Tag Archives: Liberty

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Concealed-carry permit holder uses legal firearm to prevent mass shooting in Arizona

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Letitia shared this article from Arizona Central.

Excerpt:

A man was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries early Sunday morning after a shooting broke out at a Glendale house party, authorities said.

Glendale police officers responded about 1:30 a.m. to a house near 51st and Olive avenues where they found a 27-year-old man who had been shot, Glendale Police Department spokeswoman Officer Tracey Breeden said. He was treated at the scene and taken to the hospital, where he remained Sunday afternoon.

Investigators determined an argument started between individuals at the party and the 27-year-old, and he was asked to leave, she said. The man left for a short time, then returned with a rifle and began firing off rounds outside the house.

The man pointed the rifle at partygoers and a 39-year-old partygoer pulled out a handgun and shot the 27 year old before police arrived, Breeden said. The shooter did not try to leave and waited for officers to arrive.

The shooter has been cooperative with investigators, she said. He was questioned and released by detectives.

“This is standard procedure under these type of circumstances,” Breeden said. “Information and evidence detectives have gathered leads them to believe the 27-year-old was not only firing his rifle, endangering partygoers, but also pointed the weapon at other partygoers, endangering them, prior to the 39-year-old displaying a weapon and shooting the 27-year-old.”

In self-defense cases, shots only connect with the suspects about 2% of the time. Most of the time, just brandishing the weapon is enough to deter the criminal. The goal is to prevent the crime, not to hurt people.

Wikipedia has a summary of the research of Dr. John Lott and his co-authors, which shows that defensive gun use is a lot more common than most people think.

Look:

Researcher John Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that media coverage of defensive gun use is rare, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police”.

Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that “national surveys” suggested that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias. Lott cited the figure frequently in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2002, he repeated the survey, and reported that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology, saying that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent brandishment-only. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together. 

Even the leftist MSNBC agrees that legal gun ownership reduces crime.

Excerpt:

Americans overall are far less likely to be killed with a firearm than they were when it was much more difficult to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, according to statistics collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control. But researchers have not been able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.

The decline in gun homicides also comes as U.S. firearm sales are skyrocketing, according to federal background checks that are required for most gun sales. After holding stable at 8.5 to 9 million checks from 1999 to 2005, the FBI reported a surge to 10 million in 2006, 11 million in 2007, nearly 13 million in 2008 and more than 14 million last year, a 55 percent increase in just four years.

That’s been confirmed by peer-reviewed, published research as well.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

If you still think that guns are somehow bad for reducing crime, why not check out a formal academic debate featuring 3 people on each side of the debate?

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Videos

Dr. George Yancey lectures on anti-Christian bias in academia, and beyond

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My good friend Wes posted this 28-minute lecture.

If you watch 5 minutes, then you’ll definitely stay and watch the whole thing. It’s fascinating.

Details:

Join Dr. George Yancey in an in depth discussion of the bias taking place within academia against religion in general, but more specifically Christianity. Within the discussion Dr.Yancey uses brief explanations of his previous book, Compromising Scholarship and many other excerpts of his past research as well as his forthcoming research to give us a new viewpoint on academia and religion.

I found a quick description of Dr. Yancey’s work in this New York Times article from July 2011.

It says:

Republican scholars are more likely than Democrats to end up working outside academia,as documented by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. Dr. Klein, who calls himself a classical liberal (a k a libertarian), says that the university promotes groupthink because its system of “departmental majoritarianism” empowers the dominant faction to keep hiring like-minded colleagues. And when a faculty committee is looking to hire or award tenure, political ideology seems to make a difference, according to a “collegiality survey” conducted by George Yancey.

Dr. Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, asked more than 400 sociologists which nonacademic factors might influence their willingness to vote for hiring a new colleague. You might expect professors to at least claim to be immune to bias in academic hiring decisions.

But as Dr. Yancey reports in his new book, “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education,” more than a quarter of the sociologists said they would be swayed favorably toward a Democrat or an A.C.L.U. member and unfavorably toward a Republican. About 40 percent said they would be less inclined to vote for hiring someone who belonged to the National Rifle Association or who was an evangelical. Similar results were obtained in a subsequent survey of professors in other social sciences and the humanities.

Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”

Dr. Yancey’s research was a survey, not a field experiment, so it’s impossible to know how many of those academics who confessed to hypothetical bias would let it sway an actual decision. Perhaps they’d try to behave as impartially as the directors of graduate studies in Dr. Gross’s experiment.

The lecture is a real eye-opener. It turns out that in academia, you are likely to be viewed the same way as blacks were viewed by slave-owners, and Jews were viewed by Nazis. Stereotypes, ignorance and hatred abound.

We have a lot of work to do to correct these perceptions, and unfortunately nothing that Christians see and hear in church is likely to change this. Until we get serious about prodding our young people to think and achieve, this is what people on the secular left will think of us. Not because they really are smarter, but because we are not capable of pointing out the nonsense on their side of the aisle, e.g. – eternal universes, aliens seeding the Earth with life, fatherlessness is good for children, and so on. If we don’t study the evidence, then their stupidity will rule the day, and they are the ones who are entrenched in academia.

News

Bed and Breakfast owners forced to sell hotel after harassment by gay activists

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Gay rights vs religious liberty
Gay rights vs religious liberty

The Blaze reports.

Christian bed and breakfast owners who once famously refused service to a gay couple in the U.K. now claim that they’ve been forced to sell their hotel following a contentious legal battle andongoing harassment.

Hazelmary and Peter Bull insist that they have been the victims of vandalism, death threats and website attacks since the 2008 incident. As a result, in addition to the impending loss of the Chymorvah Hotel in Marazion, Cornwall, England, the couple has also grappled with intense anger from their ideological opponents.

Since denying a room to Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, a gay couple, they have been forced to pay for legal representation and to compensate Hall and Preddy, all-the-while attracting fewer guests as a result of their stance on homosexuality (the hotel only allows married adults to share a bed).

“We were optimistic in the spring. Why wouldn’t we be with the summer ahead of us?,” Hazelmarytold the Daily Mail. “We have had a better summer than we thought but nowhere near good enough to pay our way. We were not even half-full. We must have been the only place in west Cornwall that had rooms left.”

[…]In an interview with the outlet, the Bulls said that they also had a dead rabbit nailed to their fence and that someone even removed the bolts from the tires on their car. They have also reportedly encountered death threats.

The Blaze also had an article about the Oregon couple who had to sell their bakery because of harassment by gay activists.

Excerpt:

But the harassment has also come in some very eerie forms, Melissa claims. In the early morning hours on Monday, the baker claims that someone broke into the Sweet Cakes truck, a vehicle the family uses to advance its business. The truck was parked in the Kleins’ driveway. This was particularly nerve-wrecking for Melissa and Aaron, astheir home, where the truck was located, is in a highly secluded area — one that is nowhere near where their former shop.

“Somebody came up into our driveway and rummaged through our truck and took stuff out,” she said. “The really strange thing is, they didn’t steal anything, they just made a mess. It kind of was a little creepy.”

The culprit didn’t take any money, she said, which was also odd, as the truck contained cash. While she’s definitely shaken by the incident, Melissa said that she feels safe, as her husband is a hunter who is trained to use a firearm. When he’s home, she’s fine, but when Aaron is out of the house, Melissa admitted that she does get a little scared.

In addition to losing their business, the Klein family has been impacted in other ways. Their children are now homeschooled — a decision that Melissa said she made this year following the media firestorm that erupted. And in light of the bakery’s closure, Aaron has gone back to work to help provide for the family.

The harassing e-mails haven’t stopped either. Melisa shared just a few of the messages she has received of late:

  • One message with the subject line “racist maggots” read, “People like you will burn in HELL, you racist pigs.“
  • Another read, “Your homophobic rants will not be forgotten and you will go out of business. This is the 21st century, a**holes.”
  • And another: “Do everyone a favor and fall off a cliff.”
  • One individual made it very personal: “Honey it would take a lot to make your ugly a** look good! You are ugly inside and out!”
  • And finally: “Maybe your god will send you some cat food to eat when you are living on the street?”

And those are just a few of the messages received over the past few days. Negative social media comments, too, have abounded.

This is what happens when cultural elites push the idea that their is only one side to the gay marriage debate. It probably doesn’t help that most Christians have not bothered to prepare a secular case against policies that we disagree with.  It’s very easy for the secular left to dehumanize their opponents when they think that our position is based on religion only. We have to find arguments that appeal to moral non-Christians in order to build a coalition that will defend basic human rights from gay activists.