Monday, January 7, 2013

Hey, Feinstein, it's all in the data, stupid!


This is something that I will be expanding on in an upcoming post, but this is an excellent primer. On the Coyote Facebook Page I've quoted a lot of stats recently about crime in the US. I have used this same data source (the FBI Unified Crime Reports) for my data.  I completely agree with this guy (and his subliminal insertions) that the pundits (Piers Morgan) and the politicians (Diane Feinstein) are cherry-picking the data they want while ignoring the fact that we are safer, less likely to get robbed, attacked, raped or murdered than at any point in the last 20 years. In fact, one report I read (and I still have to locate the data source) said that our murder rate hasn't been this low since 1928.

So, the quick gist is we ALL need to keep pointing to the data.  When a gun-grabbing liberal tells you that assault rifles are the cause of all of our problems, respond with "Can you explain the logic behind your statement when ALL rifles account for just 2.5% of the murders in the US?"

When they say that hi capacity magazines are the cause of all of our problems, calmly point out that after the previous hi-cap magazine ban ended in 2004, the murder rate has dropped by 15%. How can those two statements - hi cap magazines cause our murder rate to go up, and the murder rate has dropped after hi-cap magazines were once again readily available - co-exist?  They cannot; one of them has to be false, and we have data on our side here.

We're not going to change the minds of people like Diane Feinstein, Her first thought when she gets up in the morning is "how can we limit the freedoms of the people?" and her last thought before going to bed is "how can we consolidate more power into the hands of the government?"  We can, however, sway the people who aren't vested in the debate but are only spoon fed half the story by the media. We do that with education.

Before my wife met me, she had very limited exposure to firearms. Her family doesn't hunt, and after returning from Vietnam her father had seen all he wanted to see regarding guns, so she wasn't raised around them like I was.  She could not have told you the difference between an AR-15 and an M-16. When the media shows B roll footage of fully auto M-16s or M4s being fired, but deceptively talks about the AR-15, it is actively helping distort the dialog, and it's effective at doing so. My wife often says that before she met me she thought that gun control was a GOOD thing based only on what the media says about it. Now, even though she has no interest in owning or shooting a gun herself, she's an ardent supporter of the 2nd Amendment and she was converted not by confrontation, but by my fact-backed positions about gun ownership.

So while we may all agree that the gun-grabbers are insane with their lust for power and control, and that they care not a whit for public safety, before labeling EVERYONE who is anti-gun as a whacko let's try to win over the people who are victims of the media. Keep the facts handy and present them as often as you can. Get people THINKING about this issue rather than REACTING to it.

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