoms of the same thing.

Its too bad that the liberals have such a blind spot when it comes to guns. The implied and explicit threats that Hillary made during the campaign to further restrict guns was part of her defeat and part of Trump's victory. Nobody engaged in the autopsy/analysis after the election seems to get this. The working class rejected an anti-2A party platform and voted for a platform that was more neutral/supportive of gun rights. Gun rights has always been a wedge issue, and the Democrats finally found themselves on the wrong side of the wedge. Democrats need to do a 180 on the gun issue and abandon further gun restriction. Gun restriction alienates the working class.

A famous campaign mantra from the 1990s was "Its the economy, stupid!" The 2016 campaign proved that its both "its the economy, stupid" and "its the gun rights, stupid!". Together, these two basic needs in working-class America drove the vote for Trump instead of Hillary in key states.
 
Some of us like and appreciate NPR and PBS. Government de-funding public TV and radio isn't the answer, its like saying the answer to gun violence is to ban guns instead of understanding the underlying causes of violence and crime. The cause of a so-called theory of "epidemic of gun violence" is the same thing that causes an "epidemic of meth/heroin/opioid drug use" in rural America: lack of good-paying, low-skilled jobs. Both the inner cities and the rural areas are suffering, and violence and drug addiction are just different symptoms of the same thing.

Its too bad that the liberals have such a blind spot when it comes to guns. The implied and explicit threats that Hillary made during the campaign to further restrict guns was part of her defeat and part of Trump's victory. Nobody engaged in the autopsy/analysis after the election seems to get this. The working class rejected an anti-2A party platform and voted for a platform that was more neutral/supportive of gun rights. Gun rights has always been a wedge issue, and the Democrats finally found themselves on the wrong side of the wedge. Democrats need to do a 180 on the gun issue and abandon further gun restriction. Gun restriction alienates the working class.

A famous campaign mantra from the 1990s was "Its the economy, stupid!" The 2016 campaign proved that its both "its the economy, stupid" and "its the gun rights, stupid!". Together, these two basic needs in working-class America drove the vote for Trump instead of Hillary in key states.
EXACTLY!
 
Barnbwt, thank you for the quite-comprehensive review of a piece that I was fortunate enough to miss. With backgrounds in both law enforcement and EMS, I can only imagine how uneasy and irritated I would feel had I listened to this. Your review is something I will likely refer back to from time to time, and may even cite or refer to.
 
I like(d) NPR, but not enough to subsidize their factless attempts at brainwashing the masses with this stuff.
 
What about the epidemic of knife violence? Or the epidemic of automobile accident violence? Or the epidemic of hands or feet violence?

Ridiculous.
 
Some of us like and appreciate NPR and PBS. Government de-funding public TV and radio isn't the answer, its like saying the answer to gun violence is to ban guns instead of understanding the underlying causes of violence and crime
No, it's like saying the government should stop supplying guns to criminals (or cartels). Propaganda is never a good thing, and CPB is a recipe for its proliferation. I appreciate NPRs sedate demeanor vs fox/cnn shrieking, as do many others, therefore there will always be such an offering on the market.

TCB
 
A famous campaign mantra from the 1990s was "Its the economy, stupid!" The 2016 campaign proved that its both "its the economy, stupid" and "its the gun rights, stupid!". Together, these two basic needs in working-class America drove the vote for Trump instead of Hillary in key states.
I agree, but somehow even many gun rights supporters still operate under the idea that the owners of over 350 million guns constitute a niche special interest incapable of driving election results...
 
They are applying a medical germ theory of disease (gun as germ) to a criminological problem of actors with motive, opportunity and means (gun as means) when illegal acquisition of guns or substitution of means is easy. You can'y have polio without the polio virus; therefore, you can't have gun violence without guns. Reductio ad absurdem. Violence fits the medical example of immune system failure better than germ theory. 2004 a man killed a woman in the boarding house one block from my apartment and was caught in 2006 after murdering a couple with a baseball bat in their home. He had more in common with the other local murderers of 2004-2006 including a few gun murderers than the murderers had with the vast majority of owners of knives, baseball bats or guns.

This is a long going crusade, since the 1990s; gun-as-germ and eradication advocacy:
Katherine Christoffel, M.D.: "Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.... Get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths." in Janice Somerville, "Gun Control as Immunization," American Medical News, January 3, 1994, p. 9.
Patrick O'Carroll, Acting Section Head of the Division of Injury Control, Centers for Disease Control: "We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities."

They started with the conclusion, and do research to justify their conclusion; now they are being bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg.
 
They are applying a medical germ theory of disease (gun as germ) to a criminological problem of actors with motive, opportunity and means (gun as means) when illegal acquisition of guns or substitution of means is easy. You can'y have polio without the polio virus; therefore, you can't have gun violence without guns. Reductio ad absurdem. Violence fits the medical example of immune system failure better than germ theory. 2004 a man killed a woman in the boarding house one block from my apartment and was caught in 2006 after murdering a couple with a baseball bat in their home. He had more in common with the other local murderers of 2004-2006 including a few gun murderers than the murderers had with the vast majority of owners of knives, baseball bats or guns.

This is a long going crusade, since the 1990s; gun-as-germ and eradication advocacy:
Katherine Christoffel, M.D.: "Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.... Get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths." in Janice Somerville, "Gun Control as Immunization," American Medical News, January 3, 1994, p. 9.
Patrick O'Carroll, Acting Section Head of the Division of Injury Control, Centers for Disease Control: "We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities."

They started with the conclusion, and do research to justify their conclusion; now they are being bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg.
just like the "climate change" religion with their "global warming" prophecy (and its impending doom). governments around the world fund only those studies that relate to global warming. if that study doesn't come to the conclusion that global warming is imminent, no more future funding.

gun control is becoming a religion, just like climate change is a religion. if you don't believe in this religion you are an abomination and must be defeated. the globalists do this all the time to get what they want. just another globally funded soap opera.

murf
 
The anti-gun crusade also bears a lot of resemblance to the voodoo criminology of the crusades against Demon Rum, Reefer Madness, Seduction of the Innocent*, etc. with the simplistic notion that banning the scapegoat will cure the problem by making the scapegoat legally unavailable. (cue CCR: ♪ ♫ Bootleg, bootleg, bootleg, howl. ♪ ♫ )


_______________
*(Seduction of the Innocent = comic books cause juvenile delinquency; the rhetoric of the 1950s Kefauver Committee on comic books sounds a lot like the rhetoric for gun control.)
 
History is replete with examples of human violence, and efforts to mitigate that violence by making whatever weapon, illegal. A favorite example is: 1139, Pope Innocent III and the second Lateran council outlawed the crossbow as a weapon causing unacceptable devastation. This same group had thought that the crossbow would make war....unthinkable.

[But...then...the French were very glad to have the crossbow, when they were fighting off the Vikings]

hmmmm.... there may be a lesson in there somewhere :)
 
Criminal gang members with guns are the disease. Eradicate them and the vast majority of gun crimes will go away.
 
Oh hell, man has been killing man since the first one picked up a rock and bashed in another's brains. It's not going to change, ever! We just have found easier and quicker ways to do it. And were still inventing new and better ways on an almost daily basis.
 
The government needs to build dams and interstate highways because they are the only ones that can do it. The government needs to run a radio station only when the private sector can't or won't---and the last time I checked there was no shortage of radio stations.

NPR doesn't need to be defunded because it's a liberal mouthpiece (although it is) but because it is not necessary in any way to the survival or function of the nation.
 
Whether the medical community is aware or not, or has been recruited or not, disarming the population for whatever reason is one of the goals of the Marxist Socialist agenda. The"do it for the children" type perspective drives the less informed to clearing the table of all sorts of things; banning things.
In the name of automobile crash "violence" I am surprised that government controlled driverless cars aren't the new rage among the misguided; removing ownership and daily decision making. Fortunately the cornerstone of what this Country is founded upon, recognizes that this is not a rubber room; that removing all the sharp edges, and pointy things so that nobody will get hurt, flies in the face of human free will and independence.
Especially, in an era where the Progressive Left then wants to mix criminals and mentally ill back into the society, the need for self defense is heightened, not diminished. What we are fed by the media has to be suspect at all times, as it is often times is the thinly veiled agenda of some one's political view of what we "should know as truth"; we should be ever aware of attempts of social designers trying to re-design the Country into their vision of Utopia.
 
If potentially violent arguments were settled by sing off's, who here thinks that libs would not be demanding Fender Strats for everyone....to level the playing field...in the name of "social justice"?

It has been said many times, gun control is not about guns, it is about control.
 
Harvey Birdman: "Where will these restrictions end? A background check when you want to take up banjo? A five day waiting period to buy a Telecaster? An all-out ban on the Flying V or, dare I say, whammy bar?!"

Myron Reducto: "Yes, our Founding Fathers were certainly comfortable with the idea of the lute or the fiddle, but how could they have foreseen the fretless bass? No!
...And while the good people of the National Guitar Association might like you to think otherwise, do you really think we'd all be safer if everyone were walking around with a Sunburst Rickenbacker in their pockets?"
"Guitar Control" is still one my favorite bits of political satire. Chuck Heston as a grizzled Quick Draw McGraw was genius.

The scene was also accompanied by a rendering of the Crossing of the Delaware with cellos & violins bristling from soldiers in the boats :D

TCB
 
NPR doesn't need to be defunded because it's a liberal mouthpiece (although it is) but because it is not necessary in any way to the survival or function of the nation.
Eh, get both, I say. The needless waste of resources is surely part of the reason they favor policies and administrations that promote more needless waste of resources as a cure-all for society's problems.

Criminal gang members with guns are the disease. Eradicate them and the vast majority of gun crimes will go away.
*to be fair* suicide is considered criminal violence if I'm not mistaken (kind of a weird way to tally it, but whatever) and constitutes a solid majority of all deaths by way of bullet. The real question is whether pursuing crime or suicide is more likely to result in a reduction of either, both, or neither (I'm leaning more towards the latter, unfortunately). That aspect of multiple causes is what was being intentionally ignored in the article's absurd simplification (as Carl Brown noted above), rather they start with the completely baseless and rather obviously flawed assumption that the causes do not matter when it comes to the efficacy of the remedy. Or maybe they were just going through the motions of making a supporting argument for the same litany of gun control measures as ever (the half-hearted efforts of the interviewee 'experts' and half-baked argument by the narrator suggest the latter)

History is replete with examples of human violence, and efforts to mitigate that violence by making whatever weapon, illegal. A favorite example is: 1139, Pope Innocent III and the second Lateran council outlawed the crossbow as a weapon causing unacceptable devastation. This same group had thought that the crossbow would make war....unthinkable.
Oh hell, man has been killing man since the first one picked up a rock and bashed in another's brains. It's not going to change, ever! We just have found easier and quicker ways to do it. And were still inventing new and better ways on an almost daily basis.
"Man has killed man from the beginning, and each new frontier has brought new places and new ways to die; why should the future be any different?" --Col. Corazon Santiago (Alpha Centauri)

TCB
 
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