Lies, Damn Lies, and...

We gun crazies fall into the same trap as the anti-civil-rights types and rely, some, on data collected by our own partisans to bolster our arguments. It’s hard to defend against bias charges this way.

For instance, Gary Kleck has done some good work exposing a lot of lies promulgated by those that want to disarm and control the US population. He is a good egg. He is definitely on our side.

One of his statistic is that guns are used in self defense 2.5 million times a year, dwarfing the number of times guns are used criminally. But that’s a hard piece of data to collect, and the Brady’s can just say it was all made up by a biased gun enthusiast in the pay of the so-called ‘ultra-powerful and rich gun-lobby.’

The point he is trying to make is that private gun ownership has BENEFITS. And 2.5 million is a huge benefit, outweighing the risks by an order of magnitude.

Ok, for the sake of argument, let’s call that Kleck number biased. As much as the TOTALLY made up numbers like "500 million Americans are killed by guns every year" or "every 35 seconds, a child is injured or killed by a gun" type claims that various members of the 'oppressor class' occasionally bandy about without citation. What? That would mean 900,000 children a year? Baloney. 30,000 people TOTAL people are killed a year, add 90,000 for injuries. That’s adults and children, murders and suicides and accidents. I’ll concede that any death or injury is bad, but all of life is full of hazards and no one wants to live a life completely safe and cocooned in bubble wrap.

Ok, so biased numbers all around. There side is a bit more grossly biased at times, if I do say so (all ‘biasedly’) myself. Well, if one side concedes a number the other side could accept it. If the Brady Campaign agreed that guns were used defensively 2.5 million times we’d all accept that number, right? Ok, they don’t.

But the next best thing does…

Janet Reno’s Justice Department came out with a number on defensive gun use at about the same time Kleck did. They said it was more like 1.5 million. STILL a huge number of justifiable and beneficial and rightful bearing of arms. And Janet Reno and her department were no proponents of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. (h/t to Armed and Safe and the Examiner.)

Let’s go one better, and say even they over-inflated the number by 50% and it’s really ‘only’ 1 million. It’s still at least ONE MILLION that HAS to be accepted by all parties involved in this debate! Inherent right or not, it doesn’t matter... There is still a practical, utilitarian up side to guns that vastly outweighs any down side. (plus, it IS a right, after all) Guns, despite what the banners say, aren’t JUST for murdering people. They perform a huge societal good and that can’t be denied or wished away as mere propaganda of one side’s partisans.

I’m gonna say it. I don’t like, but I’m gonna.

Thank you Janet Reno.