Illinois' Idiotic Gun Ban -- A Statistical Look at the Truth

We rang in a new decade here in the People’s Republic of Illinois as an unarmed populous. We remain one of two states in the nation with no provision for ordinary citizens to legally carry a concealed weapon. A promising right to carry bill remains stuck in the Statehouse by anti gun gridlock despite a thundering endorsement by the Illinois Sheriff's Association while residents of the City of Chicago are legally prohibited from simply owning or possessing a firearm in their own home for protection. We might as well hang up a sign at the state line reading “steroid-jacked psychotic killers and rapists welcome… the people of Illinois are unarmed and at your mercy.”

Liberal wussys like to wring their hands and claim that guns create violence and cause people to kill. The truth is that some folks are simply nut jobs and will find ways to kill themselves and others with whatever means they have at their disposal. How many of these recent headlines do you remember?

• Mob armed with spears and arrows kill 35
• Seven killed and 10 injured in a knife attack
• Man stabs six cops to death at police station
• Eight pupils killed and 20 others injured in school knife rampage

You probably don’t remember them because most aren’t carried by the US media which is more interested in selectively picking stories to fit their distorted world view than with objectively reporting the facts in context.

Even when the story is too big to ignore, our media still forgets to point out the fact that guns can SAVE lives just as a single armed citizen in any of these circumstances could have stopped the perpetrator, preventing or mitigating the attacks and sparing dozens of people from death or injury.

In terms of nut-jobs, homicidal maniacs shouldn’t be our top fear anyway. It turns out that for every murder you read about in the morning paper, there are two suicides you never do – more than 33,000 in 2006 alone to be exact. Or to put it another way, the main thing to fear is to fear ourselves. Of course the anti-gunners will point out that a fair number of these suicides in the US were committed with a firearm -- which is true. But again, someone bent on killing themselves will find a way. In the UK for example where gun ownership is even more strictly curtailed, the majority of suicides are by hanging. Poisoning is second.

So let’s assume for a moment that psychologically stable, responsible adults aren’t going to either kill themselves or go on a murderous rampage with a machete, chainsaw, automobile, gas can, jar of arsenic, length of rope OR a firearm. What’s left for the gun-o-phobes to fear-monger about? There’s always the “accident” angle to fall back on. We’ve all heard the story of little Johnny showing off daddy’s gun to his toddler buddy and accidently blowing little Timmy’s head off. But are gun accidents really a material risk or have these legendary tales simply risen to the realm of urban myth along with kidney theft? To find out, I looked up actual mortality stats at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, and here’s what I discovered.

Take a fictitious city of 3-million called “Metroville” to represent a statistical sample roughly the size of Chicago. In 2006, how many children aged 0-14 would have died by an accidental firearm discharge? Exactly ZERO. In fact, you’d need a city closer to the size of New York to find even one instance of a child killed in a gun accident.

However, during the same year in Metroville, 20 kids died in car accidents (ban cars). Seven drowned (ban backyard swimming pools). And four died from flu or pneumonia (mandate forced vaccinations). Expanding to the entire population of Metroville in the same year, 8,237 people died from heart disease, 275 were accidentally poisoned, 208 died from falls, 134 from alcoholic liver disease, and 66 from intestinal infections.

Saying that owning a gun vastly increases the chance of shooting yourself is like saying that playing golf dramatically increases your odds of being struck by lightning. It’s factually true but completely meaningless since the odds are infinitesimal to begin with. Following this faulty logic, if you really want to save some lives ban artery-clogging Big Macs, insecticides, ladders, whiskey, and street food vendors instead. Or make bachelors degrees mandatory since high school dropouts are three-and-a-half times more likely to die in any given year than college graduates.

The world is a dangerous place, but not always in the ways we collectively have been led to believe. As someone who grew up around guns and was trained in their use by the Boy Scouts of America, and US Military, I’ve always had a healthy respect for their potential for misuse just like a power saw, kitchen knife, or automobile.

On the flip side, guns level the playing field and allow an elderly grandmother to protect herself from a drug-crazed maniac as Dan highlighted in a previous post. The anti-gunners like to cast themselves as enlightened souls who are advancing a peaceful and civilized society, but the opposite is true. Banning guns for responsible adults is like regressing back to a world of stone-aged primal savagery where the biggest and strongest take what they want from the weaker.

Congratulations Illinois. You remain a beacon of idiocy for the country to scorn.