On the range. Interesting photo: The flash of a cheap camera caught the slide back, and what appears to be a smoke disk.

Since Hillary has presumably gone to a home for used basilisks, we will  perhaps hear less about gun control for a bit. As in, maybe, eight years.

The unending drive to outlaw firearms remains  fascinating in various ways, first in that  it represents a desire for conclusive abandonment of constitutional government. This is far along in other spheres–jury trial, speedy trial, jury of peers, declaration of war, warrantless search. Recently we have had a clear intention by a major party simply to ignore such constitutional provisions as it finds inconvenient.  

Of course many of their voters couldn’t name two rights guaranteed by the First Amendment–surreys show that white college graduates cannot–and a substantial portion can’t read. Constitutional government requires an informed public. America doesn’t have one.

The orators profess to believe that banning guns will end murder. The actual effects of gun control are very different. This is a matter of observation, and thus has no place in political discussion. Just for the hell of it–it will make no difference–let’s actually look at the question.

The two most heavily armed countries in the world are (still, I think) Israel and Switzerland. In Switzerland, men of military age are (still, I think) required to keep an assault rifle and ammunition in their homes, and Israelis are similarly armed because, having enemies on their borders, they need to be able to mobilize rapidly. 

In both countries murders by armed citizens are essentially nonexistent. By contrast, Mexico has strict gun control. Does anyone get shot in Mexico?

Yes, actually. Some 164,000 thousand shot dead between 2007 and 2014 (Figures vary. The foregoing are typical.) Pretty effective, gun control is.

Why do murders occur so exuberantly in a country with gun control? Because making guns illegal doesn’t make guns go away. In Mexico gun control means that criminals can have, and assuredly do have, high-powered military weapons, usually AKs–cuernos de chiva. Thus a dozen narcos can enter a large town and terrorize it. If a hundred men in the town had AR-15s, the dozen narcos would enter the town in pickups and forthwith leave in boxes. Gun control leaves the town disarmed and helpless.

Which has occurred to Mexicans:

“Mexico considers new gun laws to arm its citizens against violent crime”

In a country in which the government cannot or will not enforce the laws and protect citizens–the United States comes to mind–said citizens will want to protect themselves. This is happening in Mexico. In a recent example  in Mexico City (this from newspaper accounts) four robbers, armed, boarded a public bus and collected wallets and cell phones from the passengers. One passenger drew a pistol and shot all four, killing one. The other three, badly wounded, got off the bus. The passenger followed, finished them off, gave the loot back to the other passengers, and disappeared into the city. Curiously, not one of the passengers was able to describe him. Maybe they were not paying attention.

Perhaps not optimal, but in a country plagued by looting, arson, racial attacks, and destructive brawls by vandals, people are going to want to protect themselves. Surprise, surprise.

If guns were made illegal in the US, not a single villain would turn his gun in. The bumper sticker, “When guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns,” is exactly right.Guns, usually small and easily smuggled, are immensely valuable to criminals. Why would they turn them in? Criminals do not obey laws. It’s how you know  they are criminals.

Curiously, the fewer guns in the hands of the law-abiding, the more valuable they are to criminals. When citizens may be armed, crawling in a window at night becomes much less attractive. And of course gun control would mean disarming white people, who tend to obey laws. Having witnessed Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlotte, many whites are not enthusiastic about being left helpless.

One must never say this.

Gun-controllers, unless they are greater fools than seems humanly possible–they may well be–know  that criminals are not going to turn their guns in, and there is no way to confiscate them. They also know, unless actually mad, that criminals are overwhelmingly black. Do the controllers propose to send the army through black regions of Chicago, searching houses room by room to find hidden guns? Hardly. 

When of a hundred murders in Chicago, almost all are committed by an  underclass, do we have a gun problem, or an underclass problem? Do blacks have a white problem, a gun problem, or a themselves problem?

Obama of course blamed guns for the shooting deaths in Chicago. Can he really believe this? It is like the obese blaming spoons.

It is verboten to notice that crime with guns is heavily concentrated in particular groups. I grew up in rural Virginia where all the boys and Becky had guns, chiefly shotguns for hunting deer and rifles for killing varmints. Nobody shot anybody, either deliberately or otherwise. Murder wasn’t in the culture. We couldn’t understand why our guns should be taken away because criminals in the cities wanted to kill each other.

I once spent a week with the US Army in the slums of Port au Prince in Haiti, where guns were illegal. Nobody was shot. Instead brains were laid open and arms severed by machete. It was in the culture.

But of course gun control is only tangentially about gun control. The controllers detest gun owners viscerally as they imagine them, aging white Southern yahoos or Western cowboys with potbellies and third-grade educations who are probably werewolves, Republicans or even conservatives. Deplorables. Note that they never criticize the killers, the Islamoterrorists, the blacks in the cities massacring each other with abandon, or the Hispanic narcos engaged in auto-extermination. The controllers simply dislike white conservatives or, more profoundly, those who are emotionally independent and not of the mentality of the hive. Guns are innocent bystanders.

If a woman tells me that she favors gun control, I can with confidence predict that she favors unchecked immigration, sanctuary cities, affirmative action, banning the Confederate flag, suppressing Christianity, homosexual marriage, abortion, feminism, and the dumbing down–she will call it something else–of schools to avoid wounding the self-esteem of the usual suspects.

The question of guns demarcates a sharp dividing line between who read the New York Times and those for whom it is the house organ of a class of people they detest. This is the Trumpo-Hillarian Chasm. New York, which controls the country with Washington as its action arm, is not particularly cognizant of what goes on in the rest of the US. The imposition of  political correctness prevents New York from hearing anything it doesn’t like, but also prevents it from knowing the extent to which people believe things New York doesn’t want to hear. Thus their surprise at the rise of Trump, which anyone could have suspected after an hour in Joe’s Bar in Chicago.

Here we reach the great divide. I read gun dealers saying that, after the murders in Orlando, post murdered cop after murdered cop, burning mall after looted store, AR-15s were “flying off the shelves.” Why? The gun is not accurate enough for serious marksmen, illegal I think in most places for hunting, and not well suited for killing intruders in the home, being long enough to be awkward in a confined space.

An AR is however well suited for defense of one’s home or business against rampaging mobs. It is long enough to be accurate at urban ranges, suited to rapid single-shot firing, has a large magazine, and fires military .223 ammo. You don’t suppose…?

A great many people, including me, think that “civil unrest” may be in America’s future as the economy declines, the middle class sinks, and racial hostility deepens. As the pie shrinks, someone has to get less pie. If welfare is cut, whether directly or by inflation, riots will come. Riots will occur in any event, since they already do. Blacks are dangerously angry, and are ready to rock and roll. Think Ferguson, Baltimore, LA, Milwaukee. It may not happen. But it may, looks increasingly probable, and people who would lose their jobs for saying so are preparing.

Thus the desire to get an AR or two and a thousand rounds before the government–which much of the country regards as an enemy--can shut down sales and leave them helpless, a la Mexico. In private conversation the question is explicitly racial–though one must never, ever, point out the obvious. These are people who–choose you verb, “know” or “believe”–that a Ferguson mob can come to their neighborhood and–here no choice of verbs is needed–that the recent President, Attorney General, the government, the blacks, New York, the RNC and DNC, and the media, are against them.

In Washington and New York, the Virulently Good who live in high-rises with security desks will react with horror at the thought of buying a rifle for self-defense. “How could the….?” “Why would anyone…?” “What is wrong with these…?” Their outlook rests on the belief that nothing really bad can happen. Which means that if it does, they will be toast. And that, in a morbid way, will be amusing.

http://fredoneverything.org/gun-control-hawglegs-and-hawgwash/