Locked and Loaded (Article)

[jdberger]

City on a Hill Press is produced by and for UC Santa Cruz students. [Their] primary goal is to report and analyze issues affecting the student population and the Santa Cruz community.

I'll let you read the article and decide whether the UC system is educating our children to be responsible journalists.

Please, read the article before commenting.

Locked and Loaded

The American gun control debate

[Librarian]

Good heavens!

Nicely done, Asa! Kudos to Steve Clark, too.

[Carnivore]

LoL a gun in the wrong hands can end several lives in seconds....DUH!! so can a car, boat, RV, Ax good lord more things that can be listed here. Hell just a little fertilizer, some diesel fuel and a Ryder truck can kill more people much faster then any person with a firearm. Unbelievable.

[Kid Stanislaus]

By in large it was well balanced. I'd give it a B+.

[jdberger]

LoL a gun in the wrong hands can end several lives in seconds....DUH!! so can a car, boat, RV, Ax good lord more things that can be listed here. Hell just a little fertilizer, some diesel fuel and a Ryder truck can kill more people much faster then any person with a firearm. Unbelievable.

Stopped after the first couple paragraphs, didn't ya?

[yellowfin]

It still makes the fundamental error of giving the antis credibility and presumption of honesty when neither is the case.

[huck]

Well done. It does a good job of showing what a useless, misguided approach the anti-gun crowd has adopted.

[johnny_22]

Wow, from Santa Cruz!

That was balanced. KQED could learn from this!

[dantodd]

Stopped after the first couple paragraphs, didn't ya?

This is calguns isn't it?

[Window_Seat]

“Obviously, a gun can’t fire without a person behind it,” said Nina Salarno-Ashford, executive board member of Crime Victims United of California (CVUC), speaking for herself and not the organization, which does not have a formal stance on gun control.

This is interesting for one reason...

I wonder what the head of the Brady Campaign's individual & personal stance on gun control is.

Obviously Ashford isn't afraid to tell it like it should be told here, but I wonder, if pressed, what Dennis Henigan's personal (non-BC) opinion would be on gun control if asked about it in a room with an electronic fly on the wall (EFOTW).

Erik.

[PEBKAC]

It still makes the fundamental error of giving the antis credibility and presumption of honesty when neither is the case.

Principle of Charity in interpretation accounts for that. Since the author is simply trying to give an overview of the situation both sides are interpreted as would make the most logical sense while assuming the sincerity of what is said by both sides. "These people are for gun control because they believe it will stop gun violence" is the only immediately logical way to put it while assuming the sincerity of the people who are in favor of gun control without a lot of background information and analysis to cast doubt or prove false said sincerity, which is not what the author set out to do and would result in a much longer article that is no longer just an overview which casts a somewhat critical eye on pushes for additional gun control.

So given the context entirely appropriate.

Also what can I say but this makes me feel much better about a newer generation of journalism. Article was about as balanced as they come. Bravo.

Though I have no doubt that for every Asa Hess-Matsumoto there are 10, 100 or perhaps even 1000 that are not so objective being churned out.

[Arondos]

When I saw the Brady campaign quoted for the number of people killed by gun violence I nearly quit reading.

[mrboma]

Wow...

I am very impressed this came out of Santa Cruz, much less UCSC.
Thanks for the heads up, I must have missed the article.
Regards,
Mike

[otteray]

A good, balanced article.

A refreshing contrast to the knee-jerk, anti-gun drivel published by our local paper's daily "letters to the editor" that, 10 to 1, are from mouth-foaming, angry socialist progressives, of which there is no shortage of here.

I'm liking our new deputy chief a little better now, too.

[Lone_Gunman]

Not bad at all. My comments are awaiting moderation.

This is my response:

Full disclosure here- I am a gun owner and a Sacramento County CCW holder. I want to thank you for presenting both sides of the story in a balanced fashion. This is much better treatment than gun owners usually get in the press. There are a few things I would like to add to the discussion. First, is that the Clinton era "assault weapons" ban did nothing to effect the national crime rate. Second is that no matter what we do we cannot pass a law that will keep a crazy person from doing something crazy.
In response to O'Brien's assertion that “Most people own handguns for self-defense, and there’s nothing you can do with 10 bullets that you can’t do with 30,” In most self defense situations, yes, 10 rounds would be adequate, but this is a red herring argument. Anyone, with a minimum of practice, can swap out an empty 10 round magazine for a full one and resume firing in about one second. Banning these "high-capacity clips" (the correct term is magazine, but I digress) is nothing more than ineffective legislation that legislators can point to to say "look I'm tough on crime". Further, O'Brien says “It’s so sad to see 19 people gunned down in 15 seconds by these high-capacity clips.” It was not the "clip", or even the gun, that gunned down these people. It was a criminally insane madman who was acting on a years long obsession with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Let's lay the blame where it belongs. There is not one law that could have been passed that would have stopped Laughner. I challenge you to try to come up with one.
I firmly believe that the only way to reduce violent crimes are to aggressively prosecute them. We need to make the punishment so severe that it acts as a deterrent. Passing laws to keep criminals from breaking laws is asinine. If a criminal want's to shoot someone do you think he is going to stop when he comes within 1000 feet of a school? Of course not. Yet, If I pass through a school zone on my way to the rifle range for some recreational shooting my guns must be locked up. Why? I'm not going to shoot someone, the gun is not going to magically shoot someone by it's self, and a criminal isn't going to obey the law. This is just one example of the dozens of ineffective gun laws that are ignored by criminals every day.
You'll notice that I said "reduce" violent crime and not "eliminate" it. This is not an accidental choice of words on my part. We will never eliminate violence among humanity. Never. There will always be sociopaths that cannot feel empathy, or sympathy. Among those sociopaths there will always be a violent subset. To deny this is to deny human physiology. The only way to deal with those people who are intent on harming others is to allow those that they would harm the option of defending themselves, with deadly force, if necessary.
I will end with a question. We hear anti-gun legislators and activists talking about "reasonable" gun laws. I would like to ask anyone who is touting passage of more "reasonable" gun laws this. What sort of gun law would you consider UNREASONABLE? Can you give me an example?


Thank you for allowing me to post my thoughts on this matter.

Edit: Dang it- I found two typos after I posted my comments... Oh well. Fixed em here.