Originally Posted at Free Market Shooter
While trying to figure out what firearm was used in the recent Youtube shooting attack, I came across an article on The San Francisco Gate stating that shooter Nasim Aghdam purchased a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun legally, and practiced with it that morning at a nearby shooting range. Added in was some of the typical anti-gun commentary, but this time from a “highly esteemed” source:
“Power of weaponry, the number of bullets and the ability to shoot more rapidly are the things that make mass shootings more deadly,” said John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies gun violence. “The fact that she only had a handgun and it was apparently restrained to the legal limit in California is all to the good.”
California law prohibits new purchases of high-capacity magazines, which suggests Aghdam was limited because of that restriction to 10 rounds before she would have to reload.
High-capacity magazines, which hold well over 10 bullets and have been seriously restricted in California in recent years, are critical features in many of the country’s mass shootings with high body counts, Donohue said.
After doing a double-take and wondering what sort of “gun expert” could cite such patently false facts, it was time to do some investigating into who exactly John Donohue really is, and what makes his background so appropriate to firearms discussion. His Wikipedia page documents a long and distinguished academic career, interrupted only by a failed run for the Connecticut State Senate. No military or law enforcement background – and there was not even a cursory mention of any hands-on firearms experience at all listed.
That, of course, didn’t stop Stanford Law School from including “Policing & Gun Policy” under his areas of expertise:
Donohue made it incredibly easy to dismantle his argument for “high-capacity” magazine restrictions – in his infinite wisdom and expertise, he failed to closely examine the most recent historical example which led to the virtue-signaling “March for our Lives” – the shooting in Parkland, Florida:
The gunman used only 10-round magazines.
The Parkland shooter did not use magazines larger than 10 rounds, but gun-reform lobbyists are calling on lawmakers to ban higher-capacity magazines after the Valentine’s Day tragedy.
It seems “one of the leading empirical researchers” from Stanford Law School made a glaringly major oversight in his analysis, completely ignoring the fact that using 10 round magazines did absolutely nothing to diminish the Parkland shooter‘s deadliness.
This fits a pattern of omission from Donohue – over ten years ago, the Virginia Tech shooter demonstrated that using handguns (some with 10 round magazines no less) instead of long guns makes little difference against defenseless targets, and to far deadlier effect than the Parkland shooter:
The Virginian Tech Review Panel’s assessment of the April 16, 2007 shooting in which 32 were killed and 17 and wounded, contains a pertinent piece of information for the gun grabbers who are currently tripping over themselves to blame high capacity magazines for the evil in the world. The panel’s assessment found that a high capacity magazine ban would not have stopped Seung-Hui Cho from carrying out his criminal act.
They said forcing him to use 10 round magazines instead of those that hold 15 rounds “would have not made that much difference in the incident.”
Why would it have not made any difference? Because he was shooting at unarmed people, thus he had all the time in the world to reload when necessary.
In his infinite wisdom, Donohue failed to mention one thing that stops many mass shooters (including the Parkland shooter) – a glaring lack of basic firearms skills – which is likely a trait possessed by Donohue himself:
So what DID limit the Parkland shooter, if it wasn't the two seconds (or less) it took for him to change his 10rd magazines @JohnDonohueSLS ?
His own lack of basic firearms skills – specifically, how to clear a jam…https://t.co/rk6892OJjl
— FMShooter (@fmshooter) April 5, 2018
Nikolas Cruz’s semiautomatic rifle may have jammed during the massacre at a high school in Parkland earlier this month, according to Miami Herald news partner CBS4.
Cruz then dropped the AR-15 and fled with other students, CBS4 reporter Jim DeFede tweeted Tuesday afternoon, citing three sources familiar with the investigation. Cruz still had 150 rounds of ammunition — meaning many more people could have died had he been able to keep firing.
This is part of a pattern that Donohue apparently misses in his “research”, as the Aurora shooter also demonstrated in 2012…
“The gunman’s semiautomatic
assaultrifle jammed … forcing him to switch to another gun with less firepower, a federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press. That malfunction and weapons switch might have saved some lives.”
…which was again demonstrated by the Pulse nightclub shooter in 2016, except in a much more damning fashion for those who advocate “high-capacity” magazine bans:
FBI special agents showed the rifle used in the killings to those in the courtroom, saying investigators found that it jammed while they were collecting evidence from inside the club.
Internet search results show that Mateen stopped for a brief time during the shooting and looked up how to fix the jammed weapon.
So Donohue wants the public to believe that the two (or less) seconds it takes to change a magazine makes a mass shooter more deadly, but one of these shooters was able to pause his assault for several minutes to look up how to clear his jammed weapon?
Sad, but true – an Ivy League education on “Policing and Gun Policy” has brought him to us, using his platform as a holier-than-thou “gun expert” to have his poorly researched mea culpa for gun control repeated ad nauseam by academia and mainstream media alike.
And if you think Donohue is just “another name” in the morass of anti-gun propaganda, you’d be sorely mistaken – according to the Stanford Law School website, Donohue has been cited by 24 major publications in just the last eight years in regards to gun crime, including, but not limited to:
- Conference on Empirical Legal Studies
- The New York Times
- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- American Law and Economics Review
- CNN
- The National Bureau of Economic Research (a government agency)
- The San Francisco Cronicle
- Econ Journal Watch
- Stanford Lawyer
- The Daily Journal
- The Conversation
- The Sacramento Bee
- The Columbia Law Review
- Scientific American
- The San Francisco Gate
Donohue is one of the leading academics cited to promote gun control all across America, even by our own government. Don’t hesitate to let that be known next time a liberal suggests that the NRA is somehow “killing gun violence research” in the US. And he is hardly alone – there are many other “academics” just like him using their platform for the exact same aim.
Keep John Donohue’s name in the back of your mind, as you will likely see it again in the not-too-distant future. But when you do…
…remember that he is just a California academic masquerading as a “gun expert” – all with little (if any) background whatsoever in firearms.
Over the years, I’ve found most “experts” know less than I do about guns and most other things as well.
The only thing they seem to know more about is how to get the exalted title of “expert”, since I’ve never been referred to as one.
It is a group fest, similar to group think. Once you state your position, fellow academics and political hacks with that same position all wipe each other’s behind.
(I could have phrased that differently, if you catch my drift).
Limit all shooters to jammy guns!
I knew an Armenian from the former USSR once. He told me a lot of his relatives in Moscow were in the mafia. When he hung out with them, he asked why they carried so many Makarov pistols in their tracksuit pockets. They explained it was easier to just grab one, empty the mag, and grab the next one, rather than waste time reloading. With only an 8 round mag, and what I consider a rather inconvenient design, it made sense to me.
The real problem Americans that believe in our founding documents and the rights and freedoms they insure because they do not come from a document but are naturally endowed to all of us is the fact that this so called experts testimony or opinion gets repeated at nauseam as absolute fact . Was it the NAZI propagandist plan to repeat a lie often enough in enough venues the lie becomes the fact and truth ?
Forget Me Not !
Really sick of the ‘high-capacity magazine’ bullshit. 10-round pistol/rifle magazines are reduced-capacity magazines; 14-18 is standard capacity for pistol magazines, and 30 is standard for popular semiautomatic rifles.
The only good thing about reduced-capacity magazines is…
…I got nuthin’.
The capacity depends on what make, model or “platform” you are using. I have one pistol that holds six and one that holds 21 with everything in between depending on caliber.
While the sky is the limit for capacity with magazine fed rifles, when you go to the range and shoot from the bench, you would usually use a 5, 10 or 20 because the 30’s and larger hit the bench top while you are trying to shoot.
A guy might use a 30 if he is hunting brush or fields for hogs. Otherwise, even without capacity restrictions, most hunters would use the smaller capacity mag so they can rest the rifle on a log or lay prone with a bipod etc.
I’m sick of it too – that’s why I put “high-capacity” in quotes – they are indeed the standard capacity magazines.
We should probably start referring to 10rd mags in weapons designed to carry larger mags as “reduced-capacity” magazines.
One day I’ll write an entire article about the “high-capacity” meme and ask why anyone would purposely limit themselves by carrying 10rd magazines when the firearm is specifically designed to carry a larger number of rounds, most frequently because the rounds are smaller and less effective, though obviously some handguns are simply not designed to hold that many.
Go ahead and ban them. Make them totally illegal. Folks figured out how to make them in the 1990s with blocks of wood, sheet steel, and springs or taking apart small caps to modify into high caps. Now CNC is cheap and available. Now we can 3d print them. The gun grabbers can seize every entire firearm in this country and people would just keep assembling them from parts and manufacturing them.
This is tech any person can figure out how to duplicate. Just look at the Afghanis-they’ve been turning out rifles by fireside for centuries.
If the gun grabbers were actually educated and honest, they would admit it was a hopeless task. You might as well ban sand at the beach.
They lie?
Florida Senator Bill Nelson’s High School Yearbook Photo
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No it isn’t, because he’d have a dick in his mouth if it was his Year Book
Most cops and many military members have very little of a”firearms background”. The average American gun owner knows more about firearms and how they work.
Donohue is a smug useful idiot. Hiding behind his degree, he would have you believe his positions, based on such a learned man are beyond reproach. He is a dishonest douchebag. When dissected, his positions are ludicrous yet very useful to the left and ignorant. Fuk you Donohue. You are an agenda driven POS.
“Stanford. ” Enough said.
Fwiw, in erie county new york about 12 years back, a shooter got off two rounds from a muzzle loader befor the cop he was shooting at returned fire and killed him. More than enuf time to switch out magazines, vs a trained police officer no less.
“trained police officer” is kind of a joke term. I’ve shot competition against my old local PD and shooting a gun I didn’t know, I still outshot 3/4 of them using one of their guns on their range. They generally suck, which is why they need high cap mags, AP ammo, full auto rifles, snipers, body armor, tanks to cower behind blocks away from the threat, even after the shooting is over, tactical air cover, bomb-carrying robots, orbital defense lasers and why they go straight to deadly force when confronted by such threats as elderly arthritic grandmas, retards lying in the street, blacks holding their hands over their heads or holding BB guns in the walmart BB gun aisle or running away unarmed from a minor traffic stop, white kids crawling on their knees down hotel hallways with their hands over their head, or unarmed white women in bathrobes running to them for help.
My buddy was a firefighter EMT and he told me he routinely answered calls to the ghetto. He would drive in while the gunshots were still going off, passing the cops who would be waiting a few blocks away for the fight to be over before running in to the rescue.