Dianne Feinstein is a well known politically liberal Senator. And, as fits the stereotype of a politically liberal politician, Feinstein is aggressively anti-gun. In fact, in the past, she has introduced legislation which was, basically, an attempt at gun confiscation in America. You know, the kind of thing that nutjobs like David Hogg advocate.
And anti-gunners make all kinds of wild claims about the kind of difference that these anti-gun and gun confiscation initiatives would make. The problem is that they don’t want to hear a dissenting viewpoint as to how effective their proposed laws would be, and how can you make an informed, rational decision unless you know the flip side? The answer is that you can’t.
So, in the interest of honest debate, here is the side of the gun confiscation debate that anti-gunners don’t want you to hear, and, to make our point, we’ll use a law which Dianne Feinstein herself proposed for our example. Paul Mason writes in an 2013 commentary on Feinstein’s proposed assault weapon ban:
I will also point out that in her efforts to prove that the 1994 “assault weapons ban” worked, she submits that since the ban expired back in 2004 – more than 8 years ago! – a grand total of “more than 350 people have been killed and more than 450 injured by these weapons“. Thats about 44 people per year. Thats well short of the 665 that her math promises us will be saved, and it makes that ban on hammers look like a full fledged campaign issue.
So, an assault weapon ban would “save” 44 people per year, but how many more people would die because they are denied the defensive use of those firearms? I suspect that you would see a net increase in murders under a complete assault weapons ban.
And this example just illustrates the problems with the statistics that anti-gunners use: they play fast and loose with the numbers, and they don’t give you any contrasting information to let you know what the actual difference would be (because you can’t know how many murders can be “attributed” to guns if you don’t know how many would have happened anyway using another weapon if the guns weren’t available).
The problem anti-gunners have is that they don’t look for the truth; they simply look for “data” to confirm their already existing bias.