{"id":2780,"date":"2003-01-14T22:12:05","date_gmt":"2003-01-14T22:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=539"},"modified":"2003-01-14T22:12:05","modified_gmt":"2003-01-14T22:12:05","slug":"guns-guns-those-pesky-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2780","title":{"rendered":"GUNS, GUNS, THOSE PESKY GUNS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pat Summerall emails me:<\/p>\n

Kevin Drum rounds up<\/a> the evidence against libertarian “scholar” John Lott, a guy widely relied upon on by pundits on the right for evidence that gun control actually produces more crime. Seems Lott may have fabricated<\/a> a survey he once did on defensive gun use. Is there more? Stay tuned. A more definitive takedown<\/a> of Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime can be found here.
\nWe just noticed that InstaPundit has been taking issue with Brent Kendall’s new Washington Monthly article, “License to Kill: How the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad get a sniper rifle.” First<\/a> he decided the article was terrible, sight unseen, because the headline referred to Muhammed’s gun as a sniper rifle when it was actually an assault rifle. (Never blame a journalist for his headline — we don’t pick ’em.) Then he wrote<\/a> that, according to Kendall “the gun and bullets are apparently responsible for the deaths, not Muhammad and Malvo, who in this report merely occupied a Chevrolet Caprice — an offense against automotive taste, perhaps, but no more.” Surely the professor can do better than that. Blame the person, not the gun, is a favored libertarian argument against gun control, but it’s silly. Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree simply would not have been possible had they not been able to illegally acquire a high-powered rifle. You can’t kill from two hundred yards with a hunting knife. You can’t strangle somebody from the trunk of a car.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sigh.
\nI haven’t written much<\/a> about l’affaire Bellesiles, for a variety of reasons, including some personal ones (hell, may as well acknowledge it…we have a Christmas card from his dad on the mantel). I’ve actually had some correspondence from Lott, although I’ve just scanned his work and the work that has grown up in opposition and support of his work.
\nBut I’ll divert for a moment into the meta-politics here for a moment. Pat isn’t interested in having a dialog about gun control. There are some ‘tells’ that give it away pretty quickly…“scholar” John Lott…takedown of his work<\/i>…it’s WWE time, folks.
\nAnd I’m not interested in being a luchador.
\nThere are real issues around the murder rate in the United States. But since I don’t live in Peter Pan’s world where wishing and clapping my hands makes it so, the guns out there in the world will not simply disappear.<\/b> Neither, I remind my shooting friends, will the regulation of the personal ownership and possession of guns. For the foreseeable future include figuring out how to live as safely as possible in a society where there are a whole lot of guns, and figure out how to do so while maintaining some semblance of individual rights.
\nThe U.K. continues it’s crackdown, and to what effect? They police are so buried in crime they can’t even investigate property crimes any more.
\nAnd to Pat’s (and the original author’s) position on the D.C. shooters, I’ll suggest a few words in response:
\nTed Bundy
\nJohn Wayne Gacy
\nJulio Gonzalez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pat Summerall emails me: Kevin Drum rounds up the evidence against libertarian “scholar” John Lott, a guy widely relied upon on by pundits on the right for evidence that gun control actually produces more crime. Seems Lott may have fabricated a survey he once did on defensive gun use. Is there more? Stay tuned. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}