Stunner: Three of the four women on "The View" support gun ownership for protection

Transcript

JENNY MCCARTHY: “People who would definitely disagree with the NFL ruling is a gun safety group that is trying to pressure Republican senators to support gun restriction laws for domestic abuser with a brutal PSA. Now, warning, get your kids out of the room. Because this is pretty disturbing. Take a look.”
[Everytown for Gun Safety Ad]
MCCARTHY: “Right? Effective, Lara?”
LARA SPENCER: “I would say highly effective. I mean so upsetting. Very strong message. And-“
SHERRI SHEPHERD: “For not getting a gun? For, for having gun safety?”
SPENCER: “Well right, but that’s, that’s the catch here.”
SHEPHERD: “Can I tell you, can I tell you the flipside of that. And that is absolutely so disturbing, but the flipside is when I was at my home and the alarm went off, and I ran to my son’s bedroom and Jeffery was crying, and I realized all I had to protect me and somebody coming around that corner was a daggone wicker trash basket. And I said to myself and “Everybody said to me, well get a bat.” You got one chance to use a bat and if they take it away. “Get pepper stray.” You know how close they got to get to you, if you use pepper spray? You got one of these? [makes a gesture like she’s holding a gun and makes a sound of cocking a gun] They’re not gonna come near you and your child! So when you’re standing there, and you don’t know how to protect your child ? Get a gun in your home!”
JULIET HUDDY: “Well I was gonna say when I was in my In my early twenties I had a stalker. A lot of people have that situation whether they are on TV or not on TV. And I remember feeling so vulnerable. And I just remember constantly going to sleep at night wishing that I could go over and grab my dad’s gun. You know? And keep it behind my bed. You know the knife? The butcher knife in the kitchen wasn’t gonna work for me. You know?”
SPENCER: “I have two kids. I would never want a gun in the house.”
MCCARTHY: “I’ve been in circumstances like Sherri where, you know people tried to break in and I’m with my son going, “I wish I had something to protect myself with.””
SHEPHERD: “I think that’s the thing when you’re standing there and if you’ve ever been in that situation where you have children and you go what do I have?”
MCCARTHY: “I used to think like you.”
SHEPHERD: “I used to think like you too. When you’re sitting there going-“
SPENCER: “What changed you?”
MCCARTHY: “That happened to me. They were trying to get in and I felt out of control and I had a child, and I was thinking to myself I wish I had a gun and I wish, you know, I have it very well protected now. There’s no way. Locked up.”
SHEPHERD: “Locked up, go to the gun range, know how to use it. There was a man who broke into a woman’s house. She was up in the attic. She had her two twins. He, as soon as he put his face in the attic she shot him. I betcha he’ll never try to break into that woman’s house again.”
MCCARTHY: “Long story short, don’t come at me and Sherri’s house!”  

Is gun ownership declining?: Yet more evidence that it is increasing

The General Social Survey is taken as evidence that despite gun sales soaring, the percent of the population owning guns has fallen.  As I have noted previously, this claim is inconsistent with other surveys and it is also inconsistent with the huge increase in the number of concealed handgun permits.  Well, it turns out that this is also inconsistent with the issuance of FOID cards in Illinois.

The issue of gun permits surfaced briefly in the Illinois governor’s race, when a candidate claimed that the Illinois State Police had a backlog of 75,000 gun-owner’s ID applications under Gov. Pat Quinn, forcing hunters to miss entire hunting seasons. 

The real number isn’t that high — just 49,000, according to state police. But those numbers belie a bigger headache awaiting the state’s bureaucracy now that lawmakers have set in motion a process to facilitate the carrying of concealed weapons in public, as mandated by a federal court order. 

Whereas a few years ago, 1.2 million Illinoisans held Firearm Owners Identification cards, the number has jumped to 1.6 million, state police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. Soon after the court decreed in December that Illinois couldn’t ban public carry anymore, demand for FOID cards jumped precipitously. In January alone, Bond reported, there were 61,000 FOID applications, nearly double the 31,000 in January 2012. . . .

Newest piece at Fox News: Are you a racist if you own a gun?

This is the way my newest piece at Fox News starts:

If you believe a new study, whites who own guns do so because they harbor racist feelings towards blacks. Indeed, in the study, four Australian and British psychologists also claim that racism is associated with opposition to gun control. 

The lead paragraph on this study in Friday's New York Daily News summed up the claim this way: "Racism and guns go together." 

So how is racism measured? Well, you are apparently “racist” if you don't agree that the legacy of slavery still has a great impact on how blacks are faring today. After all, slavery was abolished 158 years ago. 

Besides, blacks were doing relatively better on many dimensions, such as family stability, during the early 1960s than today.  

Of course, people might disagree with these points, but that doesn’t mean that they are racist. 

OK, so conservatives are more likely to own guns than liberals (big surprise there), and they are more likely to believe that people are more responsible for how well they do in life than something that happened to their ancestors over a century and a half ago. . . .

The rest of the piece is available at Fox News. 

One fifth of target shooters started within last five years

Gun control advocates point to Tom Smith's General Social Survey to claim that gun ownership is declining.  While that survey is pretty much all by itself and Smith long ago indicated to me that he strongly favors gun control, the GSS survey still gets a lot of attention.  There is lots of other evidence that indicates that there are problems with the survey.

1)  Concealed handgun permits have doubled since 2007.
2) "New target shooters--those who have taken up the sport in the last five years--are younger, female and urban when compared to established target shooters, or those participating for more than five years, according to a survey commissioned by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. . . . Younger: 66 percent of new shooters fall into the 18-to-34-year-old category compared to 31 percent in the same age category for established shooters. . . . The report shows that one-fifth of target shooters in America first started participating in the shooting sports between 2008 and 2012."

Firearms Manufactured, Exported and Imported to US

The big increases in production right before the Brady Act and the Assault Weapon Ban as well as when Obama was elected are quite noticeable.  The data for this and the other categories is available here.

Gun ownership in Japan

Despite the popular conception, guns are not entirely banned in Japan.

So how hard is it to own a gun in Germany?

With the public school shootings in Germany, it might be worth noting how hard it is to legally own a gun in that country.  New registration figures indicate that there are 1.4 million people who legally own guns in the country out of a population of 81.8 million people --- a 1.7 percent rate.  Of course, the illegal rate of gun ownership is presumably quite different.

Girls and guns graphic

Click on picture to make it larger.  I really wish that the references here were directly linked to the claims.  While some of these facts are obviously true (25% of permit holders in Michigan are women), there are others that I am more dubious about (e.g., 200 million firearms owned in US - I think that it is significantly higher) and still others that I would at least like to follow up (e.g., 83 percent increase in 2009 in women buying guns for personal protection).  Some numbers are pretty useless, such as the NSSF number that 74% of women in their classes by a handgun.  How many of them already owned a handgun or lived with someone else who did?  Finally, note that some numbers appear inconsistent with each other.  For example, 43% of women report household gun ownership, but the graphic below that shows that Democrats own guns at 23% and Republicans at 41%.  The implied average is clearly below that implied by the 43% (though it is possible that number is referring to personal ownership and not to household ownership).

Kim Kardashian, gun owner

The UK Daily Mail has an article on Kim Kardashian posting a picture of her stylish "Yves Saint Laurent pistol." You know that something is happening when gun ownership gets this fashionable.

Some were admiring: 'A YSL gun? Great for us chicks that love high fashion!' Other comments were critical: 'Oh that is setting a great example to the millions of teens around the world following you', said one follower on Twitter. . . .

Mai Martinez: One reporter who may end up saving a few lives

My research has convinced me that women benefit much more from owning guns then men do, and to the extent that news stories such as this encourage more women to own guns, particularly those in high crime rate places such as Chicago, to own guns, I think that there will be more lives saved.  A write up of this story at CBS Chicago can be found here.

Gun permits almost double over last 5 years in New South Wales Australia

Gun control groups in Australia aren't happy with this.

THE number of gun permits issued in NSW has almost doubled in the past five years, sparking calls for restrictions on how many guns people can acquire.
Figures from the NSW firearms registry show 111,792 permits to acquire a firearm were issued in 2009 and 2010. That was 29,427 more than for the previous two-year period. In 2005 and 2006, there were 65,997 permits issued.
The National Coalition for Gun Control, which obtained the latest figures under freedom-of-information laws, says that the increase is linked to the scrapping of a 28-day waiting period for a second or subsequent firearm. . . .

Eliminating Gun Control Produces Huge Drop in Crime

Interesting report from the Russian News and Information Agency:

Advocates of legalizing firearms in Russia often refer to the experience of neighboring Latvia: After the relevant law was adopted, street crime dropped by 80%, and the Latvian police force has been cut.

Thanks very much to Don Kates for sending this.