Worth the read

I do way to much reading on my phone. I have kindle there, I have my news feeds there, I have my mailing lists there. What I don’t do is write articles from my phone. You think my grammar and spelling are bad when I use a keyboard? It is much worse when I try and write anything over a few words on my phone.

Sometimes I read the headline and dump the article into keep.google.com, sometimes it is just a few paragraphs and sometimes it is the entire article.

Because the media is so bent I’ve come to expect a certain level of biases in my feeds. For every positive article on guns, gun ownership, or gun policy I’ll have a dozen that tell me how evil I am for wanting to own a gun.

We saw the video of the mom protecting her child from a trash panda. I don’t want to be sticking my hands anywhere near a wild animals mouth and I certainly don’t want to spend the money to “Racoon proof” my chicken and garbage cans. It only took a few rounds before the threat was neutralized.

I’ve held a rifle in my hands as a bear took out a beehive not 200 meters from me, ready to protect family and friends and livestock. I’ve had a gun at the ready when an ex-boyfriend raged and yelled at my lady. He didn’t understand how close he was to death. If he was walking that line of “is deadly force needed” and never knew it.

Regardless, I expect anti-gun reterich everytime I read an article about gun control.

What continues to be indisputable is that our nation needs constructive, ideologically-free dialogues on reducing gun violence. Leadership from the judicial, law enforcement and medical communities are key players that must contribute to this discussion. Politician have demonstrated their impotence to make any positive headway on the issue.

Yep, another request for “reasoned dialog”. I.e. a place where anything that is added to the conversation regarding banning gun or gun ownership is allowed but anything that supports the right to keep and bear arms is deleted…

Except this isn’t that article. I had to go nearly to the end of the article to pull that blockquote out of context. Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D. is actually having a conversation.

Banning assault weapons may be a good idea for their potential to inflict harm. Such a ban may also have other societal benefits that would justify it. However, arguing for a ban based solely on existing population risk reduction benefits extracted from the data appears to be more about political posturing than data-driven evidence-based analysis. 

Assuming (incorrectly) that all mass murders involved assault weapons, and assuming that all the associated deaths and injuries could have been avoided, this amounts to around 650 deaths over the past four years (2018-2021), fewer than the number of people who will die with or from COVID-19 over any two days this week.

What this data indicate is that an assault weapon ban carries with it a very small reduction in population risk. The issue up for debate is whether this reduction is sufficient to warrant banning them.

Give the full article a read, Sheldon seems to be somebody that things that an AWB is an over all good but can’t support it with the facts at hand.

What the data actually say about assault weapons

Regardless of her points on data driven bans of firearms, in the end it doesn’t matter. The lethality of a firearm nor its use by criminals does not make such a ban constitutional.