The children slaughtered in Connecticut by a drugged up mental defective haven’t even been put into the ground yet and Obama is convening a gun banning convention in Washington DC today. Hysterically, the Philadelphia Chief of police is headed down to provide his brilliant insight. Meanwhile, we enter the final week of 2012 and Philly will finish the year with around 330 homicides, the highest since 2007.  Philadelphia has the toughest gun laws in the state. I’m sure if we ban guns, the lowlife scumbags in North Philly and West Philly will abide by the new rules. Maybe a few NO GUNS ALLOWED signs will work. Doctor Sowell does his usual fantastic job poking holes in the left wing liberal storyline. I’m sure he hasn’t been invited to Washington DC for his thoughts on the matter. We wouldn’t want any divergent points of view.

If you had any remaining thought that the Mainstream media in this country was impartial and just journalists reporting the facts, you are badly mistaken. This past week was probably an eye opener for anyone with critical thinking skills. The propaganda and misinformation is being screeched over the airwaves, in Op-Eds and by Cartoonists across the land. The dead children were barely cold before Bloomberg, Obama, and the left wing do-gooder control freaks on MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the liberal propaganda machines began spewing their standard storyline. This tragedy will not go to waste. Maddow, Matthews and Shultz were probably high fiving as the news reports came in. There was a tingle up their legs.

I always knew the press had a liberal bias, but this tragedy has revealed the true colors of these faux journalists. It appears that 90% of the mainstream media has a liberal agenda and is nothing but a mouthpiece for the government assuming more and more control over every aspect of our lives. When it became clear that the murderer was a drugged up psychopath, just like the previous mass murderers, the MSM dutifully trotted out the mouthpieces for the drug industry and the psychology industry to deny that his mental illness and their drugs had anything to do with it. Corporate media helping corporate advertisers helping bought off politicians.

There will be new laws. There will be new regulations. There will be new rules. There will be new paperwork and bureaucrats and police. The mindless sheep will be surveyed and they will beg for gun control. Obama will have a grand signing ceremony surrounded by the families of the dead children. Crime rates will go higher. Homicides will go higher as the criminals will know that their victims won’t be armed. The do-gooders and the MSM will call for more laws to save the sheeple.

And so it goes.

 

Invincible Ignorance

by Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots’ choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a “study” that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

December 18, 2012

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.