Nicholas Kristof is a liberal journalist writing for the New York Times. On 17 January 2016, he published an op-ed piece titled: “Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals”.
Below are four letters to the editor taking Mr. Kristof to task over his “Facts” because they don’t support the Liberal message. My comments follow each letter. Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Nicholas Kristof may be just a bit naïve when he argues that our failure to address gun violence is partly because liberals antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association.
I have been a student of and an advocate for the sensible regulation of firearms since 1968, when I served as assistant to the chairman of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the commission conducted a landmark study of gun ownership and gun violence.
I learned, as has everyone who has seriously worked to solve the gun problem, that the National Rifle Association’s strategy has always been and always will be “give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.” The N.R.A. has consistently reacted with full force to even the most modest proposals, claiming that any regulation will result in the confiscation of all firearms.
The N.R.A. doesn’t have to convince gun owners that its policies and actions are right; it just has to keep writing checks to members of Congress.
RON WOLK Warwick, R.I.
- California is the poster child for “Give them and inch and they’ll take a mile”. Once a gun law is passed, they immediately start work on a new, stricter law. And is California any safer?
- The big push now is for Universal Background Checks which will not work without 100% firearms registration, the first step to confiscation.
- How come it is evil for the NRA which represents 5 million gun owners to contribute to politicians, but okay for gun control fanatic Michael Bloomberg, who represents himself, to contribute to politicians?
To the Editor:
Nicholas Kristof suggests that the left drop the sanctimony and the right drop the obstructionism in moving toward intelligent approaches to gun violence. One obstacle is the legitimate fear that any new regulation is one more step toward confiscation.
Let’s make a trade. Regulate guns like cars, including the equivalent of a road test and safety education, with restrictions tailored to keep guns from high-risk people. For the other side of the trade, make licensing easy, routine and inexpensive.
Drop the features intended to make the licensing process an obstacle course. Drop assault rifle restrictions based on nothing more than threatening appearance. Drop the discretion that in practice limits pistol carry permits in New York City to retired police officers, security guards, diamond dealers and celebrities.
Finally, lock in some protection for gun owners by adding a beefed-up version of the Second Amendment to state constitutions.
PAUL POSNER New York
- The right to firearms ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution. The right to drive on public roads isn’t.
- Some State governments restrict firearms even in your home; but in those same States you can drive a car on your own property without a license or drivers test. So should there be no firearms restrictions when on your own property like the car?
- Washington DC already has an intense testing and licensing process for firearms ownership. The process takes four to five months and cost a little under $500. The result, Washington DC leads the country in violent crimes. It’s insane to think a criminal would attempt go through this process.
- How can adding the equivalent of a road test and safety education make buying a firearm easy, routine and inexpensive?
- Only Liberal States (New York, New Jersey, California, etc.) intentionally make buying a firearm an obstacle course.
- Have to agree with his comments on assault rifles and concealed carry permits in New York.
- The Second Amendment does not need to be “beefed up”. It’s hard to misinterpret “shall not be infringed”. If the government tried to “beef up” the Second Amendment, it would end up 100 pages long, trying to cover every possible situation and be open to interpretation.
To the Editor:
To equate both sides in the gun debate — claiming that one side, the liberals, is sanctimonious while the other, the gun advocates, is obstructionist — misses the political reality.
Compromise on the simplest of gun rulings cannot occur because its advocates will be targeted and lose their seats in Congress. The gun lobby is ferocious. I know that because my husband, a Democrat, once ran for Congress and the pro-gun mailings came daily without cease.
Closing loopholes doesn’t solve the problem of the base that controls the Republican Party. Using the words “gun safety” instead of “gun control” is not going to change that.
Let’s hope that a pivotal election is coming and that we can get back to the negotiating table. One side is more than willing to negotiate. The other isn’t.
JANE DODD McKinney, Tex.
- If the gun lobby is so “ferocious”, how do any Democrats get elected? How did Barack Obama get elected, twice? I think there may have been other reason her husband wasn’t elected.
- There’s no need to compromise or negotiate on stupid ideas that won’t work. Bill Clinton’s Assault Weapon Ban did nothing to reduce crime. Maryland recently repealed its ballistics imaging program after 15 years and $5 million because it never solved a single crime. Canada repealed its gun registration law after 14 years and a cost of $2.7 billion, because it has never solved or prevented a single crime. Remember the ban on “Saturday Night Specials”? It didn’t reduce crime. All that did was remove inexpensive guns from stores making it impossible for the poorest of Americans to protect themselves.
To the Editor:
Nicholas Kristof’s apologia for gun ownership doesn’t address one reason people like me want more gun control, not just more gun safety. Allowing people to walk around with guns infringes on my freedom: the freedom not to live in fear of gun-toting hotheads who turn a simple unpleasant encounter with another person into a deadly one, like a man shooting someone in a movie theater in Florida in 2014 because the young man threw what turned out to be popcorn at him.
Or another man shooting some children in a parking lot because their music was too loud. Or a neighborhood-watch volunteer fatally shooting a black teenager walking in his neighborhood at night, as in the Trayvon Martin case.
And it infringes on my freedom not to have gun-toting vigilantes take over my federal lands. Sound familiar? Here’s the true inconvenient fact: the gun craze erodes our freedom to live without fear in a way crime statistics will never capture.
SHELLY B. KULWIN Chicago
- There is no constitutional right to not live in fear. There is no constitutional right to police protection. However, there is a constitutional right to protect yourself.
- In every State that passed concealed carry permit laws, Liberals predicted beforehand that it would lead to daily shootouts by gun-toting hotheads over things like parking spaces or fender-bender accidents. It never happened.
- She lives in fear of gun-toting hotheads, but not a word about the drug dealers and gangs that run parts of Chicago.
- The shooter in the Florida movie theater shooting was a retired police officer who is not required to have a concealed carry permit or background check. Are we going to disarm all retired police officers?
- George Zimmerman did not just shoot Trayvon Martin as he walked down the street. He shot him after he was physically assaulted by Martin. Remember, Zimmerman was found not guilty. Or does that matter?
- How is the occupation of Federal land in Oregon affecting your freedom in Chicago? I would think the murder rate in Chicago would affect your freedom more. Like maybe your freedom to walk the streets safely
- Law-abiding citizens with guns makes you live in fear but living in a city that had 14 killed and 82 wounded in a single weekend last summer doesn’t.
Take the time to read Kristof’s original Op-ed: Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals
You have to applaud Mr. Kristol for stating facts that Liberals have suppressed and ignored for years, but are common knowledge to 2nd Amendment supporters:
- The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993.
- In that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half. (More guns, less crime)
- That the assault weapon ban had no effect on crime.
- That assault weapons are rarely used to commit crimes.
- That crime is still decreasing despite 13 million concealed carry permit holders on the loose.
Also have to agree with Mr. Kristof’s statement that the Liberals that are writing these gun laws are “Gun ignorant”.
- New York passed a law limiting magazine capacity to seven rounds without knowing seven round magazines are available for only a small fraction of the handguns made. Their fix was to only load seven rounds into your 15 round magazines.
- A Liberal Colorado politician believed once you fire all of the rounds from your 30 round AR-15 magazine, you throw it away causing the supply of “high capacity” magazines to eventually dry up.
- Somehow a rifle with a threaded barrel or a bayonet stud or a folding stock is more deadly than one without these features.
- The ultimate ignorance of Liberal gun law writers is than criminals will obey these laws. They can only be prosecuted after they break the law, but rarely are.
As all Liberals do, Mr. Kristof includes suicides in his total of yearly deaths due to gun violence. Suicide is a choice, not unwanted violence perpetrated by another person. Does anybody really believe a person bent on suicide will change their mind because they can’t buy a gun? When California instituted a ten day waiting period to buy a guy, there was a measurable drop in suicide deaths by gun. However, the overall suicide death rate stayed the same. They just chose a different method. Suicide deaths should not be included in gun violence statistics.
I always questions surveys that say a majority of Americans and even NRA members want gun regulation because more regulation always solves problems. Survey questions can be crafted to imply things that are not true or conceal certain details; like universal background checks won’t work without universal gun registration. So if you are for universal background checks, you must be for 100% firearms registration. Surveys often canvas very small groups of people, then state that the results represent the whole country.
Mr. Kristof plays the 40% gun sales without a background check card. The reliability of the original study that invented the 40% myth has been debunked many times. Mr. Kristof quotes a new study by Harvard University (no Liberal bias there) that he says confirms the 40% number. Reading from the webpage he cites, we find that the study is still in the early stages, but they moved up release of preliminary findings, probably to support statements being made by Liberal presidential candidates. New Harvard Study
From the website:
- Roughly 70 percent: Gun owners who purchased their most recent gun.
- Roughly 30 percent: Gun owners who did not purchase their most recent gun, instead obtaining it through a transfer (i.e., a gift, an inheritance, a swap between friends).
- Zeroing in on the population of gun buyers, about 34 percent did not go through a background check.
- Among the gun owners who got their firearms through a transfer, roughly two-thirds did not go through a background check.
Add it up, and it works out to:
- Roughly 60 percent: the share of gun owners surveyed who did go through a background check when they obtained (through sale or transfer) their latest gun.
- Roughly 40 percent: the share of gun owners who did not.
It’s amazing! The numbers work out to 40% again! Without seeing the raw data, questions used in the survey and the confusing terminology of transfer vs, purchase (per ATF, a purchase IS a transfer), they can make the above confusing bunch of numbers say just about anything.
Notice in the 30% above they’re talking about transfers as a gift, inheritance or swap between friends and no background check involved. In gifts or inheritance, the giver of the gun probably knows more about the person receiving the gun than an NICS check would ever show. In a swap, both people have a gun, both people end up with a gun, so nothing changed. In a sale between friends, which they didn’t mention, same parameters apply; they know each other’s backgrounds. Also, will this survey take into consideration that there are 13 million people walking around with a current background check in their pocket, their concealed carry permit?
Mr. Kristof speaks about murders by intimate partners, ”Prohibiting the subjects of restraining orders from possessing a gun reduces these murders by 10 percent”. Subjects of restraining orders are already prohibited from buying firearms; or is he saying subjects of restraining orders be given instant felon status and any firearms already in their possession be confiscated? This can only be accomplished by registration.
Mr. Kristof ignores the other side of murders by intimate partners, when a wife successfully defends herself against an abusive partner with a firearm.
“Eliminating handguns from American life would not decrease the total number of killings between spouses. Eliminating handguns would only change the sex of the victim by assuring that in virtually every case it would be the abused wife, not the murderous husband. After all, a gun is of far more use to the victim than her attacker. Husbands, due to size and strength advantages, do not need weapons to kill.” The War on Women
Finally, Mr. Kristof needs to be commended for his acknowledgement at the end of his article that guns don’t cause crime, they are used in crimes. He cites two programs being used successfully in the inner-city working with gangs to reduce violent crime and curb gun deaths. These programs support high-risk children and reduces delinquency and adult crime. Cure Violence Fast Track
In conclusion: Just because I say it’s so, doesn’t make it so. But you can read this internal memo produced by the National Institute of Justice, which is the research and development agency of Obama’s Justice Department. It confirms just about everything I just said. Justice Department Internal Memo
Other references:
Florida Movie Theater Shooting – Retired Police Officer Arrested
Assault Weapon Ban Did Not Reduce Crime
Maryland Gov. Hogan Signs Repeal of Failed Ballistics Imaging
Canada Repeals Gun Registration After 14 Years Because it Didn’t Work
Maybe it’s not the guns Video