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[hipshot]

Obama wants to make it easier for terrorists to enter our country, but harder for citizens to buy guns.  Hmmmmm....................... 

[hipshot]

On Tuesday, President Obama stunned Americans and French alike with his false claims about gun violence in America. "I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries,” claimed Obama. It is a claim that he has continually repeated over the years.
Talk about being self-absorbed.
The French have witnessed three mass public shootings this year. January saw two attacks, one on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and another on a Paris supermarket.
In the November attacks, 129 people were killed and 352 were injured. In just 2015, France suffered more casualties – killings and injuries – from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’sentire presidency (508 to 424). This number includes the San Bernandino massacre on Wednesday.
In just 2015, France suffered more casualties – killings and injuries – from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424). This number includes the San Bernandino massacre on Wednesday.
Obama also overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated.  Of the four worst K-12 school shootings, three have occurred in Europe. Germany had two of these — one in 2002 at Erfut and another in 2009 at Winnenden, with a total death toll of 34.
Obama isn’t correct even if he meant the frequency of fatalities or attacks. Many European countries actually have higher rates of death from public shootings that resulted in four or more murders. It’s simply a matter of adjusting for America’s much larger population.
Let’s look at mass public shootings from 2009 to the middle of June this year. To compare fairly with American shootings, I excluded attacks that might be better classified as struggles over sovereignty. For instance, I did not count the 22 people killed in the Macedonian town of Kumanovo last month. 
Norway had the highest annual death rate, with 2 mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Macedonia had a rate of 0.38, Serbia 0.28, Slovakia 0.20, Finland 0.14, Belgium 0.14, and the Czech Republic 0.13.  The US comes in No. 8 with 0.095 mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Austria and Switzerland are close behind.
In terms of the frequency of attacks, the United States ranks ninth, with 0.09 attacks per million people.  Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and the Czech Republic all had higher rates.
There are two other studies on these questions that have gotten a fair amount of attention.
One, by State University of New York-Oswego public justice professor Jaclyn Schildkraut and Texas State University researcher H. Jaymi Elsass, who look at shootings across countries, has left out a large number of shootings in other countries.
Yet, despite the extensive news coverage their study has received, they miss a lot of cases.  For example, in France, they miss three mass public shootings:
— Tours, France, October 29, 2001: four people were killed and 10 wounded when a French railway worker started killing people at a busy intersection in the city.
— Nanterre, France, March 27, 2002: a man kills eight city councilors after a city council meeting.
— Toulouse, France, March 19, 2012, Mohammed Merah killed four people (the killer also killed people in Montauban, France).
Other cases are missed in such countries as Austria, Belgium, Finland, Netherlands, Italy, Macedonia, Spain, Switzerland and Slovakia.
It takes a lot of time and effort to find all the cases, but if you get all the attacks in the U.S. and miss those in other countries, it makes the U.S. look a lot worse.
Another by Lankford reportedly goes back to 1966, but while he shares his study with reporters, he requires that they don’t share it with researchers in the area and, despite the wide publicity given his findings, he has repeatedly turned down requests by myself to see his research.
The president’s statement was also limited in another sense.  He was referring only to shootings in his statement, but bombs are frequently used elsewhere in the world.
The Boston Marathon bombing was a rare exception these days in the United States. But countries such as Russia have frequently suffered bombings. Indeed, since 2009, the nation has seen 1.31 deaths per million from bombings that caused four or more fatalities.
Between 2007 and 2011, there was an average of 6,282 terrorist attacks per year outside of Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. On average, more than 27,000 people were killed, injured or kidnapped each year.
Obama keeps using these attacks to advocate requiring background checks on private transfers of guns. Such a requirement, however, already exists in France and almost all of Europe.
The background checks failed. So, too, did France and Belgium’s complete bans on the weapons used in those attacks. The terrorists who attacked those countries still got the weapons that they wanted.
Of the people stopped by background checks, nearly all are people who should have been allowed to buy guns. These delays may be mere inconveniences for most people, but they can endanger the lives of people who are being stalked and need immediate protection.
There is another common factor between mass public shootings.  Virtually all of the attacks in America and Europe are taking place where general citizens can’t carry guns for protection. At some point, it has to become apparent to gun control advocates that gun-free zones only protect the killers.
Can Obama actually believe his claim that these attacks “just doesn’t happen in other countries”?  More likely, Obama is willing to go to any extreme as he pushes for European-type gun control.  The last thing he wants to admit is that countries with such strict gun-control laws can have so many deadly attacks.

[Gumbo]

Gun law in Australia:

Australian Gun Law Update;
Here's a thought to warm some of your hearts....
From: Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia
Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real
figures from Down Under.  It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own
government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.

The first year results are now in:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,
Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!
In the state of Victoria.....alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent.(Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals still possess their guns!)
While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady
decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.

Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in 'successfully ridding Australian society of guns....'
 
You won't see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.
 
The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.
Take note Americans, before it's too late!
 

[hipshot]

And yet, some of the wingnuts like to hold up the Australian debacle as another shining example of how gun control works so well........  And the Aussies, due to their strong British influence, have always had strict firearms regulation.  Kinda like the Obamacare joke; a huge number of Americans have lost their healthcare plans, many of the ones who still have one can no longer afford to use it, and the plan hosts are going broke, because the administration needs to pump a whole lot more taxpayer dollars into this monumental swindle to keep it afloat.  But the party faithful still keep preaching that it's a monumental success.  I guess that means that the plan all along was actually to destroy what little bit of the healthcare plan industry still worked, and wreck the lives of more Americans who weren't yet totally dependant on "tha guvamint" to control their lives.

It's the future, folks.  We pay a bunch of elected officials $83.65 an hour (minimum) to make sure we never have to bother ourselves with making a decision again.  With only our collective best interests at heart, they will assume the burden of making all decisions for us for the rest of our lives.   We live out our lives in carefree luxury, as long as we vote for the right folks.......

[Rocket67]

I have seen a lot of numbers and statistics and am leary of believing any of it until I see a viable source.  One thing I never see is an actual crims statistic of "per capita".  I would like to see a study of state by state per capita in the USA and compare to countries globally.  I would imagine if you take the cities of Detroit, Furguson, Chicago, Washington DC, <insert any city with strict gun laws> out of the equation the US is relatively docile when it comes to crime. 

[hipshot]

Yes, most of the "data" on crime is driven by agendas, not facts.  I use the FBI Uniform Crime Reports.  Not perfect, but more factual than any other sources I have found.  I actually did a spread several years ago comparing the "Brady Bunch" ratings of the different states' gun control laws to the UCR.  Although the areas with the strictest gun controls tended to have the highest per capita violent crime rates, that was not always the case.  Which supports what I have always maintained; crime control and gun control are totally unrelated.  A homicidal person kills other people.  A gun is an inanimate tool with no will, intent, or culpability.  Removing guns from society will not prevent violence; we had violence before guns existed.  There are many, many ways to kill other than guns.

[Rocket67]

Obama has inspired me......


To buy an AR15.  Just picked one up yesterday.  Thanks Obama, I would have never done this if you hadn't encouraged me to. 


Now time to find a good scope.