Scrolling headlines on Drudge just now, I came across an article written by Matthew Balan, of mrc NewsBusters on-line, concerning the administration's persistence in pursuing gun control.
Ordinarily, I’d not mention this subject again, because I’ve already stated opinions on various aspects of the issue. However, in reading the article I was flat-out amazed at what it said.
Apparently there’s some guy, Bob Schieffer, on CBS news who went ballistic (pardon the pun) over what he thinks is one of the greatest presidential speeches he’s ever heard, referring to the incumbent’s message regarding gun control. And in praising the verbiage he compared the incumbent’s agenda to Lyndon Johnson's push for civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Schieffer went on to say that, “This is a turning point in this country, and the President is going to have to do more than just make a speech about it. This is one of the best speeches I've ever heard him deliver, but it's going to take more than that from the White House. He's going to have to get his hands dirty. He's going to have to get in there and – and work this problem until he gets it done. But unless we figure out a way to make sure that something like Newtown never happens again, we're not the country that we once were. I think we still are. I think there's hope. I think something's going to happen here.”
After reading the preceding, I looked Schieffer up out of curiosity, and although I know it’s the epitome of wrong to judge books by their covers, this guy looks pretty much like I expected he would. A beat-up, gray-haired old goat who’s a grandmotherly type. And he’s precisely someone who really ought to consider carrying weapons himself, because I doubt he’d be able to fend off Pee Wee Herman, much less any serious physical threat.
But coming back to Schieffer’s bubbling enthusiasm over the plan to disarm the public, I then looked up the numbers regarding how many citizens possess firearms and here’s what I found on wiki.answers.com.
“Most estimates range between 39% and 50% of US households having at least one gun (that's about 43-55 million households). The estimates for the number of privately owned guns range from 190 million to 300 million. Remove those that skew the stats for their own purposes the best estimates are about 45% or 52 million of American households owning 260 million guns.”
The following statistics were also included:
A 2011 Gallup poll estimates that 47 percent of US households own a gun.
A 2007 Small Arms Survey estimates there are 88.7 guns per 100 Americans (#1 in the world for guns per capita)
A 2010 estimate from the NRA states "Privately owned firearms in the U.S.: Approaching 300 million, including nearly 100 million handguns. The number of firearms rises over 4 million annually."
So, what this guy Schieffer is pleased about is that with 43-55 million households in the nation having at least one gun, disarming them because of one tragic shooting by a deranged person is comparable to Lyndon Johnson's push for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. And I didn’t do the arithmetic, but it seems to me that as a percentage of the gun-owning population, those perpetrating shootings such as the most recent one are less than half a millionth of one percent.
In conclusion then, as I’ve said several times recently, although the shooting was indeed a tragedy of major proportion, it likely had nothing to do with the weapons involved. And were there no guns, in this case of a disgruntled, deranged youth there might have been a fire, or bombs or acid instead. Therefore, what really needs to be resolved are the problems of unstable perpetrators which will never be accomplished by disarming law-abiding citizens.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
PS. Here’s a link on another subject you might like:US taxpayers giving $4B to foreign firms for green energy projects, study says
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