Duckworth A Conservative -- NOT!

I initially just wanted to have some fun with a liberal blog that the Pirate Armada raided. But something changed while I was putting this together and now I believe that this site can be used for other purposes.
--sig94

Larry Bodine, the site owner of "Republicans For Duckworth" was badly frightened by the movie "Miami Vice" he saw recently. He was frightened so badly in fact, that he now suffers from hallucinations that gang bangers armed with heavy caliber automatic weapons will be running amok if his favored Democratic candidate, Tammy Duckworth, is not elected to Congress. His blog starts off with this:

align="left">Gun Nut Peter Roskam
I finally saw the movie "Miami Vice" and the closing gun fight was really frightening, especially when you know that Congressional Candidate Peter Roskam would make those monster war weapons available to the public.

Take a deep breath Larry. It was a movie for Pete's sake. Hoodlums do not use 50-caliber guns as a matter of course. Why? Because the cheapest one I can find costs $3,000 and is a single shot, bolt action rifle. Hoodlums are not going to pack this in their trunk or stick it in their waist band. Look at the size of it! If it was any bigger it would be a crew served weapon.

You cannot buy a full automatic assault rifle anywhere in the US without paying a fee and passing a rigorous six mouth inspection by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for a Class III permit. And the cost of shooting a 50-cal? About $2 per round (every time you pull the trigger). The reloading gear alone costs $800.

Bomb-and-spend Roskam is a stronger opponent of gun control than is conservative incumbent Henry Hyde. Roskam opposes the 1994 Federal assault weapons ban, for which Henry Hyde voted and which Roskam's opponent, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, supports. Unlike Duckworth, Roskam has not ruled out supporting measures to allow other people to carry concealed firearms with a permit.

I'll tackle this issue in more detail later, but it seems that Duckworth does not support measures to allow people to carry concealed weapons. If so, then Duckworth, military experience or not, does not belong in the US Congress. Other countries have done this and their unarmed citizens are paying the price. But more on that later.

On July 15, 2006, Roskam appeared at a National Rifle Association rally in Addison, Illinois, but all eleven references to his name were removed from the invitations. His appearance was protested by local families of victims of gun violence who oppose his position on gun control. The NRA has given $4,950 to Roskam's campaign. They love gun nuts like Roskam.

For the most part, and the overwhelming part at that, NRA members are a law abiding group of people who happen to take the 2nd Amendment very seriously, as every amendment should be. You cannot pick and choose what parts of the Constitution you like and which ones you will disregard. As a military officer, Duckworth took an oath wherein she swore to defend the US Constitution. That includes the 2nd Amendment. When I took my oath as a police officer over thirty years ago (I am retired now), I also swore to defend the constitution of my state and the US Constitution. I never made distinctions over what parts of the Constitution I liked and what parts I didn't. If Duckworth supports the weakening of 2nd Amendment rights, she is not worthy of any support.

While in the state Senate, Roskam sponsored gun legislation that called for the destruction of background check records within 90 days of a gun's purchase. Police officials criticized State Senator Roskam for the proposed destruction of background check records. Police use those records to investigate straw purchasers who buy guns for criminals and to prepare themselves when serving a warrant or making an arrest at a home.

There can be several reasons for this, but Mr. Bodine, of course, does not go into detail. He still must be unnerved from that movie. He should stick to DVD's of "Little House On The Prairie" and Dumbo."

The most basic reason for eliminating state records is that this information may be redundant. All gun purchases are reported to the BATF. When police want information on any firearm (say for straw purchasers where a legitimate gun transaction is initiated for the purpose of giving the gun to someone who should not possess it) the police contact the National Tracing Center in Virginia.

This search is preferable to state record systems that cannot track firearms that come in from sources outside the state, or if the firearm leaves the state of origin. In my jurisdiction, barely a third of the recovered firearms originate in this state. If we relied solely on state record systems, we'd miss the trace information on most of the guns we recover. So much for that accusation.

Democratic candidate Tammy Duckworth [...] thinks it's crazy to put 50-caliber war weapons in the hands of the general public. They're no good for hunting -- they obliterate the target --into bits of fur. They're no good for self-defense because of their expense, weight, size and loudness. Also they fire bullets that go through brick walls and keep on traveling -- right into your child's bedroom or neighbor's house.

Fear mongering much? Expense, weight and size are the same reasons that criminals don't use them! And a 30-cal round such as the 7.62 X 51 will pentrate a 16" log cabin wall or a 3/8" steel door. Almost any centerfire cartridge will put a round through a standard 2" X 4" wall covered with siding and sheetrock. But that's the reasoning you get when a political hack tries to make argumentss that contradict common sense. Most of these large caliber guns are purchased by rather well to do enthusiasts who have no intentions to use them illegally. And with a firearm this expensive, they take measures to ensure that the weapon is adequately protected from theft. The firearm of choice for street hoods has been, and always will be, the handgun. The reason is simple, they are easy to conceal.

You are not, I repeat, you are not going to see a nearly four foot long 50-caliber rifle stuck under some street punk's hoodie.

Assault weapons are only good for criminals. They will point these war weapons at your family and the police when they get them. All the more reason to keep gun nut Peter Roskam out of Congress.

The mechanisms (blow-back and gas piston) used in semi-automatic hunting rifles are the exact same as those used in military rifles. The primary difference is ammunition capacity and automatic rapid fire rate. Throw in a folding stock and it is still too large to conceal easily. Shorten the barrel (big time felony)and the ATF is on your case. I have searched and I cannot find a single verifiable reference to any crime committed with a 50-caliber (BMG) rifle. I also have yet to see a single crime committed with a bayonet mounted on a rifle. Maybe there are some out there. If so, please let me know.

Bodine and his liberal cronies do not bother to do any sort of comparative analysis on the effects of restricting the right of noncriminals to possess firearms for self defense. The 50-caliber "nightmare" that strikes fear in the hearts of moonbats is simply a ruse. Liberals fear guns, all guns. But like Rosie O'Donnell, they want people with guns to protect them (and can easily afford body guards) while simultaneously denying the dirty, undeserving underclasses (you and me) the right to defend ourselves with a firearm.

But there are examples for us to examine. Gun ownership in both Australia and England has been severely curtailed and nearly regulated out of existence. We shall examine these two countries and see what the liberal policies of Duckworth and Bodine can do to victims of violent crime.

The following is a quote from an Australian crime study.

Between July 1996 and August 1998, the new restrictions were brought into force.
Since that time, key indicators for gun-related death and crime have shown encouraging results."There was a decrease of almost 30% in the number of
homicides by firearms from 1997 to 1998."
-- Australian Crime - Facts and Figures 1999. Australian Institute of Criminology. Canberra, Oct 1999

Although all reported robberies increased by nearly 20%, the number of armed robberies involving a firearm decreased to a six-year low (emphasis mine). This is an indication that violent crime goes up as the citizenry is disarmed. There'll be more on this later to dispel the liberal quackery that other "conditions" were responsible for the increase in crime.

The following stats are available here.

In 1996, (when handgun restrictions began) Australia reported 354 murders, 114,156 assaults, 14,542 Sexual Assaults and 16,372 Robberies for a total of 145,424 Violent Crimes.

In 2003 Australia reported 341 Murders (-4%), 158,629 Assaults (+39%), 18,237 Sexual Assaults (+25%) and 19,709 Robberies (+20%) for a total of 196,916 Violent Crimes (+35%).

This is the Aussie gun control miracle, only 13 less murders in a nation of 20 million people. But a 35% INCREASE in violent crime. This translates into more than 50,000 additional violent crimes in the seven years since handguns were prohibited. The liberals will crow that these violent crimes were not necessarily committed with a handgun, but what they are afraid to discuss is that all these victims of violent crime were denied access to a personally owned handgun to defend themselves.

I would love to give you the English crime stats, but I can't. After restricting almost all firearms, the violent crime problem in England got so bad that the British Home Office had to change the way violent crime is reported!! There is no way to run a comparative analysis. This is the sad story.

"Violent crime, as measured by the BCS, includes common assault, wounding, robbery and snatch theft. It does not include homicide (as the victims cannot be surveyed) and other types of violent crime, like firearms offences." (BCS is the British Crime Survey).

And then here:

To the great consternation of British authorities concerned about tourism
revenue, a June CBS News report proclaimed Great Britain "one of the most
violent urban societies in the Western world." Declared Dan Rather: "This
summer, thousands of Americans will travel to Britain expecting a civilized
island free from crime and ugliness ... [but now] the U.K. has a crime problem
... worse than ours."
The violent crime rate has risen dramatically and steadily since gun bans have been instituted. That's a trend seen wherever strict gun control laws have been implemented. And that's the part of the story British officials have tried to keep under wraps.

A headline in the London Daily Telegraph back on April 1, 1996, explains how embarassed British officials tried to hide the increased crime rates from the general public:

Crime Figures a Sham, Say Police." The story noted that "pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics," and "the recorded crime level bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed."

For example, where a series of homes were burgled, they were regularly recorded as one crime. If a burglar hit 15 or 20 flats, only one crime was added to the statistics.

This is what is known as cooking the books. All that needs to be done is "reclassify" the crime or simply refuse to report a specific type of incident. I have seen it done recently at the local level.

More recently, a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary charges Britain's 43 police departments with systemic under-classification of crime, for example, by recording burglary as "vandalism." The report lays much of the blame on the police's desire to avoid the extra paperwork associated with more serious crimes. Britain's justice officials have also kept crime totals down by being careful about what to count.

American law enforcement agencies report crime as it is reported to them. It is recorded and compiled into the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) which is published bi-annually by the FBI. Comparative crime rates are based on when the police are made aware of the crime, even if there is evidence that it occurred at a much earlier date. But British violent crime rates are based on completely different criteria.

"Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are
arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. "With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham," the report concludes."

"Explaining away the disparity between crime reported by victims and the official figures became so difficult that, in April 1998, the British Home Office was forced to change its method of reporting crime, and a somewhat more accurate picture began to emerge. In January 2000, official street-crime rates in London were more than double the official rate from the year before."

This from the September 19, 2005 London Times:

A UNITED Nations report has labeled Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, with people three times more likely to be assaulted than in America. England and Wales recorded the second highest number of violent assaults while Northern Ireland recorded the fewest.

The study, based on telephone interviews with victims of crime in 21 countries,found that more than 2,000 Scots were attacked every week, almost ten times the official police figures. They include non-sexual crimes of violence and serious assaults.

Violent crime has doubled in Scotland over the past 20 years and levels, per head of population, are now comparable with cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and Tbilisi. Based on a crime survey of the world's top industrialized countries, the U.N. report indicates that a resident of the United Kingdom is nearly 3 times more likely to become a victim of violent assault than is a citizen of the United States. The report reveals that Scotland is the most violent country in the industrialized world with over 2,000 Scots attacked every week, which amounts to about 3 percent of the population on an annual basis. England and Wales are close behind with 2.8 percent of the population falling victim to violent assault. By comparison, Americans are victimized by violent offenders at a rate of 1.2 percent.

As I mentioned earlier, liberal democrats will cry out that other conditions were responsible for the increases in violent crimes. Of course they will not specify those conditions other than the usual lot of spurious nonsense (Poverty! Injustice!) that cannot be quantified.

There are two studies that attempted to evaluate the efficacy of gun control in America. One of them is "Under The Gun" (1983) by sociologists James D. Wright (Univ. Massachusetts), Peter H. Rossi (Univ. Massachusetts) and Kathleen Daly (Yale University). Although a very comprehensive study, it's conclusions were very inconclusive. On page 313 they report that:

"The serious question is whether the amount of death, injury, destruction and generalized terror would be any less if fewer firearms were available. The world is full of objects that can be used to prey upon other human beings. Is the gun itself our national disgrace? Or is it the hatred and predation that sometimes involves guns?"

The authors explain the policy issue as follows: does the availability of firearms raise the chance of death or injury or would these acts happen whether or not firearms were involved. The authors continue:

"...the evidence on both issues is far from clear. Homicides, assaults, robberies, rapes and so on can obviously be carried out without the use of firearms, albeit perhaps less easily. [...] In short, assessing the damages, injuries and trauma caused by firearms requires knowledge of the additional damages, injuries and trauma occasioned by the use of guns over and above what would have happened in the absence of firearms."

I wonder if Larry Bodine's nightmares are covered under this "trauma" category? And finally the authors state:

"[...] First, the control of guns is not the control of violence. Violent acts would undoubtedly continue even if a completete ban on possession of firearms were put into place and were effective. [...] Second, because the many roles that firearms may play in different forms of violence are not known very well, it is difficult to design a system ... that would be acceptably effective and efficient. [...] Both the above points cast some doubt on the ability of gun control measures to reduce effectively the million annual gun incidents."

Granted, this was published in 1983 and much of the information is somewhat dated, particularly the trend that favors autoloading pistols over revolvers was just starting. But the scope of this study was never attempted before, thousands and thousands of criminals were interviewed to find out where they were getting their illegal guns (mostly the street and friends/relatives). Nothing of this scale has been attempted since.

Another, more recent study, "Targeting Guns" (1997) by Professor Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, was more revealing in other aspects. Professor Kleck writes (page 192) that:

"Widespread gun carrying by potential victims may also exert a deterrent effect on rates of criminal behavior, especially for types of crimes commonly committed in public, such as robberies. [...] gun carrying among prospective victims may discourage some crimes from being attempted in the first place, due to criminals anticipating greater risks of injuries to themselves and lower rates of success in completing crimes such as robbery. Consistent with this hypothesis ... cities with higher gun prevalence (and presumably higher gun-carrying rates) had lower robbery rates..."

He then drops a bombshell with this:

"Further, in a comprehensive pooled cross sections times series analysis of virtually all 3,141 US counties, Lott and Mustard (1997) found that rates of robbery, as well as homicide (both with and without guns), rape and aggravated assaults, declined after states passed laws making it easier for noncriminals to obtain carrying permits."

I'll explain how this is a remarkable finding in terms of the authors own political leanings. But let him finish:

"The authors interpreted the results as indicating that allowing more citizens to legally carry guns reduced rates of crimes involving direct offender-victim contact by raising offenders' perception of risk from armed victims."

I must admit, I did not expect this from a member of the ACLU! Let me give you the Author's Voluntary Disclosure Notice:

"The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other liberal organizations. He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. His is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, not has he received funding for research from any such organization."

To tell the truth, if I had the opportunity to read this Disclosure Notice prior to buying his book, I would have refused to place an order. Professor Kleck has also conducted studies on the use of forearms for self defense. In this study he estimates that:

There are approximately two million defensive gun uses (DGU's) per year by law abiding citizens. That was one of the findings in a national survey conducted by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist in 1993. Prior to Dr. Kleck's survey, thirteen other surveys indicated a range of between 800,000 to 2.5 million DGU's annually. However these surveys each had their flaws which prompted Dr. Kleck to conduct his own study specifically tailored to estimate the number of DGU's annually.
Subsequent to Kleck's study, the Department of Justice sponsored a survey in 1994 titled, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (text, PDF). Using a smaller sample size than Kleck's, this survey estimated 1.5 million DGU's annually.

So the Australian and British experiences in gun control may now be examined in light of these findings.

Access to personally owned firearms for the purpose of self defense is an important element in any violent crime reduction strategy.

Violent criminals are not deterred by the threat of imminent capture and subsequent punishment, particularly with respect to homicide. The immediacy of being shot and killed by a prospective victim is the only deterrent that appears to work.