Rob Lyman pulls me back into the gun issue with a damn interesting philosophical piece.
Partly, this disagreement arises because the parties are talking about different things. I have no doubt that reducing gun ownership among drug dealers whould reduce urban violence. I just don’t see how bugging hunters and target shooters will accomplish that. The anti-gunners, on the other hand, don’t make a very clear distinction between me and an urban gang-banger. We both have handguns; we are both “potential” murderers.
Wait a minute…wasn’t I supposed to blogroll him??
…on the way.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
>> Lots of things are registered: cars, marriages, businesses. Not just sex offenders. Phony argument. The analogy would be relevant if any of those things had been the subject of bans that used said registration, or if there were strong lobbies advocating “registration first, then confiscation and bans”.One of the strongest arguments supporting the slippery slope conclusion is the fact that the “let’s try it” folks never get around to advocating repeal of things that don’t work.Of course, it could be that they believe that everything has worked? If so, we know a bit about what they want, and it isn’t crime control.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
But everyone knows with marriage the banns come first. 🙂
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
BTW – I’ve asked these before and didn’t get an answer, but I’ll ask again. (1) What evidence would convince Lazarus that a specific gun control law provided no benefits against criminal/bad use? (2) What evidence would convince Lazarus that the cost of a particular measure outweighed the benefits? (3) Are there any such laws and does Lazarus support repealing them? I can see that it’s difficult in the real world to see if a gun control law worked. Here are some ideas: the law does not work in the event that (1) criminals’ access to guns appears not to have gone down, (2) apprehension of gun criminals does not go up [e.g., ballistic signatures are, as you say, useless, chain-of-ownership records don’t give results], (3) the severity and incidence of gun crime doesn’t go down [for instance, if we re-legalized fully automatic weapons, we might see the number of gun crimes stabilized but the severity increase]. Some of these calculations are tricky, because at any time these rates are being affected by other factors.I can think of one law I suspect doesn’t help: I think waiting periods should be the greater of one day (no impulse purchases) and the time needed to verify that the purchaser is not disqualified (felon, etc.). The latter depends on what quality ID and technology you’re willing to accept, but it’s probably less that the actual waiting period in many places. There are probably other such laws.Let me turn the question around. It used to be legal in some jurisdictions for released felons to possess firearms. This practice was ended by federal law. Do you support this law, and, if so, what sort of evidence persuades you to favor it.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Zizka:Cars, marriages, and businesses are registered for specific purposes. In particular, all of these things have tax implications. And NONE of these registration schemes are likely to be used in a denial of basic human rights. But gun controllers aren’t suggesting registration with an eye toward revenue collection–they’re suggesting it with an eye toward prohibition, and the denial of self-defense rights.You say you don’t accept the slippery slope argument. Well, England, Australia, Canada, NYC, and Canada have all gone down the slippery slope to some extent. In England pistols of any kind are banned, in Australia semi-auto rifles and shotguns are banned, in Cali and NYC “assault weapons” are banned, all of them AFTER registration laws were put in place. So it isn’t crazy to worry about confiscation, and it is rather disingenuous of you to say it can’t happen here. It HAS happened here, for heaven’s sake. If you think prohibition is a good idea, fine, but say so honestly, don’t dismiss the reality of what happened to these otherwise law abiding gun owners. I don’t ususally buy slippery-slope arguments either, but this is one of the few that’s quite real.As for not drinking in the park, I think that’s a bad law. By all means, arrest people for public drunkeness, but don’t forbid me my peaceful beer in the picnic basket. The existence one bad law exists is not a justification for another.Like I said, I don’t know if my guns make you safer, but they make ME safer, and pose no threat to you. I get to swing my fist anywhere so long as it doesn’t find your face.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
The main points I always try to make in these arguments are these:1. While an individual in a given situation can make himself safer by owning a gun, there is no reason to believe that people in countries with widespread gunownership are safer than people in countries without widespread gun ownership. And there is some reason to believe that they are less safe. 2. While I would hope to find a moderate position on the gun question, there’s no good reason to put any effort into that, because the discussion is dominated entirely by people who object to any effort of any kind to regulate, restrict, license, or register guns in any way at all. Every inch must be won by hard struggle, and every point must be argued to death, and every quibble and factoid must be shot down over and over again. For a lot of Americans gun-ownership has a fundamental sacramental value that it doesn’t have for me. There’s really not any use arguing, or trying to find a middle ground either. At the beginning of this thread it seemed that it might be an exception, but it isn’t any more.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Lots of things are registered: cars, marriages, businesses. Not just sex offenders. Phony argument.Any law applies to everyone. I can’t drink wine in the park anymore, because of laws directed at street people. I have to register in order to buy codeine cough medicine, because of addicts. Traffic laws are written for average drivers driving average cars, not competitive sports car racers. Etc. I am sure that there are gun abolitionists out there, just like there still are Maoists out there. They’re not succeeding or close to it. This is a slippery-slope argument and this is not a case when I would accept one. **Most** of the forms of gun control do not create new crimes, unless you defy them. The laws regulating restaurants do not make criminals out of restauranteurs (sp?) They just ask them to fulfill vertain requirements. In social reality it is almost always impossible to demonstrate single-factor causality. Even in health – some heavy smokers don’t get cancer. That argument can be used to shoot down almost any political proposal. I was not arguing that we are less safe because of gun ownership. I was arguing that we are **not** MORE safe, which we should be if some of the things 2nd-amendment advocates are saying are true.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
>> Mr Baker, do you have some ideas for how to keep known criminals from obtaining guns? (Other than stiffer penalties once they are caught.)Lazarus seems to like Clinton.However, he passed up a couple of things that occurred under Clinton that did have a big effect on with-gun crime.One of them was some of the social changes. (I don’t think that we can give Clinton all of the credit for ending the crack wars, but ….)Another was “Project Exile”. It involved charging and sentencing folks who used guns criminally for doing so. (You’d think that that would be SOP, but it isn’t.)Each of these measures had far more effect than any “gun control” law, at least when you account for the known variables.BTW – I’ve asked these before and didn’t get an answer, but I’ll ask again.(1) What evidence would convince Lazarus that a specific gun control law provided no benefits against criminal/bad use?(2) What evidence would convince Lazarus that the cost of a particular measure outweighed the benefits?(3) Are there any such laws and does Lazarus support repealing them?
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Zizka: Lots of things are registered: cars, marriages, businesses. Not just sex offenders. Phony argument. Any law applies to everyone. I can’t drink wine in the park anymore, because of laws directed at street people. I have to register in order to buy codeine cough medicine, because of addicts. Traffic laws are written for average drivers driving average cars, not competitive sports car racers. Etc. Not phony at all. Cars must be registered – but in most states, that is not true for a vehicle which will not be used on the public roads. (California taxes them all.) Futher, no license or minimum age is required to buy a car; a minor with the money and a friend with a tow truck (or license) can buy a car and keep it.You say “I can’t drink wine in the park anymore, because of laws directed at street people.” – but you -can- buy wine, probably in dozens of places, and drink it in many more, even outside. You don’t have to have a specific license to buy wine (just proof of age), nor must you register each bottle. Not since the repeal of Prohibition has there been any large effort to eliminate the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.To get back to your actual point, how would you measure ‘more safe’? We don’t have the ability to remove all firearms from the world, so we can’t run the experiment; smaller scale than that seems to allow contamination from outside.”I have to register in order to buy codeine cough medicine” ?? My doctor writes prescriptions and calls them in to the pharmacy; the pharmacy keeps my name on file so it can send paperwork to the insurance company. I suspect the -pharmacy- is ‘registered’, perhaps also the doctor.Your analogy “Traffic laws are written for average drivers driving average cars, not competitive sports car racers. ” is irrelevant to gun ownership or use – except as applied to carrying weapons in public. Compare the records of licensed drivers in their registered vehicles to that of unlicensed gun owners and their un-registered firearms.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Fine, dude, how well does our system work? Despite everything that’s being said, our armed populace is not safer than disarmed or less heavily armed populaces elsewhere. That is my main point in this argument.Whenever any form whatever of regulation, registration, licensing or restriction of gun ownership is proposed, a flock of spokesmen stands up screaming that government is trying to take away all guns. Not true, not true, not true. Then every argument in the kitchen sink is dragged out to prove that the measure would be ineffective, too expensive, make things worse, tyrranical, and cause skin cancer too. You can shoot this stuff down one bit at a time, but it always rises up again. There may even be a germ of truth in there — I think that A.L. is trying to get to it, though I don’t really agree with him — but the argument in the US as it stands is hysterical and many of the pro-gun arguments are worthless. Sure, criminals don’t obey laws, but they are then prosecuted when caught. I am really a double moderate on gun control. First, it is not a big issue for me. Second, I am no way an abolitionist. But a lot of the things second-amendment absolutists say are either misleading, just plain false, or nutso. Furthermore, many of them, including people I see in daily life, are rather frightening people. It pisses me off, so I get dragged in. When I said that I am a 2nd-amendment moderate, there was an assumption that such a thing exists. It doesn’t really, because the loudest voices in this argument are the absolutists, and any position other than their own causes them to accuse you of the worst. It’s not even worth trying. I’ve never seen an absolutist change his mind. They don’t even stop citing facts that have been proven false. (One guy is still saying that Australia has 15 times the violent crime of the US). If the shoe fits, wear it.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Ziska:Fine, dude, how well does our system work? Despite everything that’s being said, our armed populace is not safer than disarmed or less heavily armed populaces elsewhere. That is my main point in this argument. Yeah, but is the controlling variable the legal presence of guns? Whenever any form whatever of regulation, registration, licensing or restriction of gun ownership is proposed, a flock of spokesmen stands up screaming that government is trying to take away all guns. Not true, not true, not true.Here I’ll flatly disagree with you. The advocacy groups driving gun registration have clearly stated (and I owe you quotes and will go look for them) than the ultimate goal is a ‘gun-free’ America. There is no reason in the world for lawful gun owners to compromise on this issue when a) it’s impossible to demonstrate a clear link of registration (or even confiscation) to reduced crime rates (see this article quoting last Sunday’s Times), and b) it is clear that there is no end to the process except confiscation.I’ll have some ideas on how to break the impasse – hopefully later today.A.L.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Zizka,To me, saying “I don’t want your hunting guns” is a red herring.Aside from the fact that I suspect lots of people WOULD ban hunting guns if it were politically possible, it isn’t the point.A Glock is the perfect anti-rape, anti-robbery, and anti-assault tool (in well-trained hands, of course). I would give up all my hunting and target guns before I would give up my Glock. Hunting and target shooting are wonderful pursuits–but self-defense is a non-negotiable RIGHT.I fully understand your concern with some of the shadier characters out there. In fact, I feel your concern even more acutely than you do, because I have to share space on the firing range with nutjobs and incompetents who threaten my safety rather directly.But–here’s the point of my post–you don’t have any right to restrict MY actions because of something someone else does. I don’t care how weird some guy you know is, that has nothing whatsoever to do with me or my rights.I worry that camera owners and computer owners will use their tools to make and transmit child pornography. That worry does not lead me to want to control your computer or cameras, Zizka. I resent being asked to register like a sex offender when I have done nothing wrong. The proper response to crime–child sexual abuse, murders with guns, whatever–is to punish the perpetrators and leave everyone else alone. Gun control does the opposite–it creates new crimes to punish otherwise innocent people while having little effect on criminal misuse of guns.Only with guns are millions of innocents expected to answer for the crimes of a few.
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Here is an interesting and unusual view of “armed” vs “unarmed” populace. Check it out….http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65889,00.html
Date: 10/17/2002 00:00:00 AM
Ziska: — gun control laws, registration, etc., make it possible to prosecute people who break the laws, for example by making it easier to prove that a gun has been stolen, or by matching a bullet to the gun it came from. Not a panacea, not perfect, but a tool. Really? How well has it worked in England? How many cases in Canada have been solved by their handgun registration system? How much has it cost to implement and operate the licensing and registration system? How cost-effective has it been? Where could the nearly $1 billion Canada has spent so far to implement their licensing and long-gun registration system (still incomplete and riddled with error) have been better spent to fight crime? Licensing and registration would work in a perfect world, but in a perfect world it wouldn’t be necessary. It’s useless. A waste of time and money. Unless the goal of licensing and registration is to reduce the number of legally held guns. And that seems to be what it’s for. As in England, the purpose is not to “make it possible to prosecute” – we can prosecute now pretty easily – it’s to make legal gun ownership onerous so as to reduce the number of guns in society. In every debate I have ever had with a proponent of gun control, I have been told that the problem with gun violence is “the number of guns,” and that “something has to be done to reduce the number of guns” in private hands. Well, I don’t know about you, but “making legal arms possession more onerous” in an effort to keep people from acquiring or possessing them pretty much meets my definition of “infringing on my right to arms.”
Date: 10/16/2002 00:00:00 AM
To my knowledge none of the “gun-controllers” have ever seriously proposed taking away hunting guns. What is usually at issue is registration, licensing, waiting periods, and the the abolition of a few kinds of guns (automatic weapons, Glock pistols, armor-piercing bullets, etc.) To me this is a red herring caused by the fact that second amendment absolutists immediately claim that any form of registration, etc., is tantamount to abolition. To Kevin Baker — gun control laws, registration, etc., make it possible to prosecute people who break the laws, for example by making it easier to prove that a gun has been stolen, or by matching a bullet to the gun it came from. Not a panacea, not perfect, but a tool.Besides law-abiding citizens and lifelong criminals, there are a lot of people who are in between. I know one guy in particular who I don’t like to be around because he’s always armed and has personal issues and a bad temper. No convictions, but I don’t want to test the guy. Some Utah Republicans were offended when they were not allowed to take their guns into a meeting with President Bush. After all, they were law-abiding citizens. This strikes me as nutty to the max. (No, I don’t know exactly where to draw the line). A.L. — thanks for the anecdote you emailed me, but as you reminded me yourself awhile back, the plural of anecdote is not fact. (Much less the singular).
Date: 10/16/2002 00:00:00 AM
Mr Baker, do you have some ideas for how to keep known criminals from obtaining guns? (Other than stiffer penalties once they are caught.)
Date: 10/16/2002 00:00:00 AM
“The anti-gunners, on the other hand, don’t make a very clear distinction between me and an urban gang-banger. We both have handguns; we are both “potential” murderers.”When pressed, they’ll acknowledge that known criminal gun owners are the majority of the problem, but they often comment strongly on the “average gun owner” that “just snaps.” What they never acknowledge is that the laws they propose will only disarm the law-abiding “average gun owner,” without affecting the “known criminals.” A lesson made clear by the English experience.
>> I can think of one law I suspect doesn’t help
ONE? That’s a number worth an explanation. There are lots of different gun laws.
>> Let me turn the question around. It used to be legal in some jurisdictions for released felons to possess firearms. This practice was ended by federal law. Do you support this law, and, if so, what sort of evidence persuades you to favor it.
Actually, federal prohibition is fairly old. The only recent change discouraged an appeals process that, as near as anyone can tell, never resulted in any harm.
As the vast majority of felons these days are folks convicted of non-violent crimes, the prohibition can’t be justified as crime-control. It’s just additional punishment.
Does Lazarus think that taking guns away from tax cheats and/or grafitti artists is a good thing? If so, what is the good? What other things should they lose permanently to achieve the same good? If nothing else, why are guns different?
Yes, I’m saying that I think that we should look at the received benefits and the incurred costs even with respect to “felons and guns”. Let’s see where Lazarus runs with it.
>> It’s very difficult for someone other than a licensed driver to register a car in California, because liability insurance is almost always required.
Yet, it’s trivial to legally own a car in CA without insurance, a license, or jumping through any legal hoops. (I’ve owned such a car for years.) And, such a car can be legally transported without so much as a by-your-leave.
Interestingly enough, no one expects driver’s licenses to have any effect on intentional bad acts with a car. (We hope that the license reqts affect accident rates, but the level that we accept dwarfs the corresponding gun problem.) At most, we take licenses away from folks who have done certain bad things with cars.
Kopel has written a nice article on what treating guns like cars would actually entail. I suspect that it isn’t what Lazarus intends.
>> To my knowledge none of the “gun-controllers” have ever seriously proposed taking away hunting guns.
That’s the story, yet hunting guns have been banned. Is a “sniper gun” a hunting gun? How about a pump shotgun?
How about a definition of “hunting gun”? (CA’s assault weapon law specifically bans a single-shot shotgun that doesn’t even have an automatic cocking mechanism.) Is it a functional definition, appearance, brand-name?
BTW – The term “high-power ammo” is actually a reference to very common type of ignition system. The only cartridges that currently don’t use that system are .22 rim-fires. (The rim-fire system was used for other ammo before smokeless powder was invented.)
>> Glock pistols
What is objectionable about a Glock?
>> armor-piercing bullets
What, precisely, is an “armor-piercing bullet”? (One popular definition happens to catch almost all hunting ammo.)
First, I have never owned and do not expect to own a firearm.
But, except for the background checks (and, as someone mentioned, another source of revenue) I haven’t been convinced of any need to expand registration. And yes, it is a slippery slope = when stories like the following get no wide coverage –
http://www.post-gazette.com/neigh_city/20021016shooter1016p1.asp
while what is, as far as I can see, a similarly “local” story like the Maryland sniper get international coverage (!), people with no weapons background are likely to conclude that guns are always bad.
When was the last time a self-defense use of a gun was national news for even a day? The only one I can remember was not news because of the self-defense, but because the man who defended hinself by taking a gun away from a robber and had to shoot when the robber would not stop coming at him was going to be sent to prison for “possessing” a gun while on parole!
As a non-owner, I think that the PERSON who wants to own one or more guns should be registered: it just makes more sense to me. My driver’s license allows me to drive (with state-to-state reciprocity) anywhere in the US, and at a traffic stop in CA checking a NY license may take a while but it can be done… The car I am driving does not even have to be mine.
As to cars having to be registered (so why not guns), a car is kinda hard to dispose of after an accident and fairly noticeable by any witnesses – in any case, a lot easier to trace.
Mr. Freeman, YOU DIDN’T ANSWER MY QUESTION.
I’m old enough to remember when Federal Law first prohibited released felons from owning guns. I think it was 1968. I did not ask you only whether you supported this law (the answer appears to be “Not Really”). I ALSO asked you what evidence you would accept for (or against, I suppose) that law, and you SKIPPED that part.
I’m quite curious about your claims on California car registration. In the traditional interpretation of CA law, it isn’t possible to register a car without evidence of liability insurance (or a large cash deposit) and it isn’t legal to drive a car on public roads without registration. (Of course people do, and get ticketed.) By some chance, do you belong to the “Patriot” movement that rejects drivers’ licenses and income taxes?
Ziska:
You wrote: “While I would hope to find a moderate position on the gun question, there’s no good reason to put any effort into that, because the discussion is dominated entirely by people who object to any effort of any kind to regulate, restrict, license, or register guns in any way at all. Every inch must be won by hard struggle, and every point must be argued to death, and every quibble and factoid must be shot down over and over again.
“For a lot of Americans gun-ownership has a fundamental sacramental value that it doesn’t have for me. There’s really not any use arguing, or trying to find a middle ground either. At the beginning of this thread it seemed that it might be an exception, but it isn’t any more.”
You’ve precisely defined the situation. For a lot of Americans gun ownership IS a fundamental right. Given that, we insist that “(e)very inch must be won by hard struggle, and every point must be argued to death, and every quibble and factoid must be shot down over and over again.” That’s how you protect fundamental rights. That’s why the ACLU defends each and every perceived infringement on our First Amendment rights. If you DON’T do that, your rights get whittled away in death-by-a-thousand-cuts legislation.
To steal a cliche, “The greatest success of the gun control groups is the fact that they’ve convinced so many people that there is no Constitutionally protected fundamental individual right to arms.”
You know, while we’re on cars, I’d point out that law enforcement DOES use the VIN, to return stolen vehicles and to fine owners of abandoned cars (even if the registration plates are removed or faked). Unlike the registration plates, this isn’t used for tax purposes.
Lazarus, the VIN number is comparable to the serial number on guns. To my knowledge, nobody objects to guns having serial numbers, or to laws prohibiting defacing those numbers.
I was not arguing that we are less safe because of gun ownership. I was arguing that we are **not** MORE safe, which we should be if some of the things 2nd-amendment advocates are saying are true.
Well, what measure would you like to use to define ‘safe’?
Earlier there were discussions of using murder rates; In 2000, the total rate for the U.S. was 5.69/100K, much higher than Finland (2.77) in 7th place. If we subtract the US firearms murders, the U.S. rate non-gun rate is 2.22, now 15th (lower than the total rate of South Africa, Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Spain, Malta, Slovakia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Hungary, Scotland and Turkey, and higher than Sweden (2.12), Romania, Australia, Northern Ireland, Poland, Canada, Belgium, France et al).
Surely you do not think guns cause all the non-gun murders, too.
Certainly whether you feel safer is based on your immediate experience. I’m curious to know on what facts you suggest the U.S. society is not more safe with guns in the hands of the civilian populace.
My point was this. Suppose that the US and Finland were in every respect identical, except that Americans owned guns and Finns didn’t. According to the pro-gun argument, Americans would then be safer than Finns. This is a purely hypothetical argument, of course, but I have seen no evidence at all that American gun ownership makes us safer. I can’t prove that our gun ownership makes us less safe, but it seems more likely. (Remember, I’m not talking about whether getting a gun makes me safer. I’m talking about whether living in a country where anyone can get a gun makes me safer. My opinion is that it doesn’t. People who claim that it does need to make their argument.)
I may have used the expression “feel safer”. What I’m talking about is “being safer”. I think that relative murder rates are a pretty good index of safety. I would feel safer in a place with a lower murder rate, but my feeling would not be purely subjective.
I’m talking about whether living in a country where anyone can get a gun makes me safer. My opinion is that it doesn’t. People who claim that it does need to make their argument.
Well, OK, but shouldn’t you also have some basis for your opinion to share with correspondents? I don’t think the comparative murder rates support that guns alone are the cause either of safety or lack of same.
Suppose I were to advance the more extreme interpretations of the Kleck and Lott studies; in summary, they claim that many criminal attacks are thwarted or never occur at all due to ownership, carrying and/or use of guns by U.S. citizens. If we were to accept those claims, we might conclude that crime might be worse if we did not have widespread gun ownership. Proving a negative (we have less than we might) is, of course, a difficult task.
Disregarding the weight either of us might wish to assign to those studies, they have the advantage of being about this country; as you pointed out, if there were another country ‘exactly like the US but without the guns’ we might be able to make a comparison. It would therefore seem we need some kind of surrogate measure we could agree represented ‘safety’, and try to adjust those measures to some kind of international normative value. I can’t think of one; I’d appreciate some further suggestions.
Rob, that’s my point. California, and I strongly suspect every other jurisdiction in the USA if not the world, has a record tying an automobile VIN to the current owner. [I was trying to refute the idea that it had something to do with taxes, the way license plates with current stickers do.]
Serial numbers on weapons seem much less useful to me in the absence of chain-of-ownership records or current owner registration.
>> I’m quite curious about your claims on California car registration.
I made no claims about CA car registration in the sense that Lazarus is using the term.
I said that one can legally own a car in CA without going through the procedure that Lazarus described with a suggestion that said procedure had something to do with ownership. It doesn’t. The procedure that he described is for usage in certain circumstances.
>> I did not ask you only whether you supported this law (the answer appears to be “Not Really”).
I pointed out that the broad form can’t reasonably be argued for as crime-control, that prohibiting gun ownership by grafitti artists was merely additional punishment.
>> I ALSO asked you what evidence you would accept for (or against, I suppose) that law, and you SKIPPED that part.
Lazarus is projecting, as this particular exchange started when I asked him that question. He didn’t answer that part but did ask the same question back.
I answered. I’ll repeat my answer.
>> Yes, I’m saying that I think that we should look at the received benefits and the incurred costs even with respect to “felons and guns”. Let’s see where Lazarus runs with it.
Yes, I’m a utilitarian WRT crime control.
I suspect that the suggested function has a different value for convicted grafitti artists than it has for folks with multiple assault convictions. (There’s an interesting question wrt folks with a single assault conviction 1-20 years ago.)
I’m perfectly willing to have a conversation about costs and benefits, but I’m not too keen on playing target for someone who thinks that my pointing out that US blacks have a higher murder rate than whites makes me a racist.