Melanie Hain is DEAD!

Well, the Open Carry poster child, Melanie Hain, has been shot dead.

...by her own husband.

I am sorry, but I don't feel too much regret since looking at her smug face made me want to grab her gun and pop a cap in her ass as well. Moreover, Hain points out the flaws in the argument about defensive gun use which is that a gun in the house will stop someone from harming you. Instead, it makes it far more likely the owner will be harmed. Only an insane person or idiot would believe the arguments presented by the "gun rights" crowd about using a gun for self-defence.

Therefore, it would be funny as heck if Hain was shot with her own gun.

I am hoping that her husband turned her own gun against her.

Why?

Precisely from my Second statement: Most concealed carry idiots make me want to grab their guns and pop a cap in their sorry moronic arses.

Despite the discredited studies from John Lott and Gary Kleck, it has been shown that adding a gun to a situtation makes it more likely that someone will get hurt. In the case of an idiot, untrained civilian, it is more likely to be the idiot, untrained civilian.

It doesn't take too much brain power to get that having a loaded gun in your house makes it more likely someone will be shot accidently. I am qualifying that to say loaded gun, since an unloaded gun can't do too much.

Which is why I was trained to make sure any gun was stored unloaded and in a secure locked area.

But that's not my point here. So, let's change the statement to elephants rather than guns.

Having a herd of elephants around makes it more likely that you will be killed by stampeding elephants.

You can't be killed by stampeding elephants if there aren't elephants around: can you? If something is harmful and you have it around, there is the likelihood of harm. It doesn't take too many neurons to figure that one out. Likewise, not having a loaded gun lying around means you are not likely to be harmed by it. You can't be harmed by things that are non-existant, unless they are the statistics used by the "gun rights" crowd to back up their arguments, which are non-existant in reality.

And as Jeff Cooper's Rules of Gun Safety point out: All guns are ALWAYS loaded.

The reason for the methodologically flawed Lott and Kleck studies is to try to show utility where there is none. Quite simply a gun in the house makes it more likely that you or another family member will get shot, whether on purpose or accidentally.

Unless of course, you properly store the gun in an unloaded and locked container. Preferably a safe.

But, that makes a gun even more worthless for "defensive purposes".

Which I guess places me in the camp of being "anti" since a gun is a shit weapon for self-defence.

Have a seance and ask Melanie Hain if you disagree with me.

But right on top of Hain's getting shot, comes a study from the University of Pennsylvania. Branas's study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

Of course, the University of Pennsylvania is not the first study to show that having a gun in the house makes it more likely someone will be harmed by the firearm: here and the Wal-Hemenway study. More likely the owner or one of the owner's family members will be the victim than an intruder.

It is even more ironic that this shooting happened during domestic violence awareness month, which seeks to raise awareness about threats and violence against women. The Freedom States Alliance (FSA) pointed out that although Hain was an aggressive gun owner, her death followed a sad pattern of women being victimized by men with guns, in this case by her husband. According to a new study released this month, When Men Murder Women by the Violence Policy Center, firearms were used by males to murder 847 women in 2007 – a staggering number. More than 10 times as many females were murdered by a male they knew than were killed by male strangers.

It seems when someone uses valid data, that it is more likely that a loaded gun in the home will lead to someone having an accident, quite possibility with serious injury or even death: usually to the idiot who has it to protect himself.

If Melanie Hain proved anything, it's that the gun control crowd are bang on and the "gun rights" crowd just spout shit.

And its even stupider to have untrained civilians walking the streets carrying loaded firearms. Someone who knows what they are doing can wrestle the gun from you and use it against you. It happens to cops.

Again, another argument against guns as defensive items.

The problem is that Melanie Hain shows what anyone with any criminal justice knowledge knows, most murder victims know their killer. Again, a gun in the house makes it more likely it will be used against you.

I just saw a "gun rights" post which pointed out that knives are also used as deadly weapons. Yeah, well, it's pretty easy to defend yourself against a knife attack, especially if you are fit and trained in self-defense. Knife wounds are also easier to treat than a gun shot wound.

Being an untrained, overweight twit with a gun makes for victims like Melanie. As I said in the start of this post, I want to grab the guns from some of these CCW and open carry assholes and blast them. Sorry, dipshit, but a gun isn't going to help you if you are not fit enough to keep it out of the hands of someone who can disarm you.

Right, Melanie?

I guess that makes me a law abiding citizen as opposed to an "otherwise law abiding citizen". I would have a field day if it weren't for laws against shooting jerks who carry guns in public with their own guns.

Case in point, I was walking down the street and some jerk bumped into me. I apologised, but the jerk kept on walking in an agressive fashion. I was ready ready to pound him, but I could tell he was carrying (you know--sport shirt untucked, but not loose enough to hide the fact he was "printing").

No, it wasn't that he was packing heat that made me think twice, but the fact that it was a crowded street and I didn't want to hit a bystander.

Unlike the asshole who was packing.

But there is another side to the Melanie Hain saga, the Sheriff revoked her carry permit.

Shall issue means that idiots like Hain and the CCW Jerkoff on the street have licences to carry concealed firearms in public. It takes their doing something openly stupid, or in Hain's case something incredibly and violently stupid, to have the permit revoked. That really shouldn't be. Local law enforcement should be able to keep guns out of the hands of idiots.

Which is why there is a gun rights crowd of idiots who shouldn't own a gun, but want them anyway to the detriment of public safety and society in general.

Quite frankly, there is no such thing as "gun rights". The Second Amendment was to protect me against the establishment of a standing army. But, guess what? The military budget makes it a joke as does the gun rights argument.

I mean the questions were about the militia such as "how will your militia be armed?" when the Bill of Rights was being drafted, not how do we get firearms into the hands of criminals and irresponsible assholes like Melanie Hain? Ever wonder why the Patrick Henry Quote "Let every man be armed" isn't used much anymore, because it shows Henry was interested in the Article I, Section 8 militias and not the Melanie Hains and the other morons like her of this world.

Restrictions on gun ownership do not infringe upon my privilege as a sportsman to have a firearm (it's a privilege, not a right for a private citizen to own a firearm outside of the Article I, Section 8 militia service).

Allowing unfettered access to firearms by irresponsible people does harm the privilege of gun ownership.

I just hope more "gun rights" people will get killed with their own weapons. I can see it now, The gun rights idiot--a dying breed.

Then maybe we can have some sane gun laws.

Why so many mass shootings?

I heard the comment that the Police didn't know the reason for yesterday's shooting at the West Palm Wendy's. Try he didn't like Mondays. To quote the song: "there can be no reason, because there is no reason."

The obvious one seems to never be mentioned: access to firearms in the United States is far too easy. I can buy a handgun simply by presenting a valid driver's licence here in Pennsylvania. That is a scary concept given that the crime of identity theft is pretty common. It doesn't take too much to come up with a clean driver's licence in someone's name. Or the other options the straw purchaser or the gun trafficker.

Of course, we hear about John Lott and Gary Kleck, but their work is obviously flawed. Lott doesn't take into account other factors which could explain the drop in crime, but uses the numbers to back up his hypothesis. Other statisticians have followed up on Lott's work and have found it flawed.

Lott's thesis is that populations with greater access to firearms are better able to deter crime. Some scholars have quarreled with Lott's interpretation, but this controversy is about underlying data. One of Michael Bellesiles' principal critics, a Northwestern law professor named James Lindgren among others want to know where Lott got the evidence to support the following sentence, which appears on Page 3 of Lott's book: "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

Initially, Lott sourced the 98 percent figure to "national surveys." That's how the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime put it. In an August 1998 op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, Lott appeared to cite three specific surveys:

Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Research Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack.

But polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart show no such thing.

Alternatively, Lott would sometimes attribute the 98 percent figure to Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. In a February 2000 op-ed for Colorado's Independence Institute, Lott wrote: "Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack." But Kleck's research shows no such thing.

Eventually, Lott settled on yet another source for the 98 percent figure: "a national survey that I conducted," as Lott put it in a second edition of More Guns, Less Crime. When asked about the survey, Lott now says it was done by telephone in 1997 and that the data was lost a few months later in a computer crash.

Lott's conflicting explanations naturally attracted suspicion, first from Otis Dudley Duncan, a retired sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who wrote an article on the matter for the Criminologist, and eventually from Lindgren, the Bellesiles gumshoe, who has been posting his findings online. When Lott was asked about the serial attributions to "national surveys," to three specific polls, and to Kleck, Lott conceded, "A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly."

Lott has said that he lost all his data for the book in a computer crash and had to reconstruct it, but that he couldn't reconstruct the survey. Lott has been able to produce witnesses who remember him talking about this obviously traumatic event soon after it occurred. But none of these people specifically remember him talking about losing data for a survey he'd conducted. Nor has Lott been able to produce the names of the college students he says conducted the phone surveys in Chicago, where Lott was teaching at the time.

As I like to say, if Lott had shown that guns produced more crime, he would have had a Michael Bellesisles style roasting. On the other hand, Lott's work is pure crap, yet it is still cited by the RKBA crowd.

I like how one commentator said that people who believe Lott and Kleck (another discredited researcher) are predisposed to want to believe that muck. No contrary evidence will change their minds. Which is pretty true, because the RKBA arguments don't survive scrutiny if you have an open mind.

That is the major problem in the gun debate is that there is too much taken in faith by the RKBA crowd, and like most believers, they don't have faith strong enough to research the data and sources they use. They prefer to use what buttresses their argument, even if that is incorrect, rather than test their faith.

On the other hand, the empirical data shows that more guns and easy access to firearms is what is behind the soaring toll of gun violence in the United States. Something must be done about it. Gun policy cannot be determined by flawed statistics when raw data shows the actual toll of gun violence in terms of money spent on treating the victims of gun crime and the cost of processing the perpetrators (if they live) through the criminal justice system.

Whether that is the Justices of the Supreme Court following stare decisis in District of Columbia v. Heller 07-290, or politicians saying that gun rights are illusory since the Second Amendment is only to protect us from standing armies.

More amusing RKBA comments

Making comments that the United States needs gun control is a lightning rod for the RKBA crowd to come and post loads of comments. Another one of these time wasters just posted duplicates of a comment, which I will not post of course, telling me to look at the "peer reviewed" Kleck and Lott articles. Yes, they were peer reviewed and have failed. Kleck and Lott call the other's work crap. So, I am not sure why this person bothers wasting his and others time, but...

I find it especially funny when the RKBA crowd write to foreign journalists. It is especially funny when the RKBA crowd write to British and Australian papers to try and persuade the journos that crime is high in Britain and Australia. Even funnier since the RKBA crowd really put their feet in it by not having the facts straight.

But the RKBA crowd never really does have its facts straight anyway. Probably why they like people like John Lott and Gary Kleck. Both Lott and Kleck sound scientific, but have been pretty much disproved. In fact, if Lott were on the other side of the debate, he would join Michael Bellesisles in the discredited academic department.

The RKBA crowd like to repeat the same things over and over again. I was looking at multiple posts of the same comment on one piece.

I guess the main point is that some people should avoid trying to sound intelligent, especially when they are dealing with people who know they are wrong. The RKBA crowd doesn't have their facts straight on the gun issue in Australia or Britain, but they love to interject nonsense about how the crime rate has gone up.

The problem is that the United States is the only country with an obscure and misunderstood bit of legislation written down on the books that acts as a barrier to any sane gun legislation. No other country, even if they have the same militia tradition, has barriers to firearms legislation.

Britain, not Germany, was the first country to have firearms regulation. This is despite having a similar constitutional guarantee to bear arms in The Bill of Rights from 1689 (1 Will. & Mar. sess. 2 c. 2): That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law. Amusingly enough, as in other guarantees of rights, this follows the right to be free of a standing army in time of peace.

Anyway, Britons have never had a "right" to own guns and handgun ownership was pretty rare. In fact, I was amused when I was young, a friend said something about my being from America that I had shot a gun. To which I replied that we had guns and hunted in England as well. My family was of the class of people who had this privilege and ability.

I would like to see more action in the area of gun control, but like the draft and military service, Americans are rather apathetic until something effects them.

Then they become very protective. I find Americans to be a rather self-centred people when it comes to politics.