Gun Confiscation – the True Cost

The Boston Globe recently discussed gun confiscation as the goal of all gun control advocates. 

Unlike most gun buy-back or gun control programs, they openly discuss what it would take to confiscate guns from Americans.

As we discussed here several years ago, the cost of an attempted gun buy back would be horrific, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead, if not outright civil war. 

There are millions of gun owners that possess guns that would presumably be confiscated under such a scheme. 

760,000 Police Raids will end badly for the US

There is no way to know the exact numbers involved here, but we can make some conservative estimates that will help us understand the magnitude of what they are proposing. 

Some 75 million Americans own guns, with an average of 8 guns per household.

It is impossible to know with certainty what percentage of those gun owners would comply with a gun confiscation order. 

The key question would be what percentage of non-compliant gun owners would resist with gunfire when the police showed up to confiscate their guns. 

For the sake of being extremely conservative, let’s assume that 99% of gun owners will turn in all their guns.  And of the remaining 1% of resisters, or 760,000 people, 99% of them are just posers that won’t resist when the midnight knock on the door comes.   That leaves 7,600 gun crazies that will start shooting when the cops show up.  That is almost 18 shoot outs in each congressional district, and 150 in each state. 

7,600 shootouts between cops and armed, prepared fanatics.  The problem is that the cops don’t know for sure which gun owners will shoot back.

They will have to knock on 760,000 doors and will got shot at randomly 7,600 times.  (And these are extremely conservative estimates!)

The police will not tolerate this situation.  They will immediately transition to heavy handed raid tactics for all confiscation encounters, not just where they meet active resistance. 

Imagine hundreds of thousands of raids, each with a SWAT team, breaching explosives, and more. 

The carnage would be incredible.  It would require 20 raids per day in each state, or over 1,000 per day for 2 years in order to confiscate guns from a 99% compliant population. 

The police don’t have the manpower.  The public will never stand for it open warfare against the people.   The violence will escalate until there is open civil war. 

This idea is utter madness that will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, if not millions.

And yet is openly endorsed by a major newspaper...   Let that sink in for a moment. 

The Gun Control Freaks Worst Nightmare

The recent mass shooting in Texas is turning out to be the worst case scenario for the anti-gun fanatics.

Police Tagging Bodies in a Gun Free Zone

Every single talking point of the anti gun Left is destroyed in a single incident.

The typical anti gun talking points are:

• There is no valid reason to own an assault weapon
• We need more laws to ban dangerous people from owning guns
• The NRA has blood on its hands
• The police will protect you
• Gun free zones prevent violence

It turns out that none of these points are true, and the evidence in all wrapped up in a single incident.

The shooter was a prohibited possessor using an assault rifle and wearing body armor while murdering people in a gun free zone.   He was then engaged by an NRA member using an AR-15 style rifle that was able to penetrate the body armor of the shooter, effectively ending the shooting rampage. The police arrived at the scene well after the shooting and subsequent car chase was over.


There is no valid reason to own an assault weapon -- the NRA member was roused from a nap and ran barefoot to the church to engage the shooter who was wearing body armor.  If the good guy with a gun was armed with only a pistol or single shot rifle the outcome would have been very different. This is also a good argument against 'safe storage' laws that would have required the good Samaritan to have stored his gun broken down or otherwise less accessible.  The shooter murdered a number of people in the time it took him to retrieve his gun from his gun safe and load it.  Making that process slower would only cost lives. 

We need more laws to ban dangerous people from owning guns -- the shooter was already legally barred from purchasing or possessing guns.  The US government failed to follow the law and update the appropriate databases that would have prevented the sale of the weapon.  You can't make things illegal-er.  The current laws need to be enforced before we start calling for new laws.

The NRA has blood on its hands -- the NRA is blameless in this shooting.  The good guy with a gun was not only an NRA member, but also an NRA certified instructor.  The NRA saved lives. This talking point is baseless slander.  

The police will protect you -- the entire incident, including a prolonged car chase, was over before the police arrived.  The police do great work, and I am confident that they would have eventually brought the shooter to justice.  But the casualties would have been far higher if the shooter had 10 minutes of additional time to slaughter his helpless victims.

Gun free zones prevent violence -- gun free zones only guarantee that the victims will be unarmed as they are murdered.  In fact, many gun control zealots call for gun free zones around churches and schools that extend up to 1,000 feet.  Such a zone would have barred the good guy with a gun neighbor from owning a gun close enough to have saved the day.   Gun free zones are workplace safety measures for mass murderers. 

Gun control does not work.   Gun control laws are counter productive and cost lives. 

All of the gun control talking points are completely demolished by this one incident.

Unfortunately, this won't prevent the Lefty morons from parroting the usual bromides after the next shooting.

The Feminist war on Reality

Feminist Professors are questioning the validity of math and science because these disciplines were created largely by white males.   

Rochelle Gutierrez  is a professor at University of Illinois specializing in “equity issues in mathematics education.” Her focus is on “paying particular attention to how race, class, and language affect teaching and learning,” which basically means that she sees “white privilege” in every facet of education. In the case of math, Gutierrez thinks that because minorities are supposedly deficient in the subject compared to “whites,” the subject is flawed and in need of an overhaul.

Sara Giordano, a feminist professor at the University of California-Davis has vowed to “challenge the authority of Science” by “rewriting knowledge” through a feminist lens. She argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.

However, Giordano is hopeful that feminists can work towards creating new approaches that don’t conflate science with truth.

“We need to disrupt the epistemic authority of Science…[and] the assumption that science = truth,” Giordano writes, further arguing that this can be done by implementing a “feminist science practice that explicitly unsticks Science from Truth.”

'Unsticks science from Truth'?  'Knowledge production must be approached with anti-science'?? How are these statements not grounds for immediate removal from the University faculty?

You can get a sense of the motivation here when you read the tweets pictured above.  Feminists claim that rape culture exists.  When rational people demand proof to support this claim, the Feminists attack the idea that evidence is needed.  This is fundamentally irrational and evidence that there is not proof of rape culture.

This is more than a war on science, this is a war on reality itself.  The Left is engaged in a full retreat from reality and is in the process of constructing its own bubble where facts and logic do not exist.

There is a very simple reason for this:  Marxism and critical race theory are not supported by the facts.   None of their favorite theories are aligned with the real world or work when tried.  And when reality and theory conflict, naturally, it is reality that must be modified. 

This is truly amazing.  The denial of reality in the service of dogma. 

When your theory is not supported by the evidence, you are supposed to modify the theory.  Instead, they are seeking to keep the theory and throw out the idea of science itself.

The Left is losing the battle of facts.  They have lost the battle of logic.  This is a clear example that the Left understands that the facts are not on their side.

It's Not a Sprint, and other Lessons about Life...

A recent video entitled Life of Privilege Explained in a $100 Race tries to explain how 'privilege' gives people unearned advantages in life.   The premise is that life is a sprint for money and that there are many unearned privileges that give you an unfair advantage in life.

Life Privilege explained as a footrace

The narrator calls this race model 'a picture of life'.

This analogy is flawed and incredibly damaging to those who believe in it and the underlying philosophy.  Not to mention the narrator is incredibly racist when he claims that "some of these black dudes will smoke all of you" in a race.

The overt racism aside, the underlying premise is completely flawed.  I don't claim to fully understand the meaning of life, but it certainly not best represented as a foot race for money.  From a flawed premise and model, you cannot draw valid conclusions.  But let's examine what happens when you use this flawed model to instruct your world view.

The things that are listed in the video as 'unfair privilege' are:

• Both parents are still married
• Grew up with a father figure in the home
• Access to a private education 
• Access to a free tutor (what ever the heck that means)
• Never had to worry about your cell phone being shut off
• Never had to help mom or dad with the bills
• Didn't have to pay for your education
• Didn't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from 

So basically this amounts to two categories:  1.) Is your family intact, and 2.) did you have money.  Essentially, it boils down to: did your parents make good life decisions?  Did your parents do the things required to give you a better life?

Parents who defer childbirth until after they get married, get a full time job, and get a high school education are statistically guaranteed to be above the poverty line.  Children of two parent families have much better life outcomes, as has been pointed out repeatedly by the likes of Robert Bork and Ann Coulter.

So, yes, if your parents make good decisions about who to marry and how to manage money, you will have a greater chance of success in life.  So what?

Isn't that the entire point of raising children? Isn't that the American dream?  In fact, making the world a better place for our children is the basis of civilization itself.  If we can't improve conditions for our children because it is somehow unfair to other children, then how is progress to be made?  Are we supposed to tear up the roads every generation to ensure that some children don't walk on dirt roads while others ride the bus? 

Beyond the inherent stupidity of the idea that we cannot improve life for our children by making good decisions, the model that life is a sprint is incredibly damaging to the least privileged in our society.

When you tell people the race is rigged against them, they give up entirely.  Watch what happens a the end of the video.  Many of the people who are standing at the start line never even move.  They make no attempt to succeed at life at all.

Life is not a sprint.  If you insist on using life-is-a-race model, it is more like an inter-generational relay race.  Each generation advances their position, or they fall back in the race.  Just because you are way behind the others on the current leg of the race doesn't mean you can’t succeed over the inter-generational long run.

The video also offers no prescription for how to address this alleged problem.  The conclusion the video seems to reach is that people should feel guilty for having privilege and hand over some of their hard-earned money to someone else. 

This video is pure evil.  It promotes a flawed view of the meaning of life that damages everyone who subscribes to it.  The video also exposes the racist feelings of the Left when they assume that black dudes can run.   It attempts to create guilt in people with privilege without a prescription for change, 

And finally, if you did change the world so that the good decisions of parents had no effect on outcomes for their children, you tear down the very foundations of civilization.  This is evil.

Or maybe that is the entire point.

NFL Protesters are in for a Big Suprise

NFL owners are running a business that is intended to earn profit.  They have been extremely successful over the past 50 years, creating a multi-billion dollar industry that looms large in the minds of Americans.  

A number of NFL players have decided to kneel for the National Anthem in protest of the awful, slave-like conditions that have led them to get paid millions and millions of dollars to play a game. 

They expect somehow this will translate into deep and lasting change at the societal level.

These protests will generate lasting change: in their pockets.

The predominantly minority players who are protesting are about to see a massive decline in pay.

As league revenues and TV broadcasting rights revenues have climbed exponentially, so have player salaries.   The minimum salary is over $400k, and the average salary is close to $2MM.

There is a problem, however.   NFL ratings are falling, and the boycott of the NFL in response to the kneeling protest is accelerating that decline.

Ratings in the middle of this season are a disaster, and sales of tickets and merchandise are down as well.

The NFL is about to get a whole lot poorer.   NFL owners are going to have to cut back on expenses. 

Given the cost structure of NFL teams, the only lever that they can adjust to reflect the lower revenue is player salaries.  The cost of the bonds, the stadium, taxes, electricity, and all the things it takes to run a team are relatively fixed.    Only the player salaries can be changed in the short term.

Once the effects of the boycott are felt in the new television contract, the teams will have no choice but to dramatically lower payroll costs. The players that will suffer the most are the ones who are perceived as troublemakers.

The very players who are protesting the gross injustice of playing a game for an average of $2MM will soon be protesting against a much lower salary base. 

#LawofUnintendedConsequences