Richard H wrote:People always want to defend their rights but don't want to do crap to defend someone else's. In fact the government is really good at play everyone of one another, for an example, Pro-gun is usually conservative, thus against pro-choice, pro-choice are usually liberal thus pro gun control, when in reality they are both fighting for the same thing, which are the RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS over that of the collective.
Polititians represent the wishes of their constituencies. And there is no need to impute cynical motives to them. They get elected (or not) because they believe in their principles; and their actions, e.g., voting records, speeches, etc., demonstrate this over a long period of time. In the US, we have two major political parties, the republicans, who tend to be conservative, who typically represent the wealthy and the upper middle class, and the democrats, who tend to be liberal and who typically represent the poor and the lower middle class.
These two contrasting political philosophies represent a whole fabric of issues that all stem from the same root basis: the conservative philosophy is geared toward maintaining wealth and power, and the liberal philosophy is geared toward redistributing wealth and power.
For example:
- Democrats typically want to raise taxes, while republicans want to reduce taxes -- who pays the majority of those taxes?
- Democrats favor social welfare programs, while republicans favor smaller government -- who pays the majority of the bill for these social welfare programs?
- Democrats favor redistribution of wealth through inheritance taxes, while republicans typically oppose such taxes -- who is hurt most by inheritance taxes?
- Democrats favor legal abortion, while republicans don't -- who has the most pregnancies out of wedlock, and who picks up the tab for the resulting abortions through higher healthcare costs?
In Philadelpia recently, Mayor Nutter and the police commissioner used the slaying of a police officer to promote their anti-gun policies. They blamed the slaying on guns. The NRA, on the other hand, blamed Mayor Nutter and the police commissioner. Considering the extensive criminal resume of the killer, which included a number of violent crimes, he should have been locked away in a cage long ago -- the NRA had a point. Unfortunately, Little Johnnie Gangbanger has relatives, and they would get upset if he were sent to prison,
and they vote! So we have an administration that is soft on crime, and wants to place the blame elsewhere.
In addition, a lot of the people in the big cities live in fear of being murdered by drug addicts and gang members. To them, drive-by shootings are a regular occurance. Wouldn't the world be a better place if only there weren't any guns? It wouldn't, but unfortunately there aren't many people with PhD's in econometrics living in low income housing projects. There aren't many polititians with PhD's in econometrics either.
Not only that, but many of these people have probably never stood up to anyone in their entire lives, or if they have they weren't successful. They are the ones who would benefit most from lower barriersw to legal gun ownership and relaxed concealed-carry laws, but they simply can't see themselves successfully defending themselves in an armed confrontation with a mugger -- no matter how well-armed they are.
What's worse, the anti-gun crowd doesn't seem to have a grasp of the fundamentals of what they need to measure. They tend to see gun crime as a separate and independent category of violent crime and crime in general. If you can dry up the supply of guns then you should reduce the rate of gun crimes relative to other types of violent crime, and isn't this a good thing? Wouldn't the total crime rate then be lower? But, when you disarm potential victims, you reduce the opportunity-cost of committing violent crimes, and you can expect the absolute rate of violent crimes to increase. And you can expect the absolute rate of gun crimes to increase also, just not by as much -- but so what? Murder is murder, whether you do it with a gun, a kitchen knife, a tire iron or your boot.
These are all testable hypotheses, and they have been tested and confirmed. But don't expect a polititian to understand it. Or most other people for that matter.
So, we have places like Philadelphia, which currently has the distinction of having the highest violent crime rate of any major city in the US. We have Mayor Nutter and the Philadelphia city council passing gun-control laws in defiance of state law, an issue that has already been adjudicated in Pennsylvania's supreme court. Of course, about a mile away from Philadelphia, just across the river, is Camden, NJ, where they have very strict gun-control laws as well as laws banning effective self-defense ammunition, such as hollow-point bullets, as well as knives. And the violent crime rate in Camden is 50 percent worse than in Philadelphia.
So go to the polls at election time and vote.
Regards,
Al B.