By Matt Vespa
I’m sure FiveThirtyEight
isn’t held in the highest regard among conservative circles. They said Obama
would be re-elected in 2012. That happened. The site’s creator, Nate Silver,
also took some flak from the Left when he said the Republicans would have a
good 2014 midterm year, specifically the GOP takeover of the Senate. So, in a
way, the data-crunching site can entertain and annoy those on either side of
the aisle. For the die-hard Trump supporters, yes, FiveThirtyEight was totally
wrong in their 2016 projections; Trump won. Yet, on gun violence, the site and
its writers have been nuanced. They haven’t taken the ban all guns, more
background checks, and prohibit so-called assault weapons route that other
celebrities, pundits, politicians, and nutjobs have taken recently after the
tragic Las Vegas shooting.
Fifty-nine people were
killed, with another 527 wounded when Stephen Paddock decided to open fire on
the 22,000 attendees, who were enjoying the last night of Route 91 Harvest
country music festival. It’s the worst mass shooting in American history. Yet,
the site noted that mass shootings are rare, they don’t constitute the majority
of gun crimes or deaths, and viewing policies to reduce gun crimes solely
through mass shootings is a way to conjure up some
really bad policy on the subject. Specifically, more background checks as a
policy initiative probably won’t stop future mass shootings. Over at The
Washington Post, a former FiveThirtyEight writer, Leah Libresco, said she
supported pretty much what the anti-gun Left wants on gun policy. But when she
analyzed the data, support for those positions “crumbled.”
In all, she found out
that there’s no such thing as an assault weapon, and that most gun deaths are
the result of suicides. Still, she says she doesn’t want to own a gun and is
probably viewed as anti-gun for those of us who support the Second Amendment.
Yet, she also said that reducing gun violence is going to be a long,
tedious work of personalized and highly targeted interventions that involves,
for example, disarming at-risk youths in gangs individually, not some blanket
ban—which is what Democrats want to do with some long guns. Disarming gang
members, saving lives, and keeping kids away from a life of criminality through
an algorithm that can determine and find these kids—who isn’t for that. The
Left probably won’t like that. It’s too small-scale. It doesn’t attack the
concept and principle of gun ownership, or look for inroads to chip away at
this constitutional right at the legal or legislative level. In short, it’s a
policy that could work, which would shield any future attempt at banning guns
in America and give conservatives a victory. On principle, the Left can’t
support this method. Libresco said New Orleans is trying it out in combating
gang violence.
Last, she also found
that Australian and United Kingdom gun laws, which the anti-gun Left salivates
over, were ineffectual. Mass shootings over there were still rare, and gun
violence did not decrease as a result of the gun ban and buyback legislation
that was passed.
…[M]y colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three
months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States,
and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions
might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for
crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were
narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not
broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain
and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s
policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other
gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass
shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback
program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain,
the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or
deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found
out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an
invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more
features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher
mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist
can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together
Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies,
where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick
puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but
don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about
as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but
a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit
meaningless.
[…]
I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored
interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive
partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but
they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the
largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could
care for them and get them help. Women
endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can
enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns.
Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life
or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them
de-escalate conflicts.
When you get the data,
you see the liberal gun agenda for what it is: a massive soup of bad social policy
that only chips away at our rights. I would have more respect for them if they
just came out in unison and said that they want to ban guns, but they won’t.
they’re too cowardly and deep down they know this battle has been won by
us.
---
An
Average American’s Comment About Liberals’ Pushing Their Gun Grab Agenda In The
Wake Of The Las Vegas Mass Murder:
The shooter violated a ton of laws starting with the law
against murder. Didn't work too well, eh? The hue and cry for laws against guns
is just another way of saying that human beings shouldn't be allowed to run
around loose. Some shouldn't, but that does not mean that we should all be
locked up (and who would be qualified to turn the key? eh?) Besides, removal of
weapons does not remove intent to kill; the killer will simply use another
weapon. Such as vehicles, Molotov cocktails, IED's, machetes, baseball bats
(sometimes used by "Antifa creeps), you name it. Killing is a matter of
will, not weapons; it will not be dealt with by regulating instruments.
----
In
Other News:Still No Evidence of Trump-Russian Collusion
After investigating for nearly 9 months…
Conducting more than 100 interviews over
more than 250 hours…
Producing more than 4,000 pages of transcripts…
Reviewing more than 100,000 pages of documents…
Interviewing every intelligence community
official who drafted the report on Russian election meddling…
Speaking with all relevant Obama administration officials…
Hearing from every Trump campaign official
the committee has asked to appear…
The Senate Intelligence Committee still
has not found any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and
Russia.
Watch Here: Sen. Richard
Burr: Intel Committee Still
Does Not Have Any Findings On Collusion With Russia
SEN.
RICHARD BURR: “There are concerns that we continue to
pursue. Collusion. The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if
there was any hint of collusion. Now, I’m not going to even discuss initial
findings because we haven't any.”
Complied by
the Republican National Committee
_______________
Sebelius
testifies in Menendez's corruption trial
Quick recap: A top Obama CMS
official testified
Monday that an “aggressive” Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez was “very hostile” in
his attempts to resolve a dispute over his wealthy donor’s overbilling of Medicare
– conversations that included Harry Reid and Kathleen Sebelius.
Sebelius testified that a 2012 meeting with
Menendez was “unusual” for two reasons:
1) It was the only time Reid ever asked her meet with a
member of Congress, and
2) It was the only time she was asked to meet about a CMS
billing dispute.
(Note: Menendez’s donor was already
convicted of improperly billing and stealing $100M from the federal
government.)
JAMES
ROSEN: The former head of the Health and Human Services
Department said she found it “unusual” when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid asked her to meet with Senator Bob Menendez about a Medicare billing
dispute in 2012. This testimony from Kathleen Sebelius marked the latest twist
in Menendez’s bribery and corruption trial. Here is correspondent, David Lee
Miller.
DAVID
LEE MILLER: A handful of supporters and protesters greeted
Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez as he arrived for day 15 of his bribery
trial. Appearing under subpoena, prosecution witness, former Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, testified about a meeting involving
Senator Menendez. According to the prosecution, eye doctor, Dr. Saloman Melgen,
gave Menendez thousands of dollars in gifts and political contributions in
exchange for Menendez using his influence to help the doctor obtain visas for
girlfriends and help in business deals. In August of 2012, Secretary Sebelius
attended a meeting with Menendez at the office of then-Majority Leader Harry
Reid. Sebelius told the court quote, “Everybody did some talking, but Senator
Menendez, it was his meeting, so he presented the issues he was concerned
about.” Prosecutors say there was only one issue concerning Menendez,
convincing the secretary to change Medicare policy to benefit Dr. Melgen, who
was appealing a Medicare decision that he overbilled the agency $8.9 million.
Sebelius told the court quote, “The discussion involved policy this case has
triggered.” The defense tried to show that there were other subjects discussed,
but Sebelius held firm.
MILLER
(CLIP): Do you agree with her characterization of that meeting, the secretary’s
characterization?
SEN.
BOB MENENDEZ (CLIP): As I have told you, never going to
speak about this trial. Our speaking will be in the courtroom.
MILLER
(CLIP): Does that mean you are going to testify?
MILLER: In
earlier testimony, a former Medicare official testified that the senator had an
“aggressive tone” during a 2009 phone call. That call ended abruptly, when the
senator realized he wasn't going to get what he wanted.
Complied
by the Republican National Committee
