Ignorance and lack of logic underlie Progs’ Second Amendment position

A Proggie-run first aid class reveals the shocking level of ignorance, innumeracy, and illogical thinking behind their anti-Second Amendment stance.

Second Amendment first aidI’ve always liked the Boy Scouts’ motto: “Be Prepared.” Because I’ve been fortunate enough that I seldom have to put my first aid techniques into use, I always forget them, so my part of being prepared is to take a refresher class every four or five years. Even if my memory were better, I’d still take the classes because the protocols constantly change, as is the case with CPR. (Nowadays, you need to remember your BeeGees.“)

In terms of first aid, this class was time well spent. I’m now up to date on conducting a basic examination on a conscious or unconscious person, using pressure or tourniquets to stop bleeding, making slings out of anything handy, doing CPR, and using an AED. As always, I hope that I go several years without having to put into use the skills I learned.

But all was not perfect in this friendly and helpful class. The subject of gun violence came up several times and both the teachers (MDs, RNs, and EMTS) and the students showed really shocking ignorance and a complete lack of logical — and perhaps moral — thinking on the subject of guns and death in America.

My past California-based classes have always revolved around specific emergency scenarios: earthquakes, fires, car accidents, and every day emergencies, ranging from heart attacks, to drowning, to accidental knife wounds. This time, though, the teachers said that the single most important emergency we can prepare for is a mass shooting, as well as generalized shootings, because guns are the primary danger facing us.

“When was the last school shooting?” a teacher asked, clearly expecting people to talk about the Valentine’s Day mass murder in Broward County Florida. But this is Marin and the class knew better.

“Yesterday, in Michigan. Two died.”

“That’s right,” said the teacher. “How many people are killed every day in America with guns?”

A moment of silence, before someone called out her best guess.

“2,000.”

“No,” said the teacher, “ninety. Ninety people die every day.”

How does one begin to unpack all the fallacies, innumeracy, and illogical thinking in the above interactions?

Fallacy #1: For a first aid class, mass shootings are currently the most important thing to need to prepare for.

The claim that our greatest risk in Marin comes from guns is so very wrong and to worry about our schools getting shot up is so paranoid. There are two things going on here, one of which is the likelihood of an event occurring and the other is the magnitude of the event should it occur.

Take earthquakes, for example. It is true that earthquakes happen infrequently even here in California, so maybe we’re being overly cautious preparing for one. But the thing is that we know, we absolutely know that a big one will hit here in Northern California, and when it does, it will make a mass murder look like small potatoes. If we’re preparing for unlikely, but possible events, we should definitely be preparing for that earthquake — although it’s good to know that the same skills will apply to other unforeseen events, including that unlikely mass shooting.

And how unlikely is a mass shooting? It turns out, according to a recent study from a source Proggies should find reputable (Northeastern University), that overall American schools are safer than they’ve been in the past few decades:

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.

“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

It’s not just that mass murders at school are decreasing. All violent crime has been decreasing over the past 25 years — subject, of course, to the bump that can be tied directly to the Black Lives Matter movement causing police to retreat from America’s most violent communities. (There may also be a legalized marijuana bump in crime.)

Fallacy #2: That the shooting in Michigan constituted a “school shooting,” and that all shootings at schools are the same animals.

The double murder in Michigan a few days ago took place on school grounds, but it wasn’t a “school shooting” as that term is understood. Instead, it was a domestic murder: a young man murdered his parents, both of whom happened to be on school property at the time.

There is a big difference between a gang shootout that ends up taking place on school property and the situation when a fatherless young man on prescription drugs, who’s been a source of fear for those around him even as the government does nothing, comes to school determined to emulate his Columbine heroes. (And yes, there’s absolutely no question that these young mass murderers find inspiration in past murders and aim to match or outdo past carnage.)

Likewise, these evil young losers are a different animal from the disgruntled husband who hunts his wife down at her school workplace to kill her. Pretending they’re all the same leaves us less capable than ever of addressing the central evil.

I could write a whole post about ways to address the mass murdering teenager, none of which are applicable to the domestic or gang disputes that end up on school property (often after hours). The former requires addressing cultural factors, such as fatherlessness, the over-prescription of psychotropic drugs to troubled teens, the dangers of social media, copycat killings, and government institutions failing over and over and over to stop known ticking time bombs. Guns are the least of the problem. I’ll get to crime statistics in a minute, but think about this: There are around 270,000,000 guns in America, but only 11,000 were used in crimes last year. The vast number by far, are used for creation, for self-defense, or not at all.

Fallacy #3 The number of people killed daily with guns is heinously high.

In a perfect world, even one murder is one murder too many. Each murder is a tragedy and that’s true even when a pack of blood-soaked gang-bangers or MS-13 members wipe each other out. Once upon a time, each was an innocent baby whose future could have been very different. The mere fact that they were on that path to murder is the tragedy of a lost soul.

Having said that, the reality is that 90 gun-based murders every day in a country the size of the United States is nothing. America’s population is roughly 326,000,000. Last year, according to the FBI’s crime statistics, a total of 11,004 people were murdered with guns. That’s 0.0033% of the population — which is a statistically insignificant number. The real tragedy of these numbers is where they cluster.

I would be very surprised if affluent, mostly pale-skinned Marin County (population approximately 260,000 people) has an average of one gun murder per year, and that’s true even taking into account that we have two communities — Marin City and the Canal District — that are not lily-white, that are poor, and that have all the pathologies of poverty.

It’s different when you head into a Democrat-run black inner city neighborhood. Despite being only around 13% of the population, in 2016 blacks were 52% of America’s murder victims (7,881 blacks were murdered out of a total of 15,070 murder victims in America). In the same year, blacks (again, at only 13% of the total population) made up 35% of known murderers. And of course, those murderous blacks were mostly killing other blacks.

This is not intended to be a racist stereotype about blacks being murderers. Instead, it is to say that American blacks in Democrat-run ghettos are living at Ground Zero for all the toxic behaviors we know lead to murderous men (murderers are usually men).

In Marin, white Progressives routinely live out the magical behaviors: get educated, get a job, get married, have children, stay together for the children. The tragedy of the condescending racism underlying Progressivism is that these same people made successful through those life choices refuse to urge the same behaviors on America’s most damaged communities because doing so is racist, colonialist, microaggressive, and whatever other crap the PC crowd thinks up. Not only will they not preach what they practice, they relentlessly push policies on black Americans — welfare, denying armed self-defense to those in ghettos trying to live a decent life, refusing to stand in judgment on teenage single motherhood, turning schools into PC factories that have little interest in actual education — that have created a septic situation of poverty-stricken single motherhood, promiscuous girls, and murderous boys.

We are guilty of killing blacks in America, but ironically its done, at least ostensibly, in the name of love, not in the name of racist hatred. We’ve created black auto-genocide.

What Proggies are doing, though, is even worse than stripping blacks of a functional culture, and leaving them trapped in urban decay to prey on each other. Please remember what the instructor told our little class; namely, that there are 90 murders per day in America. And remember please what I added, which is that these murders are disproportionately committed by blacks on blacks.

That’s not the real scourge in the African-American community. Every day in America, approximately 21 black people illegally kill each other. And every day in America, 1,876 black babies are legally aborted.

The tragedy of Progressivism is that I am absolutely certain that every single person in that first aid class but for me heartily approves of abortion and will always vote a straight abortion ticket (by which I mean that, as between two candidates, the deciding factor will always be abortion). The person in the class who called out “2,000 per day” when asked about gun murders was an uninformed innumerate. Ironically, though, she came remarkably close to the real killing rate in America.

I shouldn’t chide her too much, though. Ms. Innumerate was responding to something that’s a unique problem of the early 21st century, which is the way in which the media has nationalized shooting. In a pre-internet era, and before the day of frantic, anti-Second Amendment reporting, a shooting in Michigan, whether in a school, hospital, or funeral parlor, would not have been news in Marin County. I doubt it would even have made the back pages of the local newspaper.

Nowadays, though, thanks to the internet and our savagely anti-Second Amendment media, every shooting makes the national and local news feed. That’s why someone living in exceptionally crime-free Marin, rather than having an appropriate sense of safety, thinks 2,000 people are getting killed with guns every day. No wonder Proggies are in a blind panic. Because they’re innumerates, they genuinely don’t understand the actual risks of gun violence in America. The reality is that, if you’re not a black male in a Democrat-run inner city, or a black child of any sex in the womb, you’re pretty safe.

Fallacy #4: This fallacy was an unspoken one, but was still a clear underlying thread considering the anti-Second Amendment temperature in the room. It’s the belief that we ordinary Americans must be trained to deal with injuries or illness, because it will always take more than five minutes (often many more than five minutes) before paramedics will show up — but that we ordinary Americans cannot be equipped to deal with violent, deadly people, despite the fact that it will always take more than five minutes (often many more than five minutes) before police will show up.

Throughout the class, every time the teachers referred to paramedics and firefighters as “first responders,” I wanted to holler out, “No! The whole point of this class is that, whether it’s an earthquake or a heart attack or a mass shooting, we’re the first responders. It’s up to us to do what we can to staunch the bleeding and splint the bones while waiting however long it takes for a trained responder to appear on the scene. And if this is true for repairing damage, why in the world isn’t it true for preventing damage? The vast majority of Americans, even if they’re obnoxious or even vaguely larcenous, are not murderous, and they should outnumber the bad guys with our firepower. After all, we are the true first responders.”

As matters now stand, we don’t teach our kids to do anything but to shelter in place — or, as I say, to turn themselves into the ducks in a shooting gallery. I’ve repeatedly told my kids that they should be positioned on either side of the door and that, when the shooter walks in, they should throw at him everything they have: backpacks, books, canned drinks, water bottles, pencils, every damn bit of equipment in a chemistry lab, anything. Indeed, I read a rather clever idea from someone who is trying to think out of the box when it comes to classroom self-defense:

One of the reasons I cannot argue politics in Marin, aside from the fact that I’m more of sniper than an in-your-face debater, is that the level of factual ignorance and logical thinking is so profound that you can never get to the real issue. How can you educate people about the Second Amendment when they think guns are the greatest risk in Marin, that 2,000 people a day get killed with guns, and that the best way to deal with an active shooter is to make yourself a frozen target in a gun-free zone?

We don’t even speak the same language. And you most certainly can’t debate social policy, as opposed to gun policy, with people who will instantly label you a racist hater if you point out that shooting in America is a black problem and, moreover, that we don’t address this problem by piling pathologies on that beleaguered community.

I also don’t think I’ll ever score any points if I made them aware of the fact that the only time they get upset about gun crime is when the guns invade their lily-white communities. Maybe it’s just me, but that strikes me as pretty racist right out of the box.

*****

What Business Thinks