Having spent enough time under the deluge of ignorance spewed on the topic of gun control and the nature of certain specific firearms, I figured it was time to do a bit of spewing of my own.
The following diatribe may anger or embolden you. It may cause you to nod or to shake your head.
What it should not and hopefully won’t do is hit you where most arguments on the topic are aimed these days: your emotions.
I’m sorry in advance for what I’m about to lay on you — not because I’m sorry for the potential offense, but because I’m sorry that so many of you have been indoctrinated into a state of terminal irrationality.
Without any further buildup, here we go:
Of all the gun-related deaths occurring annually in the U.S. (around 32,000), almost two-thirds are attributed to suicide; a couple thousand more are accidental.
When it comes to the stats that are quickest to get the blood boiling, namely homicide, that figure falls to around 8,600 (averaged out over the last five years).
Of those, almost 70% involved handguns — both the revolving and clip-fed semi-automatic variety.
Shotguns, both sporting and tactical, account for the next-biggest slice of the pie.
Learn to Distinguish Fact From Political Agenda
Fewer than 3% can be attributed to rifles (any rifles, semi-automatic or single-shot)… and yet it’s this segment of our collective national arsenal that gets by far the most coverage from the press.
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You see, that 3% includes killings committed using what the mainstream media insists on calling “assault rifles,” or what knowledgeable people refer to as semi-automatic rifles.
Assault rifles are militarized versions of common weapons like the AR-15 and AK-47 pattern rifle.
True assault rifles feature “selective fire,” which allows fully automatic as well as salvo-fire — a function that unleashes three rounds for every trigger pull.
Semi-automatic rifles — the kind you can actually buy — do none of those things; one trigger pull sends out one bullet, with no option for selective fire.
Assault rifles are and have been illegal in this country for years.
The last time any legally owned, fully automatic weapon was used in a crime dates back to the 1930s.
Semi-automatic rifles, like the kind pictured below, may look and feel like their military-issue cousins, but in function, they are nowhere near the same animal.
The weapon used in this month’s massacre in Orlando was NOT an assault rifle.
It was a legal, semi-automatic weapon, produced by German manufacturer Sig Sauer (not an AR-15, contrary to what you may have heard), which remains available for sale in most jurisdictions.
The very same weapon type that accounts for fewer than 3% of violent deaths, or fewer than one in 10,000 deaths taking place annually in this country each and every year.
And yet the anti-gun crowd, echoing word for word the talking points of self-interested politicians, seem to have an eternal fixation for this very specific type of weapon… a weapon that is used less frequently in violent crime than any other type of firearm (including weapons designed exclusively for sport).
Statistically, you’re three times more likely to get bludgeoned to death by a household item. You’re six times as likely to be stabbed to death.
And yet we’re to believe that it’s THIS class of gun that’s to blame for the horrors inflicted on society by a handful of psychotics?
Given how easy they are to purchase and their apparent effectiveness, you’d think they’d be more dangerous, statistically, than hammers and large soup ladles.
Just Because They’re Loud Doesn’t Mean They’re Smart
And yet they’re not.
Talking heads use terms like “assault rifle” or “military grade” to scare and imprint on the minds of the ignorant that a certain gun is especially problematic, that civilians do not “need” to own them.
The first presumption is a straight-up lie. The second presumption is a logical incongruity and irrelevant in any informed conversation on the matter.
Conflating needs and freedoms is at the very heart of the issue; as a nation, and as a species, we own, operate and/or consume plenty of things we do not need and yet that are potentially harmful (more on that later).
When combined with sensationalist quotes from the likes of narcissistic presidential candidates, the desired result — a ban on this category of firearm — will strip tens of millions of Americans of a right, all thanks to the actions of an isolated few.
If that does not define tyranny — the very thing the Second Amendment was designed to combat — I don’t know what does.
The dissolution of freedom for the sake of security…
As Ben Franklin once pointed out, that knee-jerk reflex will lead to the loss of both.
Of course, I don’t expect any amount of data, facts, or quotes from Founding Fathers to sway the opinions of the blissfully indoctrinated, so instead, I’ll ask this question: If we’re on a warpath to ban non-essential products because of dangers inherent to their use, why not go back to alcohol prohibition?
Are You Anti-Death… or Just Anti-Gun?
In 2015, alcohol resulted in 88,000 deaths, or almost three times as many deaths every year as guns do (that includes ALL gun deaths, not just murder).
In that same year, drunk driving killed over 9,900 people — more than all gun-related homicides — accounting for close to one-third of all driving fatalities.
Now, of course, the opposing side will claim that I’m comparing apples and oranges here… that there is more criminal intent when using a gun then using a car while impaired.
Does intent matter, though, when the result is not just comparable but a few-fold more severe?
And is there actually a lack of intent? People intend to get drunk. Their subsequent actions are quite natural and extremely predictable results of that intention.
The gun grabbers argue that guns are non-essential, especially those scary-looking rifles with those long, menacing magazines.
Even if you accept that premise, alcohol, just like those guns, is NOT essential to any function of society.
If guns are made only to kill, then I’d argue that alcohol is made only to impair.
Put those factors together with the right individual, and calamity ensues.
At the end of the day, legal booze takes the lives of thousands of innocents, children included.
Again, the bleeding hearts will argue that this legal product takes time to kill, and kills those who use it, making it a self-inflicted condition.
In doing so, they willfully ignore the thousands who die each year, in violent, terrifying events, caused by others.
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The Biggest Killers: For Sale at Your Local Grocery Store
Not convinced? What about tobacco?
One of my own friends (an owner of a semi-automatic handgun but a self-proclaimed proponent of an “assault rifle” ban), when presented with this argument, claimed that “you can’t throw a pack of cigarettes into a crowd and kill a bunch of people.”
And yet, according to the CDC, secondhand smoke kills more than 58,000 Americans each and every year… Many of those victims are children; all of them were innocent non-smokers, injured and killed by the hands of others.
Take all tobacco deaths, and that number balloons to over 400,000.
Looking at the cold, hard numbers, guns rank right above STDs when it comes to preventable causes of death.
Excluding suicide, firearms wouldn’t come anywhere near breaking the top 10.
On a chart of most common causes of death, preventable or unpreventable, once again, the gun accounts for a subset of the smallest chunk — suicide.
Tobacco and alcohol, both leading contributors to heart and lung disease, including a variety of cancers, are bona fide epidemics by comparison.
Looking at all of these dry, emotionless figures, it leads me to the obvious question: Where is the outrage?
Where are Bernie and Hillary’s passionate speeches when it comes to alcohol?
Where is the dialog on banning tobacco? Where are Bernie, Hillary, and a majority of the very vocal Hollywood elite on this topic?
I think the answer is simple.
To Find the Biggest Liar, Look for the Fastest Talker
Gun grabbers, on average, still like their alcohol and are willing to accept the risks of its use.
They may not like their tobacco as much as they once did, but, being a quiet killer, it simply doesn’t pop up on their radar.
To them, 58,000 dead every year just doesn’t make the same impact as a single event where a single person takes dozens of lives.
To them, it’s just statistics, when what they’d rather focus on is the isolated but much-publicized incident involving a certain device.
The big picture, when compared to an image of weeping relatives or bloodied school children, becomes an afterthought, devoid of sensationalist potential to motivate tears and, of course, votes.
When it comes to things they DON’T like or DON’T enjoy, however, the all-mighty ban is always an option.
It’s not enough for just them to abstain.
We all have to.
And that’s where the emotions come in.
If Obama Had a Son… He’d Have Been Exposed to Secondhand Smoke
Our own President, who has abused his position multiple times in the past to make emotional appeals to people at a time when emotions are especially charged, went on TV and urged anybody who frowns on gun regulations to talk to the parents and relatives of children slain in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
Seriously? We’re supposed to derive federal legislation from conversations with grief-stricken parents of murdered children?
Does he say that every time a drunk driver plows into a minivan? Does he say that every time lung cancer claims a child, thanks to the bad decisions of a smoker?
Does he even acknowledge the fact that as a smoker (the jury is still out on whether he’s actually quit), he put others, including his own offspring, in danger?
No. He only reserves such shameful propaganda for moments like these… moments that polarize the right and the left like no other… moments that win him more of what he, and others like him, live and breathe to accumulate: political capital.
It makes me wonder if Obama and the rest of his ilk are anti-death at all, or just anti-gun… anti-gun because, quite conveniently, his political adversaries and their constituencies tend to view gun ownership as sacred.
I’m not really wondering this at all, actually.
The facts point to the underlying truth pretty well. Stopping death is maybe a tertiary goal for this segment of the population.
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The Truth Will Always Surface, Sooner or Later
Several days after the Orlando shooting, the world’s biggest and most vocal anti-gun shill, the Huffington Post, actually shocked me when it published an article that admitted yes, “assault-style rifles” (they must be thanking their lucky stars for this convenient misnomer and all of its variations) are rarely used in violent crime… adding, however, that this doesn’t make those incidents any less “terrifying.”
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So now we’re calling for a ban on scary objects, even after admitting that their actual effect isn’t nearly what it’s been propagandized to be?
Does that sound like “common-sense gun control”?
Does that sound like the product of rational thinking, or the bastard child of political polarization and highly effective media campaigns?
Granted the freedom to pick and choose things to ban on a whim, I wonder which practices, freedoms, or privileges enjoyed by Americans might next run afoul of these self-proclaimed progressives.
Never before have I seen seemingly educated, intelligent humans devolve this readily into a pack of drooling coma patients, completely impervious to reason, logic, easy-to-comprehend statistics, and basic understanding of cause-and-effect.
Never before have I seen so many so eager to fall in line behind vote-hungry politicians, all for the sake of contrived moralistic aestheticism.
Want to control guns? Learn to vet the buyers better.
Use no-fly lists in federal background checks.
Ban gun sales to suspected terrorists… and not just the nasty poster-children for mass murder like the AR-15, but everything, right on down to the pea-shooters your granddad once used to plug mice in the attic.
Don’t want a gun in your house? Don’t buy one.
Put more succinctly: Get your heads out of your butts, people; learn to think for yourselves; and remember that the moment you make millions pay for the deeds of individuals numbering in the single digits, you remind sane people why the Second Amendment was drafted in the first place.
The Second Amendment is What Gives Teeth and Claws to the First Amendment
The Second Amendment was created as the ultimate check against governmental overreach.
It was drafted to remind the powers that be that if they decide to turn to tyranny, which almost all ruling bodies do when left to expand unrestrained, the people can and will take those powers away.
Nothing less. Nothing more.
In that regard, it seems to me that the Second Amendment isn’t just effective, but a necessary fail-safe to ensuring that the First Amendment, which grants us freedom of speech, isn’t just a bunch of meaningless words scrolled on parchment.
Sure, gun grabbers will be quick to claim that no citizen militia, well organized or fragmented, can stand up to the U.S. Army and its attack helicopters, drones, and cruise missiles, but recent lessons with Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies prove exactly the opposite.
Moreover, the fact that our own President feels compelled to go on the air and petition for a “reasonable” disarming of the populace shows that our own government does indeed fear its own citizens.
And that’s a good thing, because given its willingness to act the way it does domestically and globally, it seems that our government fears few others.
At the end of the day, the never-ending argument of gun control isn’t an argument about weapon types or magazine capacities.
It’s an argument about whether we trust the government and all of its tentacles to own ALL the guns and make ALL the decisions as to how they’re used.
The Price of Safety and Comfort is the Awareness That Neither is Guaranteed
If you believe they’re worthy of that level of trust… well, I suppose, you’re also content with the way they’ve been handling their jobs.
Something tells me that most of you will find at least a couple things wrong with that premise.
To me, gun ownership is just one part of the self-reliance that American culture has espoused since the very start; part of the reason people from all over the world still seek life in this country when life in their native land proves unlivable.
It cannot be made obsolete by technology or social advancement. It cannot be made irrelevant by a growing or demographically evolving population.
Self-reliance and yes, the right to bear arms, for whatever reason the law-abiding citizen chooses to, is more than the second entry in the Bill of Rights.
It’s a natural right that goes right along with the right to breathe.
To treat it as anything but is to weaken our resolve to remain free of the inevitable abuses brought on by the onset of absolute power — the very same variety of power our federal government enhances with every ban and every needless regulation.
Perhaps it makes me a zealot to take the argument this far, but I believe the right to bear arms is right in line with the right to own property; to make and grow wealth; to self-determine our paths in life.
There are no gray areas or middle ground when it comes to this right. You either believe in freedom of self, or you believe in the inherent benevolence of our government.
Frankly, I’ve seen too much in my life to put much faith in the latter.
Fortune favors the bold,
Alex Koyfman
Check us out on YouTube!His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.
