Hat tip to The Blaze.
I must confess that I was unaware until today that the 1982 movie The Verdict was one of David Mamet's works That was a great movie.
Mamet is known for his direct and no-nonsense manner of writing and speech. Being at one time, in his own words, a "brain dead liberal", he abandoned that stagnant and intellect-numbing world and now is a firm Conservative and supporter of individual rights.
His remarks on gun control put most of us to shame for their brutal clarity. Noting that the Left wants us to believe that the conclusions of the debunked (Even by determined gun control advocates) Kellerman* study and others and accept that guns in homes make one less safe, he presents us with a logical argument that I wish I had made:
"The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals."
He does not let up with his brutally clear reasoning:
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant…
Will increased cosmetic measures make anyone safer? They, like all efforts at disarmament, will put the citizenry more at risk. Disarmament rests on the assumption that all people are good, and, basically, want the same things.
But if all people were basically good, why would we, increasingly, pass more and more elaborate laws?
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution."
"Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store?But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition."
His scathing remarks on wholesale taking from the producers/taxpayers and distributing at the pleasure of the government should not be left out:
"Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability:the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.' "
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*The 43:1 study, also called the Kellerman study, which was published in 1986 in the New England Journal of Medicine, was an atrocious example of false use and application of statistics. It was based on cherry-picked statistics in the Seattle area. It suffered from a complete lack of scientific responsibility. It was an attempt to get people to think that they, or someone else who was innocent, are 43 times more likely to be injured or killed by their own firearms than to wind up using it on an intruder. When later pressed about the manner in which he came up with his ratio, he then switched gears and threw out the 2.7:1 ratio - an equally false yet less outrageous number. To provide one example of how poorly the study was done, the only events that were counted as times when a person used a gun in defense of a home was when the bad guy got shot. This was the most pathetic portion of the finding since the vast majority of people who own firearms have, rightly so, no desire to kill people and show/produce/declare their weapon in order to cause the bad guy to leave in the overwhelming amount of circumstances. This fact alone completely threw off the entire average, even if the rest of the statistics had been honestly complied, which they were not. The awful and dishonest techniques used by Kellerman can be seen in part on the link below:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-tainted-public-health-model-of-gun-control/
"Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability:the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.' "
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*The 43:1 study, also called the Kellerman study, which was published in 1986 in the New England Journal of Medicine, was an atrocious example of false use and application of statistics. It was based on cherry-picked statistics in the Seattle area. It suffered from a complete lack of scientific responsibility. It was an attempt to get people to think that they, or someone else who was innocent, are 43 times more likely to be injured or killed by their own firearms than to wind up using it on an intruder. When later pressed about the manner in which he came up with his ratio, he then switched gears and threw out the 2.7:1 ratio - an equally false yet less outrageous number. To provide one example of how poorly the study was done, the only events that were counted as times when a person used a gun in defense of a home was when the bad guy got shot. This was the most pathetic portion of the finding since the vast majority of people who own firearms have, rightly so, no desire to kill people and show/produce/declare their weapon in order to cause the bad guy to leave in the overwhelming amount of circumstances. This fact alone completely threw off the entire average, even if the rest of the statistics had been honestly complied, which they were not. The awful and dishonest techniques used by Kellerman can be seen in part on the link below:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-tainted-public-health-model-of-gun-control/
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