I note this morning Megan McArdle [1]:
Now the gun controllers pour out of the woodwork to claim that you’re more likely to kill yourself or a family member with a gun than a criminal.
Some of the people deploying this statistic really ought to know better. Composition fallacy, anyone?
These are not double blind experiments. Guns may be the weapon of choice for all sorts of crimes; that does not mean that they cause the crimes.
Men like to kill themselves with guns. (This is not culture-specific; women tend to choose poison everywhere, presumably because of some deep fear of disfigurement). Gun suicides tend to be successful. But this does not mean that if you took away the guns, people wouldn’t commit suicide.
True, and in much the same way as we see in places where guns are banned outright… (OK, but you get the idea)… the tool of choice tends to be knives or other implements of destruction, which are just as deadly.
I suppose however that it should surprise nobody that these old tired arguments get dragged out once again.
The issue of course at the center of all of this, and it’s one that liberals will seldom mention, is the point that people are ultimatelyy responsible for their actions as opposed to their environment or objects that happened to surround them. As an example, have you ever noticed how often the SUV gets blamed for a traffic accident? A true except that guns are not the central issue, and the people are responsible for their own actions, is to rip the foundation of the liberal believes surrounding their wealth redistribution and social engineering.
All of it comes out at this, however; the murder rate in DC is going to drop over the next couple of years, and the left is not going to have any reasonable explanation for it, other than the fact that people are allowed to have firearms to protect themselves and their property. The resulting nonsensical argument that they will doubtless employ at that point will be amusing if unavailing.
In the end what’s going on here is they’re running out of arguments. Trouble is, they haven’t run out of anti-gun zeal, yet. Liberals, after all, are generally speaking unaffected by mere fact.