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6 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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1 Against Gun Control "Adam Lanza, an honors student with no criminal record, murdered his mother, stole four of her guns, and -- for reasons we may never know -- decided to rob the world of the lives of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was a murder of unarmed innocents on a scale with few precedents in American history, the second deadliest school shooting in history, and the worst massacre in an elementary school since the 1927 bombings at the Bath School in Michigan." (Paragraph 2). |
1 Why gun control is ineffective "The hard truth is that none of the proposals that politicians and commentators have made -- about guns, mental health, broken homes, cultural failings, violence in mass media, and so on -- could have prevented this awful crime or any other similar crime yet to take place. No law can make the murderously insane sane or remove the ability to destroy innocent life from the hands of every mentally ill American." (Paragraph 4). |
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1 Why gun control is ineffective "Less constitutionally problematic is gun-control advocates' aim for an extended ban on high-capacity magazines -- which they define as any magazine that carries more than 10 rounds." (Paragraph 20). |
1 Gun Facts "There were 200 million legally owned guns in America in 1994 and almost 1.3 million violent crimes involving firearms, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Today there are more than 300 million legally owned guns in America, and there were roughly 350,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2011. In other words, the number of legal guns in private hands went up by a third, while the number of firearm-related crimes dropped by 74 percent." (Paragraph 24). |
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1 Why gun control is ineffective "This is purposeless if the idea is to prevent further Newtowns. Adam Lanza had plenty of time to reload his guns, as did the shooters at Texas Tech in 2007 and Columbine in 1999. High-capacity magazines, particularly for handguns, are designed not for mass killings but for home defense. In the hands of an inexperienced or infrequent shooter, a high-capacity magazine lends a certain peace of mind -- the confidence to fire a warning shot, for example, with the knowledge that there are more bullets at the ready if necessary." (Paragraph 21). |
1 Why gun control is ineffective The only proper objection to the existence of these magazines would come from those who honestly believe no one should have the right to defend his home with something more deadly than a stick or a bat or a blade -- and that all lethal legal weaponry should remain in the hands of authorities who might not arrive on the scene in time to help. (Paragraph 22). |
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1 Why gun control is ineffective "The AR-15 rifle (which Adam Lanza used) takes a standard .223-caliber bullet, which pales in force by comparison with the weapons of the American West. The lever-action rifles used by Lakota and Arapaho Indians to wipe out General Custer's force at Little Big Horn fired bullets almost 10 times larger than the .223 and could be unloosed nearly as quickly. In some states, the .223 is actually banned as a caliber to use for hunting deer, because it is considered too small to effect a swift, humane death. It bounces around inside the animal, killing it slowly. Note that the lethality of a firearm isn't determined by its caliber. Placing restrictions on such elements of a weapon in the belief that the villainous or the mentally ill will be kept from committing murder is itself delusional. And even if Dianne Feinstein's ban were passed, every weapon used in 1966 by Charles Whitman in the University of Texas clock tower to kill 14 people and wound 32 would still be perfectly legal." (Paragraph 30). |
1 Why gun control is ineffective "There may be steps that can be taken to keep guns out of the hands of the truly mentally ill. But speeding up the process of committing unstable individuals may come with its own risks. Lanza was reportedly socially awkward and mildly autistic, but he showed few other signs of his capability for evil or his murderous intentions. Any policy that would sweep awkward young men into the psychiatric ward is likely to be full of false positives, innocents who bear the penalty of a lifetime stigma for crimes they might never commit." (Paragraph 31). |
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1 Why gun control is ineffective "In this, as in gun restriction, policymakers would be wise to understand the limits of what they can do in a world where evil and insanity will always exist. Benjamin Disraeli wrote, "When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken." Whether that corruption comes from a rational or irrational source, the law itself has little power to protect us in the moment when darkness knocks." (Paragraph 32). |
1 Gun Control Fact "The laws we have are written not with the aim of preventing crime so much as defining what is criminal, and they will do the least to restrain the actions of those who cannot even tell the difference between reality and imagination." (Paragraph 33). |
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1 Gun Facts "Fewer guns were used to kill in 2011 than in 2010, and fewer in 2010 than in 2009, and so on. Additionally, the homicide rate has been steadily declining for 20 years." (Paragraph 36). |
1 Gun Facts "The seeming outbreak of mass shootings is especially jarring because we live at a time of unprecedented peace. Violent crime in the United States is at historic lows." (Paragraph 34). |
