The words of a friend

A friend of mine posted this on our community message board, in response to a number of the knee-jerk gun protectionists that spring into action the moment there's any sort of gun related tragedy such as the heinous murder of 20 near-babies and 6 school staff in Newtown, CT late last week.

I have been answering one and two at a time the charges, such as

• that guns make you safer (statistically they don't, you are more likely to be shot with your own gun than ever to successfully defend yourself or your home with one)
• that it is possible to be safe and responsible with guns (may be, but there are a lot of people who think they are both things but who are in fact not, such as the mother of the unnamed evil-incarnate that took all of those innocent lives)
• that guns are necessary in case the government overreaches (in a world of drones and missiles and tanks and the like, exactly how much is any gun, even a semi-automatic assault weapon, going to help even if it does become necessary to overthrow the government, which we rather hope will never happen anyway)
• that restricting any gun ownership violates the second amendment (I don't see too many 'well regulated militias' around, and anyway I also don't see too many people advocating for private ownership of nukes, so we've all tacitly agreed there IS a line, we're not arguing over whether there is one, we're arguing over where it should be drawn)
• that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" (true, but why should we make it easy and efficient with a product whose sole use is exactly that ease and efficiency of killing)
• that "if you outlaw guns, only criminals will have them" (The types of criminals who will likely still have them will mostly be organized crime and professional assassins, neither of which tend to engage in the sort of random massacres that we're trying to prevent.  Also, just because you can't keep them out of the hands of every possible criminal is to you a good reason not to try to reduce the number of criminal hands that might be able to get hold of one?)
• that "if more people had guns, someone would have stopped (insert your favorite mass killing)"  (The answer to this depends on the specifics of the case.  In the case of Kent State (which someone brought up), do you really imagine that someone drawing a gun would have REDUCED the number of casualties?  Would it not in fact have increased them, as the abusive authorities now felt threatened and considered the students to be resisting arrest?  In the case of the Batman theater murders a month or two ago, in the smoke and confusion, collateral damage from 'friendly fire' would have been high, to say nothing of confusion over who was a bad guy and who was a good guy, there's every reason to believe self-appointed saviors of the crowd could have started taking shots at one another, not realizing that the other gun-holding person wasn't the perp)

But my friend (who has asked to remain nameless, which I will respect, but who gave me permission to repost this unattributed) wrote a piece which says, I think, most of what I've been trying to say much more succinctly and persuasively, so here goes.  The rest of this post are words with which I agree, but which I did not author originally.

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Guns do not make you safer. Inevitably, they end up being used against someone whom the gun was intended to protect, very often the gun's owner.

Guns make things more dangerous in contentious situations, not less - that’s just a fact. Life is full of arguments, disputes, anger, cheating, depression and resentment. Adding a gun to any of those situations is adding gasoline to a fire, one that can blow up in unpredictable ways, that can more easily have deadly results than if the gun were not present. We've learned that very hard lesson even here in Grantham this past year.

Having more even more powerful weapons with larger magazines available and legal turns the gasoline into dynamite, with predictably worse results.

There’s a certain amount of bravado in the arguments put forth by gun enthusiasts whenever tragedies like the one in Connecticut happen. If only someone with a gun had been there, maybe someone like themselves, they could have stopped this tragedy. Most profess to how their own weapon makes them secure and safe from harm - if only everyone had a gun, we’d all be so much safer, the argument goes.

Except, this isn’t true. Take a look at the facts of every mass-shooting that’s happened since the original “I don’t like Mondays” shooting back in the 70s. In nearly every instance, even when someone who was there *was* armed, it did them no good. Why not?

The answer is simple, and you don’t need to ask me. Just ask any cop on the beat - having non-law enforcement personnel at a crime scene with a weapon makes it more dangerous, not less. Once the shooting starts, these are scenes of chaos and danger, and you’re as likely to be shot as a perpetrator or shoot an innocent bystander yourself as to be the hero and save the day, probably more so. How do you sort out the "good guys" from the "bad guys" in a situation like that? How do I know that you, the guy who just drew a weapon, isn't another bad guy? Unless you're a cop or another trained professional, it's damn neigh impossible. The times when an armed individual was successful at intervening, it's usually an off-duty cop with professional training in how to handle those situations, not some self-appointed Dirty Harry.

Why do you think the professional police organizations all oppose radical initiatives like the "stand your ground" laws that overturn the "duty to retreat" doctrine that's been in place since we adopted English common law? It's because they know they'll make public places more dangerous, not less.

I highly recommend reading this Op-Ed from the New York Times that was written by an infantry officer who served two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who went to High School in Littleton Colorado when the Columbine shootings happened. He wrote this after the Aurora shooting spree this summer, and says it better than I ever could.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/an-arms-race-we-cant-win.html?_r=0

Partner Violence

This one is not politically correct.  But it's something which frustrates me, so I wanted to get it out there.

Every so often, some well-meaning person starts going off on "violence against women" as a problem in our society, and to the extent that violence against PEOPLE is a problem, and women are people, yes, violence against women is a problem.

My frustration is that the term is bandied about so often, many are left with the clear implication that when there is violence, it's against women.

Here are some statistics from the FBI on murder from 1995 and 1996.  More than five times as many men are murdered each year than are women.  So there's that.

The long "oh, please save the poor women" posts usually focus on partner on partner violence, so let's look at those numbers specifically.  Yes, the number of women murdered by their husband or boyfriend is higher for women than the converse for men.  But is it so overwhelmingly higher as to be almost trivial for men?  No.  Men are murdered by a wife/girlfriend more than once for every twice women are murdered by a husband/boyfriend.

Yes, the number is higher for women.  But it is not so much higher that we should be dismissing the men who are thus murdered, or portraying this as an act universally perpetrated BY men AGAINST women.

Statistically, men report less abuse than women do, but some studies have indicated this has less to do with a lower AMOUNT of abuse and more to do with societal attitudes.  Abused men are seen as weak, sissies, or just complainers.  How could a man POSSIBLY be abused?  They're so much bigger and stronger, says the sexist stereotype by some of the same people who would bristle if you were to bring up men as the stronger, more in-control gender under most other circumstances.

We have a plethora of abused women/children's shelters, but try finding one for abused men.  They're very difficult to find, even though again, statistically about half of relationship violence is perpetrated AGAINST men.

When police are called to a "domestic", overwhelmingly when one member of the couple is arrested or taken away to "cool off", it is the man, even when the woman was the one doing the abusing.  We just assume that if there's violence going on, it was perpetrated by, or at least initiated by, the man, or that he's such a high risk to accelerate it that he must be removed from the situation.

And let's take a look at the highly publicized violent acts.  For example, Lorena Bobbitt.  She cut her sleeping husband's penis off, and then discarded it in a field as she fled the scene, and among many, she was seen as a cult hero, a woman who stood up for herself.  She was arrested and tried and found not guilty.

Really?  Imagine the situation had been reversed.  Imagine a man who was taking the kinds of systematic abuse Ms. Bobbitt is reported to have taken at the hands of her husband.  Imagine that husband snapping one night and, instead of just leaving, filing for divorce and getting a restraining order, he'd physically cut some portion of her body off before leaving.

Do you imagine ANYONE would have considered him to be a hero?  It seems to me that he'd have been tried and convicted, with scores of "anti-violence-against-women" types claiming that no matter WHAT punishment he got, it was not sufficient, and in all likelihood, he'd have been required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Look, I'm not saying partner violence isn't a problem.  I'm really not.

But PLEASE, let's talk about it as partner violence, not violence-on-women, because statistically the incidence in both directions is not that different, and so to try to make it out as a single-direction problem merely dismisses (and thus, further victimizes) roughly half of all of the victims.