Geezers and guns, my friends, geezers and guns. That's what our taxes buy us. You'd think I'd at least have gotten a free-Glock-with-purchase.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
When the gun prohibitionists quote a statistic about how many people are killed by firearms misuse, the discussion sometimes bogs down into whose crime stats to believe and how to count crimes vs. the defensive firearm uses. Death by Gun Control works on a level that nobody can dispute: documented world history.
In the 20th Century:
Governments murdered four times as many civilians as were killed in all the international and domestic wars combined.
Governments murdered millions more people than were killed by common criminals.
How could governments kill so many people? The governments had the power - and the people, the victims, were unable to resist. The victims were unarmed.
Truth They Cannot Refute
Death by Gun Control delivers the essential - and gut wrenching -- truth that the anti-self defense "gun control" advocates never try to refute. They simply cannot refute the facts or the formula.
Here's the Formula: Hatred + Government + Disarmed Civilians = Genocide
What makes the argument so powerful? Two factors. First, it makes common sense: unarmed defenseless people have no hope against armed aggressors. Second, it states the historical truth: evil governments did wipe out 170,000,000 innocent non-military lives in the 20th Century alone.
Using the facts in Death by Gun Control, you can take down the enemies of the Bill of Rights. The rights-destroyers have no answers to these facts. They have no excuses for their killer ideas.
JPFO's work has already borne fruit. John R. Bolton, an under-Secretary of State for the United States, this year urged the United Nations to recognize how an "oppressed non-state group defending itself from a genocidal government" will need ready access to firearms. Mr. Bolton might have been the first U.S. official in modern history to have argued to the UN that private citizens might need to be armed against their own killer governments.
Paul Harvey, the world-renowned and much admired radio commentator, last year reportedly broadcast the JPFO-produced facts linking "gun control" to the genocide of millions of unarmed civilians. Country by country, Mr. Harvey counted the murdered victims of civilian disarmament policies.
Our new book could inspire other opinion-makers to join the chorus. Chapters in the book teach about:
The essential meaning of "gun control"
The Genocide Formula
The laws and policies that led to mega murder in Cambodia, China, Nazi Germany, Guatemala, Rwanda, Ottoman Turkey, Uganda, USSR
Zimbabwe's land invasions and firearms confiscations
Soaring crime in Britain after gun prohibition
Violence and police state polices in Japan
The right and duty of armed self-defense in Judaism and both Protestant and Catholic Christianity
Racist roots of "gun control" in America
The United Nations program to disarm civilians worldwide
Police state polices that condition Americans to accept victim disarmament
Contributors: Leading Lights for Liberty
There is much more. Death by Gun Control features articles contributed by:
James Bovard (Introduction): "Not every firearms regulation leads inexorably to genocide. ... But there is no trigger guard on political ambition."
Stephen Halbrook, Ph.D. (Chapter 9): How Nazi firearms laws disarmed German Jews -- the whole story.
Jacob Hornberger (Chapter 10): Retelling the tragic, inspiring tale of The White Rose Society, college students who paid the ultimate price for freedom of mind.
Larry Pratt (Chapter 18): What the Bible says to Christians and Jews about self-defense and victim disarmament.
Endorsed by Experts
Honestly, is this book any good? Ask David Kopel, scholar at the Independence Institute and author of several books and many articles on firearms ownership and public policy. Mr. Kopel honored our book, saying that Death by Gun Control is "one of the best books ever written about the right to keep and bear arms."
There are many excellent books that advance our understanding of the right to keep and bear arms, the Second Amendment and the American liberty philosophy. Death by Gun Control is unique because it alone drives directly to the heart of the matter: that "gun control" ideas kill - both overseas and here in the U.S.A.
http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#dgc
Honest of you to put geezers, first, Matthew, and I will gladly sign off on a 25% reduction in defense spending, if it can be accompanid with means testing which immdeiately cuts Social Security and Medicare spending by 25%. If one wishes to have a 100%, no deduction, estate tax until all Medicare expenditures on a newly dead citizen are recouped, fine.
Hey, wrong blog!! Yeah, I must have been drinkin' to think Matthew would frame it that way.
the grimly humorous part is that if the top 50% earners pay 97% of the taxes [according to the IRS from TaxProfblog some time back] then, those people really only get the guns part, because they are mostly cut out of the rest because they make too much money...
Swiss,
Rich people get both Social Security and Medicare, which are pretty much all of the rest.
Megan, how in the hell is this news to you? This has been the case for a long ass time.
Posted by NutellaonToast
Nut,
Megan only knows what her friends are talking about..she adds the reverb to the 'echo-chamber'
MEH: I think MMcA was referring to "guns" as a metonym for "defense spending" -- the post doesn't have anything to do with personal gun ownership.
SwissArmyD: Lower income taxpayers pay little income tax (which may be the basis for your 50%/97% statistic) but do pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes if they earn any income from employment.
alkali,
thanks for making my point.
The Gov't taxes us blind, to pay for 'their' guns, while forever trying to take ours away..
Should highlight, in relief, the Need for all 10 of the first amendments to the Constitution.
what do you think the stimulus check is for?
Interesting point about the Glock. According to my calculations: Approximately 210k adults at about $1500 each for a rifle, training and ammo would cost us 315 billion dollars. Our annual outlay on defense is 552.6 billion dollars as of 2007 (according to the OMB).
In other words we could arm the population for less cost than a year of Defense budget. The defense plan should be arm our entire population, keep the nukes ready and in good condition and save several tons of money by eliminating everything else. I doubt anyone would attack us under those circumstances. Of course if they did our response options would be limited to nuking their country out of existence, but so what. It still would be effective at a fraction of the cost.
Meh: Megan only knows what her friends are talking about..she adds the reverb to the 'echo-chamber'
Don't miss the significance of the first part: Megan has friends.
Oops, 210 *million* adults. The rest of the numbers are still good I think. But if not, feel free to correct 'em.
Oops, 210 *million* adults. The rest of the numbers are still good I think. But if not, feel free to correct 'em.
Nelson, the problem is that defense in the current era is not just a matter of holding off invasions or physical attacks on our territory. Those we could cope with much more cheaply than the current defense budget.
Unfortunately, the easiest way to attack us (or most other countries today) is simply to disrupt our trade flows. It's not just that so much of our business is dependent on trade with other countries, although it is. It's that so much of everything we consume is supplied, or requires supplies to create, from somewhere else.
And, thanks to Just In Time inventory management, there isn't a lot of margin if something gets significantly disrupted. Think for a minute of what would happen to us (or China, or most other places) if a couple of submarines started taking out oil tankers as they approached our ports. Just for a few weeks, let alone longer. Not pretty.
So while it may be that some of that defense money is wasted, a lot of it is spent on stuff that really is necessary to defend our economy. Defense that even a totally armed citizenry couldn't provide.
"Think for a minute of what would happen to us (or China, or most other places) if a couple of submarines started taking out oil tankers as they approached our ports. Just for a few weeks, let alone longer. Not pretty."
You can build a lot of oil wells in ANWR pretty quickly for half a trillion dollars. Plus, we'd have nukes. Even if we did keep a Navy, we could still spend a lot less on it and the other branches than we do now and still be protected.
Basically, we only need enough Defense for defense, and if we need to go offensive, we could wait until after we're attacked. Our major threat to our freedom isn't other armies, or even terrorists, but our government spending our future wealth through debt and bad laws (and enforcement) limiting our freedoms.
Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | April 15, 2008 6:19 PM
let's hope they're closer to her than she is to her professed beliefs..(read: libertarian)
Nelson wrote:
"Basically, we only need enough Defense for defense, and if we need to go offensive, we could wait until after we're attacked."
This might be, of all the stoopid things I have ever read on the net, the All-Time Grand Prize Winner.
Nelson, do you seriously think you can grow a military with offensive capabilities overnight?
That'll happen when we're all drinkin' that free Bubble-Up and eatin' that Rainbow Stew.
Marcus
Oil was merely an example (picked, admittedly, because I thought more people could relate to it). But the same applies to everything from chromium to cut flowers. Sure, we could produce a fair number (but not all) of them here. But economics working how it does, it would be more expensive. Which means, simply, that our standard of living would drop.
And in the short term, we would be in big trouble. ANWR might have lots of oil. But it isn't exactly a quick effort to determine exactly where, drill the wells, build the pipelines, and get it flowing. And if we decided, for reasons of security, to build a pipeline thru Canada (rather than use oil tankers from Alaska, as we currently do), it would take even longer. And while we wait, we suffer.
Grammar note: Why did Megan hyphenate "free-Glock-with-purchase"? It makes no sense to me.
Could any one explain to me why Megan hyphenates the way she does?
The phrase "geezers and guns" is unfortunate. There should be a strong moral distinction between spending to take care of the aged and spending to buy weapons or make war.
There should be a strong moral distinction between spending to take care of the aged...
Yeah, the old people should 1) save (while young) and 2) get help from their children. Defense is, of course, the quintessential example of a collective good that must be purchased with compulsory taxes.
This might be, of all the stoopid things I have ever read on the net, the All-Time Grand Prize Winner. Nelson, do you seriously think you can grow a military with offensive capabilities overnight?
Of course not. But over weeks, months and years we can produce an unequaled war machine like we did after Pearl Harbor. The point is, we have more military might than is necessary for pure defense. We spend more on our military than, correct me if I'm wrong, the next seven countries *combined*.
Besides, if we just used nukes whenever we were attacked, we'd be attacked less often, we'd reduce overpopulation, we'd reduce global warming due to debris blocking out the sun, we'd secure resources (what's left of them) and we'd give people that want to die their wish.
IF we're going to go to war, we're going to end up killing people anyway. If we kill enough people fast enough, resistance will disappear and we can end the war sooner. Everyone is better off, except the dead of course but such is the nature of war.
I got some geezers I'd like to trade in for more guns. How many would it take to buy a .50 cal machine gun?
Think for a minute of what would happen to us (or China, or most other places) if a couple of submarines started taking out oil tankers as they approached our ports. Just for a few weeks, let alone longer. Not pretty.
Wrong question. Think of what would happen if China did that.
See, outside of Russia only our closest allies in western Europe have the capability of sinking a handful of our ships without us knowing about it. Even then, it's very unlikely. Most of the rest of the world's submarine forces are coastal, and the subs that aren't are easily trackable. The US is unquestionably the best at submarine warfare.
It's stupid to try and cause a large disruption in the US economy if the immediate response is the complete destruction of your own.
Brooksfoe: Thank you for a marvelous demonstration in the difference in moral values between libertarians and what are now called "liberals". In my world, geezers who failed to provide for their retirement may starve or depend on private charity, and national defense is a necessity, because there are bad people out there and some of them have armies, navies, and air forces at their disposal. In your world, actions don't have consequences, people that sweated through school, training, starter jobs, and self-education to become highly productive should be forced at gunpoint to pay for the irresponsible, and somehow the USA is responsible for every nasty dictator out there...
Nelson - Re:
Years before your ready is an awful long time during a war, even weeks can be.
As for WWII, yes we did go from a very small military to an enormous one relatively quickly but
1 - We suffered during them meantime. We probably would not have been attacked if we had been more ready, and if we were attacked anyway the war may have been shorter with less American casualties.
2 - We spent around 1/3rd of our GDP on the military at the peak (compare to about 1% of the war in Iraq, or 5% for our whole military).
3 - Weapons systems where simpler than and it was easier to covert a factory that produced civilian goods in to military production. Sure a Sherman tank wasn't very like a 1940s truck or bulldozer, but it was much closer than an M1 is to the modern equivilent. With aircraft the difference might even be more extreme. Its somewhere between not easy and impossible to rapidly scale up productions of things like F22s, and nuclear aircraft carriers.
4 - Its not just weapons that are more complex, the training we provide our soldiers is more extensive and complex. We'd rather not send in millions of green recruits. Even if we could provide adequate training for privates, it would take longer to get decent noncoms and officers.
glorious - "It's stupid to try and cause a large disruption in the US economy if the immediate response is the complete destruction of your own."
True. But if we scaled back our military to a purely defensive force we would not longer have the ability to rapidly destroy the other guy's economy.
Well the initial idea that Nelson introduced, was we would retain our nukes, but do we really want to immediately jump to nuke usage against any serious threat?
Also even though such an attack might be foolish, so was Pearl Harbor. We still want to be able to guard against foolish attacks and respond to them forcefully.