Today’s Idiot
Darren Seiber. Fresh from making the same tired joke about guns compensating for penis size [What about my wife’s gun? -Ed.], comes proof of an utter inability to do the slightest bit of research:
However, the truth of the matter is, that Texas gun laws are no less lax than that of other states.
Really? Tried buying a gun in DC, Illinois, Massachusetts, NC, MD or NY? Also, this is wonderful:
We are wrong because guns are wrong. They are deadly, unethical creations that do not save or secure any number of lives that could build a reliable statistic. Instead, there are mountains of statistics telling us otherwise.
Guns are ethically neutral. And, depending on who you believe, guns in the US are used defensively between 700,000 times and 2,000,000 times per year.
And from that, we go to making shit up:
Take, for instance, this statistic: for women, having a gun in the house increases the chances of being murdered by 172 percent. If that’s not good enough, chew on this for a while: one study showed that people who attempt to use a gun in self-defense are four times as likely to die. Having a gun in the home does not make you safer. It is not an imaginary insurance policy.
Now, I’ve read probably every gun statistic on the planet and I’ve never heard that one. I even spent five minutes trying to Google it. Can’t find it. Someone let me know if they locate a source but, for now, I’ll go ahead and call it bullshit. Also, a Florida study concluded that active resistance to crime (preferably while armed) was the best course of action.
Other whoppers in the story: blaming male dominance and America is the leader of gun fatalities.
And, at the end, the source for his statistics is the International Action Network on Small Arms. So, this idiot just parrots the made up talking points of an anti-gun group.
I love, particularly, the rather unsophisticated manner in which he implies the bogus gun statistics for the world as applicable in the US.
What a complete and total dumb ass.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Odd that the young man has a busted lip in his picture. Is that the only picture he has?
I’ll go out on a limb here and surmise the only way this fellow can get a date is to be some uber-pussy radical lefty. Hey honey, I against guns, want to go out Saturday. No, how about next Saturday, no, can I have your number?
What do you bet that Seiber is studying Journalism? Another idiot wasting ink and trees.
It appears that the attention from Say Uncle has caused the Easttennessean college newspaper to require registration to view the Darren Seiber column.
Pussies.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Either you or the bonehead author appears to have choked on a double-negative. If his point was that the whole country has gun laws as “lax” (permissive) as Texas’s, then he’s as full of crap on this point as he is on every other point he made in the article. But if his point was actually what he said – that Texas’s gun laws are no less lax than those of any other state – then he’s about right. To say Texas’s gun laws are no less lax than those of Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York or North Carolina, to say nothing of everyone’s favorite non-state DC, is the height of understatement. Texas’s gun laws are significantly more lax than any of these.
That may be a half-truth, it’s hard to tell since he doesn’t identify the study or even complete the thought. Four times as likely to die as what? As people who have a gun but don’t use it to resist? Or four times as likely as those who don’t have a gun – an artificially low figure since people who don’t perceive themselves at risk of homicide are less likely ot own a gun for self-defense? By that logic, I’m sure he could find a study somewhere proving that people who go to hospitals are four times more likely to die than people who don’t.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am
He’s right about Texas’ gun laws not being particularly lax, when compared to other gun friendly states. Pennsylvania controls handgun transfers more strictly than Texas, but for the most part we’re more lax than Texas, which surprises a lot of GFWs around here when they mention Texas as an example of a state with bad gun laws. Last year when I went to visit my friend Carrie, I discovered that you can’t carry on a college campus in Texas, that open carry was generally forbidden, and signage had force of law beyond your usual “ask the guy to leave” trespassing laws. Though federally handgun sales are restricted to 21 and over, in PA 18 is good for possession. TX law I believe is 21 for possession. This all prompted me to tell Carrie:
“I’m sure you never expected to hear this from a damned Yankee, but your state’s gun control laws annoy me” 🙂
March 26th, 2007 at 11:24 am
good point, xrlq. from the preceding ‘graph, I assumed he meant what he didn’t say rather than what he said.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
While all inanimate objects are inherently ethically neutral, you could argue that guns are more ethical than say.. swords.
Swords were extremely expensive and difficult to wield. Only the rich and well trained were able to use swords, and in a battle the best trained swordsmen usually won.
Guns on the other hand were fairly easy to obtain and learn. One of the reasons the aristocracy hated guns was that mere commoners could practice with them for a few hours and become quite proficient. Weapons of war were no longer reserved for those with wealth, land, or title, which made the peasantry that much more difficult to repress.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Sound like pretty typical VPC junk statistics, although the numbers look a little low for their sort of junk science. The 172% value smells like something from Douglas Wiebe’s ‘research’, popular wherever those unable to distinguish between correlation and causation meet.
I’m sure there’s a Joyce Foundation-funded study behind it, although since you mentioned that the numbers were bullshit I’m pretty sure we have the same thing in mind.
Oh, and the classical response to your wife’s gun would be that of penis envy. No matter how often that tired response is destroyed by every psychological analysis for the last few decades, Freudian freaks will bring it out again and again.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Active resistance to crime is always the best course of action. Most criminals are such punks that they will run off if there’s a chance they’ll be hurt. And they will go on a power trip and treat you the way a dog treats a chew toy if they see you as a compliant victim. Practice putting your thumb through a hard-boiled egg (unpeeled). If you can do that, you can put it through someone’s eye.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
The statistics he mentions probably have the same errors of conflating homicide and suicide as well as criminal-on-criminal violence.
Gang members technically own/possess their weapons, but they are also the most likely group to be shot and killed. And it’s not because they own guns, it’s because they participate in violent, illegal activities. And their wives/girlfriends/children will also be likely of experiencing violence and murder.
If you take the statistics separately, and compare yourself to “at-risk” groups, your chances of being shot and killed are usually pretty low.
Anyway, I once had a professor try that whole “guns are bad because they are designed to kill”. Killing itself is not necessarily bad, since killing in self-defense is good, but murder is bad.
March 26th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
“…people who attempt to use a gun in self-defense are four times as likely to die.”
So, who are these immortals, and how did they acquire their immortality? This is new and truly amazing stuff here.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
People who have been shot with a gun are 100% more likely to have been shot with a gun than people who have not been shot with a gun!
March 26th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
If I wanted to “compensate” with gun purchases, I wouldn’t have purchased a 5″ barreled-1911, I probably would’ve been looking for something in the 9-12″ range. I’m just sayin’…
“with such a mind set, every gun supporter should have a degree in philosophy”
If only there were more luftmensches around…
March 27th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Glad to see them coming down from “23 times” to “172% more” (that is, less than 3 times more). Actually, that sounds pretty likely, given that many people have guns because they feel threatened and are likely to be right, and that most big cities pretty near ban handguns for ordinary people so mostly criminals have them. What the gungrabbers will never, ever do is to compare the murder rate of non-criminal gun-owners to non-criminal non-gun-owners of similar age in a similar neighborhood. I think we all know how that would come out.