Bill O'Reilly in Tuesday's commentary here starts off solidly enough by pointing out that gun violence epidemic Obama implies is mostly exaggerated. Whereas the mass killing incidents are unconscionable, even when you include these incidents in national statistics, we have some 300M weapons in the private sector and only a tiny percentage of these are ever used to commit violent crimes. We have long-term, declining homicide and other violent crime rates over decades. I have embedded relevant charts in recent posts, but this article by Robert Verbruggen does a good job of debunking the propaganda of gun restrictionists. In particular, he points out an abuse of statistics by which they substitute gun deaths instead of the more relevant gun homicides construct; this is notable because a majority of gun deaths are suicides, not homicides. Let's point out by FBI statistics, roughly a third of homicides do not involve firearms, and firearm-based murders have been declining as the number of available firearms have increased, and some of the lowest homicide rates occur in gun-friendly states.
Yet I submit that Bill O'Reilly's discussion is muddled:
The population of the USA is approaching 330 million, so you can see there is not a gun-crime epidemic and the vast majority of these heinous crimes are committed by hardcore criminals, not civilian shooters. Right now there are more than 300-million firearms currently on the streets of America so there will be a thriving black market for guns no matter what kind of registration laws are passed...Now Talking Points understands public safety and reasonable gun registration laws should be on the books.It's not clear if violent recividist criminals acquire weapons on the black market how gun registration does anything but discourage law-abiding citizens from exercising their right to self-defense.
Where is the federal law that mandates strict prison time for anyone using a gun in the commission of a crime? You cannot leave sentencing to local judges if you want to control gun violence on a national level. Talking Points has said it before – anyone convicted of a gun-related crime should get 10 years in prison on top of what they get for the crime whether it's assault, murder or robbery.Here's where his argument completely loses me: he's talking about a federal takeover of local crime law and justice, which is flatly unconstitutional, violating the tenth amendment; he seems to be scapegoating local judges for undue leniency in sentencing violent criminals, with no evidence presented in support for this argument; he ignores the prison industrial complex which is hardly vested in rehabilitation and the fact that the land of the free has among the highest incarceration rates in the world; and he wants to treat some forms of murder or otherwise violent crime "more equal" than other forms, which strikes me as unconstitutional at its core. Not all homicides are premeditated; the idea that a mandatory supplemental sentence will influence a mass murderer who is contemplating his own suicide or risking a fatal confrontation with police or a SWAT team is, at best, dubious. In fact, it may well give a criminal, looking at spending the rest of his life in a cage or the electric chair, less of an incentive to surrender.
Let me be clear: I am not favorably disposed towards those who violate the unalienable rights of others--life, liberty, and/or property. But Bill O'Reilly's law-and-order populism, promoting policies like mandatory minimums or three strikes, is more of a problem than a solution. You see injustices like minor infractions serving as a third strike and disproportionate sentences.
Finally, Bill O'Reilly never even raises the fact that the executive orders are plainly unconstitutional. He knows the Congress would never pass such restrictions into law and this was an in-your-face imposition of executive tyranny.
