chasfm11 wrote:The Washington Times
By Stephen Dinan May 8, 2012, 04:37PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/ins ... amendment/
"'Shoot-first' laws have already cost too many lives. In Florida alone, deaths due to self-defense have tripled since the law was enacted. Federal money shouldn't be spent supporting states with laws that endanger their own people," said Reps. Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the two Democrats who are offering the legislation. "This is no different than withholding transportation funds from states that don't enforce seat-belt laws."
All they need is to gain a majority in the House again and keep control of the Senate.
Question: How many lives have been lost to people who didn't or couldn't defend themselves?
I think that's the wrong question. First off, we start with the assumption that liberals and politicians are liars, and don't assume that any statistic one of them quotes is accurate or truthful --in fact, we should assume it is intentionally deceitful. Consider the wording....he doesn't say deaths of "innocent" people due to "self-defense" have tripled....he says "deaths due to self-defense" have tripled, and I believe this is a deliberate mischaracterization. 1. He doesn't define "self-defense," and I'd guess the definition he's applying isn't really describing incidents that all are self-defense; 2) even if all the deaths cited are due to legitimate self-defense, it doesn't mean any of them have anything to do with SYG laws; 3) he conflates deaths of people killed in self-defense, at least some of whom, presumably, (assuming the worst from the gun rights standpoint) are criminals, with the deaths of people who aren't criminals....in other words, he suggests that killing criminals endangers the larger population of people who aren't criminals, or more bluntly, he's actually saying that SYG laws endanger criminals (and this is no doubt his true heartfelt concern, as it is with many liberals); 4) the "tripled since the law was enacted" assertion is probably a rhetorical trick. Since much more time has passed before SYG was enacted than after, the comparison can't possibly be between equivalent time periods, which means the claim is inherently selective. To take an extreme example for purposes of illustration, one day before SGY was enacted there could have been one self-defense killing, and the day after there could have been three, so one could say self-defense deaths have "tripled" since enactment, and that kind of comparison is exactly the kind I suspect is being made; and 5) "deaths due to self-defense" are not defined, so, a homeowner killed defending his family in a home invasion could be counted as a "death due to self-defense," and given the history of the anti self-defense crowd, there is every reason to suspect that is also part of the numbers game here.
Finally, it's sort of a so-what claim....if the killings aren't legitimate and lawful, then presumably, those doing the killing are being prosecuted, and may well have occurred anyway. A murderer invoking the law as a defense doesn't invalidate the law, any more that invoking a claim of ordinary self-defense invalidates the concept of self-defense. And if not, then he'd be claiming something else entirely: that questionable claims of self-defense are not being prosecuted because of SYG laws. Since he's offering no statistics to support such a claim, real or faked, it's a pretty sure bet that such a claim can't be substantiated even using all the statistical tricks normally deployed by the anti-gun crowd.
"Journalism, n. A job for people who flunked out of STEM courses, enjoy making up stories, and have no detectable integrity or morals."
From the WeaponsMan blog, weaponsman.com