Joe Huffman, blogger and organizer of the Boomershoot, spotted an article that contained some inaccuracies on the topic of “assault weapons� and crime. The article was written by Michelle Malsbury in response to the school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota and was posted online at UselessKnowledge.Com.
The inaccuracy starts when Ms. Malsbury takes some already skewed numbers from the Brady Bunch:
The Brady Center report had found a 66% decline in assault weapons’ share of total crime gun traces from the pre-ban period to the post-ban period.
And turns their information into this line:
As a matter of fact, according to the Brady Center there was a 66% decline under the ban for crimes that could be traced back to the use of assault weapons.
Now, Joe is very much a gentleman and he sends Ms. Malsbury a polite email with the correction. You can read his email here.
Hi Joe. Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. I guess that any percentage of decline would not make a difference for those bent on carrying guns that get in the hands of babes and then kill other children…so let’s begin to issue guns to children in grade school so they can protect themselves from each other. NOT!
If I may be so bold as to comment on Ms. Malsbury’s attitudinal problems with Joe’s correction of her misstatement of fact (which she has not yet seen fit to correct, BTW)…….
The use of emotionally charged hyperbole by the gun bigots is a tell tale sign of their inability to grasp the fundamentals of the topic.
First off, I’d like to point out the fact that there was even ONE crime committed with an ‘assault weapon’ during the decade long duration of the ‘assault weapons ban’ proves that banning certain types of firearms does not save a single life and that criminals do not follow laws.
Secondly, I would challenge Ms. Malsbury to describe to me an ‘assault weapon’ in one sentence without resorting to the text of the expired legislation.
And lastly, the “Chicken Little� theory used by the gun bigots to describe what will happen to our society if we don’t ban certain types or all firearms holds as much water as the argument that climate change would stop if people would just stop driving cars powered by fossil fuels.
There is no actual scientific evidence of truth in either of these ideas and the gun bigots and the envirofascists realize that they cannot win on the merits of their arguments so they instead decide to use scaremongering tactics.