I found this article while looking for something else, as so often happens. It had all of the usual sensational claims, erroneous conclusions and misleading numbers used by Gun Control proponents. So I decided to dissect it and provide counter-points and facts.
The Biggest Threat to Americans? Other Americans With Guns
By: Dean Obeidalah
Russia, ISIS, yadda yadda. The biggest existential threat to Americans is other Americans—specifically, the ones armed to the teeth.
What do you think a mother would say is the greater threat to her child: Russia or guns?
Comment: It’s not Russia or guns, it’s Russia or criminals who may have a gun. A gun is not going to kick down your door and rob you, but a criminal with a gun (or knife or club) might.
I couldn’t help but ask myself that question on Friday when I heard the testimony of General Joseph Dunford, President Obama’s nominee to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. When Dunford was asked what was the greatest threat to the United States, he responded by ranking them in this order: Russia, China, North Korea, and ISIS.
Now, Dunford is undoubtedly correct when it comes to the global threats facing us, and those are the threats it’s his job to assess. But from a day-to-day perspective, our greatest threat, and I’d submit the more pressing one, is our fellow Americans. We kill far more of each other on a daily basis than any foreign actor has come close to doing in recent years.
Comment: Let’s be more specific. Our greatest threat is our fellow Americans who are criminals that will break down your door and kill you with a gun, knife, or tire iron in order to take your stuff. The key word is criminal. Over 100 million law-abiding gun owners killed no one today.
Here are some numbers for you to consider:
- Gun Violence: Every day 30-plus Americans are murdered with guns. We are talking over 10,000 Americans killed each year by gun violence. And every single day, including today,five children or teens are murdered by someone using guns; that is 11 times more often than children are killed by gun violence in other “high income” nations.
Comment: The author uses words like “murder” and “gun violence” without defining them. A criminal who is shot and killed by a homeowner or police officer may have died a violent death, but he wasn’t a victim of gun violence nor was he murdered.
Gun control proponents have to invent terms like “high income nations” because if they don’t, their numbers won’t say what they want them to say.
In fact, far more Americans were killed by gun violence in 2013 alone (33,636) than all the Americans killed on U.S. soil by terrorists in the last 14 years, and that’s including 9/11. (2,977 Americans were killed on 9/11 and only 48 have been killed since by terrorism on U.S. soil.)
Comment: Terrorism vs. gun violence isn’t a fair comparison. National security is a government responsibility. The Supreme Court says individual security is a personal responsibility.
The 33,636 number includes 21,000 suicides where a gun was used, criminals killed by police, criminals killed by civilians, criminals killed by other criminals and people killed in gun accidents.
The author fails to mention the number of times a person has used a firearm to protect themselves from being murdered, robbed or raped. The Center for Disease Control estimates this happens between 500,000 and 3 million times a year!
- Other Gun-Related Deaths: Apart from gun violence, another 20,000 Americans use guns to commit suicide each year. (Suicides involving firearms are fatal 85 percent of the time in contrast to about a 3 percent fatality rate when using pills.) When you combine the above numbers with the 560 people accidentally killed by guns on an annual basis, that comes out to more than 32,000 Americans who die each year by firearms. These numbers really brought it home for me: Between 2000 and 2010, 335,609 people died from guns in our country; that’s more than the entire population of St. Louis, Missouri. (318,000.)
Comment: The 20,000 (actually 20,945 according to the FBI) suicides where a firearm was used are not gun violence. The word violence is rarely used to describe an action one inflicts upon themselves. It is used to describe actions one inflicts on another. If a person commits suicide by hanging themselves, is it rope violence?
Suicide isn’t a gun issue, it is a mental health issue. Treating suicide by banning guns is like treating obesity by banning fatty foods. There’s an underlying issue that is not being dealt with.
- Driving Under the Influence: Each day nearly 30 people are killed in auto accidents that involved an alcohol-impaired driver. In 2013 alone, 200 children 14 and younger were killed in crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers.
Comment: Per the author, every day 30 people are killed by firearms and 30 people are killed by alcohol-impaired drivers. We blame the gun for the firearms deaths, but the driver for the alcohol-impaired driver deaths. Make sense?
Alcohol related traffic fatalities have dropped from 21,000 in 1983 to 10,500 in 2014 due to education and strict enforcement of EXISTING laws.
- Domestic violence: Each day,three women are killed by their husband, boyfriend, or a person with whom they had been in a relationship. In fact, a study found that alarmingly, at least one-third of all women murdered in the United States in recent years were killed by their current or past male partners.
These killers of Americans are all distinct. There’s no one remedy that will reduce the deaths in all these cases. But there is one killer that truly jumps out as the greatest existential threat to Americans: Deaths involving guns.
Comment: Contrary to what Gun Control groups would have you believe, gun homicides have dropped 49% since 1993 when they peaked.
All 50 States and Washington DC now have concealed carry.
Since Obama’s election, gun sales have soared to an average of one million guns a month peaking in August 2015 at 1.7 million.
So, more firearms in private hands, more citizens with concealed carry licenses and violent crime at a 20 year low. Explanation?
Now I know that many on the right are preparing to regurgitate their tired talking point that this is a push to grab their guns. They are wrong. I fully support that the Second Amendment guarantees them the personal right to own firearms as recognized in the seminal 2008 Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller. (Amazing how many on the right applaud the Supreme Court when it renders decisions they like such as Heller but literally want to abolish the Supreme Court as we know it after the recent gay marriage ruling)
Comment: “Fully support the Second Amendment”? I’m not so sure..
Amazing how many on the left applaud the recent Supreme Court gay marriage ruling but are still fighting private firearms ownership after the Supreme Court’s Heller decision supporting private firearms ownership.
But how can we sit idly by as so many of our fellow Americans are killed by guns? It is as if we have collectively decided that these deaths are acceptable loses. Even after mass shootings nothing seems to change, generally due to political considerations.
Comment: We haven’t been sitting idly by. Gun sales are up; concealed carry permits are up. People are protecting themselves. Crime is down.
And we see politics at play again over the heartbreaking shooting death of Kate Steinle in San Francisco last week by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a man who was not in the country legally. Many on the right, like Donald Trump, refuse to talk about the gun aspect of this crime and solely want focus on Sanchez’s immigration status because it plays to their political base. (I doubt Trump would ever mention that 70 percent of the guns recovered by the ATF in the Mexican drug war between 2007 and 2011 originated in the United States. Talk about exporting dangerous things to another country.)
Comment: The author fails to mention the gun used by Kate Steinle’s murderer was the stolen personal weapon of a Federal Agent. Is he advocating disarming Federal Agents?
The “70 percent” number has long been debunked. Seventy percent of the “traceable” firearms recovered in Mexico are from the USA which is only 17 percent of the ”total” amount of firearms recovered.
Guns aren’t being “exported” to another country. They are being acquired under false pretenses and illegally smuggled into another country. Except the 2000 guns the Obama Administration allowed to enter Mexico during Operation Fast and Furious.
So while we are confirming a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to protect us from global threats, isn’t it time to create a federal level “Department to prevent gun deaths” to protect us from this domestic threat?
Comment: The Supreme Court has ruled that neither State nor Federal governments have a legal duty to protect you as an individual citizen from crime”. You cannot sue the government for failure to protect you from crime.
The federal government’s current gun-related tasks would be unified and integrated into this new department in an effort to increase effectiveness, much the same way we saw the Department of Homeland Security bring together the responsibilities of 22 different agencies under its auspices.
Comment: Aren’t the country’s “gun related tasks” already unified under BATFE? Or maybe the author doesn’t know the “F” in BATFE is for firearms? BATFE falls under the Justice Department, the guys that would prosecute the people BATFE arrests. Sounds pretty unified to me.
How’s that Homeland Security thing working out? With an annual budget of $38.3 billion are we really safer, $38.3 billion safer?
For starters this new agency can ensure that the federal law barring federally licensed gun dealers from selling firearms to people convicted of crimes or with mental illnesses is fully functioning. As we learned just last week, the Charleston shooter Dylann Roof should not have been able to legally purchase a gun as he did because of his criminal record. However, a background check flaw allowed that to happen.
Comment: So the Federal agency that oversees the background check system (the FBI) is incapable of properly running the program and needs a new Federal Agency to oversee them and correct the “flaws”.
Dylan Roof’s mother took his gun away from him because she was worried about his mental condition. He stole it back and committed his crime. You would have me believe if he was never sold the gun, he wouldn’t have stolen another gun and committed the shooting?
This new agency can also be charged with investigating gun trafficking across state lines, formulating comprehensive programs to reduce suicides by guns, and cracking down on federally licensed gun dealers that consistently sell guns used in crimes. Astoundingly, 1 percent of gun dealers account for nearly 60 percent of the guns used in crimes.
Comment: There’s already agencies charged with investigating gun trafficking across state lines, BATFE and the FBI. They just don’t do it.
U.S. Rep. James Langevin made the 1%-60% statement in 2000, quoting a 2000 BATFE report. In the 15 years that have passed since the report was issued, nothing has been done by BATFE to target the straw purchasers who buy from these dealers. Nothing!
The belief that restrictions on firearms would reduce the number of suicides is unfounded. In California, long waiting periods to buy a firearm were put in place to prevent spur-of-the-moment suicides or crimes of passion. After the law was in place for several years, there was a measureable drop in firearm related suicides; but the overall number of suicides stayed the same. The same amount of people were still committing suicide, they just changed their method.
We have numerous federal agencies dedicated to keeping us safe from global threats. Isn’t time we had a federal agency dedicated to protecting us from the clear and present danger posed right here in our nation by guns?
Comment: Again, the Supreme Court has ruled you are responsible for your own protection.
Additional Comments:
Strangely enough, after using all of the normal gun control rhetoric, the author doesn’t call for the usual gun bans, gun registration or magazine limits. He seems to be calling for the enforcement of the system that is already in place. And I can support that.
What I can’t support is another billion dollar budget Federal agency tasked with trying to get other Federal agencies to do their job. It doesn’t take a new agency. It takes a president that will demand the agencies that answer to him enforce the law as written.
My biggest fear is this new Federal Firearms Enforcement Agency would be structured like the Environmental Protection Agency. It would by edict, not law, inflict all types of illegal restrictions on law abiding gun owners in the name firearms safety. And there’s nothing we could do but fight their rules in court. How’s that working out for the farmers and ranchers? They incur huge fines and have to spend thousands of dollars fighting the EPA in court for years just because they built a pond on their property?
We don’t need another government agency deciding what is best for us based on their liberal logic instead of the Constitution.
It makes me wonder if this is a new, long term tactic for the gun control crowd. To support enforcement of current regulations by proposing establishment of a new Federal agency to ensure applicable laws are followed. But over time, it would morph into an EPA-like bureaucracy that could make all kinds of restrictive rules and policies that would never be passed by Congress as law. Gun owners beware.
I was curious about the author, Dean Obeidalah, because this wasn’t the normal Gun Control supporter type piece. Did a little searching on the internet and found that he is a well-known stand-up comedian that lean’s left. He’s an Arab-American and has written many articles promoting understanding of Muslins.
I was able to find several other articles he has written concerning gun control. I’m pretty sure if you support the theories of Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, you are a dyed in the wool gun banner. I would be leery of supporting his proposal of a new Federal agency.