Gun control Propaganda Examined

A facebook reply I decided to post here instead of with the liberal friend.

https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/998315679844618240

I'm just looking at these and finding out if they're true. Some of them aren't very balanced.

1. No background check required for "private" sales: true, but that's actually pretty standard US-wide because the state has no way to effectively know when a private sale takes place. A friend can sell/give a gun to a friend (or anyone, really) and the only way the govt would know is if they were honest enough to report it themselves. There's a lot of selling of cars that also goes on without the govt being able to do much about it. Also, it's important to remember that "private" is a special legal term here and its opposite is NOT "public" like you might expect. Private just means someone too small fry to need a license to sell. I'm sure some abuse the category and avoid needing a license, but the vast majority of gun sales and sellers are licensed and ARE required to do background checks on all sales.

2. No licenses/registration for gun owners: true, but it's not clear to me how that would help or how such would be used. There are a great many deadly products we don't see fit to require a permit for or registration of in our society. The idea that guns are machines meant solely to kill may make it seem obvious that this puts them in a category that we should license for, but upon scrutiny, cars aren't and yet we do, so there must be some other criteria for licensure/registration. The theory under which most states don't require these measures is that a person has a right to defend self, family, and property with whatever tool deemed necessary and govt has no right to interfere. I'd like to hear thoughts.

3. No requirement to report lost/stolen guns: true, but again there's no requirement to report lost or stolen meds, vehicles, etc. which could be equally dangerous. By what principle would we create a special category for a self-defense tool?

4. No law limiting multiple purchase: true, but only a handful of states have such limits. TX does, however, have a reporting law in place on some kinds of guns so that someone attempting to buy more than one of that type within a short period sends a red flag to authorities.

5. No state license required for dealers: true but completely disingenuous. TX doesn't have one because it finds the FEDERAL one adequate, as do most states. All non-"private" gun sellers in TX must be licensed.

6. No law regulating possession or transfer of "assault" weapons: true but largely a question of style that doesn't engage the real question of substance. The features that make a weapon "assault" in the military sense are not available to the public by federal law. There are semi-automatic weapons available which mimic the military styles, but when you ban them by substantive feature rather than look, you end up with mostly the current federal ban anyway.

7. No requirement to keep sales and background check records: see #5. Federal law already requires no-"private" sellers to keep records of sales and background checks indefinitely.

8. Somebody is killed with a gun every 8 hours in TX: I didn't check this one, but I'm guessing that they included suicides and accidents to pad this statistic. For an apples to apples comparison in which we are asking about violent acts perpetrated upon others, the statistic is much lower. For some comparison, however, the rate of homicide by gun in Chicago (which is exclusively urban, which introduces another variable, and can't also control all the gun laws in surrounding states/localities, so not strictly apples to apples either, but still), with a much stricter approach to gun laws, is orders of magnitude higher per capita.

Thank you for the chance to inform myself, read a few things from sources I don't politically agree with, and gain a better understanding of the details of the issue at hand. My conclusion from all this is that there are many ideas for how to regulate gun ownership better that deserve discussion. I'm not persuaded that most of these measures would be anything more than an inconvenience to law-abiding people and would tend to deny the right they would otherwise have to the tool of self-defense they find suits their conditions unmolested by arbitrary govt impositions. However, I'm open to discussion on them.

On the other hand, as a scholar of rhetoric, it's hard for me not to soundly condemn this video. The purpose of its litany of compact statements is to depict TX as a place of wanton violence, the wild west, where lawmakers don't take any obvious measures to restrain the tools of violence. But each point is either a careful distortion to hide the full context, a primrose path to a conclusion that wouldn't really solve what it claims, or a baseless apples to oranges comparison. My experience with TX is that it's a place full of love, life, and many acts of kindness with excellent educators, legislators, and law enforcement authorities working to keep a criminal minority from disturbing the civilized peace that the vast majority experiences, who base their daily routines on an expectation that it will continue.