MYTH: “The police can protect you.”

Police write great reports, but an officer can only protect you if he/she happens to be there when the crime starts.  Remember when the Christmas-tree lot worker was beaten with a bat?  This happened on TV Highway, the major road between Beaverton and Hillsboro.  The victims phoned 911 twice while being assaulted by eighteen youths, but the operator didn’t believe them and refused to send the police.  Ten minutes later, the young man was struck with the bat and permanently disabled.  His uncle had to beg a passerby to phone 911, this time for an ambulance.

Are you a baby-boomer?  When you are 70 years old, will you be able to fight off a mugger with your fists?  What if it isn’t just your money he wants?  If you do not stop the anti-gun trend, guns will be registered, then confiscated, by the time you and your generation need them the most.  The only gun-owners will be people who disobey the law.

MYTH: “A handgun in a home is 43 times more likely to kill one of the residents than a criminal.”

This is a bogus statistic from an MD named Arthur Kellerman.  If you remove the suicides from his sampling, his statistic is now “6 times more likely”.  Most of his remaining “victims” were multiple criminals living together, where one shot the other in a fight.  He lets you assume they were families just like yours, by counting gun-death statistics for criminal households together with those of traditional families. (Polsby and Brennen, “Taking Aim At Gun Control” 1995). He has repeatedly refused the opportunity to debate speakers on the other side of the issue.

MYTH: “More children die of gunfire in America that the next 25 industrial nations combined”

Former President Clinton made those claims because he knew the press wouldn’t investigate them.  He counted Hong Kong and China separately, although they had been together for years.  He counted Kuwait as a top industrial nation, but left Russia and Brazil off the list. Russia and Brazil banned guns long ago, but have murder rates four times higher than what we have in the US.  If you look at murders involving juveniles they’re off the scales.  Both of those countries have significantly smaller populations than the U. S., yet either one of them by itself has a juvenile death total much higher than ours. (Prof J. Lott, Nat. Review.)

MYTH: “Countries with strict gun laws have less crime”

Russia, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil have very strict gun laws and much higher crime than we do.  Switzerland has almost 100% handgun ownership.  They even have shooting competitions for teenagers.  Their murder rate is lower than England, where handgun ownership is banned.  Violent crime in England has risen since the ban.  If guns caused crime, Switzerland would be the most dangerous nation on earth, rather than one of the safest.  Finland has higher per-capita gun ownership than America, and they also have lower crime rates.  Israel has 40% higher gun ownership, and near zero murder, except for terrorists.  New York, California, Chicago, and Washington DC have the strictest gun laws in America, and the highest crime rates.  Virginia borders Washington DC, yet it has few gun laws and far fewer violent crimes. Vermont has the least restrictive gun laws in America, and their gun crime rate is 48^th out of 50 states.  Every state that started allowing average citizens to carry concealed weapons saw a decrease in violent crime over the ensuing years.  Gun laws have been proven to make things worse, not better. (Prof. J. Lott, More Guns, Less Crime, 1998)

Think about it – if you were going to go on a shooting rampage or robbery spree, would you do it where the people are armed, or where the laws forbid your intended victims from having guns?  If you doubt this, you can do your own experiment: Post a sign in front of your residence:   THIS HOME IS PROUD TO BE GUN FREE

MYTH: “Incidents like Columbine demand gun control”

Deaths from incidents like Columbine are extremely rare, even now.  For the first 190 years of American history, guns could be bought by mail, or in any gun store with no questions asked.  No school shootings.  The perversity that brought Columbine and similar incidents has nothing to do with gun laws, and will not change because of them.  In two of those incidents, the shooting stopped when armed civilians intervened with their own guns, but those people weren’t invited to the White House for photo-ops, so you didn’t hear about them. (More on this below)

MYTH: “Guns should be registered like cars”

Compliance only comes from law-abiding citizens.  Confiscation then becomes easy, and the “logical next step” after the next gun crime is in the news.  The most recent examples of this are Australia and Britain.  All it took was one person in each place to do something stupid, and the both countries paid with their rights to own firearms.  Politicians made themselves look tough on crime, by punishing the gun owners who obeyed the law and registered.  The law-abiding gun owners lost their ability to defend themselves against violence.  But did confiscation improve things?  British gun crimes rose 40% since their 1996 handgun ban.  Australian armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%.  The only people who lost their weapons were those who registered them.  The criminals and the IRA still have theirs. In Germany, registration preceded confiscation of weapons from Jews, homosexuals, opponents of Hitler, and any other “undesirables”.  Once disarmed, they were easy prey.  The same happened in Rwanda, Uganda, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Turkey, and the Soviet Union.

It is too easy a step from registration to confiscation.  Since criminals won’t register their guns, they won’t be turning them in if the government decides to ban them.  The Supreme Court (Haynes v. US, 390 US 85, 1968) has ruled that criminals cannot be prosecuted for failing to register guns (self incrimination).  So gun registration will affect you, but not them.

MYTH: “Guns are already registered, I see that on the television cop shows”

Other than a few extremely repressive states, gun registration does not exist.  But on the TV cop shows, we see the hero cop say, “The murder weapon is registered to you, how do you explain that?”  Perhaps some Hollywood screenwriters would like to condition you to believe that gun registration is a fact, so you won’t complain when their favorite politicians try to push it through.  Don’t believe it, and don’t accept it.  Gun registration is the only way confiscation can happen, short of house to house searches.

MYTH: “Thirteen children a day die of gun violence.”

You really have to work the numbers around to get to this.  The Clinton administration announced this using a backdrop of elementary school children.  They didn’t say that 84% of the “13 children” are gangsters between the ages of 15 and 20, killing each other over drugs and turf (Prof. J. Lott, LA Times article).  Clinton promised that this would be fixed by his 1994 gun laws, remember?  Of the remaining 16% of non-adult gunshot victims, there are accidents, suicides, murders, and justifiable self-defense.  Only 2.9% of all deaths under the age of 14 are from accidental shootings, an all time low (Johns Hopkins University).  More children are killed by each of poisoning, drowning, fires, and bicycles.

MYTH: “More gun control will help stop hate crimes”

How will disarming likely victims protect them?  People who are willing to violate murder laws are willing to violate gun laws, but they are not willing to risk being killed if their victim is armed. If 50% of all gay men in an area were known to carry handguns, people who now assault them would look elsewhere for entertainment.

MYTH: “What if only one life is saved by more gun laws, isn’t is worth it?”

How many lives will be lost because of gun laws? 2.5 Million crimes per year are stopped by armed citizens. What are their lives worth? (G. Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America). In the case of the school shooting in Mississippi, the vice-principal (who stopped the shooter) had to run 1000 feet each way to get his gun from his car, because it was illegal for him to have it any closer to the school.  How many children were shot during those minutes?  What if it had been legal for New Yorkers to carry guns when Colin Ferguson shot up the subway car?  Did strict New York gun laws stop his racist rampage?  No, but they did guarantee him unarmed victims.  What about the hundreds of women who had to wait the Brady period when they took notice of a stalker and were subsequently raped or worse before they could pick up their weapon.  Don’t these people count for anything?

MYTH: “The Second Amendment was written when muskets were the primary military arms.  The Founding Fathers never would have considered allowing citizens to own assault rifles.”

The First Amendment was written when the hand-operated printing press was the primary publishing tool.  Shall we also ban free speech on television, radio, and the Internet because they weren’t invented in 1791?  Technology may have changed, but human nature has not.  Honest people still need means of defense against dishonest ones.