This sounds as though Sarah Brady and Josh Sugarmann were standing right behind the author delivering crib notes. Lots of hysteria, lots of stats quoted out of context, no pragmatic solution offered, and just the usual “we have to take these guns away from the 99% of people who don’t abuse the right to own them because of the fraction of 1% that do” type thinking.
It starts:
Cheap, available assault rifles, which closely resemble the Kalashnikov AK-47s brandished by Iraqi insurgents and African rebels alike, have become the weapons of choice for gang members and other violent criminals in Palm Beach County.
Oh yeah? The BATF and other organizations that have studied the Clinton era AWB will tell you that assault rifles are used in less than 1% of all gun crime. The author provides no documentation or corroboration for this little factoid; we see no factual evidence or statistical analysis that indicates Florida is any different than anywhere else in the US, where the handgun is actually the overwhelming choice of criminals.
It continues:
Growing numbers of criminals are favoring these powerful semiautomatic weapons, which, authorities say, have greatly enhanced their capacity for indiscriminate violence. In the past six months, assault rifles have been used to maim or kill dozens, including bystanders such as a 50-year-old father of three and an 8-month-old baby.
Dozens eh? How many is that? 24? 36? You would think they’d have accurate recollections of these killings and maimings.
As you can see, Florida averages about 900 murders a year and about 80,000 aggravated assaults. Assuming that we give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume that assault rifles have maimed or killed 48 in the last six months, that’s only a tenth of 1% (0.001) of all the aggravated assaults that have happened in Florida.
Even if 24 people have been killed in Florida in the past six months by assault rifles (something they fail to document or establish), that’s five percent of all homicides in that time period. Hardly an epidemic in the context of the 900 or so murders a year that aren’t assault rifle related–why aren’t the antigunners worried about the other 95%? Maybe because you can’t scare soccer moms and suburban voters into voting for AWB’s if don’t engage in scare tactics? Assault weapons seem very much less the public health menace unless you consciously ignore the less-sexy 95% of all Floridian murders.
The article seems to want you to believe poor Taveres Carter was killed wantonly and randomly by assault rifle wielding thugs; well, he sorta was, but the reality is that he was killed in the back seat of a car driven by his father, who is facing jail on solicitation to commit murder charges and apparently was engaged in gang activity when the shooting happened. They kinda forget to mention that in the article. Ooops. Convenient, huh?
Another sin of omission:
In Palm Beach County, 76 of 124 assault rifles confiscated and turned over to the sheriff’s office armory in the past 15 years were AK-47-style rifles, inventory records show. Of those, NORINCO manufactured more than half.
They’re hoping you’ll miss the fact that they fail to provide any context here, and think that Palm Beach County is awash with hundreds of loose assault rifles wandering around by themselves; that’s about 8 rifles per year confiscated. How many guns a year does Palm Beach County confiscate from criminals? We don’t know because the article doesn’t tell us, but here in Baltimore they confiscate about 4000 guns a year. PBC is a huge county, densely populated with over a million people. So it’s comparable demographically to the population dynamics here (actually…there are about 400K more people there). But we’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume they don’t confiscate 4000 a year there. Heck, we’ll assume they only confiscate on quarter of the guns we confiscate here. That’d still mean that assault rifles are less than 1% of the guns confiscated in PBC!
Somehow I don’t think you can describe this as some sort of epidemic once you consider these numbers in any sort of context (the avoidance of said context, of course, is the author’s mendacious, deceitful intent from what I can tell).
The article resorts to the usual, hoary canard about “gun show loopholes.”
State law leaves regulating gun shows to county governments.
In 1999, the county commission passed an ordinance requiring criminal background checks for all guns sold at gun shows and a mandatory five-day waiting period for all gun sales. The task of enforcing these laws falls to the sheriff’s office and other local agencies. Wallace said he didn’t know whether the sheriff’s office conducts regular compliance checks at gun shows.
So the county already demands and requires background checks for ALL guns sold at gun shows…but they’re not enforcing the laws on the books?
Sound familiar? Of course it does. The gun grabber philosophy to a letter: since the gun control laws we already have aren’t working, we’ll pass more of the same type of laws, and deny law abiding citizens access to weapons they lawfully use and possess in the hopes that non-law abiding folk will magically be disarmed.
We’re not enforcing the seemingly easy to enforce laws we already have, as even this gun-phobic article readily confesses. Why should anyone think more of the same legislative handwringing will suddenly start to work?
Expect to hear a lot about this intentionally misleading nonsense from Ceasefire Maryland this year when it comes time to debate our pending AWB bill.
If gun-safety-hell Florida had the same murder rate as as gun-safety-paradise Maryland, it would have had 3.18*522 murders in 2005 (3.18 for the relative population of Florida vice Maryland). That is, Florida would have had 1658 murders. Instead it had 883. That is about half Maryland’s rate of murder.
So, if a state needs to change its firearm laws to improve public safety, Maryland should change to be more like Florida, don’t you think.
I’m sure the Brady people will agree immediately as soon as you make them aware of the situation.
Comment by Phil Lee — January 29, 2007 @ 6:38 pm
Ah, but the comments..::shaking head::…to whit “..I carry a 45mm with me..” DOH! “The Glock 45 is the most effective and durable.”, etc, etc, etc.
Man I hate it when we as firearm owners sound like idiots.
Comment by Matt — January 29, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
I should add that Florida in 2004 reach a new low in firearm crime and 2005 remains close to that low — see their state supplied chart at:
http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/fsac/Crime_Trends/violent/fa_index.asp
Comment by Phil Lee — January 29, 2007 @ 6:52 pm
The 45mm…that must pack some recoil.
Comment by Administrator — January 29, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
I think you’ve fallen right into their trap by lending any credence whatsoever to their bogus use of the term “assault rifle”:
“Che*ap, available assault rifles, which closely resemble the Kalashnikov AK-47s”
and
“In Palm Beach County, 76 of 124 assault rifles confiscated and turned over to the sheriff’s office armory in the past 15 years were AK-47-style rifles, inventory records show. Of those, NORINCO manufactured more than half.”
I know of no modern army that uses semi-automatic only rifles as their main battle rifle. The NORINCO SKS is semi-auto only, isn’t it?
I think you should debunk this particular lie right off the top. I always use “assault rifle” in quotes, myself.
Comment by Nimrod45 — January 30, 2007 @ 12:24 pm
I forgot to mention something else: just because some gun or other happens to be the “weapons of choice” for some criminal mutant is not sufficient justification for the infringement of *MY* rights - this is blatant fearmongering, an attempt to demonize certain guns, and thus all guns, and thus all gun owners. Conflating the actions of criminals with law abiding gun owners is disingenuous, at best. We should not be held responsible for the actions of others.
Comment by Nimrod45 — January 30, 2007 @ 12:45 pm
[…] Pro-Gun Progressive also fisks Sloppy Reporting in Florida. […]
Pingback by Gun News » January 30 - Today in the News — January 30, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
Nimrod makes a good semantic point about the term assault rifles; that’s a finer point that we can make when having a sane conversation with a rational individual, but often get buried when the mud starts to fly on this subject.
As for criminal’s choices…there’s a famous letter that Clyde Barrow wrote to Henry Ford that I’ve seen quoted many times. Apparently Bonnie and Clyde had such good luck outrunning the cops with the Ford V8’s of their era, they wouldn’t go on their criminal escapades in anything else.
Seems they felt obliged to tell Mr. Ford as much, and wrote to thank him for the fine motor he produced that helped them perpetrate all sorts of shenanigans.
I don’t recall anyone saying Henry Ford should quit making V8s. I’m glad he didn’t, as I rather enjoy Ford V8s of this era myself.
Comment by Administrator — January 30, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
The 45mm…that must pack some recoil.
(hoping HTML tags work here, not sure)
Depends on the cartidge, but I would think that it would be a one shot weapon. Meaning, one shot at one person’s going to the hospital, one to the morgue, and who knows which is which?
Comment by Matt — January 30, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
Nimrod’s point about “fearmongering” is true, but a side issue. We all know it is fearmongering, even the legislators we need to convince to take our side. But fearmongering works for the grabbers and will work even if we point out what they are doing to everyone. Everyone already knows it.
The best way to counter grabber fearmongering is to supply boring context to their claims. In most, if not all cases, the grabbers talk about items in isolation for the reason that placed in context, big fears become small.
So, the implied grabber message is that Florida has become risky because of sloppy handling of CCW permits or the failure to ban “assault rifles.” The proper context is that Florida gun violence is near a 10 year low or that Florida murder rate is much less than other places like Maryland. You can add the question “if Florida is so bad, how come it is doing so good?”
Comment by Phil Lee — January 30, 2007 @ 3:55 pm
From Wiki, just for interest. The first and last sentences of this, the opening paragraph, are appropriate:
An assault rifle is a selective fire automatic rifle or carbine firing ammunition with muzzle energies intermediate between those typical of pistol and battle rifle ammunition. Assault rifles are categorized between light machine guns that are intended more for sustained automatic fire in a support role, and smaller submachine guns that fire a handgun cartridge rather than a rifle cartridge. Assault rifles are the standard small arms in most modern armies, having largely replaced or supplemented larger, more powerful battle rifles, such as the World War II-era M1 Garand and Tokarev SVT. Examples of assault rifles include the M16 rifle and the AK-47. Semi-automatic rifles, including commercial versions of the AR-15, are not assault rifles as they lack the capability for automatic fire. Similarly, automatic rifles without the ability to fire single shots are not assault rifles as they are not selective fire.
Comment by Matt — January 31, 2007 @ 7:58 am