This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Guns

  • Millionaire arrested in NYC for defending his home

    ROS sends us a link to The Blaze article about George Bardwil, a millionaire who lives in New York City. He confronted a burglar in his home Thursday night with his bodyguard’s gun. I guess the bodyguard leaves the gun legally registered to him at his employer’s house. Anyway, Bardwil called the police after he frightened away the burglar and turned over the video of him during his confrontation, which the police promptly used as evidence to lock up Bardwil for using a gun that isn’t registered to him.

    Bardwil says that he’s afraid to sleep in his house without a gun. He has good reason to be scared. Barely two years ago, he lost $300k to armed robbers while he was tied up and threatened.

    “I was with a couple friends. There was a buzz at the door. I assumed it was somebody I knew,” Bardwil told The Post in a blow-by-blow account of the 2:45 p.m. robbery at his first-floor apartment on East 51st Street near Second Avenue, where the creeps swiped $300,000 worth of designer watches, diamond jewelry and cash.

    “There was a large black male with a gun [and an accomplice]. We were all tied up and relieved of our watches, wallets, money,” Bardwil said, adding that the crooks clearly knew he had video-surveillance equipment concealed in a closet — they dismantled it first — and a safe hidden in a drawer beneath his bed.

    I wonder why he doesn’t have a gun registered in his name. He’s lucky that he didn’t shoot the burglar. New York would throw away the key.

  • Funny or Die; The Black NRA

    Yeah, they think they’re being funny, but they’re just perpetuating stereotypes, both white and black.

    I’m not particularly frightened by a Black man who legally owns a gun. Since the NRA supports responsible gun ownership, I’m sure there are already Black members of the NRA. In fact I know a couple.

    Colin Noir responds to the idiocy;

  • Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: More Guns Does NOT Mean More Murders or Suicides

    Well, I wanna see how the     anti-gun tools and fools     gun control advocates are going to spin this one.  I ran across it on Breitbart.com and found it interesting as hell.

    It seems as if some folks from academia recently decided to study the issue of whether the prevalence of guns in a nation’s population is related to that nation’s murder and suicide rates.  The study is published in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Volume 30 (2), pp. 649-694.  It examined data from both the US and Europe relating to both suicides and murders involving guns.

    The anti-gun lobby ain’t gonna like the results.   But they certainly made me smile.

    The Harvard study found little or no connection between the the prevalence of firearms among a nation’s population and the rate of murder or suicides.  And they found some other interesting other bits of information as well.

    Here are some quotes:

    Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates. Since well before that date, the Soviet Union possessed extremely stringent gun controls3 that were effectuated by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement.  So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them. Yet, manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world.  In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun-less Soviet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those of gun-ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998-2004 (the latest figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates. Similar murder rates also characterize the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and various other now-independent European nations of the former U.S.S.R. (pp. 650-651)

    Malcolm presents reliable trend data on both gun ownership and crime in England for the period between 1871 and 1964. Significantly, these trend data do not at all correlate as the mantra would predict: violent crime did not increase with increased gun ownership nor did it decline in periods in which gun ownership was lower. (p. 684)

    Also of interest are the extensive opinion surveys of incarcerated felons, both juvenile and adult, in which large percentages of the felons replied that they often feared potential victims might be armed and aborted violent crimes because of that fear. The felons most frightened about confronting an armed victim were those “from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms.” (p. 686)

    Consider Norway and its neighbors Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Norway has far and away Western Europe’s highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe (1.9%), and Sweden lies midway between (15.1%) the Netherlands and Norway. Yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian, and the Swedish rate is even higher, though only slightly. (p. 687)

    The mantra more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death is also used to argue that “limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides.”  Once again, this assertion is directly contradicted by the studies of 36 and 21 nations (respectively) which find no statistical relationship. (pp. 690-691)

    There is simply no relationship evident between the extent of suicide and the extent of gun ownership. People do not commit suicide because they have guns available. In the absence of firearms, people who are inclined to commit suicide kill themselves some other way. (p. 691)

    The mantra referenced in these quotes, of course, is the false assertion that “more guns mean more deaths and, therefore fewer guns means fewer deaths.”

    There are many more such gem quotes in the study.  For anyone looking to counter the anti-gun lobby’s propaganda with facts, it’s a keeper – and it’s in downloadable PDF format, so it works on a Kindle or Nook.

    Our liberal “brethren” should accept it as Gospel, too.  After all, it was published by freaking Harvard! (smile)

    These results don’t surprise me whatsoever.  I wrote much the same here myself, over a year ago, concerning domestic gun laws and their correlation with murder rate.  I found essentially the same results – no correlation.

    Kudos to Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser, the study’s authors, for their work.  Anyone with half a brain or some amount common sense already knew this – but that leaves out much of academia and virtually all of the libidiot     anti-gun tools and fools     gun control advocates.  Now it’s been documented and published yet again.

    It’s not the guns that are causing the problem, folks.  It’s the society.

  • CDC report supports Second Amendment

    Earlier this year, while the country was still trembling in fear over the Sandy Hook murders, by Executive Order, the President lifted a 17-year restriction placed by Congress to prevent the Center for Disease Control from conducting a study on the effects of guns in our culture. So, the CDC went to work and poured through available data for their report. So, their report was released in June. Have you heard anything about it? Probably not, because apparently it didn’t turn out the way the gun grabbers wanted. This summary from Guns & Ammo;

    1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:
    “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

    2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
    “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

    3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining:
    “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” The report also notes, “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”

    4. “Interventions” (i.e, gun control) such as background checks, so-called assault rifle bans and gun-free zones produce “mixed” results:
    “Whether gun restrictions reduce firearm-related violence is an unresolved issue.” The report could not conclude whether “passage of right-to-carry laws decrease or increase violence crime.”

    5. Gun buyback/turn-in programs are “ineffective” in reducing crime:
    “There is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective, as noted in the 2005 NRC study Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. For example, in 2009, an estimated 310 million guns were available to civilians in the United States (Krouse, 2012), but gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns (NRC, 2005). On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides (Kuhn et al., 2002).”

    6. Stolen guns and retail/gun show purchases account for very little crime:
    “More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70 percent of the guns used or possess by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.”

    7. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are not homicides, but suicides:
    “Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”

    Somehow I don’t think this report’s release would have been as quietly shuffled away had the results been even a little bit different.

    Thanks to JBS for the link.

  • Another .762 caliber rifle found

    You might remember last week that the Washington Times reported that one of the Fast & Furious weapons found at crime scenes in Mexico was a .762 caliber rifle. This week, it’s NBC that saw one of these rifles at the brief school shooting in Georgia yesterday;

    A photo of [Michael Brandon Hill, the shooter] holding a rifle, believed to be the same one used in Tuesday’s shooting, was found on Hill’s cellphone, Davis said.

    The rifle was a .762-caliber AK-47-style weapon, manufactured by Romarm/Cugar.

    I’m pretty upset that Big Gun would create this rifle and not let me shoot one. But I guess the most fantastic part of the story is that Shooter Hill was carrying 500 rounds of ammunition for the gun. He must be The Hulk. The bullet is half again the size of a .50 caliber, so 500 rounds is quite a load.

    Um, media guys, it’s 7.62 millimeter, or if you’re married to calibers, that’s a .308 caliber. Hill was still pretty sturdy for carrying 500 rounds of .308. And of course, i can make fun of it all because no one was hurt – no one was hurt because good guys with guns arrived on the scene in time. And the gunman was more interested in being famous than being a killer. Good thing he was in a gun free zone or someone might have gotten hurt. And it looks like he might have stolen the gun from a friend.

    Thanks to H1 for the link.

  • Illinois gets expanded background checks

    Andy sends us a link to Reuters which explain Illinois’ expanded background checks laws which go into effect January 1, 2014;

    Previously in Illinois, where Democrats control the state legislature but remain sharply divided over firearms safety, only adults buying guns from a licensed firearms dealer or at a gun show in the state have been subject to background checks.

    Those buyers must have a firearm owners identification (FOID) card, which is issued by Illinois state police to applicants who pass a screening of state criminal and mental health records. The seller must then call a state-run hotline to check that a buyer’s FOID card is valid before making the sale.

    Under the new law, gun sales or transfers between private parties, including those that take place online, will have to follow the same system.

    I’m sure Lil Killah and D-bag will be taking time out of their busy crime sprees to get FOID cards and comparing them when they transfer their gats back and forth. But the governor thinks that these new laws will actually do something because “Guns are a plague on too many of our communities”. Personally, I think that breeding criminals is a plague on our communities, but I’ve never been in elected office, so what do I know about reality.

  • NRA; Dom Raso on “Deterrence”

    The folks at the NRA send us their latest commentary on guns starring former Navy SEAL Dom Raso as he talks about the power of deterrence in regards to guns;

    A lot of good people either aren’t willing or aren’t capable of thinking like a criminal. They don’t realize that, for these guys, crime is just a job. It’s how they pay the bills. They don’t want to take the risks that they don’t have to. And for them, every gun in the hands of a good guy — whether it’s a police officer or a citizen — is risk that they don’t want to take. Those guns that you never see or think about, behind locked doors, and concealed in purses and under jackets, make you safer.

    You’ll never hear it in the media because for them if no one gets shot it’s not a story. But it’s not like there aren’t any criminals in Houston. They just don’t like taking chances that put their lives at risk. That’s the power of the Second Amendment.

  • Profiling or Situational Awareness?

    Recently American Thinker ran a piece, “Profiling, a Darwinian Necessity,” in which author, Richard Butrick, correctly identified the tendency to observe one’s surroundings and perceive threats to be a survival mechanism genetically hardwired into human brains, regardless of race or ethnicity.

    Butrick’s observation got me to thinking back to my days as a combat infantryman NCO in Vietnam. The truth of his premise allowed me to be here now writing this.

    Looking back to those long-ago years, it’s difficult to pinpoint when, as a private, I first heard some Army officer or NCO use the term situational awareness. Like most young privates, I likely paid little heed to the critical, even mortal, importance of that term.

    But with more experience in the field as an infantryman, it became obvious to me that one of the essential skills of a successful warrior is a finely honed proficiency in situational awareness. That consists of being constantly aware of where you are at what time, of who is with you and where they are in relation to you, of what direction all of you are moving and into what kind of terrain, and most importantly, what potentially lethal threat lies ahead or to your flanks (and sometimes, in really tough times, behind you). An awareness of all that input from your surrounding environment allows a functioning assessment of the risk to yourself and your men and the ability to determine if that risk is reasonable.

    And most importantly, containable and controllable.

    Learning to be situationally aware is the bedrock of being a successful warrior. It is an absolutely indispensable requirement for infantry officers and NCOs who are looking to bring their troops home safely. The key to being skilled at situational awareness is the ability to learn from experience so that one recognizes patterns of both physical situations and human behaviors and is able to sort out those that are risky from those that pose a true deadly threat. And the more refined your warfighting missions become, the greater the requirement for situational awareness skills. Those who have it perfected to greatest degree are those who make up our special operations forces. Some of those people have situational awareness honed to such an extent as to seem clairvoyant.

    But this is a skill that is not limited to soldiers on the ground. Every aviator, civilian and military, has to be constantly aware of absolutely everything occurring in the environment surrounding his aircraft. I can imagine that this is magnified a thousandfold for combat helicopter pilots and crews. All first responders must have well-developed situational awareness skills, and that is why, when injected into emergency environments, they are asking a steady stream of rapid-fire questions: to enhance their awareness of what is happening and what has happened. Finally, there is probably no greater demand on any human being for top-notch situational awareness skills than on a ship’s captain, especially those commanding war vessels. Ship captains probably have better situational skills when sleeping than most fully-awake civilians.

    So what does all this have to do with profiling? Well, first of all, profiling just happens to be the application of situational awareness skills to our everyday environment. The process of assessing that environment and our position in it and the potential dangers present is in full and constant operation for those who must deal with the threats to that society.

    Since it is the police who seem to come in for the greatest criticism from the lefties with regard to profiling, let’s look at how situational awareness is an essential skill for any police officer. Consider for a moment how we train young rookie cops; we pair them with veteran officers so that they can benefit from the latter’s experiences. And just what are those experiences conveyed to the rookie? They are patterns of circumstances and human behaviors that are fed into the rookie’s brain to help form an accurate assessment of his true situational awareness, which can have lethal consequences if ignored.

    I have many times seen Texas state troopers out in the endless miles of Interstate 10, between San Antonio and El Paso, involved in roadside pullovers of large BMWs, Mercedes, and Escalades with California or Florida plates, driven by black or Hispanic males. Are they, the cops, profiling? Bet your butt they are. But why is that? How about because the history of major drug busts on I-10 in West Texas, the primary conduit between Southern California (read: Tijuana) and Florida, involves the very types of drivers the Texas troopers tend to pull over.

    Those troopers are guilty of employing nothing more than situational awareness in their patrolling of those endless miles of Interstate 10. There is a great likelihood that black or Hispanic males driving luxury vehicles have a high correlation with cross-continent drug-haulers. In that process, do some innocents get stopped and temporarily inconvenienced? Sure they do. But is that of any greater import than the inconvenience we all suffer in the security measures associated with contemporary air travel? In every airport, we meekly submit because it’s for the greater good of America. Isn’t halting the ground flow of drugs between Tijuana and Miami equally beneficial to the well-being of America?

    I’ve used a rather specific example here (which I’m sure will be denied by the Texas Department of Public Safety), but the truth is that profiling is practiced by them and all other law enforcement agencies on a regular basis across America. And for good reason: profiling helps put away bad guys. Liberals can scream in protest all they want, but the simple, incontrovertible truth is that such profiling helps take bad guys off the street and out of circulation. I realize that truth means little to people such as this one, who laments the fact that crime is going down because we’re locking up those bad guys. Such ignorance can only be described as sad.

    Try to comprehend the liberal mind…

    Crossposted at American Thinker