A friend of mine brought to my attention an editorial from the Charleston Gazette. “Slaughter” is a typical leftist tirade against guns, starting with the tale of Charles Thornton’s assault on the town hall of Kirkwood, Missouri:

Thursday, [Thornton] took a large, silver pistol to a council meeting. He killed a policeman on the town hall parking lot, then killed another inside, then killed three others and wounded several, before he was shot to death by more police.

The article then follows with a couple more anecdotes of tragic crimes and gives some shady statistics.

America averages about 30,000 gun deaths per year – most of them suicides, but more than one-third murders. Other advanced nations with strong pistol controls have only tiny slaughter rates. For example, Sweden had just 37 gun murders in 2004, Australia had 56, England had 73 – and America had 11,344.

Sweden has a population of about 9,000,000 people. Australia has a population of about 21,000,000. England has a population of about 50,000,000. America has a population of about 300,000,000. Per capita, America still has a far larger number of gun murders, but the difference is not as large as the Gazette makes it sound here. It’s a small dishonesty, perhaps, but it’s still dishonest, and needs to be noted.

Second, who cares how many “gun” murders were committed, even per capita? Is a gun murder worse than a knife murder or a beating murder? I keep seeing billboards that say “1 crime + 1 gun = 5 years to life” and “More time for gun crime” and other similar messages. These billboards convey a meme that I simply can’t get my head around, because it’s essentially saying that violent crime committed with a weapon other than a gun (or with no weapon at all) simply isn’t as serious a crime. If someone kills me, I don’t give a crap whether they killed me by shooting me with a gun or stabbing me with a knife or choking me to death with a Spider-Man tie, I want them sent away for killing me, not for choosing the most politically incorrect weapon.

What are the murder rates of these countries, regardless of the weapons used? What are the violent crime rates in general? These statistics would be far more telling than the “gun” murder rates, but the Gazette, being a “communist rag,” as my uncle put it a couple of weeks ago, doesn’t even bother looking for these statistics — they just go for the easy, but meaningless statistics that look the best for their side of the debate. It’s dishonest, but it is somewhat par for the course in any sort of attempt at persuading people. I just hope (though I’m not foolish enough to actually believe) that people who read this editorial have the sense to look at facts and think for themselves rather than just letting the Gazette tell them what to believe.

The Gazette then attacks the position of gun rights activists:

The U.S. gun lobby offers just one cure for America’s sky-high murder rate: Other people also should carry loaded pistols so they can shoot back at killers. Under this formula, the Missouri city council chamber, the Los Angeles home and the Louisiana college would become the OK Corral in blazing gun battles.

This is fundamentally untrue — the gun lobby doesn’t offer this as the only cure for the murder rate; they simply say that it would help more than disarming potential victims. Most gun rights activists will point to New York City, where crime rates dropped during the 1990s, when crime-prevention policies other than gun control were going into effect both in New York City and the nation at large. By contrast, there was no corresponding drop in the crime rate when any of New York City’s myriad of gun control legislation was passed.

Additionally, active self-defense is not the only crime-deterrent that is found in allowing citizens to arm themselves. Robert Heinlein once wrote that “an armed society is a polite society,” and that concept would aid in deterring crime. Relatively sane attackers would be deterred by the likelihood that a potential victim might be carrying a gun. Most murders are not committed by individuals who fully expect to die in the commission of their crime, and the added risk that comes with an armed citizenry (even if the percentage of citizens who choose to be armed is relatively small) would serve to deter some^[a] criminals.

Oddly, the Gazette seems to believe that potential victims’ attempting to shoot back at an attacker is somehow worse than their simply being an easy target. Their “OK Corral” shootout scenario is largely hyperbole, but even if it wasn’t, I believe that being a participant in a shootout is a far cry better than being a target in a shooting gallery.

The piece closes with this tidbit:

Maybe it’s too late for gun control to work in America, because the nation already is saturated by nearly 200 million firearms. Finding them all would be almost impossible. Yet we wish that some political leaders would be brave enough to try.

“Maybe it’s too late for gun control to work in America.” That statment, to me, implies that the Gazette thinks that gun control works somewhere. Can they name that place? Here’s a challenge (as originally stated by Joe Huffman) to the editors of the Charleston Gazette and to any gun control advocate who happens to read this: “Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?”^[b]

1. Admittedly, it wouldn’t stop anyone who, like the examples given by the Gazette, intended their attack to be the last act they take in this life, but even if the “chilling effect” doesn’t deter these sorts of criminals, an armed citizenry would be more capable to utilize a more direct deterrent to these acts once they were in progress. [↩]
2. Emphasis mine. Remember that one is not safer if one is beaten to death by a baseball bat or stabbed with a knife than if one is shot by a gun. [↩]