But, much more to our dismay, we realize that he hasn’t yet stuffed himself so full of eclairs that his obscenely obese noggin has exploded.
But back to his being an insufferable Canuck dickhead: In a most spectacularly idiotic heap of illogical drivel, little Davy Flab posits that it’s utterly strange and contradictory that Americans are arming themselves when things are getting so much safer. At no point in his rambling narrative does he for one second consider that perhaps America is getting safer because people have been arming themselves. Citizens with guns is a huge demotivator for goblin wannabes. And in those cases where the wannabe turns into a full-fledged goblin waste of oxygen, guns are remarkably well suited to make him stop wasting it, permanently, so that he doesn’t commit crimes again.
Three-quarters of Americans want to keep the right to own handguns, weapons whose only function is to kill human beings at close range.
And, unlike liberals like Davy Flab, goblins sat up and took notice. Particularly when those weapons started being employed to kill goblins at close range. Funny how that works.
But here’s the odd thing: At the same time as Americans have become more enthusiastic about gun rights, fewer and fewer Americans actually want to own a gun themselves.
In the 1990s, the proportion of Americans who kept a gun in the home tumbled from one-half to one-third. And while gun ownership has risen in the Obama years, it remains lower than in the 1960s when strong majorities of the American people demanded stricter laws.
So gun ownership, as a proportion of the total population, went down, then up, but not as high as it once was. And your point? Other than the one peeking out from among the folds of fat on your head?
Americans support gun rights because they believe guns are necessary for self-protection.
Some even support gun rights simply because they’re, you know, a right. Amazing, that. Similarly, His Imperial Majesty supports the right to free speech. Not because we believe for a second that there is any practical use to be had from the likes of sub-ignorant imbeciles like David Frum publishing inane columns, but because it is, well, a right.
At the same time, people hesitate to own guns themselves because they recognize that keeping a gun in the house is a dangerous thing to do.
Yep, that’s it. That’s the only reason people “hesitate to own guns.” Because David Frum knows everything that goes on in the head of everyone, everywhere, all the time. Nobody chooses not to own a gun because they can’t afford one, because they don’t feel that they need one or because they don’t really want to spend the time or don’t have the time to become proficient with one, just to name a few reasons why people might choose not to buy a gun, none of which are the actual reasons because David Frum knows.
And keeping a gun in the house is a dangerous thing to do because… Because David Frum knows that too. He’s really scary smart for an overweight gasbag, isn’t he? Oh, but that’s not all, he’s got the word of “some studies” to back him up too!
A gun in the house minimally doubles the risk that a household member will kill himself or herself. (Some studies put the increase in suicide risk as high as 10 times.)
Never doubt the veracity of “some studies.” The results couldn’t possibly be tainted by, say, some purchasers of guns already being depressive before they bought it. Heck, they could have bought the gun specifically to eat a bullet for all that we know. But nooooo! Those individuals were happy as clams, singing all day long with an idiot smile of frabjous ecstasy on their faces, so full of joie de vivre that they had to be physically restrained from simply vanishing in a glorious puff of luminescent happiness. UNTIL THEY BOUGHT THAT EVIL GUN!
Makes us wonder why countries where guns are really, really hard to come by, like Sweden, have so many people killing themselves. Not to mention how on Earth do they do it when we all know that guns are really the only thing you can off yourself with?
An American is 50% more likely to be shot dead by his or her own hand than to be shot dead by a criminal assailant.
Which is utterly irrelevant, but thank you for the nice non sequitur. We’ll be sure to dress it up real nice and put it in a display cabinet in the Imperial Foyer for strangers to point and laugh at. On the other hand, an armed American is a whole lot less likely to be shot dead by a criminal assailant than an unarmed one is.
More than 30,000 Americans injure themselves with guns every year.
And we won’t even bother looking up the number of Americans who injure themselves while driving motor vehicles every year, we’ll just jump to the only “logical” conclusion and demand that we ban vehicles because they’re just too gosh durn dangerous. But we can assure you that the number is a whole lot larger than 30,000, so our argument is much much stronger than yours, Davy Dorkhead.
The good news is that as America becomes safer, fewer and fewer Americans feel the need for a weapon. The overall violent crime index has tumbled by one-third since the early 1990s. The worst crimes — murder and rape — have declined even more. American citizens are safer today from crime than at almost any time since record-keeping began, very likely safer than at any time in the history of the country.
Which, of course, has nothing to do whatsoever with guns becoming more prevalent in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Those citizens are far too busy shooting themselves and their spouses at home while fumbling around with those useless, needless murder weapons to ever have time to wander around in society deterring crimes.
Americans perceive these improvements in the safety of their immediate neighborhood. Back in the early 1980s, half of Americans said they feared to walk alone at night near their own homes. By the early 2000s, only one-third expressed such fears.
We’d say something here, but then we read the next paragraph:
Yet unfortunately, Americans are not, however, nearly so accurate at assessing national trends. In the mid-2000s, when crime rates were declining fast, almost 70% of Americans wrongly said that crime rates had risen over the past year.
So at the exact same time only a third of the population said they felt unsafe, two thirds of them said they were less safe? Wait, we think we’ve got it: Apples and oranges. 2/3 said they were safe, and 2/3 said they felt less safe than the year before. So a third felt less safe than a year before, but still felt safe. OK, but what does that prove, other than a big, fat nothing (but enough about David Frum)?
What force on earth could convince Americans that down is up?
The fact that David Frum wouldn’t recognize statistics and the proper use thereof if it swung its giant, 8′ horned dick of doom and slapped him in his fleshy jowls with it?
No. David Frum goes on to babble endlessly, or at least it seems endless, about how TV coverage of violent crime is turning poor defenseless Americans into paranoid gun nuts when, in truth, they face no dangers at all because, remember, David Fucknozzle knows! We’ll spare you the details.
Only one-fifth of young Americans own a gun; one-third of over-50 Americans do.
Odd, that. It’s almost as if youngsters are too busy spending their limited disposable income on apple-tinis, iWhateverthefuckisthelatestfads and generally behaving like, well, young people, to have any shekels left for buying guns.
Republicans are twice as likely to own a gun as Democrats.
Democrats let their bodyguards own them instead, while demanding that everybody else give up theirs. Oh, and that might just possibly have something to do with why older Americans own more guns than youngsters since youngsters are about 10 times more likely to be dumber than posts and thus 100 times more likely to be Democrat Socialists.
Maybe not so coincidentally, Republicans are more likely to watch the scariest news channel of them all: Fox.
Scary mainly to liberals because it frightens the snot out of them when their fascist drivel is opposed by anybody, anywhere.
Whites are twice as likely to own a gun as nonwhites —
You just know what Davy Needledick is warming up to here, don’t you? And yes, you’re right:
and it may also not be a coincidence that gun purchases have suddenly spiked since November 2008.
Yep, that’s it. White people own guns and they own more guns than ever after November 2008 because, black president! RAAAAACISTS!
We can’t wait for David and Debbie Wasserkopf Schultze to elope to a desert island. They’d make such a pair. But we’d have to insist they be sterilized first, because no children deserve being burdened with that particular gene combination.
Of course, the actual truth is a lot more simple than David’s mindless ululations of the leftist battlecry: When a Democrat Fascist becomes president, anybody with a brain knows that he will, sooner or later, start trying to take our guns away. It’s in their nature. It’s what they are, it’s what they do. So people start buying them while they still can. As a bonus, they also become quite a bit more capable of keeping the creeping liberal fascists honest since they don’t particularly relish the thought of being shot, should they overstep their bounds by too much.
Democrats take power -> Americans buy more guns. In exactly the same way that, in pre-WWII Europe, people started burying their silverware in the backyard every time the Germans started getting too restless.
The more terrifyingly criminal the world looks, the more ineffective law enforcement seems, the more Americans demand the right to deadly weapons with which to defend themselves. It is local TV programming directors, not the National Rifle Association, who are tirelessly persuading Americans that they need to strap a gun to their legs before heading to the mall.
That and the undeniably dead victims of massacres that always seem to happen in, ahem, gun-FREE zones. Get back to us when you have a report of a massacre at a gun range or a gun show, if you please.
And what will change those attitudes is not more atrocity stories, but instead the reassuring truth: The United States is safe and getting safer, safer than ever before in its history.
And never you mind the stacks of still warm, bleeding bodies under the tarps over there. We know it’s impossibly hard for liberal asshats like David Frum to fathom, but it really doesn’t matter to any sane person whether America is 99% safe as opposed to 74%. What matters is NOT belonging to that lifeless pile of unlucky 1%’ers and doing everything you can to make sure that you won’t.
Screaming “but this is all so unlikely” at a bullet tearing at me is not going to stop it, and we very much doubt that any amount of comforting statistics is going to make my loved ones any less bereft when I’m still very, very dead. A nice, reliable firearm in my hands before that moment, on the other hand.
The police can protect you, and will, and do.
Indeed. If they happen to be around in strength when the massacre is about to start. Which, for some reason, they usually aren’t. It’s almost as if beasts desiring to murder other people consciously avoid venues where police is present in numbers large enough to stop them. It’s baffling. Only thing we know, because Frum Knows and Told Us™, is that it has nothing to do with fear of those scary evil guns that police officers carry around with them everywhere they go.
We have no doubt that the police officer that we respect very much wouldn’t hesitate to pop the goblin before he could shoot us, were he only there. But he’s not going to do us a whole lot of good two blocks down the street no matter how conscientious he is. Unless he’s got a rifle, some good glass and a heap of skill.
And a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security
Nothing’s a “guarantee” of anything. A fire department is no guarantee that our house isn’t going to burn down, yet we’d a damn sight rather have one than do without.
— it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy.
And so is a car in the garage, a stove, a kitchen knife, a furnace, a swimming pool, cleaning supplies and G-d knows what else can cause a tragedy, yet we don’t see anybody howling with a fanatical gleam in their beady eyes that we should ban all of those, do we?
The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders.
If they are, then he was doing it wrong.
They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child.
In our house, they’re also a hell of a lot more likely to be the cold, dead hands of the goblin who fucked up royally by choosing our house for a home invasion.
In the land of the Second Amendment, nobody will take your guns away. But if you love your children, you should get rid of them voluntarily.
Of course. If we truly love our children, we should voluntarily get rid of any hope we have of defending said children from a violent, armed criminal. Because children just love to get raped to death, and who doesn’t want to have to helplessly witness that happening to their own children?
Just go right the fuck back to Canuckistan and fuck a moose, why don’t you, because you sure as fuck aren’t doing any good here.
Thatisall.