Tag Archives: Liberty

News

Is the New York Times a reliable news source or leftist agitprop?

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From the New York Times.

Excerpt:

In state after state, guns are being allowed in places once off-limits, like bars, college campuses and houses of worship. And gun rights advocates are seeking to expand the map still further, pushing federal legislation that would require states to honor other states’ concealed weapons permits. The House approved the bill last month; the Senate is expected to take it up next year.

The bedrock argument for this movement is that permit holders are law-abiding citizens who should be able to carry guns in public to protect themselves. “These are people who have proven themselves to be among the most responsible and safe members of our community,” the federal legislation’s author, Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, said on the House floor.

To assess that claim, The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.

More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

National Review explains what’s wrong with this analysis.

Excerpt:

All of these numbers are completely meaningless; in any large population, there will be some crime. The only way to see what these numbers mean is to compare concealed-carry holders to the general population. Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find.

North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter. Instead of “rais[ing] questions,” the Times has demonstrated yet again that permit holders are more peaceful than the general population.

And do you know what else is missing from the New York Times analysis? Any investigation into the number of crimes prevented by defensive handgun usage by licensed concealed carry permit holders. After all, a good journalist would want to weight the bad consequences of a policy together with the good consequences, right? That would be a fair and balanced approach that would inform the readers instead of misleading them.

Do gun control laws reduce violent crime?

Here’s what happened after gun laws changed in Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

Excerpt:

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Politicians predicted disaster. “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets…”

The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”

But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

Not surprisingly, the national media have been completely silent about this news.

One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen. In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.

Meanwhile, the other four most populous cities saw a total drop at the same time of only 6 percent.

Similarly, in the year after the 2008 “Heller” decision, the murder rate fell two-and-a-half times faster in Washington than in the rest of the country.

It also fell more than three as fast as in other cities that are close to Washington’s size. And murders in Washington have continued to fall.

If you compare the first six months of this year to the first six months of 2008, the same time immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s late June “Heller” decision, murders have now fallen by thirty-four percent.

Gun crimes also fell more than non-gun crimes.

Robberies with guns fell by 25%, while robberies without guns have fallen by eight percent. Assaults with guns fell by 37%, while assaults without guns fell by 12%.

Just as with right-to-carry laws, when law-abiding citizens have guns some criminals stop carrying theirs.

And it’s not just in big cities. MSNBC explains how 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.

If you ever need to debate this, I recommend buying these academic studies published by the University of Chicago Press and by Harvard University Press. The former shows how crime rates dropped in the USA when Americans rescinded gun control laws, and the latter shows how crime rates rose in the UK when the British strengthened their gun control laws. Sometimes is good to have the data handy.

Want both sides? Then watch a debate on gun control

This debate is in 13 parts, featuring the two of the best proponents of legal firearm ownership – John Lott and Gary Kleck. The real sparks fly during the Q&A, so don’t miss that. (If you can’t watch the debate, then you can read this post and this post instead).

Here’s part 1, which contains the introduction.

Here are the remaining speeches:

This is everything you need to know about whether legal ownership of firearms reduce crime. And you get both sides – unlike in the New York Times.

Here is my previous article exposing the ignorance of NYT executive editor Bill Keller.

News

Typical working UK mother spends 19 minutes per day with her children

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From the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical working mother spends as little as  19 minutes a day with her children; working fathers even less.

Time-neglect is what child psychologists call it, and they are studying its effect in middle-class families with increasing concern.

‘We are seeing some of the most privileged and yet in some ways the most neglected children in history,’ says child psychologist Dr Richard House, from the University of Roehampton.

We have some of the longest working hours in Europe and the recession is piling pressure on parents to be the last to leave the office. The guilt parents feel about this has consequences for when they are with their children.

‘Parents are reluctant to say “No” when they need to. They try to compensate by lavishing gifts on them. Neither is good for children’s well-being and healthy development,’ says Dr House.

His warnings follow a Unicef report that admonished British parents for trapping their children in a ‘cycle of compulsive consumerism’ by showering them with toys and designer labels rather than time.

[…]Unicef’s research also shows that what children actually want is more stable family time, as do many of the parents struggling to provide for them.

More than two-thirds of mothers work, and no one would want to see the progress women have made in the workplace reversed.

No one except the husbands and the children, but who cares about them?

More:

Historian Rebecca Fraser, mother of three daughters and author of A People’s History Of Britain, says that while nostalgia for the Fifties is understandable, the progress of women in education makes a return to that model unlikely.

‘In 1951, only one quarter of the tiny British student population (5 per cent of adults) were women, while in 2011 more than half the student population are female,’ she says.

‘With so many attending university, it is probably inevitable that most women are going to continue to want a career.’

[…]Child-care experts warn that time-neglect by high-achievers  can have serious consequences on their children.

Professor Suniya Luthar, a world expert in the welfare of children from affluent homes, has just completed research that shows the numbers of teenagers with significant mental health issues can be up to three times higher among those from high-achieving and prosperous families.

‘Traditionally, the view is that these children have it all, but the pressures on them are immense,’ says Professor Luthar.

‘The solution for any parent is to spend time with them.’

They also need clear boundaries, she says, something that ‘uber-working’ parents often are less able to enforce.

Every decision a woman makes has to be based on the plan for a marriage, family and children. Ideologies like feminism and socialism are incompatible with marriage and family. What is the use of a woman crying crocodile tears over her voluntary neglect of her own children when every decision she made prior to marriage and after marriage is based on an anti-family, pro-government worldview?

When a woman votes for government to tax her future family, regulate her husband’s employer, and restrict the family to purchasing  government services only (day care, public schools), then she must not complain when she is forced into the workplace and her child is handed to strangers to raise. That is the end result of being taken in by fashionable ideologies. When you oppose low taxes and small government, you oppose keeping money in the family. And that means that the wife will work, and the children will be raised by strangers. Women who vote for socialism, environmentalism, feminism, etc. are forcing themselves away from their future children.

Think before you act – don’t act on feelings and intuitions. If you want a marriage and a family, then vote accordingly.

News

If Ron Paul were President, 16 to 28 states would keep abortion legal

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Which states would Ron Paul allow to legalize abortion?
Which states would Ron Paul allow to legalize abortion?

From the Weekly Standard. (H/T Triablogue)

Excerpt:

“[Ron Paul] has an outstanding chance of winning in Iowa,” according to Bob Vander Plaats, who served as Mike Huckabee’s 2008 state campaign chairman. “There’s a lot about Ron Paul that people like,” Vander Plaats says, pointing to Paul’s “almost prophetic” vision of our economic problems and his commitment to do away with “politics as usual.”

But Paul could face trouble with values voters in Iowa, where 60 percent of GOP caucusgoers are evangelical Christians. Vander Plaats says his socially conservative umbrella organization, the Family Leader, has ruled out endorsing Paul because “sometimes [Paul’s] libertarian views trump his moral compass.”

“On abortion, [Paul] believes that’s a states’ rights issue, we believe that’s a morality issue,” says Vander Plaats. In a post-Roe v. Wade world, “We don’t believe abortion should be legal in Maine and illegal in Iowa.” (Paul voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, but expressed deep reservations about voting for a federal law on abortion.)

“We’re very concerned” about Paul’s position that the government shouldn’t recognize civil marriage, Vander Plaats continues. The group also balks at some of Paul’s foreign policy views. ”Even though we may agree with him that we’re not called to be the policeman of the world, we do believe we’re called to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel,” says Vander Plaats. “And we do believe [a nuclear-armed] Iran is a definite threat not only to Israel, but to our freedom as well.”

[…]Vander Plaats says he doesn’t think very many Iowa voters are aware that Paul thinks it should be up to states to decide whether or not to protect human life. But now that Paul leading in the Iowa polls, his positions may come under greater scrutiny.

Here’s a 2006 USA Today article listing the states that would make abortion legal under Ron Paul’s plan.

Excerpt:

•Twenty-two state legislatures are likely to impose significant new restrictions on abortion. They include nearly every state in the South and a swath of big states across the industrial Rust Belt, from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Michigan. These states have enacted most of the abortion restrictions now allowed.

•Sixteen state legislatures are likely to continue current access to abortion. They include every state on the West Coast and almost every state in the Northeast. A half-dozen already have passed laws that specifically protect abortion rights. Most of the states in this group have enacted fewer than half of the abortion restrictions now available to states.

•Twelve states fall into a middle ground between those two categories. About half are in the Midwest, the rest scattered from Arizona to Rhode Island.

[…]The 22 states likely to enact new restrictions include 50% of the U.S. population and accounted for 37% of the abortions performed in 2000, the latest year for which complete data were available.

The 16 states likely to protect access to abortion include 35% of the U.S. population and accounted for 48% of the abortions performed.

So Ron Paul, far from being pro-life, would allow abortion on demand in 16 to 28 states, many of them the most populous states in the union – like California and New York. I understand that he calls allowing abortion in 16 to 28 states “pro-life”, but voters have to think and decide – is that really pro-life? Is it really pro-life when the number of abortions per year will drop from 1.1 million to 550,000? Is that pro-life? (Assuming that the people in the pro-life states don’t just cross the border to get an abortion elsewhere – which is false, of course). Paul’s position is that he is personally pro-life, but he thinks that other people should be allowed to decide if an unborn baby can be killed or not, at the state level. Isn’t that pro-choice though?

Similarly, Paul would allow states to redefine marriage to be anything they want it to be, since he thinks that the definition of marriage is an issue that states should decide. That’s his view. Is that pro-marriage? Does that position take seriously the need for children to be raised by a mother and a father?