HotAir.com:
Has someone tampered with the water supply at the New York Times? In the past six days, its featured columnists have penned not one but two essays urging readers to reconsider the progressives’ march on gun control and the Obama administration’s big public-relations push as well. Neither one carry Ross Douthat or even David Brooks bylines, either. Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof explained a few “inconvenient gun facts” to fellow liberals, and underscored why voters consider their ranting to be nothing but demagoguery:
We liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it’s complicated: The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half.Then there are the policies that liberals fought for, starting with the assault weapons ban. A 113-page study found no clear indication that it reduced shooting deaths for the 10 years it was in effect. That’s because the ban was poorly drafted, and because even before the ban, assault weapons accounted for only 2 percent of guns used in crimes.Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws: With some 13 million Americans now licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime (as conservatives had predicted) nor a spike in killings (as liberals had expected). Liberals were closer to the truth, for the increase in carrying loaded guns does appear to have led to more aggravated assaults with guns, but the fears were overblown.Kristof then goes to the question of Congressional resistance to gun-control regulation. Progressives blame the NRA for frightening politicians into ignoring polls showing broad support for universal background checks, but Kristof says they have no one to blame but themselves:So why does nothing get done? One reason is that liberals often inadvertently antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association by coming across as supercilious, condescending and spectacularly uninformed about the guns they propose to regulate. A classic of gun ignorance: New York passed a law three years ago banning gun magazines holding more than seven bullets — without realizing that for most guns there is no such thing as a magazine for seven bullets or less.And every time liberals speak blithely about banning guns, they boost the N.R.A. Let’s also banish the term “gun control”: the better expression is “gun safety.”The problem isn’t the nomenclature — it’s the dishonesty in the attacks. Kristof does a pretty good job of explaining how progressives get the facts wrong, but he misses how they got the politics wrong. After the Newtown shooting, progressives demanded a renewed “assault weapons” ban as well as insane magazine restrictions, some of which passed in states like New York and Colorado. Then when those didn’t move in Congress, progressives then pretended that all they requested was expanded background checks, but they had alienated everyone that might have worked with them on that issue long before then.
No comments:
Post a Comment