Maybe this will give you the willies

While you are all worried about the evil guvment (nevermind that big business is a whole lot more evil, but you've been drinking the water--er, kool-aid).  It seems that the NSA can snoop on your computer even if you are not connected to the internet according to the latest leak from Edward Snowden.

Remember that while you are violating the constitution by plotting against the government (Article III, Section iii)!

But, don't worry, they also have implants that can read your mind as well.  You can expect to be sitting in some secret prison rotting away after the mind police arrest you.

Another Law Abiding Gun Owner leaves an AR-15 in their car

It seems to me that most crime guns are reported as being "stolen" for their method of entering the illegal arms stream, people would want to take better care of their assault rifles.  On the other hand, they are great for shooting kindergardners and cinema goers and not much else.

So, why not leave it in your car, especially if you are a pro-gun activist.  We need more headlines like this one from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Prominent Utah gun lobbyist's AR-15 assault rifle stolen from his car

I have a post in the making called "why the pro-gun position may not be so good if you really like guns" and this might be a good thing to add to it.

What you can do with bear arms

If we are going to be silly buggers about it: bear arms can play a harp:

I have quoted from Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) in other places, but it makes it clear that the terms "bear arms" means in a military context--Despite what "Fat Tony Scalia" says:

"We think there is a manifest distinction. In the nature of things, if they were not allowed to bear arms openly, they could not bear them in their defence of the state at all. To bear arms in defence of the state is to employ them in war, as arms are usually employed by civilized nations. The arms, consisting of swords, muskets, rifles, etc., must necessarily be borne openly; so that a prohibition to bear them openly would be a denial of the right altogether. And, as in their constitution the right to bear arms in defence of themselves is coupled with the right to bear them in defence of the state, we must understand the expressions as meaning the same thing, and as relating to public, and not private, to the common, and not the individual, defence.
But a prohibition to wear a spear concealed in a cane would in no degree circumscribe the right to bear arms in the defence of the state; for this weapon could in no degree contribute to its defence, and would be worse than useless in an army. And, if, as is above suggested, the wearing arms in defence of the citizens is taken to mean the common defence, the same observations apply.
To make this view of the case still more clear, we may remark that the phrase, "bear arms," is used in the Kentucky constitution as well as in our own, and implies, as has already been suggested, their military use. The 28th section of our bill of rights provides "that no citizen of this state shall be compelled to bear arms provided he will pay in equivalent, to be ascertained by law." Here we know that the phrase has a military sense, and no other; and we must infer that it is used in the same sense in the 26th section, which secures to the citizen the right to bear arms. A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane. So that, with deference, we think the argument of the court in the case referred to, even upon the question it has debated, is defective and inconclusive.
In the case of Simpson v. The State, 5 Yerg. 356, Judge White, in delivering the opinion of the court, makes use of the general expression that, " by this clause in the constitution, an express power is given and secured to all the free citizens in the state to keep and bear arms for their defence, without any qualification whatever as to their kind and nature."

Repeating lies does not make them true

Let's start with

Guns save lives 

Seriously? What concrete proof do you have for this statement?  Looking at the news, there are far more examples of guns doing what weapons do, which is kill or cause serious bodily injury.

I'm open to proof that guns save lives, but right now there is precious little proof this statement is anything but BULLSHIT.

The US doesn't have a gun problem--it has a mental illness problem/crime problem/texting problem

Again, give me a break.  Are you telling me that other countries don't have these issues as well?  Guess what? they do, but they don't have the gun problem the US has.

Guns are inanimate objects/tools

Yes, they are.  Although, calling them tools is a bit disingenuous since they are actually weapons and as such have the purpose of killing or causing serious bodily injury.  That's why there is a big difference between hammers, swimming pools, cars and all those other false analogies to firearms.

Firearms are weapons.

Anyway, we are seeing loads of empirical evidence to the fact that the US has a serious gun problem, but people are in denial and coming up with all sorts of piss poor reasons for doing nothing about the problem.

Denial ain't a river in Africa, but the US sure is deep in it.

Or is that shit creek?

The History of English in 10 Minutes

I can see why registration and background checks could be scary....

I can just imagine this as a reason for owning a firearm and putting it on an application to buy and register one.

No wonder people want to call them "Modern Sporting Rifles"  (only if the sport is "shoot the kindergardener in the classroom").  More fun here

The Gun Violence Debate in the US runs on ignorance

I've already mentioned that the federal funding for gun violence research has been cut since the facts have an "anti-gun" bias and the Tiahrt Amendment protects the  illegal firearms trade, which means that the debate has been running on literal science fiction (not to mention the work of Lott and Kleck which is figurative science fiction).  "Fat Tony" Scalia produced a judicial "opinion" that was pure sophistry hiding ignorance of the facts.

The real point here is that even statistics are suffering in this battle to stack the deck.  Thus, The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.

To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.

But, are the data which is coming from official sources even accurate in this matter?  Slate magazine tried to find out the facts, but like concrete data as to how many concealed carry permit holders actually go bad and who REALLY relies on the "get away with murder" laws, anything that has to be turned up needs to be done manually.

The feature was meant to be a provocation of sorts: We knew that those rows of figures, each one attached to a name, piling atop one another every day, made for an arresting visual, one that might trouble even the most ardent gun-rights supporter.

But as time went by and the interactive was discussed, questioned, and cited, this provocation also became a kind of experiment. How many deaths were being reported on, and how many were falling through the cracks? Why was it that no single source was collecting this data in real time? In other words, we wanted to know if an interactive like this can actually be valuable as something besides a provocation—whether crowdsourcing can produce real-time data and whether that data is useful and complete. (Hoping people might use our data for their own research purposes, we made it available as a downloadable file.)

A year after Newtown, the 11,400-plus human figures on that list remain a chilling reminder of the toll guns take on Americans every day. And the answers to our questions have started to become clear. Some people did use our data, for both interesting visualizations and public programs (sometimes, alas, without reading it carefully first). But we’ve also learned some tough lessons about how hard it is to track death by gun in America. The overwhelming likelihood is that our interactive missed more than half of the gun deaths in the past 12 months. The main reason there is no single source collecting this data in real time is surely because it is an enormous, daunting task—one that we only made a small dent in, with the help of devoted volunteers.

The statistics which are slowly, painstakingly assembled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, find that about 32,000 people are killed by guns in America each year.  Unfortunately, the CDC's data in addition to possibly being incomplete is not published in a timely fashion.  For example, the most recent year for which preliminary data is available is 2011 and the CDC's "exact" number was 32,163. Slate also found that some gun deaths fell through the cracks.  Additionally, Slate used everyone who was killed by a gun (e.g. Tamerlan Tsarnaev), which caused an uproar from the right.

Slate also found that:

Suicides, it turns out, are this project’s enormous blind spot. Most every homicide makes the local paper, even if in large cities these stories are sometimes relegated to a mere news brief. Accidental shootings are usually reported upon, as are shootings by law enforcement and incidents in which civilians kill in self-defense. But suicides are mostly invisible. And the fact is that suicides make up 60 percent or more of all deaths by gun in America. In our interactive, misleadingly, only about 10 percent of recorded deaths were deemed suicides by our crowdsourced categorizers.

Slate has a companion piece to this The Missing 20,000 Gun Deaths. Suicide accounts for the bulk of gun deaths, which is a fact I know annoys you greatly.   On the other hand, the data also shows that owning a firearm is far more dangerous to the owner.

Ultimately, the lack of information filters down to researchers. Though most scientists Slate talked to said that they’d always found individual police departments forthcoming and helpful.  There is widespread frustration that data isn’t systematically available in a more timely manner for people doing the research. “I don’t know why we don’t have rapid case accounts,” said Harvard’s Cathy Barber. “It’s crazy that we are using 2010 data.”

The real bottom line is that we cannot have a serious discussion about this topic without accurate information.  The information which has been fueling the debate is pretty much wrong whether it is that the Second Amendment relates to private arms or studies that show more guns is the reason there is less crime.  Indeed, it doesn't help your side of the argument if the "facts" you provide are bullshit, or just plain non-existent.

It's time the debate started using facts rather than wishful thinking.