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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.

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Representative Eric Swalwell’s (D-CA) stupid tweet, which we discussed previously, inspired this one from ‘journalist’ Nina Burleigh:

Almost every single person I’ve ever heard of with an AR-15 has been a mass murderer. Based on Twitter sample the rest of them are scarily paranoid. Get on the right side of history @DLoesch @Rambobiggs #gunsense https://t.co/rFtHFBpvLM — Nina Burleigh (@ninaburleigh) November 17, 2018

This is the same Nina Burleigh who once said:

I would be happy to give him (Bill Clinton) a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.

Yeah, that’s the kind of judgement we have come to expect from the left. Telly Davidson, writing in The American Conservative, noted this as the ‘Nina Burleigh Rule’:

When explaining that quote in The Huffington Post in 2007, Burleigh said, I said it (back in 1998, but a good quote has eternal life) because I thought it was high time for someone to tweak the white, middle-aged beltway gang taking Clinton to task for sexual harassment. These men had neither the personal experience nor the credentials to know sexual harassment when they saw it, nor to give a good goddamn about it if they did. The insidious use of sexual harassment laws to bring down a president for his pro-female politics was the context in which I spoke.” Critics today cite this as the “Nina Burleigh rule”—that men who politically champion pro-feminist policies like Bill Clinton shouldn’t be taken to task when they violate those policies personally, including sexual harassment and assault. While critics have cited this for its apparent hypocrisy and double standard, it is nonetheless illuminating.

Obvious translation: we can expect nothing but hypocrisy from the left.

The lovely Miss Burleigh then continued with another tweet, linking this story:

The gun numbers: just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms Facts show owning more than 40 guns is actually fairly common in the United States, and violence falls most heavily on the country’s poorest neighborhoods Lois Beckett in New York | @loisbeckett | Wednesday, 15 November 2017 | 02.00 EST You’ve heard the statistics before: Americans have more guns per head than any nation on earth – along with gun violence rates that are dramatically higher than other rich, developed countries. But these big-picture facts can be misleading. Not every American is packing heat and gun violence is intensely concentrated in small neighbourhoods.

Note what was done here: The Guardian article noted that “owning more than 40 guns is actually fairly common in the United States” and “violence falls most heavily on the country’s poorest neighborhoods.” The reader is expected to infer that owning a large number of firearms is somehow concentrated in our poorest neighborhoods.

That, of course, is untrue. Our most violent neighborhoods are the result of drug dealers and gangs having their competition and semi-open warfare, but the men who are armed and violent there are not the ones with huge weapons collections, but who have a one or two weapons, mostly cheap handguns.

The city’s criminals, for instance, prefer semiautomatic pistols to revolvers and generally seek out cheap junk guns. What’s also notable is the type of gun that doesn’t appear among the top models seized. In 2014, Chicago police recovered only three assault weapons associated with criminal incidents. “Often there’s a misimpression about the importance of assault guns and assault weapons, and it’s important to point out how rare that is,” says Phillip Cook, an economist at Duke University who studies underground gun markets. “The guns being used in Chicago for crime and murder are by and large very ordinary pistols.”

Back to The Guardian article:

Here’s a look at the dramatic concentration of America’s guns – and America’s violence: Gun ownership American civilians own at least 265m firearms, which gives Americans the highest rate of per capita firearm ownership in the world, with about one gun for every American. Yemen comes in a distant second, with about 55 guns for every 100 people, according to data from the 2007 Small Arms Survey. But surveys show that gun ownership in America is actually highly concentrated. Only 22 to 31% of Americans adults say they personally own a gun. Rates of personal and household gun ownership appear to have declined over the past decades – roughly two-thirds of Americans today say they live in a gun-free household. By contrast, in the late 1970s, the majority of Americans said they lived in a household with guns. Most of America’s gun owners have relatively modest collections, with the majority of gun owners having an average of just three guns, and nearly half owning just one or two, according to a 2015 survey by Harvard and Northeastern researchers, which gave the most in-depth estimate of Americans’ current patterns of gun ownerships. But America’s gun super-owners, have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.

The previously linked article noted that when cheap handguns were used, Chicago’s criminals tended to dispose of them, so that they would not be in their possession if later apprehended for some other reason. These aren’t the type of people who have average collections of 17 weapons. That type of criminal keeps only one or two around, to reduce his liability if caught, and knows that he can obtain another easily enough if he needs one. People with large collections are serious collectors, people who invest a lot of money into their collections.

Of course, Lois Beckett, The Guardian article author knew that. She is not only a reporter who ‘covers gun violence for ProPublica,’ but wrote, in The New York Times, on September 12, 2014, that the 1994-2004 ‘assault weapons ban’ made no real difference and that “big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.”

The Assault Weapon Myth by Lois Beckett | September 12, 2014 Over the past two decades, the majority of Americans in a country deeply divided over gun control have coalesced behind a single proposition: The sale of assault weapons should be banned. That idea was one of the pillars of the Obama administration’s plan to curb gun violence, and it remains popular with the public. In a poll last December, 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban. But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference. It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do. In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows. The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots. Annually, 5,000 to 6,000 black men are murdered with guns. Black men amount to only 6 percent of the population. Yet of the 30 Americans on average shot to death each day, half are black males. It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.” America was then suffering from a spike in gun crime and it seemed like a problem threatening everyone. Gun murders each year had been climbing: 11,000, then 13,000, then 17,000. Democrats decided to push for a ban of what seemed like the most dangerous guns in America: assault weapons, which were presented by the media as the gun of choice for drug dealers and criminals, and which many in law enforcement wanted to get off the streets. This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban. Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of gun murders each year, but gun control advocates had failed to interest enough of the public in a handgun ban. Handguns were the weapons most likely to kill you, but they were associated by the public with self-defense. (In 2008, the Supreme Court said there was a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.)

Miss Beckett knows that the assault weapons ban has virtually no effect on gun crimes, but she did mention, most impolitely, where the problem for the gun control advocates lay:

Even as homicide rates have held steady or declined for most Americans over the last decade, for black men the rate has sometimes risen. But it took a handful of mass shootings in 2012 to put gun control back on Congress’s agenda. After Sandy Hook, President Obama introduced an initiative to reduce gun violence. He laid out a litany of tragedies: the children of Newtown, the moviegoers of Aurora, Colo. But he did not mention gun violence among black men.

There you have it: the one area in which homicide is the greatest problem is the area into which no President, not even our first black President, can tread, that the problem is a racial one. To mention that is to be seen as somehow criticizing black Americans or the black community or even just black men, and that will draw immediate howls of racism.

But racism is most certainly in play among the gun control advocates. The media pay a huge amount of attention to mass shooting incidents such as Sandy Hook or Parkland High School, because they are unexpected, and not coincidentally, because many of the victims are white. But we expect black men to be killing other black men in Chicago — 493 total homicides this year as of November 15, 2018, mostly of black males — to the point that it’s simply no longer news.¹

The subject is simply taboo; you cannot talk about, or write about, in anything but the mildest, most inoffensive terms, the fact that our murder rate is a primarily urbanized black murder rate.

Me? I’m not afraid to mention it. I don’t care about being called names, and I’m retired, so I can’t get fired for saying it, but the left who are so very concerned about the murder rate and the availability of firearms are concerned only about white victims, not black ones, willing to address only those killings in which white people are killed in unexpected places, not black people murdered in heavily black communities. The left want to go after so-called ‘assault weapons,’ when those types of weapons are very rarely used to commit murder, when those types of weapons are primarily used in shootings in which white people die.²

Of course, there is a sort of incrementalism that the left wish to employ, with an ‘assault weapon’ ban being simply the first step, the foot in the door. Eventually they’d like to ban all private firearms ownership, but know that would never fly in the United States, at least not anytime soon. The Second Amendment? Oh, that piece of outdated paper?

Nobody needs an AR-15, we are told. If the left are successful in banning ‘assault weapons,’ it won’t be too much longer before we are told that nobody needs to hunt Bambi, because the grocery stores are full of food.

But the Second Amendment was not written to say that an American citizen somehow needs the approval of other people to own a firearm, nor that what a citizen wants must somehow be subject to the judgement of others as to whether he really needs it. The Bill of Rights was written to protect the American people from the power of a mob, from the tyranny of a majority. That Miss Burleigh may write what she wishes is protected by the First Amendment; that I may say that what she has written is stupid is also protected by our freedom of speech.

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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.

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¹ – The Chicago Tribune reported that, as of November 10, 2018, for the past 365 days, 542 people had been reported as murdered. Of those, 476 were male, 63 were female and in 3 of the cases, the sex of the victim was not specified. Of the 542, 3 had been Asian, 27 had been Hispanic, 45 had been whites who were not Hispanic, in 103 cases the race of the victim had not been specified, and in 364 cases, the victim had been a non-Hispanic black.

² – In a way, it reminds me of university policies which encouraged the reporting of sexual assault allegations to university administrators. When sexual assault cases are handled within the university, the most severe punishment an accused assailant can receive is expulsion and a ban from university property. Such might help protect the cute coeds on campus, but leaves a rapist out on the streets, where he can prey on convenience store clerks and other working class women. I guess that if you aren’t a cute, probably white, coed, you don’t really matter to university officials.