Gun Control Push in Wake of Roseburg Shootings

Since Ted won't get up on his high horse about the recent putsch toward gun control by the left after the shootings in Roseburg, I guess it's up to me.

Yes, Obama Wants Your Guns

. . .Obama and the left want your guns. That’s all. End of story.

Over the course of the last several years, politicians and pundits of the left have shied away from calls for complete gun confiscation. No longer. The mainstreaming of gun confiscation has begun with the White House. President Obama explicitly praised Australia and Great Britain for their gun regimes. Both countries largely ban guns and have taken part in mass registration and/or confiscation.

And why shouldn’t the left want your guns? President Obama has already dismissed the notion that the Second Amendment was meant to protect citizens from government tyranny. Next, he’ll come after the guns with the government, all the while maintaining that tyranny is merely an intellectual conceit of the right-wing conspiracy theorists. If the government is just another name for the things we do together, as Obama claims, then why can’t we all just take our guns away from ourselves?

But don’t worry – Obama continues to maintain that if you like your guns, you can keep your guns. Why shouldn’t we believe him, based on past experience?

It's pretty clear the left is getting ready for yet another push for gun control and ultimately confiscation and the banning of private ownership of guns.

Why? Because guns in the hands of citizens who disagree with them stands in the way of their taking control of the country, lock, stock and barrel. Pun intended.

Because it won't many lives.

 Zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws

So, given this, let’s look at how jurisdiction-level homicide rates (i.e., homicides per 100,000 people) correlate with jurisdiction-level gun laws, counting the 50 states and D.C. (I use 2012 Justice Department homicide data, from the Proquest Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2015. I use the 2013 gun law scores and grades from the Brady Campaign, with low scores meaning a low level of gun restrictions and high scores being a high level. And I use an estimate of my own for D.C. based on the Brady Campaign’s criteria, since the Brady list didn’t include D.C.; I think my estimate is if anything an underestimate of D.C.’s tight gun laws, at least as of 2012-13.) I have also run the analysis using the data from the National Journal article that has recently been in the news, and the result is virtually identical.

The ten lowest-homicide jurisdictions, again including both intentional homicide and accidental gun deaths and the ten highest-homicide ones (Click to enlarge):

And a scatterplot with all 50 states:

The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero. (If you omit the fatal gun accident rates, then the correlation would be +.065, which would make the more gun-restricting states look slightly worse; but again, the correlation would be small enough to be essentially zero, given all the other possible sources of variation.)

So it's more the content of a state's character than the contents of it's holsters.

Do civilians with guns ever stop mass shootings? Short answer - Yes.

Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding people carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one such example can be found, or saying that they haven’t heard of even one such example.
. . .
Naturally, such examples will be rare. Even in states which allow concealed carry, there often aren’t people near a shooting who have a gun on them at the time. Many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities or private property posted with a no-guns sign), in which gun carrying isn’t allowed. And there is no central database of such examples, many of which don’t hit the national media, especially if a gunman is stopped before he shoots many victims. Moreover, at least some examples are ambiguous, because it might be unclear — as you’ll see below — whether the shooter had been planning to kill more people when he was stopped.

Still, for whatever they are worth, here is a list of some such incidents (which deliberately excludes killings stopped by people who were off-duty police officers, or police officers from other jurisdictions, at the time of a shooting, as well as some other cases which struck me as borderline):

1. In Chicago earlier this year, an Uber driver with a concealed-carry permit “shot and wounded a gunman [Everardo Custodio] who opened fire on a crowd of people.”

2. In a Philadelphia barber shop earlier this year, Warren Edwards “opened fire on customers and barbers” after an argument. Another man with a concealed-carry permit then shot the shooter; of course it’s impossible to tell whether the shooter would have kept killing if he hadn’t been stopped, but a police captain was quoted as saying that, “I guess he [the man who shot the shooter] saved a lot of people in there.”

3. In a hospital near Philadelphia, in 2014, Richard Plotts shot and killed the psychiatric caseworker with whom he was meeting, and shot and wounded his psychiatrist, Lee Silverman. Silverman shot back, and took down Plotts. While again it’s not certain whether Plotts would have killed other people, Delaware County D.A. Jack Whelan stated that, “If the doctor did not have a firearm, (and) the doctor did not utilize the firearm, he’d be dead today, and I believe that other people in that facility would also be dead”; Yeadon Police Chief Donald Molineux similar said that he “believe[d] the doctor saved lives.” Plotts was still carrying 39 unspent rounds when he was arrested. . . .

Get the full article for 6 more examples.

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Columbus Day Edition" ready at The Other McCain.