Well, to be fair, who ever heard of a Jewish militia?
Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q is quickly becoming a favorite here, and her thoughtful and, as usual, refreshingly blunt commentary on the gun control debate shows why.
Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day on the post, Bret Stephens’ Capitulation To New York Times’ Anti-Second Amendment Culture…
“If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.”
-Joseph Stalin
***
“Given the FACT that per-capita death-by-gun rates are anywhere from 1,000% to 3,000% higher in the US than in any other civilized country:
IS THIS A PROBLEM? OR NOT?”
“…what is YOUR solution to what seems, at least to me, to be a rather large problem…”
—Charles Green (Ethics Alarms commenter)
***
Anti-2nd amendment enthusiasts and those in favor of the 2nd amendment have two different ideas about what ‘the problem’ is. Having once been very anti-gun to becoming in favor of the 2nd amendment (but not gun owner myself) was a journey that redefined what the primary ‘problem’ is.
Like many leftists I could unquestioningly retort gun “facts”. Certainly I still have concerns around gun violence, and generally pro 2nd amendment folks think gun violence isn’t a good thing either. So first off if we’re going to have a reasonable debate, we need to remember both sides care about people and life. It’s how life is preserved and who it needs to be preserved from – that makes the difference and defines ‘the problem’.
What began to change my mind was the view from those who were disarmed and suffered greatly for it. As mentioned in the post, Jews (and Germans) were disarmed before things got deadly crazy. In communist regimes the people, except for military, were disarmed. In this country blacks and Native Americans were disarmed and more easily murdered (When Bloomberg suggested, in 2015 that black men should be disarmed, we should have seen that as a bad sign). Let’s not forget that Wounded Knee was bigger mass murder than Las Vegas…
Now lets consider how many lives have been lost because citizens were forced to register their arms, were easier to find because of it, and eventually died because they couldn’t protect themselves and their families from tyrants. How many couldn’t have a gun in the 1st place and got killed? Would anyone like to crunch those numbers?
As a woman here’s another view: Rape in Europe is skyrocketing and making women vulnerable due to political correctness and a lack of self protection that would truly stop a predator. In December 2015 the NY Times noted the clear statistical connection between rapes and migrants. Kristin Rhode from the Oslo PD testified that Norway was unwilling to admit “this was a big problem.” Should women, gays, and others vulnerable to potential harmful ideologies wait for a reluctant government more concerned with the appearance of multiculturalism, to protect them? Is this what is meant by “civilized” counties? No. Their socialism is not protecting them.
The problem for me today is much bigger than the unfortunate crazy who is irresponsible and shoots into a crowd. The problem is the ever growing reach of Marxist utopianism that we see from NFL players genuflecting to social justice™ to Maxine Waters telling white law makers to “step aside” to schools not including the aspects of history and world events I just mentioned. The problem is an increasingly weak minded population only concerned with emotional low hanging fruit arguments that squelch intellectual debate. The problem is that if we continue to embrace more limits on gun rights here, we will in fact be walking into a strange death that has only been highlighted by Europe’s constant problems with terrorism, rape, assault, etc.
The problem is an ever encroaching tyranny by globalist Marxism that is tearing apart our country like it is other countries and further eroding trust in our government. The problem is those unfamiliar with history are too brainwashed by the smiley faced “we are One” ideology to understand how such an ethos can lead to deadly destruction.
Living in the wild west includes the sometimes ugly consequences of freedom. I’d rather live free and able to protect myself from militants, blood thirsty communists, and rapists, than be taken over for an ideology that smiles at me while taking everything I hold dear and trashing it. Autonomy matters and it is worth defending against all who wish to take it away. If we’re going to talk compromise, tell me why we should ignore history and what’s happening in Europe first. Then tell me why we should trust a government implicitly. And finally tell me how “this time” it’s going to be different. Then I’ll talk compromise.
Ethics Alarms 
Hey even if every woman in Sweden ends up getting raped every day, at least they won’t have a gun problem like those filthy Americans!
Gun ownership has risen in past decades with a NEGATIVE CORRELATION to violent crime. In other words, as gun ownership has gone up, crime has gone down. Guns are not the problem, least of all the NRA, whose members are nearly 100.00% law-abiding, good people and responsible gun owners.
The people who try to make every mass shooting (including terror attacks) about gun control do not have facts or reason on their side. They persist because of some combination of the following:
1. They feel helpless and want to be able to stump for a solution, ANY solution, rather than simply admit that there’s nothing they can do.
2. They need to make this about THEM somehow and have something to grandstand about.
3. They desperately want to deflect the “narrative” away from any discussion of either declining morals or Islamic terrorism
4. Good old political mud-slinging. Can’t let a good tragedy go to waste when you could be exploiting the emotion of dead victims for nakedly partisan political purposes.
While gun violence may be declining on the whole, there ARE two specific kinds of incidents on the rise: the sociopath mass-killer who wants to be famous, usually writes an egotistical “manifesto” and is hindered by no moral belief system whatsoever…and the Islamic extremist terrorist. Neither type restricts themselves to only using guns. And those are the two “conversations” (Islamic terror and the general decline of empathy and decency since the 60s) that the Left does NOT want to have under any circumstances. Better to just keep it to guns.
That last paragraph really hits home and echos what I keep saying to my leftist friends and family who don’t study history the way I do.
Jack, you praise Mrs Q for being “refreshingly blunt” in your promotion of her comment to COTD status.
Let me be equally blunt: You’ve been hoodwinked.
This post, where possible to be fact-checked, is demonstrably false in several key areas. And most of it is nothing more than hysterical generalizations, incapable of even being fact-checked.
Let’s start with “Rape in Europe is skyrocketing and making women vulnerable due to political correctness and a lack of self protection that would truly stop a predator.” This is something you hear from people like Nigel Farage – but the facts show otherwise.
Look up the stats. You’ll find out that, for the most recent data available (typically 2010), the US ranks 14th in rape per capita – out of 114 countries. This puts us with HIGHER rape rates than such so-called Marxist, socialist countries as: France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and many more.
See for yourself at http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Rape-rate
The ONLY Western European country with higher rape rates than the US is Sweden, with 3X the US rate. As is carefully explained, this is because Sweden has radically stricter statistical guidelines than all other European countries, counting each instance of rape by one person and one victim multiple times, not just once per person. (For more, see https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/swedens-rape-crisis-isnt-what-it-seems/article30019623/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&😉
Mrs Q attributes “higher” rape rates to immigration: here is what the BBC had to say about that claim in February of this year:
“During 2015, the year in which Sweden took the largest number of asylum seekers, the number of reported sex crimes and rapes actually decreased by 11% and 12% respectively compared with 2014 – 18,100 sex offences were reported to the police, of which 5,920 were classified as rape.”
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39056786
Now let’s get to the heart of Mrs Q’s falsehoods: her claim that Nazi gun laws were responsible for the inability of Jews and Germans to resist. As she puts it, “…Jews (and Germans) were disarmed before things got deadly crazy.”
Read some history. First of all, Germany had very strict gun laws under Weimar. The Nazis generally RELAXED gun ownership laws – except for the specific case of the Jews and a few other undesirables (gypsies and homosexuals).
Despite the obvious racism of the act, you have to remember that Jews comprised only about 1% of the German population. They, and most other Germans, had very few guns to begin with. In nobody’s mind but the crazy revisionist history of Wayne LaPierre and a few far-right historians were the Jews ever in a position to rise up violently. Don’t forget: the Nazis generally made gun ownership easier, and the Nazi regime’s incredible success in the 1930s was because they enjoyed great popularity – there WAS NO significant resistance movement. The “silent majority” cheered Hitler.
By the time of that law – 1938 – far greater deprivations had already occurred. Radio and newspapers were owned and controlled by the Nazis. Jews had long before been forbidden to hire Aryan housekeepers, become doctors, own assets beyond a certain amount, and a host of other prohibitions. Prohibiting gun ownership for that narrow population, while increasing for other “good” Germans, amounted to a nothingburger – that ship had sailed long before.
I suggest Ethics Alarms readers read up on what’s known as “Nazi Gun Control Theory.” You’ll find, no surprise, it’s a favorite conspiracy theory of modern US gun-rights advocates (including the aforementioned LaPierre), and wackos like Ben Carson More details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_theory
You know who thinks it’s bunk? Most mainstream historians, and the Jewish Defense League. The Jewish Federation of MetroWest New Jersey puts it this way: “Access to guns and the systematic murder of six million Jews have no basis for comparison in the United States or in New Jersey. The Holocaust has no place in this discussion and it is offensive to link this tragedy to such a debate.”
Now let’s talk about hysteria.
“The problem is an ever encroaching tyranny by globalist Marxism that is tearing apart our country like it is other countries and further eroding trust in our government.”
You can’t fact-check stuff like that; it’s the baldest of opinion, made worse by its unverifiable nature.
Here’s a contrary fact (underscore FACT): A Quinnipiac poll says 62% of Americans believe Trump is dividing the nation. Not Marxism.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/24/trump-approval-rating-division-poll
More hysteria: “The problem is the ever growing reach of Marxist utopianism that we see from NFL players genuflecting…”
Need I ask for the name of one, single NFL football player who calls himself a “Marxist utopian?” May I ask for one credible source for claiming that any NFL football players are, despite their probable denials, actually “Marxist utopians?”
Come on. This column occasionally gets spurts of well-reasoned, fact-based arguments. This is not one of them.
I don’t see that you have rebutted anything, Charles. Rapes by Muslims are a problem in Europe. Like anything involving Muslims, the issue is being suppressed by the Left. The fact that US rapes are high is irrelevant—the fact that they are high is the same reason that violence is high, and we’ve discussed this: the inherent proclivities of an authority-defying culture with access to more freedom than most countries. Still, as this essay about Sweden’s rape problem and immigrants notes, rape is up in some of these countries. If I were a woman and rape was rising in my country, I’d want a gun. That was all I took away from Mrs. Q’s point.
As for the jews and guns, your argument slides into spinning. You write, “The Nazis generally RELAXED gun ownership laws – except for the specific case of the Jews and a few other undesirables (gypsies and homosexuals).” Bingo. The people the Nazis intended to oppress and liquidate were forbidden to have guns. Point, game, match. Taking away guns is a predicate to tyranny. So what if it was only about 1% of the German population? So what if Jews were unlikely to use the guns to fight back? So what that they had very few guns to begin with? Yes, we know that Hitler was largely supported by the German people, so he didn’t feel the need to disarm them. Your argument doesn’t rebut Mrs. Q’s point at all.
Then you cite a poll??? The average citizen doesn’t know what Marxism is. Talk about a “so what,’ only exceeded by the argument that what NFL call themselves limits what they can justly be described as doing.. I personally wouldn’t call what the Left’s attempt to dilute Constitutional rights Marxist–I don’t endorse COTDs, I just post ones I think are well-written and thought-provoking. I would call the BLM movement Marxist in spirit—you saw that they just called free speech oppressive in shutting down an ACLU speaker, and I would call whatever is coherent–it’s not much—in the NFL’s kneeling fiasco class division action that Lenin would have approved of. Whatever it is, its anti-democracy, America, and American values, LIKE Marxism.
At the risk of using an over-used cliche: Me thinks you doth protest too much.
(And I still owe you a post.)
If you like, I’ll also praise YOU for being refreshingly blunt!
In Defense of Someone Else’s Comment :
I don’t find Charlesgreen’s post to be any kind of rebuttal to the main (and vastly more important) points Mrs. Q makes, simply because it ignores those points as well as the whole of what she is saying. Her cogent highlights say nothing that hasn’t been touched on before in this blog, but it puts them together in ways that form a stronger and I think more accurate perspective, such as a couple I will parse as I see them, bit by bit:
(1) “an increasingly weak minded population” (2) “only concerned with emotion”….; (3) unable to focus on any big picture or general truth because it only sees “low hanging fruit arguments” (4) which, by ignoring roots, branches and the fruit-beyond-understanding will “squelch” (perfect word: the argument IS begun, over and over again, but nothing kills an argument faster than clicking Like or Dislike and running away) (5) to destroy the essential “intellectual debate”. The whole is an intellectual argument that cannot be dismissed with statistics, not even accurate statistics, if there is such a thing; the five points are the easy targets of those who will not or cannot debate them.
The Holocaust reference is another easy peach-in-reach, CG. What follows puts it in context, even without Jack’s ‘so-what’ points. “In this country,” Mrs. Q notes in another indivisible outline for an intellectual debate, (1) blacks and Native Americans were disarmed” (2) therefore “more easily murdered” … (3) which “we should have seen … as a bad sign)” (4) “Wounded Knee was bigger mass murder than Las Vegas.”
Speaking of statistics …, no, semantics … I live in several echo chambers (including that of my own upbringing and education) so I have learned to ignore the reverberations coming from the right as well as the left. One helpful thing about being an atheist is that one does not believe in demons. Therefore the demonizing of ideas such as Marxist, conservative, socialist, Nazi, feminist, communist, Fundamentalist, etc., in either upper or lower cases, is taken as “color” to illustrate an opinion. Fine. I cannot see them as intrinsically evil. They are concepts, forever open to debate. I came to this conclusion after many of my acquaintance refused to read Ethics Alarms after running screaming from a name or phrase printed therein. So I can overlook Mrs. Q’s provocative tags (as with all others posted on this blog, including my own unforgivable teasers) in order to appreciate a brilliant, timely, multiple-thought-provoking essay for which I sincerely thank the author.
To try and slim it down, here’s what Mrs Q concluded:
“Rape in Europe is skyrocketing.”
“If we’re going to talk compromise, tell me why we should ignore history and what’s happening in Europe first.”
I did look at what’s happening in Europe; it is not what she claims it to be; in fact it is the opposite. Look the data: you’ll find the rates for rape declining in France, Germany, Denmark for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
Where is Mrs. Q’s data to support her claim?
Rape in Europe is NOT skyrocketing. Furthermore, the rates of rape in Western Europe are well below that of the US. Thus the claim that living in the free West is protecting her from the depredations of Marxist-etc. Europe is patently false on the face of it.
(And thanks for the blunt-praise)
Charles, I was planning on rebutting the exact same two points as you did, but you did it better than I could. I am surprised to see these blatantly misleading right-wing talking points accepted as fact here.
Chris, at the risk of putting words in your mouth, I think both you and I are echoing that TV ad with the little fox: “Just show me the RapeFax.”
Europe’s rape rates are not relevant in comparison to those of the U.S. They are relevant in comparison to their own past rape rates. A bit of a shell game there.
Also, plucking one year of a decrease in rapes that fell in between two years of INCREASE in rapes in Sweden is just astoundingly dishonest, Charles. I have to assume that you are just repeating what you read in someone else’s dishonestly reported article, rather than that you yourself are the author of such a deception. It’s like arguing that a playground slide doesn’t really go down, by pointing out that in the middle of the slide there’s a bump. See, look at this one foot of slide! It’s actually going up!
Everything I’ve read from Leftist sources mitigating the Swedish rape problem still admits that there is also a genuine increase in real sex attacks in Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe. I’m not sure how else you can explain away things like Norway requiring Muslim migrants to take “No Means No” anti-rape classes in order to politely educate them on the immorality of rape. You’d have to literally stick your head in the ground to deny that there’s a real problem there.
How is that a shell game? If guns prevent rape, wouldn’t the US have the lowest rape statistics in the world?
Mansplaining: most women think guns are icky, as I already correctly pointed out. Women are about half as likely to own a gun as men. Go figure. I’m sure it’s just a random oddity. A bit more than 1 in 5 women own a gun, far fewer carry one.
I have little doubt that if every woman carried a gun and knew how to use it, rapes would go down. (I am not advocating that.)
Let’s fact-check that one.
The states with the highest gun ownership have the highest rates of reported rape.
Specifically:
–Wyoming, Montana, Alaska and South Dakota are the four highest states in per capita gun ownership; New Jersey is at least in the bottom half, and probably much lower.
–In per capita reported rapes, Alaska rates #1; South Dakota is #2; Montana #10; and Wyoming #33.
–New Jersey ranks #51 – the lowest of all States (data include DC)
Can you picture the scattergram?
QED: Gun ownership not only does NOT prevent rape, it seems to be positively correlated with it. (Not stating causation, just correlation).
That doesn’t prove that “if every woman carried a gun and knew how to use it, rapes would go down.” But it sure casts doubt on it.
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/03/opinion/sutter-alaska-rape-list/index.html
https://qz.com/437015/mapped-the-us-states-with-the-most-gun-owners-and-most-gun-deaths/
Jack is peeved that I (correctly) pointed out that he was engaging in gender stereotypes, and instead of apologizing or contemplating the fact that he did in the first place, he is doubling down on it. I guess that is easier for his little gray cells.
For the record, I would be far more likely to submit to a rapist if he had a gun. So, now I need to have a gun because he might have a gun? And I have to be ready to whip it out in a moment’s notice. So, conceal carry I guess? None of this makes any sense to me.
Not to get on too far of a tangent, but I bet we would have a lot fewer police killings if we weren’t such an armed society. I would be terrified to be a police officer — every traffic stop could involve an armed psycho.
My understanding–and I could be wrong–is that most rapes are perpetrated by someone close to the victim. I think when people argue that women should be armed to ward off rapists, they are picturing some stranger jumping out of the bushes and attacking. That happens, and I don’t oppose women carrying, but it is extremely rare. I doubt most rapes would be prevented by a more heavily armed female populace.
“but I bet we would have a lot fewer police killings if we weren’t such an armed society. I would be terrified to be a police officer — every traffic stop could involve an armed psycho.”
Agree.
Which is why juries don’t like convicting them of manslaughter when they get spooked and shoot.
Definitely true.
Though it’s also true that “being spooked,” i.e. the cop’s state of mind – as reported by the cop himself – is a legal defense in most of these cases. It’s a legal standard fraught with self-dealing, and with granting legal status to paranoia. (That said, of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you).
I was watching an old, old Law and Order (Pre-Jerry Orbach, 1990) about a police cover-up of a cop shooting of an un-armed black kid when the cop thought he was reaching for a gun. After the cop is shown to have engaged in the cover-up, the Asst. DA asks the DA, “Why the cover-up? Why not just confess that he made a mistake? No jury would ever convict him.”
This is Hollywood Liberal Dick Wolf’s show, 27 years ago. That comment wasn’t meant as alarming or ironic, or an indictment of the system.It just stood to reason then: cops are on the front lines, they can’t be perfect, sometimes they will shoot too soon in what they think is self-defense.
Was Micahel Moriority wrong? He’s STILL not wrong. Somehow, this went from reasonable to juries excusing racist cop murders.
It’d be far more revealing to correlate per capita active carriers to a rape stat that has been controlled for fluff stats (since some rape reports, as we know from the campus nonsense, are bull stats). You can make an extremely generalized assumption, but it’s very shaky.
Then again, rape situations ought to be fairly reviewed by case: the likelihood of a drunk woman in a bar carrying or even able to utilize a gun, is a somewhat mitigating circumstance to the stat, the situations where rape occurs between two individuals who are already well known to each other is another special class of rape.
I think you’ll find that rape likelihoods increase when a man who will commit rape knows he is in an advantageous position over the woman he is about to rape.
Common sense tells you then that rape decreases as a woman’s positional advantage increases. Possession of a firearm, in concert with situational awareness, in a non-inhibited condition would all tend to dissuade rape.
Texagg,
I agree with every single caveat you mention; rape stats, even among the already-tricky larger category of crime stats, need to be read with care, and almost never reveal the full situation.
(An interesting case in point: a hundred thousand years ago, I worked for the NCJSS branch of the Justice Department when it introduced the Crime Victimization Survey. At the time, it provided a stark contrast to the FBI crime statistics, and many within the FBI fought it fiercely. But it was right. People don’t report lots of crimes, and police departments have their own axes to grind. Rape was one of the most disparate of stats between the two sources.)
That said, I still can’t fully agree with your final conclusion, “Possession of a firearm, in concert with situational awareness, in a non-inhibited condition would all tend to dissuade rape.” Writ large, wouldn’t you expect those caveats to show up at state-level stats? And yet we see the opposite, as I pointed out.
In fairness to your point it may well be true that the ‘non-inhibited condition’ doesn’t apply to the rapist. Even if every woman in a bar is armed and sober, it doesn’t matter if the rapist is armed and drunk. But then that’s a situation in which arming the woman just tends to a draw. And we’re still stuck with the gross-level correlations we see in Alaska, Montana and South Dakota.
“Writ large, wouldn’t you expect those caveats to show up at state-level stats? And yet we see the opposite, as I pointed out.”
I donno, I don’t think we have the data on “increased situational awareness” per capita…nor do I think we have data on “decreased inhibition” per capita when rape occurs…
It seems to me that many (most?) rapes that are averted by an armed victim probably aren’t reported as such. First, the victim’s weapon (be it a gun, pepper spray, knife, keychain, whatever) probably comes into play long before the crime passes from “assault” to “rape”. So even if she calls the police, it is more likely to be recorded as an assault than a sex crime, since it was stopped before any sexual contact was made.
Secondly, this is the sort of thing that is likely to not be reported by the victim. A guy gets ugly with her, she points a gun at him or pepper-sprays him, and he breaks off the attack. She’s physically unharmed, and lots of times is going to prefer to just go home instead of spending the rest of her night and part of the next day talking to cops.
Yes, that rings very plausible.
It’s just as likely that the increased rate in concealed carry is a response to a preexisting high rape rate. Who’s to say what that rate would look like with less concealed carry?
Great observation.
State-based statistics are usually fakery and mostly used by stat-manipulators. If you can’t go county-level, tit would be better not to make a scattergram at all.
“A bit more than 1 in 5 women own a gun, far fewer carry one.”
Point of order: pollsters got that many women to ADMIT they owned and/or carried a gun.
I don’t know a single woman that would admit to a stranger that she owns a gun. In Texas, this is an intensely private topic, well covered under ‘none of your business’ and with such disdain that lying and answering ‘no’ is socially acceptable.
Actually, charles clearly and unambiguously debunked two of Mrs. Q’s points:
As mentioned in the post, Jews (and Germans) were disarmed before things got deadly crazy.
As charles showed, “Germans” as a whole were not disarmed, and actually had more access to weapons under Hitler than they did previously. This did not help prevent the Holocaust, because as charles pointed out, there was no significant resistance to the Nazis in Germany at that time. If Jews had still been legally allowed to own guns, that would not have made a difference either, as they made up less than a percent of the population. Mrs. Q’s argument is thus both factually inaccurate and insupportable. Hey, maybe if the Nazis had let the Jews keep their bikes, the Holocaust could have been avoided too; there’s about as much evidence that gun control lef to the Holocaust as there is that bike control did.
As a woman here’s another view: Rape in Europe is skyrocketing and making women vulnerable due to political correctness and a lack of self protection that would truly stop a predator. In December 2015 the NY Times noted the clear statistical connection between rapes and migrants.
Charles also debunked this point. I would also add that Sweden changed its legal definition of rape in 2005; a lot of the “skyrocketing” has happened since then, and is likely more attributable to the expanding legal definition than to the increase in migrants. Neither Mrs. Q nor anyone else here has provided any evidence that Muslim migrants are responsible to the rising rate of rape in Europe; given that charles has shown that the rate is much lower in other European countries that do not have the same broad definition of rape as Sweden, this is highly unlikely.
I can only conclude that others here are not taking in the strength of charles’ rebuttal because the misleading and inaccurate statements by Mrs. Q appeal to their own political biases.
There is no one, NO ONE, denying that migrants are causing a large increase in rapes all across Europe. Even the very sources behind Charles’ claim that a change in the definition of rape is the reason for Sweden’s high rape rates…still concede that that’s only a partial explanation, and there is in fact a very real increase in actual rape attacks.
They are literally requiring migrants to take classes in Denmark teaching that rape is wrong. Police in Britain ignored, and then tried to keep under wraps, an entire cabal of migrant sex-slavers because they didn’t want to appear racist by rounding them up. It is a real problem.
Hi Charles, et al. I noticed the data you provided about sexual assaults in Europe was from 2010. A lot has changed since then due in large part to their immigration issues. Here’s some more recent examples.
-In 2014 Germany’s rapes increased to the point Westfalen-Blatt conducted an investigation noting several cases were covered up by local police.
Here’s an older stat that may be of use. Police in Norway reported in 2009 “all reported rapes” were from immigrants.
But lets stick with updated cases…
-The Rotherham borough council Feb. 4th 2015 explained the rise in sex trafficking and child exploitation correlated with the influx of immigrants.
-9/15 authorities in Bavaria began warning parents to not let their kids wear revealing clothing while that same year Merling police suggested kids no go outside aloe anymore. All this due to increasing increased child sex trafficking done by immigrants.
-9/15 Corriere Della Sera published the account of a “No borders” activist who was gang raped by Sudanese migrants who kept quiet out of idealism but when she finally reported the incident was accused of acting our of spite.
In Cologne New Years 2015 1200 women were raped in mass and all suspects were N. African or Middle Eastern. News of this came out several days later after people took to social media to say what happened.
Speaking of polls IPSO July 2016 reported 36% of Britains felt immigration had a positive effect on their country. Sweden was 24%, Germany 18%, Italy, France, and Belgium 10-12%. These are also countries with higher cases of rapes.
-Denmark in 2016 published research noting Somali men there were 26 times more likely to rape than Danes.
So the question is “is rape really dramatically in the rise in Europe?” One point to consider in answering this is how many rapes are being reported and if they are not, why?
As noted in the “No borders” activists case she didn’t want to seem racist. In 2015 a victim of gang rape wrote an open letter to her attackers saying “You are not a problem at all” because they “live in a racist society.” She apologized to her attackers.
In 2015 German minister of Justice Heike Maas noted only 1/10 of rapes are reported.
Kamel Daoud (of Algerian descent) in Le Monde (2016) spoke out about the increasing sex attacks and was promptly called an Islamaphobe and far right racist.
Is it possible Europeans are so brainwashed to the idealism of open borders and not being racist that they keep quiet when violence occurs for the sake of multiculturalism? Yes it is. That citizens actually feel bad for sending their attackers back to their country of origin after, as in one mans case, being brutally anally raped, points to a general failure of citizens having proper perspective about their own self-preservation. I’m not concluding fewer guns makes people willing to put up with these problems. I am saying it’s likely, as reporters and citizens in Europe are now finally saying, that there is something twisted about being so worshipping of “open borders” that press, authorities & victims cover up crimes and attack the credibility of those who wish to address it. Add to this a population that doesn’t or can’t defend themselves against such crimes and what we have, regardless of polls from 2010 say, is a problem.
As far as Jews and disarmament I reference 2 books. Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny by Aaron Zelman and Gun Control in the Third Reich by Stephen Halbrook. The Jews for the Preservation on Firearms Ownership (JPFO) has addressed the liberal Jews who argue against the allegations regarding this issue and they probably have a better response than I do.
As far as the National Football Social Justice League, I can say one doesn’t have to identify as Marxist to act Marxist. Sadly modern education says little about the atrocities of Marxism (could it be because of Common Core?) to students. Colleges teach how great socialism is, and modern social justice movements have hammer and sickle toting allies available at every event they can get into. These same folks rarely mention the 100-200 million killed thanks to communism.
Sadly many are confused or misguided about Marxism. In fact many of these folks don’t know Hitler was a socialist in spite of the word being in the party name. So yeah, I don’t expect Colin Kaepernick to say “I’m a Marxist” but he’s certainly soft-shoeing for the cause, whether he knows it or not (Castro tee-shirt). CBS reported that Seattle socialist city council member Kshama Sawant would like Kaepernick to sign for the Seahawks because he agrees with his views. Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders wife praised Kaepernick as well saying he “inspired respect.”
If there any doubt about the Marxist influence on the current social justice tantrums we see today, just watch for the next big lefty protest. Notice the many socialist workers carrying their hammer and sickle flags. Or ask some of the blacks at BLM protests how they feel about the socialists who go to the front of their protests promoting the “workers party” rather than black violence by police.
I’ve never heard of Nigel Farage. If saying I sounded like him is supposed to be an insult, I say that reminds me of something Saul Alinsky once said “Ridicule is mans most important weapon.”
Lastly I want to mention that Charles’s rebuttal to the actual issue I brought up wasn’t addressed; which was deciding on what the problem is regarding the 2nd amendment. My take is the problem has to do with disarmament, registries, and people not being able to defend themselves against tyranny. I also mentioned part of the issue is not having reasoned intelligent discussions on the matter where emotional low hanging fruit arguments are made. Hopefully I didn’t prove my own point.
Mrs Q, you are quite right about the only global stats being available coming from 2010 – I was pretty clear about that in the link I cited. And since then of course we have seen a lot of sexual assaults, coming disproportionately from young men, immigrants, mainly coming from countries like Morocco.
The question I’d raise is, in the face of limited data, it’s important to be precise, and clear about sources. In your reply here, you are neither. Here are a few examples.
1. First, you don’t link to any sources whatsoever. Why is that important? Read the next items.
2. You say “n Cologne New Years 2015 1200 women were raped in mass and all suspects were N. African or Middle Eastern.”
Here is the real data: “During the 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations, there were mass sexual assaults, 24 alleged rapes, and numerous thefts in Germany, mainly in Cologne city center. There were similar incidents at the public celebrations in Hamburg, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart[26] and Bielefeld.[14][27][28] For all of Germany, police report that 1,200 women were sexually assaulted and estimate that at least 2,000 men were involved, acting in groups.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany
In other words, 24 in Cologne, not 1200. That figure is for all of Germany. Is that far too many? Absolutely. But you do no one any good by overstating the number by a factor of 50, and not giving a citation.
3. You cite Stephen Halbrook as an authority. Certainly any scholar’s work deserves to be examined on its merits, but it’s also relevant to ask about any conflicts of interest. He is known for his litigation in support of the NRA. Here is what some others have to say about Halbrook:
“In a 2004 issue of the Fordham Law Review, legal scholar Bernard Harcourt said Halbrook “perhaps rightly” could say that he made the first scholarly analysis of his Nazi-gun-registration subject, but as a gun-rights litigator, not as a historian.[4]:669–670 Harcourt called on historians for more research and serious scholarship on Nazi gun laws. “Apparently,” Harcourt wrote, “the historians have paid scant attention to the history of firearms regulation in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.”[4]:679–680 According to Harcourt, “Nazis were intent on killing Jewish persons and used the gun laws and regulations to further the genocide,”[4]:676 but the disarming and killing of Jews was unconnected with Nazi gun control policy, and it is “absurd to even try to characterize this as either pro- or anti-gun control.” If he had to choose, Harcourt said, the Nazi regime was pro-gun compared with the Weimar Republic that preceded it.[4]:671,677 He says that gun rights advocates disagree about the relationship between Nazi gun control and the Holocaust, with many distancing themselves from the idea. Political scientist Robert Spitzer said (in the same law review as Harcourt, who stated the same thing) the quality of Halbrook’s historical research is poor.[6] In reference to Halbrook’s theory that gun control leads to authoritarian regimes, Spitzer says that “actual cases of nation-building and regime change, including but not limited to Germany, if anything support the opposite position.”
And,
“In the encyclopedic 2012 book, Guns in American Society, Holocaust scholar Michael Bryant says Halbrook, LaPierre, Zelman, Dave Kopel, and others’ “use of history has selected factual inaccuracies, and their methodology can be questioned.”[6]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_theory
Professor Alan Steinweis, a Holocaust scholar, has this to say about your and Halbook’s theory that the Nazis’ stripping of Jews of their guns:
“I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor. Neither does gun control figure in the collective historical memory of any group that was targeted by the Nazi regime, be they Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, gay people or Poles. It is simply a nonissue.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/opinion/ben-carson-is-wrong-on-guns-and-the-holocaust.html
4. Nigel Farage is worth your time to look up. Here’s a start for you:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage-accused-of-grossly-irresponsible-scaremongering-after-labelling-london-museum-crash-a-a3653366.html
He was the leader of Britain’s UKIP, and a key driver of the Brexit campaign in the UK. Most recently, he joined Steve Bannon in Alabama to support Roy Moore in a rally for Moore’s senate campaign.
5. You say “In 2015 German minister of Justice Heike Maas noted only 1/10 of rapes are reported.”
This is a systemic problem with rape in all countries. However, you might look at another report from Germany, which suggests that German nationals are only 18% likely to be accused of rape, whereas foreigners are 44% likely to be reported. In other words, that 10% figure is not uniform across the cases of suspects.
Source: http://www.dw.com/en/why-are-sexual-assaults-in-bavaria-on-the-rise/a-40613027
6. You say “Denmark in 2016 published research…” Really? Somehow I doubt that “Denmark” was the author of any published research. But in case I’m wrong about that – where was it published?
7. Finally, if you’re going to assert that people are “marxist” even if they don’t know it, then you’re in pure conjecture-land – UNLESS you can cite something other than your own opinion to support it.
Where is your data? These are incendiary issues, and anecdotal citations, some of them provably wrong, and all of them without citations, is not the way to make them less incendiary.
Everything I listed is easily verifiable if you search the names, dates, countries. Also Wikipedia is a source no professor would respect in a research paper.
Again you avoid actually addressing my central argument.
I tried to verify one of your claims, and it was wrong. It’s now up to you to prove your claims (and really, it always was, as they are extraordinary claims). The Wikipedia quote I showed you has three separate citations explaining how your claim was wrong.
If the details of your argument are wrong, then your central argument is probably wrong, too, or at the very least, unsupported.
Like Chris, I also disproved one of your “citations,” and cast doubt on a few others. If you can’t be trusted even to get your own facts right, while also refusing to offer links, why should any of your claims be trusted?
These experts can speculate all they want on whether not disarming Jews would have saved Jewish lives, and I’d be very surprised if these scholars didn’t have anti-gun sentiments. I can’t help but think about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where a couple hundred desperate Jews decided to go out fighting, and kept a numerically-superior and much better armed Wehrmacht at bay for almost a month, inflicting heavy casualties. They knew they were going to die, but they died on their feet, like men, fighting, thanks to a few rifles and pistols they managed to smuggle in. What a tremendous gift those handful of guns were.
We’ve been fighting an insurgency against half-starved, poorly-equipped goat-herders since 9-11, and it’s pretty certain that, despite all of our shock, awe, and technology, we’re going to leave there with our tail between our legs. This is exactly the sort of thing our founders had in mind when they drafted the 2nd amendment to the Bill of RIGHTS.
Mrs. Q, what on earth is your source for those rape stats? Many of them are hard to believe; this one in particular does not pass the smell test:
Police in Norway reported in 2009 “all reported rapes” were from immigrants.
Apparently, it was one police spokesperson who said this, and he was wrong:
In a news report in 2010, a spokesperson for the Oslo Police Department stated that every case of assault rapes in Oslo in the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 was committed by a non-Western immigrant.[28] This picture has later been nuanced, as only perpetrators in the solved cases were counted, and 4 of the victims in the 16 unsolved cases described the perpetrator as being of White (not necessarily Norwegian) ethnicity.[29] The report shows that, of 131 individuals charged with the 152 rapes reported in 2010, in which the perpetrator could be identified, 19,8% African, 14,5% Middle Eastern, 11,5% Asian, 2.3% from the Americas, 13,7% European countries, and 38,2% were of Norwegian origin.[30] In the cases of “assault rape”, i.e. rape aggravated by physical violence, a category that included 6 of the 152 cases and 5 of the 131 identified individuals, the 5 identified individuals were of African, Middle Eastern or Asian origin. In the cases of assault rape where the individual responsible was not identified and the police relied on the description provided by the victim, “8 of the perpetrators were African / dark-skinned appearance, 4 were Western / light / Nordic and 4 had an Asian appearance”. The report states that statistical differences in criminal behavior among ethnics vanishes when figures are controlled for socio-economic circumstances.[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Norway#Sexual_crimes
I would not be surprised to find many of the other stats in your comment are exaggerated as well.
Sadly modern education says little about the atrocities of Marxism (could it be because of Common Core?)
No, that could not be. Common Core does not mandate what topics must be taught, or how they must be taught; it only mandates what skills students must be taught over the course of a school year.
Here is a link to the Common Core standards on History:
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RH/6-8/
I see nothing in there that says “leave out the atrocities of Marxism.” You also seem to confuse Marxism and Communism throughout your comment; while Communism was inspired by Marxism, so is basically every progressive movement since the 20th century; no less than Martin Luther King, Jr. said his philosophy was a balance of capitalism and Marxism.
In fact many of these folks don’t know Hitler was a socialist in spite of the word being in the party name.
“It’s in the name” is not a good argument, unless you believe that North Korea really is a democratic people’s republic. The National Socialists actually targeted the socialist parties that already existed…”First they came for the socialists” is literally the first line of the Martin Neimoller poem. I’m unaware of any modern, respected historian who believes “socialist” was an accurate descriptor of the Nazis.
“The National Socialists actually targeted the socialist parties that already existed”,
Because the socialists wanted socialism for everybody. The nazis only wanted it for ethnic Germans (hence the national part of national-socialism)…
The arguments are tiresome, both the socialists and national socialists could not realize their aims without totalitarian regimes where government ultimately controlled industry and the private lives of the people.
Oh please.
In no way, shape or form did the Nazis consider themselves socialist. For a thorough debunking of this myth (and an explanation for the continued fascination with this myth on the Right), see:
https://www.thoughtco.com/was-adolf-hitler-a-socialist-1221367
see:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hitler-and-the-socialist-dream-1186455.html
https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian
Your article claims socialism is built around class. No it isn’t. It’s built around the destruction of class…
Your article can’t even get that fundamental right. The nazis, wanted to eliminate class too, they just didn’t want to achieve that the way the Bolsheviks did: outright killing the propertied class.
By that logic, both Hitler and Jesus were socialists.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Of course my comment about “It’s built around the destruction of class” isn’t the complete definition. But there is plenty of overlap between naziism in practice and socialism in practice to demonstrate the two are essentially the same economically, with some differences in implementation and the notable difference: naziism is for one ethnicity.
There’s scant to zero overlap between Jesus’ apolitical philosophy of voluntary magnanimity and socialism.
Two can play at cherry-picking definition games. Just for fun, read these:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/jesus-was-a-socialist_b_13854296.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism
https://rcg.org/realtruth/articles/140610-007.html
http://www.angelfire.com/cellophanetales/jesusthesocialist.html
Just for fun, no Jesus was not, he never advanced a political worldview let alone a belief that government should impose heavy taxation and redistribution.
Just for serious, I’m not going down this digression. I assume you acknowledge that national socialism at its heart is socialism. Just an ethnically exclusive form of it.
Texagg, I agree let’s not go down this path. Though just for the record, I do not agree with you on this point.
This is a fantastic statement in support of self autonomy and self sufficiency. Another well written comment that I hope reaches a wide audience.
If I may, as a foreign observer, it seems to me that there are two divided groups in your United States. One loves their country and the ideals it was founded upon. The other loves the State and whatever modern government can do for them, demanding ever more.
When you lose sight of those originating ideals, which are uniquely American, or you actively turn against them, it makes you self loathing as a culture. If you were not aware of these ideals it makes you stupid and easily lead down a path of promises where self reliance is denigrated and you expect and therefore need someone else to take care of you.
Well said.
If this time it will be different,and we need to try over and over, I want to know how many times? Five, ten, a hundred, name a number. I find it harder to accept and justify the first couple chances. That’s saying the colateral damage on the tenth failure, means less to you than the one who’s failed none times. This reminded me of those quotes about forgetting history leading to repeating it, and a colaterl about the insanity of doing the same thing and expecting any different. We all have limited time and I really dislike wasted time and energy due to willful blindness.
Q: “How many people have to die before we start having a conversation about gun control?”
A: How about when gun death stats reach 1/10th of democide stats?
THIS
Great comment, Mrs Q!!!
I’m assuming that Mrs. Q is referencing the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee, not the more recent Wounded Knee Incident in which 2 Indians were killed. Still, her point is well taken: Disarm a vulnerable group and they are an easy target for oppression and even genocide. The Jews who were armed during the Warsaw Uprising put up quite a fight considering the limited number of handguns and rifles they had.
On this point we can all probably agree: “disarm a vulnerable group and they are an easy target for oppression and even genocide.”
The problem comes in drawing analogies. I absolutely reject the inference connecting (both) Wounded Knee instances with today’s situation of the paranoid far-right bunker mentality of a (very) few. The US citizenry is in no way anywhere near the situation of the Indians in those instances. This is gross scare-mongering.
If you want to draw that analogy further, how about extending it to the Palestinians on the West Bank? To North Korea? Both of those populations are equally adamant about not wanting to be disarmed; and yet our foreign policy consistently (and foolishly) says things like, “The only thing they understand is the threat of overwhelming power.”
What all those situations have in common is the futility of threatening populations with force, or even genocide. What those situations do NOT have in common with the US citizenry and the Second Amendment should be blatantly obvious: there is no occupying force, there is no President issuing nuclear threats, there is no military threat against our citizenry.
I recognize that there are a bunch of people out there who mutter darkly about the slippery slope connecting us to genocide being save only by the unfettered right to own guns. I just think it is far, far out there to suggest such connections. And on this, I’m in the vast majority of the US population.
Good guy / Bad guy dichotomy.
The North Koreans are our ENEMY. The Palestinians have consistently behaved as enemies to an ally of ours. One group has been technically at war with us for the better part of a century, the other group maintains a de facto warlike attitude towards Israel. You don’t compare our enemies to our citizens (even though Obama did).
It may be far-fetched today, but what about, let’s just say 100 years after abolishing the 2A? A lot can happen to the political landscape of a nation in that amount of time, and once that right is done away with, we would never, ever get it back.
“once that right is done away with, we would never, ever get it back.”
True. Also true about women’s suffrage and slavery. Though not true about Prohibition, to be fair.
“You don’t compare our enemies to our citizens (even though Obama did).”
Come on, Tex, play fair. I didn’t make that comparison, you did. I only cited a parallel circumstance. For you to re-state an observation and call it a “comparison” is simply cheap sleight-of-hand argumentation.