(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Along with "If it saves one life," that's a common talking point injected into the debate by the gun haters. And since he's following their playbook, naturally Barack Obama is eager to exploit it.
Again, from his and Joe Biden's "Urban Policy" on the official White House website:
They support... making guns in this country childproof.
A laudable goal! Who could be against it?
Well...uh...I am. And seeing as how the intent is to make it mandatory--from Chicago to Cheyenne--you should be, too.
On the surface, if you know nothing about guns, it seems like it could be a good idea. After all, we all have heard the horror stories of little Johnny finding the pistol in Dad's nightstand and shooting little Susie. No one wants to see that happen--ever.
Where we disagree is on the best way of preventing it.
First, to put things in perspective, economist and author John Lott tells us:
Accidental gun deaths among children are, fortunately, much rarer than most people believe. With 40 million children in the United States under the age of 10, the Centers for Disease Control indicates that there were just 20 accidental gun deaths in 2003. 56 children under the age of 15. While guns get most of the attention, children are 41 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation, 32 times more likely to accidentally drown and 20 times more likely to die as a result of accidental fires. Looking at all children under 15, there were 56 accidental gun deaths in 2003— still a fraction of the deaths resulting from these other accidents for only the younger children.
Despite the image of children firing these guns and killing themselves or other children, the typical person who accidentally fires a gun is an adult male, usually in his 20s. Accidental shooters overwhelmingly have problems with alcoholism and long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent acts. They are also disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver's licenses suspended or revoked. Even if gun locks could stop children from using guns, gun locks are simply not designed to stop adult males from firing their own guns — even if they were to use the gun locks.
OK, so if that doesn't work, what would?
Say, I've got a swell idea! How about "smart guns"? You know, personalized weapons that identify the owner, and lock out anyone else from firing them?
The idea has been on the books for some time. I addressed it several years ago, and while some of the technologies have evolved and changed, the underlying principles have not. I'm going to reproduce it in my Gun Rights Examiner column as my next post in this series.
Previous posts in this series
"Hail to the chief?"
"Dreams of Obama"
"Closing the Bill of Rights loophole"
Opposing views
That's the name of a website that takes the issues of the day and presents the most authoritative references they can find from both sides. They've recently added Gun Rights Examiner to their "Recommended Sites" list, and I'm reciprocating here.
While I agree with the sentiment that there really is no legitimate other side when right and wrong are involved, it's a very useful "one stop shopping" resource--and we do want to know what "the wrong side" is up to, don't we?
You can access the Opposing Views without registration, but if you want to vote in their polls, etc., a fairly unintrusive sign-up is required. As of this writing, "weapons on campus" is at 50/50, and with the recent brutal slaying at Virginia Tech, "the right side" can do better."
This can be another powerful resource for getting "our" message "outside the choir."
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Lou Dobbs on Olofson
I hope to have more developments on this story today, including documents and hopefully a video link. Until then, you can read a transcript of the program here (scroll down page to that segment) .
Check out the latest from other Gun Rights Examiners:
Comments
David Codrea is so obsessed with guns that it seems pathological. There are about 25,000 gun deaths a year--every year--in this country. And yet the gun nuts are obsessed with making guns even more easily accessible. Why?
Over the years I've decided it's sexual. Yes, sexual. They are so obsessed because it's their way of asserting that yes, yes, they really are men! But they really don't believe it and having a gun in their hand is like having a penis to show all that, see, I really am a man! But they don't really believe it.
Easy access to guns is killing us and sexually insecure characters like Dave Codrea and others like him who are obsessed with "proving" that they are "men" by waving their fake penises around just compound the problem and cause more deaths and injuries and suffering of many kinds.
Henry: LOL! You just made my day. Thanks.
I guess we should ban cars then, since they cause way more deaths than guns do. And nice job doubling the stat of gun deaths to make it more convincing. You are truly retarded individual and I sincerly hope you aren't having sex or children.
Oh, and David will probably leave your comment up just to show your idiocy and ignorance. Unlike most anti-gunners, gun nuts support and allow the free speech of others. Check out some anti-gun youtube videos sometime, and you'll notice some insane spinster-cat-lady who has disabled the comments and rating ability of the video because it got so horrifically trashed by actual facts and truth.
Please die in a fire. Cheers.
I will indeed leave it up.
If Henry did not exist, I would have been tempted to invent him.
Which I would never do, by the way, out of principle. But fortunately, the Henry's of the world do exist, eliminating the need to parody them.
This made my day.
Henry, I won’t bother to argue statistics with you – I’ll leave that to David. (Not that you seem overly concerned with the facts...)
Let me ask you a few simple questions. If you answer honestly, you’ll gain significant insight into the “gun issue.”
You’re taking a walk with a female loved one (your wife, mother, sister, a good friend) and you are confronted by an armed thug – or two, or three, or four armed thugs – who begin making demands.
First question: What would you do? All the official advice given by hoplophobes like yourself is to ‘give them what they want.’
Second question: What if they want to make you watch while they rape her?
What’s the plan, Henry? Since guns are just “fake penises” and you apparently esteem yourself such that your endowment is sufficient to exist without a gun, is the plan to wave your manhood in protest? Will you run? They’ll shoot you! Or chase you down and stab you or beat you to death. Argue them out of it? Right, right, they must be creatures of reason if they’re mugging you. Call 911? Sure, you have five minutes to wait around for the cops, right?
Admit it, Henry, your best hope for survival would be to scream like the helpless disarmed person that you have relegated yourself to be, and to hope that someone like David Codrea shows up with a ‘fake penis’ to save you.
That’s the price of disarmament, Henry, and it’s paid every day in ‘gun free zones’ that people like you scream for at the top of your lungs.
It’s an ugly thing to live your life refusing to take responsibility for yourself. It’s even uglier to deride those who do take responsibility for their lives.
Good points, Mr. Jones.
Now, all--let's not make this about Henry.
Let's please discuss Obama's conclusion that "guns in this country" must be "child-proofed."
Thoughts?
It seems to me that, like everything else government undertakes to do, there must be an "or else," either explicit or implied. If guns cannot be 100% reliably "child-proofed," the alternative will be to ban them. That's what they call "reasonable." I have no doubt that when Mr Obama and his enablers like our friend Henry all swear they support gun owners rights, that they only want "reasonable gun control," they are lying. They don't want gun control, they want the guns.
I'm going to a gun show in Hilliard, Ohio this weekend to buy more fake penises. I'm obsessed with fake penises, especially the military and evil black ones.
Henry, your numbers of 25K are off, its 32K of gun deaths per year. But lets look at that number. Half are of people who killed themselves. Isn't it their body? Don't they have a right to choose? And have the decency of privacy? So now we are at 16K. I wonder how many are killed by police. How many are killed by a citizen in a lawful situation using deadly force. How many are criminals killed by other criminals. You know gangs and such.
When you get down to the number of deaths and real victims it pales, big time. Now asked yourself this, would I that would be you, like to know how many lives guns save by would be victims just showing violent criminals that they are armed?
Let's childproof guns the way our family did. Careful explanation that they are NOT toys, what they are for how to operate them safely and yep clean them.
Then to the range to show they are indeed not toys. Responsibility taught carefully and absolute supervision as the kids actually shoot.
Guns have saved our lives in this family more than once and our son and daughter have respect for not just themselves but for these tools of Freedom.
Yep, we study history of our Constitutional Republic and what the Second Amendment truly means.
It isn't about safety, or children, or "common sense" at all. It's about power, control and hate.
Those who say they hate our guns are liars. They really and truly hate you and me, the children and everyone else.
Politicians such as Obama have the POWER and every incentive to act out that hate - and they will not give it up because we ask them to do so.
When in doubt how to push a cause through, start naming the children.
I think the seminal issue is responsibility, or more accurately: Who is responsible for the individual citizen's physical safety?
I say me and Obama says he. The only logical conclusion a free man can reach is that he and only he holds the ultimate responsibility for keeping himself and his family safe. The collectivists, however, have arrived at the conclusion that because responsibile behavior will be invariably not practiced by some individuals that government must intervene (at the cost of those who WOULD bear their own responsibility and freedom.)
All the above grants Obama the benefit of the doubt - that he really DOES care for the children. I submit that he does not, and that child safety is a convenient excuse to seize more power - one more hoop for us to jump through in order to own a gun, one more offense to dangle over the subjects' heads if they do not comply, one more way to show the bedwetters like Henry that "at least someone is doing SOMETHING." And at the end of the day, one more way to ensure that we can do nothing to stop their next edict, which indeed may have nothing to do with guns whatsoever.
John Moses Browning's M1911 is still considered by many (myself included) to be the finest fighting pistol ever made--in large part because of its superb trigger. Superb triggers are exactly what the citizen disarmament advocates say we must give up, "for the children." If your child is killed because you can't stop the evil thug from doing so, because the heavy trigger (mandated by law, so as to be too heavy for a toddler to pull) causes you to miss, I guess that's just too bad.
As for "smart guns," New Jersey has passed a law requiring them when the technology becomes available, but the police will be exempt from that requirement--the "Only Ones" not required to have "smart guns."
Why is that? Because cops don't want to have to trust their lives to such gadgetry.
The rest of us, though--that's another matter.
According to Henry, my wife's gun is a penis extension. I guess that must make me a homosexual.
Do I get some sort of federal protection now that I am in a minority class?
Geeze, Henry.
There would be no "obsession" with guns if the Constitution was actually being followed. And Henry - have you listed your house and property as a "gun-free zone" yet? Or are you still relying on the fact that criminals don't know which household in your neighborhood is occupied by law-abiding gun owners?
Have you told your neighbors and the police that you will refuse "armed" intervention in the event that someone threatens you or your family?
Seems kinda hypocritical that you would expect anyone with a gun to intercede on your behalf if such an occurance became necessary.
Please - do us all a favor and list your house and car as being "gun-free."
I'd hate to think that someone would ever use their fake penis to protect you.
Git er done!
Oh - I can't help but think that people who are actually NOT willing to defend themselves are emasculated, and have an issue with real men - and women - who are willing to defend themselves and their families.
Perhaps you are simply suffering from penis envy. Post you house as a gun-free zone, and I'll be the first to admit that your junk is enormous...
Ah, yes, "childproofing guns"--again.
(I suppose it is one piece of good news in this otherwise tiring time, that if those who hate the concept of individual sovereignty SO MUCH that they would forcibly disarm peaceable citizens, are insatiably relentless and frothing at the mouth at their current strategic position, what they are not, is very original.)
As with every other sales pitch for their snake oil, this "childproof the guns" ruse is not about statistics, nor safety, nor crime.
Nor, more importantly, any sort of consistent logic. One would assume that at least a good lot of these disarmament types are parents themselves. Now I don't know about you, but every parent I've ever talked with about any other subject would tell you that there is NOTHING that can be truly "proofed" against a child, and the better answer is (surprise) education. But suddenly, for this one exception (EEEEEK! GUNS!), this principle is suddenly stood on its head and flies out the window? Wow, I actually didn't think the salesmanship was that good.
The answer, of course, is not to try and "child-proof" the gun, but to "gun-proof" your own child*--you know, education? If a principle really is a principle, it holds, and of course this one holds here just as it does everywhere else. (One doesn't even have to be a "gunnie" for this to work out well for everyone; does teaching a child how to handle poisons safely imply some sort of psycho-sexual fixation with hemlock?)
Seems to me, at least, that educating oneself about dangerous items that one may come across, can only be helpful to both recognize them as dangerous, and to be safe around them. And so some of us trouble ourselves to learn about the state, which is the most dangerous thing any of us will ever run across.
(You know, the same state that teaches you history, and current events, and politics. The one that seems to think that the only thing it has ever done wrong is not getting more involved when it should have. The one that thinks civilian disarmament may just be the swellest idea since taxes.)
___________
* With apologies to Massad Ayoob, from whom I first heard this term. He wrote a book called "Gun-Proof Your Children".
Deleted an off-topic comment that belonged in another article.
To:Laniappe's Troll
You are a troll on the internet. That is probably your role in life as well. Go troll the street corners with all the other attention whores. After all, the oldest profession is where the term 'trolling' came from. And I'm sure you come from a family with generations of experts in trolling.
Wow, it continues to speak and yet say nothing.
LG, David's work goes back many years now, and stands on its own. Your snipe-y postings here (the latest of which is on the wrong topic, BTW, if you care) simply don't compare.
Stop using the phrase "us gun people"; from what I have seen you have no claim on that title.
Your rantings imply a supreme confidence that what happened to Olofson could never happen to you (which is what really underlies most of the concerns expressed here). You know, good luck with that. Maybe you're right. Or, maybe you may want to read your history a little more closely. (Only Ones do have a long and nasty history of turning on themselves, and I would be willing to bet that you are nowhere near the Onliest of Only Ones.)
Guys, I reposted his comment in its entirety under the correct article, the Lou Dobbs piece that directly precedes this one.
Please all--back to Obama, kids and guns.
Thanks!
If the yardstick is "if it even saves one life," then let's ban bathtubs, automobiles, airplanes, boats, houses made of combustible materials, propane and gas appliances, electricity, living along hurricane and tsunami susceptible shorelines, war, etc. etc...
Henry, we hire police officers to carry guns on the job. The armed citizen wants to be at least as well armed as the average officer. In neither case is it about having to prove anyone's own manhood. It only recognizes that the bad guys we might encounter as we go about our lives are well armed and don't care about killing in order to take whatever they want. Carrying a gun is the most effective way to defend oneself against an armed attacker.
Your argument is all emotion with no logic. I would bet you never took debate in high school. BTW, what is a women with a gun trying to demonstrate?
If guns are an extension of a man's penis, does that mean that men who support gun control secretly want to have vaginas?
OK, I get Henry, but if that's the case how mall is his?
You know, here in Alabama we have laws against selling sex toys -- silly, but on the books. Does this mean that they are going to try back-door gun control (no pun intended as far as you know) by equating firearms with with rubber penises? Won't that split their coalition? If vibrators are outlawed nationwide, won't they lose the lesbian vote?
Errata: Dropped an "s" on "small"
I have said this before, and I will say it again:
"For the children" has become the rallying cry of statists everywhere.
What they don't want you to know is, that by restricting the rights of
adults today in order to "protect" the children right now, they are
selling those self-same children into tyranny, when they become the adults of the future.
No matter what they actually *say* they want, be it anti-gun, anti-tobacco, anti-abortion; for "the animals", "the environment", "public safety", "the children"; they have only one, real objective: CONTROL. Control over you, your life, your money, your choices, your *freedom*.
The Statists of all stripes have only one thing in mind: CONTROL. They wish to enslave everybody, to work towards their version of the "common good". That is to say, whatever is good for THEM. They have no regard for "public safety", "the environment", or even "the chillldrunnn" - these are just convenient covers for their true objectives. They use these covers in order to generate guilt or fear, which leads to sympathy/agreement with their cause. They trade on emotions, not reason, because they know their "arguments" cannot hold up to the harsh light of the truth.
They will say anything, do anything, use anything; they will lie, re-define, re-interpret, re-invent; they will use emotion - tugging on the heartstrings and playing on fear.
Statists are monsters who must be exposed for what they are. The more we expose their agenda and tactics, the less power they have. The more we use reason, based on the truth, the faster they will be defeated, for their arguments cannot stand up to such rigorous scrutiny.
Childproofing guns is a damn good idea. My first gun was "childproofed" when I was nine. Uh huh, my grandfather and my uncle childproofed it for me.
They taught me how to use it, how to respect it, all the rules regarding its safe handling, and that I was not to be a nine year old child when I took it out to hunt or target shoot.
I was to be a nine year old "adult in training", I learned those lessons, I incorporated them into myself and my attitude, and I was a nine year old "adult in training" just as my grandfather and uncle taught me and demanded that I be before I was considered trustworthy with a firearm. Or for that matter, any other serious tool.
So you see, my gun was child proofed in the exact manner all of them should be.
I think we should childproof a whole lot more guns every year. At Christmas, on birthdays, Arbor Day, etc. and so on. I know I have childproofed my guns, my grandchildren think think I was "gripey", but guess what, they are not children when the shoot them, but "adults in training".
Guys like Henry dislike adults, makes them feel inadequate. I can assure them that they should worry about it. They aren't wrong. They actually are inadequate.
Henry,
Is that the best argument you have for gun control, really?
Ad hominem attacks are intellectual weaklings.
And as for being sexually obsessed;
What do you call a man who isn't sbsessed by sex? Dead, or on the way out.
Henry J. Flandyszsays: "Over the years I've decided it's sexual. Yes, sexual."
Then you've wasted a lot of your time. The gun/penis analogy has absolutely no factual basis.
They just want everyone else to take responsibility for their kids, so they don't have to! If you have a gun, and a little one, keep it out of reach, if you have and older child, teach them how to use it, and a healthy respect for it. I was shooting cans at 7!!
Sorry, Henry.
I insist threads remain on topic.
If you won't, I'll just delete you--which I just did. I put the work into this to discuss the topic I present--not to give you a forum to hurl insults.
If you can stay on topic and debate the issue presented, fine.
Otherwise, you're out of here. You can put the work into your own column and say what you want from there.
Off topic comment deleted.
Video of Dobbs Report
youtube.com/watch?v=J63JWMt3-6g
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