Janine Jackson interviewed Guns Down America’s Igor Volsky about ending gun violence for the March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New Press (2019)
Janine Jackson: Other countries have misogyny and racism, untreated mental illness and bar fights and robberies. What they don’t have are weeks like that just passed, in which Americans, reeling from the murders of eight people in Atlanta, woke up to news of 10 people killed in Boulder.
It’s the guns. The difference is the guns.
More and more people in this country seem ready right now to think big about responses to violent law enforcement, inadequate healthcare and onerous student debt. Can we also shift the conversation and the political terrain on gun control?
Here to help us think about that is Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Igor Volsky.
Igor Volsky: Thank you so much for having me
JJ: When we hear about horrible things like the killing in Atlanta, in Boulder, in all of the places that we could name, there’s a tendency—journalistic, and maybe just human—to seek more information, more details: What were the circumstances? The motivations? Who is this individual?
Somewhere along the way, one gets the sense that the problem of gun violence is too complicated to address. Whatever measure is being suggested “wouldn’t have prevented Atlanta,” and that’s somehow not a reason that it’s not enough, but a reason to abandon the whole project. I’m wondering, first of all, does pushing past that hopelessness call for a different way of thinking, new goals, or maybe just clarity about what our goals are?
IV: You’re absolutely right. There’s really this sense, oftentimes in the press, that this problem is just too hard, that we already have 400 million guns in circulation, and there’s nothing we can do about it, that we somehow have to pay the price of 100 people dying every day from gun violence because we have a Second Amendment.
And the reality is that none of that is true, that we know exactly what needs to be done in order to save lives. And we know that because states across America have strengthened their gun laws, have invested in communities that are suffering from cyclical everyday gun violence, and have seen significant reductions in their gun suicide rates and in their gun homicide rates.
So these models of democracy, or these “laboratories” of democracy, as Republicans in particular often like to point to, really serve as an example of what we need to do on the national level, in order to have a standard that fits the entire country.
And, secondly, we just need to look overseas at some of our great allies, who have dramatically reduced gun violence by doing three basic things: by, No.1, ensuring that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are actually regulated, and can’t produce incredibly powerful weapons for the civilian market. Those countries raise the standard of gun ownership by requiring gun owners to register their firearm, to get a license to have a firearm in the first place. And they’ve also addressed the root causes of gun violence: things like employment opportunities, housing security, healthcare. So we have the blueprint; we just need to follow it.
JJ: You will hear that “Assault weapon bans don’t help, because most murders happened with handguns,” or “Background checks don’t help, because there’s a lot of resales,” and, “Well, it’s a lot of suicides.”
But if you spell it out to the goal being fewer guns, if you make that the goal, well then that addresses all of those things. And it sounds like what you’re saying has worked in other places: It has a goal of just there being fewer guns out there.
IG: Yeah, the reason why the United States has a death rate that’s about 25% higher than our other peer nations is exactly what you just identified: We have way too many guns, and they are way too easy to get. And until our media and our leaders can have the courage, the political courage, to recognize that reality, and to begin communicating about it to the American people, it’s going to be a challenge to meet the goal of saving lives.
And I have to say: We now have a president in the White House who has done this work before; who—when he was running for the presidency—released one of the boldest gun-violence prevention programs of any presidential candidate; who promised us that his experience in Washington, DC, gave him the skills to work with Democrats and Republicans to get big things done. And so he has a heavy responsibility to follow through on those promises, to address the nation fully about this crisis, and then to work through Congress, diligently and aggressively, to get tighter gun laws across the finish line.
JJ: Let me just bring you back to media for a second. When media tend to move from incident coverage to policy coverage, then reporting on gun control gets often into this kind of static frame, where you hear from opponents and proponents of a particular measure; they both get quoted, sometimes they get quoted in equal amounts. But there’s this kind of backdrop, which is that in this country any restrictions on individual gun ownership face an uphill battle, because it’s enshrined in the law, because the lobby is all-powerful and because this country just loves its guns. These are presented as blanket impediments to change. But how true is that? Is that really an accurate, current depiction of the lay of the land?
Igor Volsky: “Regurgitating claims that the Second Amendment somehow impedes us from doing anything about this problem is a real hindrance, I think, to the kind of conversations we have publicly about this issue.”
IV: Yeah, this false balance that you’re identifying is that you often see in media stories this effort to perpetuate, really, what is a myth about the NRA’s great power and abilities. And this notion of just regurgitating claims that the Second Amendment somehow impedes us from doing anything about this problem is a real hindrance, I think, to the kind of conversations we have publicly about this issue, to the kind of conversations we have with our friends and families, particularly some of them [who] are gun owners, or more politicized gun owners. And the truth of the matter is, the kind of coverage we need on this issue, the kind of press we need on this issue, is one that reflects the science, and the real history.
The overwhelming science in the gun violence space tells us one simple truth: Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. And that’s really it. That’s the reality that you have to start from.
So any kind of argument about, “If you have gun restrictions, you’re disarming the good guys,” or, “If you have gun restrictions, that means it will only harm the good guys, because the bad guys will never follow it”—that kind of argument, that the NRA has so successfully gotten the press to parrot for decades, is a real hindrance.
And so I think we hopefully, hopefully, have reached a point where gun violence is so ubiquitous, and support for actually doing something is so widespread, that we will hopefully see less of this effort to just pretend that “Well, nothing at all is possible,” right?
And just a second on the Second Amendment: The history of this is very intriguing to me, because for decades and decades and decades, really up to about 1972, it was hard to find anybody in the press, or within even the gun community, who argued that the Second Amendment is somehow an impediment to gun regulation.
That argument is actually quite new, and it was developed through NRA-funded researchers and NRA-funded lawyers. They birthed this idea that the Second Amendment somehow prevents us from doing what we know we need to do. And oftentimes the media just parrot that invented notion, without actually recognizing that it is certainly not what the Founding Fathers intended, but also doesn’t reflect the reality of how most courts—the Supreme Court to some degree, but also courts across the country—have ruled repeatedly that the amendment allows for pretty significant regulation. And so my hope here is that we can have a different kind of conversation about this issue.
Extra! (9–10/96)
JJ: That was one of the points that scholar Howard Friel made in an important piece for Extra!, for FAIR’s magazine, back in 1996: that media seem to feel they’re charting some middle ground when they say, “They could allow for some restrictions on gun ownership,” and the other point is, “No, there should be no restrictions whatsoever.” And they kind of chart a middle course. Friel’s point is they’re ignoring all of that legislative, judiciary history that you just mentioned, which actually says, “No, there’s no conflict between the Second Amendment and some measures of gun control.”
Let me ask you, finally, I know that at Guns Down, you know that legislation isn’t all there is; you see it as a multifront battle to get us to a safer place with fewer guns. You talked about things that Biden could do. Is there particular legislation afoot that you see moving things forward? What, in general, do you see as roles for the public here? Where can we get involved in making change on this?–
IV: We’re constantly in this cycle of—a gun event happens; usually it’s a mass shooting that grabs headlines. We all talk about, “Oh, things need to be done,” right? We get a lot of press coverage, some of it good, some of it not, about that event. And then we all take a breath and we move on, usually in a matter of days, sometimes, really, in a matter of hours. And the question is, how do we break that cycle?
And I think there are roles for the general public, and there are roles for leadership, right? I think the president needs to actually lead. The kind of enthusiasm and vigor and hard work that he and his administration put into passing the recovery plan, they need to apply to getting background checks across the finish line, they need to apply to getting an assault weapons ban across the finish line. They’ve shown what they can do when they’re motivated and dedicated. And they need to do that.
And to make sure that happens, all of us across the country have to keep the pressure on, have to communicate in any way we can, whether it be on social media, or making calls, or organizing friends and neighbors to do larger pushes, to ensure that the president hears from us. Politicians who’ve been talking about this issue for years, who support reform but haven’t actually pushed hard enough to follow it through, they need to hear from us. And then, of course, we need to also push those lawmakers who aren’t there on the issue yet.
But what I always think is, to first identify what is the path to actually getting something done; to me, that’s getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, and passing through the reforms I mentioned, with a simple majority vote. And to move the individuals, to target your advocacy at lawmakers and officials who actually have an incentive to listen to what you’re saying, and to make progress. (And I suspect that many of the congressional members on the Republican side don’t have any incentive to compromise on anything, no matter how popular it is in their home states or districts.) So I would ask folks to be targeted in how they do this work.
But I am confident that if all of this aligns, that if we have a president who is committed to acting as he promised, and a public that is cheering him on and pushing him on, we will finally get to a place where we begin to make some serious progress on saving lives in this country.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Igor Volsky, of the group Guns Down America. The book is Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, out from the New Press. Thank you so much, Igor Volsky, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
IV: Thank you.
After the MGM hotel mass murders by a man with so many guns …I guess he wanted to reenact the St. Valentine’s Massacre x a googol?
Some suggestions:
People have to take tests to drive a car— so——make periodic gun testing a necessity for gun ownership too. Have a gun license for ownership that’s renewed like a drivers license.
Make bullets really expensive so that people think before shooting.
And as the 2nd Amendment says, ” A well regulated militia…” Maybe that’s what gets the above listed ideas passed into law.
I think every person should be issued a rifle at birth…and that private sales of guns needs to be outlawed.
However, just as we did in the Marines, the rifle one gets issued by Uncle Sam shall be stored in a Public Armory, and in order to access it a person must hand over a license.
In order to get the license, or ‘Rifle Card’, a person has to go through the requisite training; which for us Jarheads, included a one week class about marksmanship fundamentals, followed by a ten day period of practical application.
That second part, the ten day period, would be enough right there to weed out most people from wanting to be gun owners.
We called that second half of our rifle range training “Grass Week,” because most of the time was spent crunched up into tight shooting stances down in the grass, amongst the sand fleas, ants and chiggers.
There were times where even back then a thousand years ago, in the prime of my youth, I thought my knees and back we’re going to ‘fall off.’
Either way, there are a lot of novel ways that we could address the actual problem of gun proliferation in the U.S.
Correlation is not causation. There is most likely a lurking variable. Only the simple will see a correlation and state that they know the cause. Yes, with more guns there will be more gun deaths. You didn’t need to interview this man to get that piece of data. Why are some people willing to act on that desire, that is the question that needs to be answered. I’m removing suicides from this discussion because that is a different argument (one worth having, but different). Most gun murders occur on the streets in inner cities. They are committed with handguns. They are committed by minorities. Those are facts that are indisputable. It is worthwhile to look into the fact that minority fatherless rate is over 75%. This is a correlation that is worth looking into. I believe there is a causation here. How to fix this problem is beyond my ability.
Janet asked the right question: You will hear that “Assault weapon bans don’t help, because most murders happened with handguns,” or “Background checks don’t help, because there’s a lot of resales,” and, “Well, it’s a lot of suicides.” It’s too bad she didn’t hold her guest accountable to answer these questions. Instead, he dodged or possibly forgot the question. Her job was to ask it again and get him to answer the questions.
Tim:
“Most gun murders occur on the streets in inner cities….”
==
Guns are used most often in domestic violence.
I couldn’t find data to refute your statement. I found stats from LA. 53-63% of all murders in LA are committed by gangs. That supports my statement. Please support your statement.
Tim,
I think what they should do is reclassify voters as militia. This would make the right to keep and bear arms a privilege of only those who vote.
Tim, you posted:
“LA 53-63% of all murders in LA are committed by gangs.”
– Did your statistical source say whether or not a gun was used to kill in every case in that stated percentage of total murders? If not, then you can’t use that stat to back up your point. Either way, you need to clarify, otherwise you are equivocating and violating the axiomatic limit of your own statement ‘correlates aren’t causes.’
– What was your source anyway? What year are you going by? I’ve tried to find your numbers and what little is out there varies wildly depending on which year, and all kinds of other statistical bs.
The one thing we know for certain; is that gun wholesalers in the U.S. are 100% responsible for bringing in 100% of those guns and dumping them on the market.
There’s your “lurking variable”
Who knows, maybe you can point to some gang banger who is bringing in whole containers full of Glock pistols?
Those stats were on murders with guns. You can google it yourself. I absolutely stated that “I believe” the cause is fatherless families. You just look for ways to be mad at what I say.
You aren’t providing any stats just complaints. You have to love people who just pick apart and don’t provide any solutions. That’s you, Coward.
I think you need to look up what a lurking variable is and then comment.
So the gun wholesalers are at fault for the deaths and not the person who pulls the trigger? That is some twisted logic. Somehow, my guns haven’t killed anyone. Maybe I purchased from an innocent gun wholesaler.
My suggestion is that fatherless families lead to a lack of morals. This leads to the large number of murders with handguns. Let’s put good minds to work to find a way to promote fathers in families. Let’s keep kids in school longer. I don’t have solutions to these problems, but believe these are the lurking variables, not the quantity of guns or wholesalers.
Tim,
I knew you were full of shit.
I asked for your source, not the lazy method you used (even Google publishes a source with its canned responses to queries.)
Why are you acting so childish? Are you a child?
Tim,
The point of bringing up gun wholesalers was not to blame them for the deaths, it was to bolster one of the solutions that was brought up in the interview; how in other countries that have drastically reduced gun violence, there was a shift in policy to regulate manufacturers and suppliers.
In the U.S., gun purchases at the wholesaler level, F.F.L.’s, Class III Licensees, are virtually unregulated. How it is feasible for any weapon, no matter it’s primary function, to be lumped in with hunting rifles, pistols and shotguns, in a laissez faire manner, then rationalized by fake libertarians (like you) who don’t want to mess with the so-called “free market,” is only an impediment to any talk about reducing the guns and therefore reducing the gun deaths.
My other point, which you seem to lack a mental faculty in comprehending – unsurprising with your admitted consumption of Murdochian garbage- is metaphysical, in other words, gets at the underlying problem.
You said it yourself:
“Yes, with more guns there will be more gun deaths.”
Well? We know we have unregulated manufacturing and sales to wholesalers, which then dump them on the market, then we wonder how so many guns get into the hands of people?
If most of the people killing with pistols, are in the group of people who are dire life’s circumstances, why would you wag your finger at the actual cause – the guns – and steer the conversation to other unfalsifiable factors like “fatherless” families?…pffffft.
The problem for people like you and Tucker Carlson, who try to link the problem of gun proliferation in poor communities, to identity politics and not the guns, is the science and history on solutions that work to lower gun deaths, is clear on this.
As Volsky said, the U.S. needs to follow the models that have worked in other countries:
1. Ensure that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are actually regulated, and can’t produce incredibly powerful weapons for the civilian market.
2. Raise the standard of gun ownership by requiring gun owners to register their firearm, to get a license to have a firearm in the first place.
3. Address the root causes of gun violence: things like employment opportunities, housing security, and healthcare.
Tim,
You might be right, but maybe the better thing to be asking is; how did those minority communities become so flooded with guns?
My guess is that some were purchased legally and others illegally. I cannot do anything about the illegally purchased guns. We already have laws. We should do a better job at enforcing those laws.
One thing is clear, no manufacturer is going down there handing out their guns to get those communities to shoot each other. Chicago has the highest murder rate. They have some of the strictest gun laws. Gun laws aren’t preventing this. More gun laws won’t prevent this.
We cannot promote defunding the police and at the same time ask citizens to disarm. When somebody breaks into your house, you have seconds. Police will arrive in minutes. If you have a way to fix this problem, I’d like to hear it.
Tim,
If you can manage to maintain an open mind, there is a pair of podcasts that I suggest you listen to. It is a two-part interview where an organizer named Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes what is meant by a police abolition movement, and what the campaign intends to do to replace cops.
Both podcasts are over on The Intercept. If you Google “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes The Case For Abolition,” you’ll find it.
It is a a very good two-part interview. Check it out.
Tim,
In your first TL;DR post, you seem to by contradicting your primary point in contention – that correlation is not causation.
On the one hand you agree when there are more guns, there are more gun deaths, then on the other hand, you seem to think the solution to the problem of more gun deaths has nothing to do with the supply of guns, but is instead the “fatherless” problem….what in the actual bleep are you talking about?
In essence here is how your ridiculous comment/point breaks down:
Premise 1: Correlation is not causation.
Premise 2: There is a Lurking Variable.
Premise 3: Where there are more guns there are more gun deaths.
Premise 4: There are more gun deaths in minority communities.
Premise 5: There are more guns, primarily pistols, in minority communities.
Premise 6: There is a problem with high fatherless rates in minority communities.
Conclusion: The problem of high rates of gun deaths in the U.S., is not the guns it’s all those fatherless minority families.
This is so logically fallacious and rhetorically nonsensical, and pathetic.
I clearly said that I believe. READ. I did not state it as fact. It is certainly worth looking at. Guns don’t kill people. Gun manufacturers don’t kill people. We’re left with the people who use them. What is different between the minority groups and the non minority groups? One difference is fathers. There may be other factors. It’s certainly not income. If income is the reason, then there would have been many murders during the great depression. There weren’t. We’re probably looking at values. I put forth that fathers provide values that young men need.
Okay Tim,
Yes Tim, I see very clearly that you have been strung along for a very long time, mired in your stinking thinking, ie; “beliefs.”
Either way, as always thanks for the chat.
Not once did I say it was the guns causing deaths. I said that there is a correlation. I also agreed that more guns would mean more gun deaths. If there were no guns, there would be not gun deaths. That isn’t very complicated. So? There is a correlation between people with smelly fingers and lung cancer. So? There is no causation.
Why are blacks 13% of the population yet committing 48% of all murders? That is the question that needs to be answered. Why do they murder? They murder because they have a gun in their hands? Hardly. Why don’t they value life? 51% of whites life in a house with a gun. Why don’t they have a the same murder rates as blacks? Is that question too hard for you to comprehend? Don’t tell us economics. If you do, please tell us why murders didn’t rise during the great depression. The answer is most likely values. You can’t answer any of these questions and still defend your position.
Tim,
Those numbers are phony, because the one question that dissolves any data about crime differentials based on race, is this:
By who’s standard of “race” were those numbers derived? The FBI’s? The CDC’s? Oh so now you believe the Feds….I see (rolls eyes.)
The gaping hole in anything you can get from right-wing reactionary sources has all to do with how the right ignores and dismisses the facts when they are inconvenient for their side, then latch onto the same type of methodological thinking whenever they think it benefits their side.
This is why reactionaries are idiots. If it’s the “blacks” as you say Tim, who are doing more of X and less of Y, how come white people who use illegal drugs are just as prevalent as other races, yet black people over represent in the U.S. criminal justice system for drug related crime?
Then there’s the whole “where there’s smoke there’s fire” aspect of systemic racism, ie; known cases of over policing in certain neighborhoods, while the police completely ignore others – the white hoods.
Then there’s this too:
“….the ‘differential criminal justice system selection hypothesis,’ asserts that differential police presence, patrolling, and profiling, combined with discrimination in the courts and correctional systems, leads to more Blacks being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated.”
Since you like to crunch the numbers so much, go read the paper titled “Assessing the Race-Crime and Ethnicity-Crime Relationship in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Delinquents,” over on the NCBI site.
In the paper, it becomes crystal clear that when the system is rigged from the outset (which it is), of course the available data about “race and crime” is going to overrepresent certain groups and under represent others.
There is a myriad of implicit biases built into the system which then only drives these political identity ideas of divisive thinking that you and Tucker Carlson are so addicted too. Like a couple of clucks for anything that supposedly makes “those others” look less civil.
Where is there even a single piece of tangential evidence for the “white molecule,” or the “white gene?” Let’s see it Tim, can you give me even a single thing that exists in science that empirically accounts for “whiteness?”
I’ll save you the trouble, you can’t. Because, qualitative aspects of existence do not have quantitative explanations. Quantities of one thing are incommensurable with Qualities of some other thing.
Just as consciousness has no mechanism that science can point to, or reproduce in a lab. there is nothing about quantities of anything that gives rise to the qualitative aspects of what it feels like to get burnt to a crisp because one lacks melanin in their skin.
Race is a sociologically contrived subject, with no basis in empirical science. This does not mean that race is meaningless, it just means, you have to be skeptical of ANYTHING you read when certain types of people try to link race – a qualitative property, to quantitative aspects of existence.
Race does of course have meaning, especially in the U.S., the sad thing is most people take its meaning completely out-of-context, and in turn make living breathing feeling people out as if they were objects.
Any “racialist” study or inquiry that uses a race-base analysis and tries to combine the two incommensurable categories by force, is sheer magical thinking at best, or straight-up racism at worst.
Tim,
As soon as you admit the number of guns has an affect on the number of gun deaths, by default you have to agree that DECREASING the number of GUNS DECREASES the number of gun DEATHS, or else you are being irrational and incoherent.
If you are against decreasing guns, then you aren’t serious about decreasing gun deaths.
Premise 1: There are Guns.
Premise 2: There are Gun Deaths.
Premise 3: The number of gun deaths follows from the number of guns.
Conclusion: Decreasing guns will decrease gun deaths.
Do you deny the validity of the above theorem?
Your comparison of today with the Great Depression, is an appeal to ignorance. You ignore the probability of the smaller number of guns existing in the U.S. between 1929-1939 compared to now. You also ignore the much larger population we have today compared to back then.
Do you think the Depression Era had more than 393 million guns? If not, then why would you compare then to now?
Another thing you seem to be ignorant of about the Great Depression, is all of the stricter gun laws we had back then. Since you “conservatives” are so fond of keeping things like they were in the past, it surprises me that you ignore this. Yet more evidence of the hypocrisy of the Constitutional “originalists.” Whenever they encounter things that don’t politically suit them, it just slips their mind I guess.
Either way, your referential of using the past for the analysis of our current time period’s gun deaths, is like comparing the U.S. in the year 2101 to now, it’s just silly, unscientific, unknowable, and therefore pointless.
Ultimately, all you are doing is constructing another one of your tried n’ true “whataboutisms.”
Let’s deal with reality on reality’s terms and let go of all the shoulda, woulda, coulda shall we?
If you don’t think there is a higher murder rate in the inner cities, there is no hope for you. You are so afraid of being called a racist that you won’t admit that 13% of the population commit 48% of the murders. You won’t admit at statistic that requires you to say that there are real problems in the black community. Even Jesse Jackson can admit that. COWARD.
Tim,
Dude, believe what you want, I’m just trying to show you why those stereotypical “race” based numbers are not legit, they “seem,” legit but in reality they are extremely problematic.
– was self defense factored out of the cases tallied as “black?”
– was the “black” person self reporting or self-identifying as “black,” or was it the system dictating “race” based on how dark someone’s skin was or how wooly their hair was?
– how does a stats gatherer control for qualitative subjective aspects of reality? (This is all I’m asking….once you realize there is no way that every single strict control can be met, you realize how ridiculous it is to talk about whole number of guns by race.)
Finally, are you for or against reducing guns? Are you for or against coming together to get at the root causes of gun violence -wherever it happens- well?
Instead of asking for gun control, maybe we should be looking at why people kill each other and treat people amd not the causality of their mental disorders.
One thing human beings have done right since the dawn of time is kill each other. Guns is a relatively new item, and in the. Ourse of human history we did it well before guns and will continue to kill each other even of you get rid of guns.
OK, but the theory is that the easy and common access to firearms here in this country makes it way, way more easier to kill people. Most other countries don’t have the same problems with gun deaths and crimes that the US does, and most of those countries don’t have the same gun access or gun culture that the US does. It follows that maybe it’s the guns that are the problem.
Nobody’s arguing you’ll stop ALL murders/killings if you control guns more.
What is the out of wedlock birthrate in other countries? Is it 75%? Not likely. That is the number for the black community. It is very likely that the lack of fathers is the cause. 51% of whites live in a house with a gun. 28% for non-whites. Why is it that 13% of our population commits 48% of all murders? If it’s just access to a gun, then why don’t women commit half of all murders? There is something else going on. Whites have more guns, but aren’t committing most of the murders. An intelligent person would ask what is the difference? You cannot blame poverty without answering why murders didn’t increase during the great depression. Something else is going on. I submit it is the out of wedlock birth rate. This problem is far more difficult to solve than trying to nab all guns.
What is the out of wedlock birthrate in other countries? Is it 75%? Not likely. That is the number for the black community. It is very likely that the lack of fathers is the cause.
____________________________________________________________
No, it isn’t very likely. It’s just your assertion based on gut feeling and not any kind of evidence. You may be guessing right, but it’s still just guessing.
Here’s what a quick Google search found about the outta-wedlock birth rate by country:
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-births-rise-worldwide#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20for,%3B%20and%20blacks%2C%2071%20percent.
Chile, Iceland, Costa RIca, and Mexico all apparently have 70%+ outta wedlock birthrates. None of those countries has the same problem with gun crime the US does.
Unlike ANY of you, when I am challenged and there is something inconsistent, I reexamine my thesis. I looked into Iceland. Some interesting differences between it and the US. First, they are homogeneous. Second, Their entire population (329k) is far less than any of our major cities. Third, their cohabitation rate is VERY high. Fourth, the number of kids/mother is very low. Fifth, the average age of the mother is higher.
Contrast that with the US. We are the least homogeneous country. Our population is 1000 times as high as theirs. Our cohabitation rate in inner cities is low (kids are fatherless). Fourth, the inner city kids/mother is higher. Fifth, the inner city teen pregnancy rate is high.
If this isn’t the problem, please tell us why blacks make up 13% of the population, but commit 48% of the murders. What is the reason for this? Whites have more guns, blacks commit more murders. If you don’t like my reason, fine. WHAT IS THE REASON WHY THEY HAVE FEWER GUNS ARE FEWER IN THE POPULATION AND COMMIT A SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER MURDER RATE? Answer that question only.
Tim,
You dig Iceland? I thought you were vehemently against socialism in any form? Iceland is a democratic-socialist nation, you do know that right?
So if you wish the U.S. were more like Iceland, then you need to visit your local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, to see where you can help.
From their contact page:
PH#: 212-727-8610
Website: dsausa (dot) org*
*so the spam sensors don’t think I’m leaving spam, i phonetically spelled out the dot for the DSA website.
Tim,
You accuse me of over thinking and I accuse you of over simplifying. You’d think we should be able to meet in the middle somewhere, no?
This is why I tried to draw your attention back to the guns. We can have the race, class, and socioeconomic talk, but let’s put all that on hold for a minute, and just talk about the guns.
The entire premise of this article has little to do with race. It has ALL to do with the truth of where there are more guns there will be more gun deaths. You seem to think this point is trivial, and have it in your head that some old dude down the street with 150 AK-47s in his garage is a perfectly safe situation in a community of young families. Gun Control advocates would point to such a scenario and say it is not an ideal situation. This is all the article is trying to say dude.
If you are against lowering the gun numbers in the U.S. then fundamentally, you are against lowering the gun deaths.
Why are you against the Public Armory idea? I noticed you left that one alone. Or what about tying the right to keep and bear arms to the right to vote?
Let’s make it so that if you don’t vote, you can’t own firearms. Maybe then the GOP will stop trying to push the country back into the 19th century where voting freedoms were more limited?
What’s wrong with tying firearm ownership to the franchise to vote? Sure, some non-voting criminals might get their hands on a few guns, but under a more stringent and controlled gun-for-vote scenario, the idea is that there would NOT be as many unrestricted ways to own a firearm.
I’m particularly interested in why you are against armories? This is how the military does it on every base in the country. You brought up Iceland, in Norway, the rural communities there use subterranean gun vaults that are regulated by each town. Why can’t we do something like that in the U.S.? At least this way, the community has firsthand knowledge on where all the weapons are, and that info is safely kept within the community, away from the state.
“Born out of wedlock” does not correlate well with “raised by a single parent”. For one thing, the high divorce rate means that there are a lot of children of married parents who are being raised by one parent. For another, there are lots of stable committed couples who never thought it necessary to get official sanction for their union. I know quite a number of unmarried couples that have been together for thirty or forty years, have raised children, and are now empty nesters.
I will also turn your own question back on you. The number of girls being raised without fathers is equal, to a good approximation, to the number of boys being raised without fathers. If “the lack of fathers is the cause”, why don’t women commit half of all murders?
Why don’t women commit crimes at the same rate as men? Both sexes (yes, there are only two and they are determined at birth) have their issues. Men need to control their sexual and hostility nature. Women need to control their emotions (unless women are just perfect).
Tim,
Here is a simple bit of trivia that challenges what you may think you know about living in cities:
(A) In a town of 300 people, all of whom own guns, and all of whom identify as “white,” there were 3 murders by gun last year.
(B) In a city of 8, 000, 000 people, 750, 000 of whom own guns, and which identifies as racially mixed, there were 341 murders by gun last year.
Q: Based on the law of probability, which place are you more likely to die by gun?
A: A town with a CONSISTENT 1% murder rate year over year.
Now give us context. Was that just one year or was it habitual? Did you cherry pick? Were you being disingenuous to try to make a point or just lazy with details?
Tim,
To all of your questions about the dangerous towns trivia:
I thought you would tell me what the answer was? I thought you would actually plug the variables into your equation? Don’t you have all of the info you need right there?
My point was to show you how stupid it is to throw in random comments about race, I see with you, that, the point I was trying to make went right over your “head,” it is crystal clear, that it never even enters your minds’ airspace. This is a difficult medium to try and communicate with.
Hella sad, to see intelligent people (like you Tim), buy into highly problematic, and most likely false, narratives designed to alienate and divide.
Oh well, you go with whatever makes you happy, no amount of yapping about this online is going to show you how reality works.
Intellect can only take you so far, wisdom which takes time, patience, and humility to develop is way more useful. But you go ahead, do you, to hell with the rest of us out here, we’re just “NPC’s,” and even though we are alive and feel stuff, all that matters is your own first person subjective perspective. I get it. You think it is weak and wrong to be empathetic, it is “liberal” or “leftist” to come together to solve our problems (even if this is what Iceland did.)
Talk about Iceland, you know what else about Iceland? They are a socialist democratic country dude. This is why everything is much more balanced there. Capitalism, especially gangster capitalism the way we do in the U.S. is way more volatile then Democratic Socialist systems.
Only you will get you to “see.”
Whites own a higher percentage of guns than blacks. Blacks are 13% of our population.
Why do blacks commit 48% of all murders?
ANSWER ONLY THAT QUESTION.
Tim,
You said “Whites own a higher percentage of guns than blacks.” (Wrong)
What is a “white?” What is a “black?” (You have no idea what in the hell you are talking about, you are just making shit up out of thin air.)
By “higher percentage of guns” you talking of the total guns in existence?
Or are you talking per capita?
Or are you talking like whole round numbers here?
Do you see now? See this? Dude, gun deaths impact us all, trying to winnow this down by race makes no sense.
I’ll answer whatever question you want, so long as you tell me what in the hell a “black” is? Last time I checked, human beings come in shades of brown there grand cyclops.
You don’t know what a black is?
You cannot answer the question so you simply answer, “What is a black?”
I don’t think you’re a deep thinker. A big question sits in front of you and you attack the legitimate question. I know it’s sitting in your mind. You’ll quietly try to resolve your cognitive dissonance. You’re not interested in solving the problem so long as you might be considered a racist for asking it. COWARD.
Tim,
I have repeatedly explained why your line of questioning about race versus guns is illogical, irrational, and illegitimate. No one ever claimed to be a “deep thinker,” this is you, projecting now.
Where did you get the statistics of whites owning 51% of all guns? From a Fox News poll?
Where did you get your statistics about “blacks” committing 48% of murder?
Is this based on convictions or arrests? Did that percentage control for self defense, and racial mis-categorizing?
It doesn’t take Jack Handy to start seeing the holes in the way you conflate the data.
Blacks make up 13% of our population. Why do blacks make up 48% of all murders.
Answer only that one question.
Fine, here’s my answer: It’s complicated and it likely doesn’t have very much to do with absent fathers.
Answer this question(s): Given that firearms make murdering people a Hell of a lot easier, isn’t it worth it to see what the murder rate would be, irrespective or race, if we controlled guns a lot more?
Your answer: It’s complicated. You might as well have said: because.
LOL
OK, Go fuck yourself, then.
Tim,
You’re whole point in contention is based on circular reasoning, it begs the question of who these “blacks” are, and where you pulled those numbers from?
I’m not splitting hairs here, this is a serious flaw in your kind of reasoning bro.
If you can’t reveal your methodological underpinning elements, ie; how you developed knowledge of the subject in question, then the premise is problematic to begin with.
No serious researcher believes everything they read about “race” and “crime” because it is canon by now, how rigged the US justice system is from the outset.
I said it before, I’ll say it again, if the system you are taking your numbers from was rigged to begin with, of course the data will under-represent some while over-representing others.
You know, this whole convo says more about the snake-in-the-grass line of reasoning you constantly fall back upon, than anything else.
Now, I’m asking YOU TIM:
Are you for or against reducing guns?
I will honestly answer your question when you honestly answer mine. “It’s complicated” is not an answer. Tell me all of the complications.
Your answer is snake in the grass if you are trying to say that if we only had cops patrolling in white suburbs, we would have more white murder statistics. I’m not talking about any other crimes other than murder. Are whites driving around murdering people in their neighborhoods? No. If you say they are, they’re really good at hiding the bodies. Why are whites so good at hiding the bodies? Why are the families not asking where their loved ones went? To say that more cops causes the murders to be reported differently is crazy talk.
We can argue whether or not the justice system convicts blacks more often. We cannot argue if blacks are committing murders at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of population.
Tim,
You claim – with no sources or citations – “48% of all murders are committed by blacks.”
Until you give me your source on that part, I can’t answer the “why,” “where,” and “how” such a number, statistic or assumption came to be.
I tried to explain to you that unimpeachable, indubitable resources on crime based on racial differentiation, does not exist. All of them are based on our rigged system.
You ignored me.
So here we are, with you missing the most salient points of this article; how the quantity of guns has an up or down affect on quantity of gun deaths.
Point #1:
No other developed nation has gun laws as lax as the U.S. and the U.S. suffers for this, the U.S. death rate is 25% higher than all other developed nations.
Point #2:
Even if we snap our fingers and every person of color were to vanish from the U.S., the problem of gun proliferation in the U.S. remains.
We know that decreasing nukes, decreases the likelihood of nukes being used, and the same holds for firearms.
It’s like you are ignoring the science, and supplanting it with your racialized beliefs. What is your goal here?
Are you trying to achieve a workaround from the inconvenient fact that if we want to decrease gun deaths, than we have to decrease guns?
In summary.
Q #1: Are you for or against decreasing the number of guns in the U.S.?
Q #2: If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the U.S. what would it be Tim?
FBI crime stats for the 48%. It’s very easy to find. These data may make you feel uncomfortable, but wishing it weren’t so doesn’t help the problem. The first step is you recognizing that there is a problem in the black community. The much more difficult step is to truly find the root cause and then showing them how to fix it themselves.
Point #1 OK. So?
Point #2 Our murder rate would decrease by half.
We don’t know that decreasing the number of nukes decreases the likelihood. There is no proof of that anywhere. Common sense leads us to that conclusion.
I already stated that more guns means more gun deaths. How else would you like me to state it? Please tell me how you are going to disarm the bad guys first. People with good values don’t murder. I’ve probably owned my guns longer than you’ve been alive. They haven’t been used to cause harm. You aren’t going to take them away either. When you disarm all the bad guys with guns and can assure me that no bad guys will ever have them, I will consider disarming. Right now, your laws will only disarm good guys because they are the only ones who might be naive enough to disarm. The bad guys already murder, they’re not going to give up their guns because you pass a law to make you feel good about yourself.
A #1 Against unless you can guarantee me that the bad guys disarm (you’ll never get that done).
A #2 I would wish for people to know God. You cannot be fully based on Judeao Christian values and murder, steal, etc. (yes, there will always be those that pervert religion). I highly doubt many of the people in prison for violent crimes attended church every Sunday. That would be a very worthwhile study. Nobody on the left would ever publish it.
Tim,
Yeah I knew you were relying on those long ago debunked “FBI crime stats.” You remind me of a clown I used to argue with on YouTube, who used to run the channel “Race and Crime.” Dude had the same schtick as you, pushing fear-based nonsense that only existed on paper.
His channel eventually dried up and disappeared, once one of the YT administrators over there had his channel flagged with a banner that led to a study which refuted the FBI’s stats.
That dude was a clay head, at first he tried to claim he was raised in a rough neighborhood in Florida, and had experienced violent crime up close and personal, when I pulled his card on that, he finally fessed up to being ignorant of the plight of extremely impoverished people (kind of like you have fessed up to living in a “Lilly White” neighborhood.)
Your age is irrelevant, my racist Grandmother stayed that way all the way to her grave…sadly. And, I’d be willing to bet, you and I are not as different in age as you seem to think.
Tim,
You say you are an aged person with guns. This brings up the question, of what assurance you can give the younger people who will still be here after you die, that your guns won’t fall into criminal hands? Hopefully you have a plan for your stash.
This is a question for you to answer yourself. I just brought it up, because large caches of firearms, left behind by some aged gun-nut, are mishandled irresponsibly all the time, did you hear about the thousands of AKs and tens of thousands of rounds some dude in Southern California left behind? Wow, good thing it was the BATFE who stumbled upon them first.
You see, if your guns were stored in a public armory, they could go to the community, or whomever you’ve allotted on your rifle card, if you should pass away unexpectedly.
What do you think of the Armory idea?
I can agree with you about the “God” idea…except I would change it from “God” to spirituality in general. I think the biggest thing lacking in Western culture writ-large, is a sufficiently developed system of spiritual infrastructure. Too much of what we need has been replaced by political operatives who masquerade as religious leaders.
Have you ever heard of Idealism, not the ethical or moral kind, but the philosophical kind? That’s the trip I’ve been on lately, probing the mental aspects of reality….and what I’m starting to realize, is that it is all mental, not my personal mentality, but mental as an ontological category.
Race and Crime,
You’re a fool and a coward.
All those murders in Chicago are done by whites killing blacks? Those black mothers crying identifying the murderers as black are lying to protect whites? The black community owns a very large problem and you are afraid of being called a racist. Coward.
If my guns were in an armory, how would they help me if somebody breaks into my house? Would that armory have allowed me to take them out during the summer riots? During the great depression, the government seized gold in safe deposit boxes. I have no confidence that a Democrat run government wouldn’t do the same but with guns.
I had not heard of Idealism. While I would like others to be Christian, any system with codified, good values will work in society. If the values are not codified and are “make up your own along the way,” that won’t work. Most leftists today are still using Judeo Christian values. They are probably only one generation away from a religious home where those values were instilled. Although they denounce Christianity, their value system is still based on Judeo Christian values. Think of this as a cut flower. It still smells nice and looks nice, but after a while it will die. We are seeing some of those effects today. The more we move away from Judeo Christian values, the worse our society will be.
You might be thinking about some of the big (and small) issues in life, but I doubt many are. The Bible has those issues codified. Here’s a very small issue. If you borrow your neighbor’s lawn mower and it breaks while you are using it due to no fault of your own. Who is responsible for its repair or replacement? Here’s a bigger issue. What is murder? Many people believe Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Was Floyd murdered (I’m not asking about whether or not Chauvin caused Floyd’s death). If your system works through these kind of issues, keep working through your system. If it doesn’t and you are allowed to substitute in your own thoughts, that is too open for a society and the society will fail (you may not be the problem, but others left open to their own interpretation will cause problems).
You seem reasonable. Pick a name so I can ignore the coward and address you.
Tim said:
“We can argue whether or not the justice system convicts blacks more often.”
To which I then say:
Not really. You can tell yourself whatever fairytale you want. When you start denying the empirical facts, is when I exit the stage.
It is a well known fact the U.S. “Just Us” system favors wealth and not “justice.”
That’s not much of an answer. You have proposed one thing that might cause it. Previously you dodged whether their murder rate was even real.
The answer to your question is: no. It comes down to the axiom: when seconds count, police are only minutes away. I have many friends each with many guns. I don’t know anyone who has committed suicide or murdered anyone. It’s not a problem that happens often in my lily white suburb neighborhood. When I believe that the problem comes down to values and not quantity, why would I want to reduce my access? When the riots broke out this last summer, you’ll never convince me that you didn’t wish you had a gun.
Tim,
If you believe the problem of higher gun deaths in the U.S. really comes down to “values” and not quantity of guns, you are engaged in magical thinking, full stop.
It’s as if you are trying to have your cake and eat it too:
Here’s the cake –
“Whenever there are more guns there are more gun deaths.”
Here’s the cake you are trying to eat too –
“Let’s blame minorities for their “shitty values” for the cause of more gun deaths.”
Dude, both cannot be true, it violates Occam’s Razor.
The solution is to reduce guns across the entire system if we want fewer gun deaths in the U.S., which I now see you oppose.
How many times do you need to hear that correlation is not causation. Learn a tiny bit about statistics.
‘Assault weapon bans’ have usually meant sales of new guns would be banned, but the existing ones would get ‘grandfathered’. Maybe some minor restrictions on selling used equipment, but typically a ban does nothing to remove weapons, only to stop adding more
I think a more useful approach would be to change the designation of assault weapons so they get the same treatment as belt-fed machine guns & rocket launchers. ie – still perfectly legal to be owned by private citizens, but only after passing a much tougher background check than for a bolt action hunting rifle
The effect of making something like all of the AR-15 variants legal to own provided you first obtain a federal firearms license would mean that there’s no loophole to ‘grandfather’ existing inventory. The practical effect would be that every police department & properly licensed firearm dealer would suddenly be swamped with guns in need of storage until proper licensing could be obtained. I would expect only 10% of this would ever actually get all the way through the process, so there would be a problem of what to do with a nationwide inventory of idle weapons. Eventually most would just be destroyed instead of continuing to rack up storage fees
Seems to me that it would be an honest assesment to define the AR platform as a ‘dangerous device’. Same for SKS’s and any firearm capable of war fighting, even if at a lesser intensity than a full-auto battle rifle
Last I checked, there has never been a single crime committed with a legally owned machine gun. I’d like to see all the semi-auto battle rifles aquire that same quality
Phil,
I hear what you are saying, like maybe any magazine fed rifle or pistolized version of the same, with a removable magazine of more than “X” number of rounds, should be reclassified as a Title II, Class 3, NFA weapon, that requires a Tax Stamp to own, right?
I don’t see how reclassifying AR/AK based weapons addresses the number one firearm used in murders, handguns, though?
I think what we should do, is have more community outreach between gun owners and people who are scared shitless of guns. The only way forward is if the two sides can meet in the middle somewhere.
It’d be nice if there was total accountability through a virtual or brick and mortar armory system, information that could be kept in the community, anonymized, safeguarded from the state, and cops, yet accessible to people who register with the system. This way people at least know who’s got what where.
The transparency thing is coming, they now have smart sunglasses that can detect when a person is packing a concealed firearm or explosives. Vuzix is the name of one company, they makes a pair of $800 smart sunglasses, with interactive menu, built in camera, and app that links to facial recognition cloud servers. Might want to start buying stock in that company.
The privacy of owning a gun became an ordeal in the five burroughs a few years ago. Some city official thought it a bright idea to leak to the New York Post a map of names and addresses of every registered firearm owner in NYC, which the Post then published the next day in full color, then retracted with apologies by the P.M. edition. Talk about a boon for firearms burglars.
Which brings me to my final point, weapons storage, I think it should be the law, that ammo, mags and firearms are always kept in a safe out of the reach of children. Anyways, interested to hear your input, this is what is like to live in the slippery slope, of freedoms that are taken to the extreme.
I understand where you’re trying to go with a safe and also an armory. Some of the advantages are nice. There are disadvantages. If a burglar enters your house, you want instant access, not “give me a sec while I dial in the code.” You also want to stop any kids from accidentally shooting themselves. I don’t know of a good way to balance these two. AR/AKs are not the big problem. Handguns are used to commit more murders. The left is attacking ARs because they look scary and are used by the white shooters in schools. They won’t attack handguns because they are used by the black gangs and they don’t look as scary. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
During the riots, I was glad to have clips with many rounds. I also understand the desire to limit them.
IMO, the real problem exists elsewhere and I have theories, but no proof of those theories. There weren’t many school shootings 30 years ago. Gang violence is pretty much limited to inner cities. What has changed? Gun technology hasn’t changed much. We had full and semi autos 100 years ago. That’s not where to look. We had medium and high capacity clips 100 years ago. That not where to look. We had semi auto handguns 100 years ago. That’s not where to look. Since 1972, the percentage of gun ownership has steadily decreased. That’s not where to look. There is a lurking variable. My thought is that it is societal. What has changed there? Electronics? Maybe. Video Games? Maybe. Secularization? Maybe. Fatherlessness? Maybe. Something else? Maybe. A combination of all of the above. Maybe.
We need to look at what has changed. Nothing has changed with guns. The change is societal (IMO).
Tim,
“If a burglar enters your house.”
The stats on this are clear, unless you are prepared to walk around armed in your own home (unlikely) a burglar can enter your home unimpeded anyways.
You seriously telling me you would murder someone just for entering your home Tim? This is where your “values” and “morals” argument starts to dissolve and sound incoherent. Are you just going to start blasting, even if the person made a mistake and entered the wrong home, or was just there to get out the rain, or for something to eat?
You know nothing about my home. It’s unclear if you know anything at all.
People who want to get out of the rain could simply stand on my patio. Those people would probably knock first. If you’re inside my home at night and came through a locked door, you’re not there by mistake. Break in to eat? Knock on the door. I’ll give you food. Nobody comes to my neighborhood looking for food. You aren’t that simple minded are you? You don’t even know the definition of murder. I’ll help you. It’s the intentional taking of an innocent human life. Innocent and intentional are the key words here. If you break into my house, you’re not innocent. Who are you to say if my shot was to intentionally kill? Murder fails on two points.
I feel like you’re just mad that a conservative exists and you just want to try to catch them somehow. Fully half of the country agrees with me. Go tilt at windmills.
Since you don’t feel you need to be protected, what is your address? Let’s advertise on the internet that you don’t have a gun, where you live, and that you will give anyone who enters the benefit of the doubt that they are there to get in out of the rain. You have no courage. You’re all talk.
Tim,
I’m not “mad.”
It’s just obvious that you refuse to budge and explain how killing in any form is justifiable?
How can you say you are conservative, when it’s the conservative party (GOP) who invented the Brady Bill (Reagan), The Brady Bill Expansion (GW Bush), and got rid of bumpstocks and expanded background checks (Trump)???
Advertise your name and address coward. You’re not worried.
Anything about me personally is relevant.
It changes nothing.
Meant to say…
That making this about individual’s private info is irrelevant.
You’re the one that believes guns aren’t necessary and that a person in your home is there for wholesome reasons.
Print your name and address. You have nothing to worry about.
You won’t because you don’t want any bad guys coming into your house because you know that they can harm you in seconds and by the time the cops get there, it will be too late. You depend on the fact that there are enough guys like me out there to scare burglars into not wanting to burgle a house. You need guys like me. Otherwise, your system doesn’t work. You’re a coward and a hypocrite.
This is just your butthurt EGO yapping now.
Because you’ve run out of salient contributions to the problem.
As if somebody’s “morals” is what pays the bills…it don’t.
Take it easy Tim
I expected fairness when I chose to view this site. All I got was the standard liberal talking points on guns, CRT, and Co-morbid. Did you ever consider that black children fired up with tales of how awful whites have treated them might result in violent attacks on white children. And if we’re seeking enlightenment-for the first time in heavily censored school curriculum-maybe we should teach children about the one’s behind all wars, economic troubles, and worldwide misery for all of us: The International Banksters! In these increasingly dangerous times did you once consider the needs of our most vulnerable citizens, women living and traveling alone, the elderly, and people living and traveling in dangerous areas and their need to protect themselves with a gun? Whenyou look squarely at Covid the facts surrounding the alleged pandemic there are many red flags! Bill Gates, despite his PR is, as evidenced in his never reported exploits in innoculating children in India and Africa. His vaccinations injured and killed some 480,000 Indian children. He has been banned from India presumably pending the legal action he faces there. In Africa he forged documents and coerced parents to immunize their children. Sterilization and injuries abounded there as well. The man is a eugenicist and he has spoken on camera that old people should be prematurely unplugged from life support to save tax dollars and that “old saw” “If we do a really good job in vaxxes and birth control we can greatly reduce the population.” He has called his work “the final solution” as he smirks and gesticulates. His biometric tattoo’s key ingredient is Luciferase and he labeled the patent 2020 060606. His Instagram account crashed due to massive hate mail after he aired his commercial with “spirit cooker” satanist, Maria Abromovitch. He has bought every agency involved in covid response and he aired his mock covid outbreak film, Event 201 one month before the outbreak occurred; even doing Fauci’s 2017 Georgetown commencement prophecy that Trump would have an outbreak during his term in office! The Event 201 script was used nearly verbatim during the “real” outbreak. They are calling injecting people with an experimental vaccine “science”!?!? And no one challenges this! The fact is the truth is not liberal or conservative. It simply is. Sincerely yours, Bill McCloy