The Kevin Miner Gun Challenge!

In 1980, San Diego Padres shortstop Ozzie Smith set the all-time assists record for a shortstop at 621, and won the first of 13 consecutive Gold Glove Awards.

He also hit .230, with zero home runs and .313 On Base Percentage. The following baseball season, Smith's appearance at the plate was even more dismal, logging a .222 batting average and zero home runs, with an on base percentage of .294.  To put it in non-baseball terms: pathetic. Due to animosity between Ozzie Smith's agent, Ed Gottlieb, and the San Diego Padres management, Smith found himself a St. Louis Cardinal at the start of the 1982 season.

I guarantee you nobody is taking this guy's gun away!!

At spring training, Cardinal manager Whitey Herzog saw Smith's potential as a hitter and offered the young player a deal.

"Every time you hit a fly ball," said Herzog to Smith, "you owe me a buck. Every time you hit a ground ball, I owe you a buck."

The plan worked beautifully. Smith accepted the deal, stopped trying to hit home runs, and earned $300 over the course of the 1982 season. His batting average improved to respectability, and Smith finished his career with a respectable 2,460 hits. As a Padre, Ozzie Smith's batting average was a lowly .231 As a Cardinal, Smith hit .272.

I offer a similar proposal to any law-abiding gun owner. For every day that a government official doesn't take your gun away, you owe me a buck. For every day that a government official does take your gun away, I will give you $10,000. Per gun. And yes, I am completely serious.

Why do I make this offer? Because quite frankly, less than three months after 20 mothers and fathers had their children taken away from them by a madman, a predictable group of sourpusses have sulked and complained that they are the real victims here.

Spare me. That is just wrong for so many reasons. You, a victim? Why? Because in the future, a 17 year-old with a documented history of mental illness and a criminal record might not be allowed to purchase a Tec-9, a 9 mm High Point Carbine Rifle, and two shotguns at a gun show? It's happened before. The buyer's name was Eric Harris.

So happy I could flip!

We have automotive safety laws in the country. To obtain a car, one must first take lessons from a certified instructor, pass a test, and obtain a licence. After buying a car, one must register the car and pay insurance on it, because even though cars can be useful, these cars can also be quite dangerous if not handled properly. In fact, cars themselves must meet certain safety standards from the manufacturer if they are to be sold to the general public.

Substitute the word "car" with "gun," and guess what? You're not a "victim." No one is going to take your car away and leave you defenseless against a "bad guy with a car." You will survive. You will not be, nor are you now, a victim.

But people who get shot and killed are victims. Sometimes these victims had a gun, sometimes they didn't. But the perpetrator had a gun that, all too often, was legally purchased. So take me up on this challenge. Eventually, you will learn that nobody is out to "take your gun away."

Or better yet, stop complaining.

Shooting Ranges Believe in Gun Control

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Here at Atwell's Shooting Range in Painesville, Ohio, people don't want just anyone walking around with a loaded gun. Because, you know, that would just be dangerous, even if the person with a gun is a responsible, law-abiding citizen.

What if the treatment is worse than the symptom?

So the House Democrats unveiled their proposal to reform our nation's gun safety laws. As usual, the other side cried foul, save for some vague promise to provide better mental heath services.

We've seen this play out before. After a mass shooting rampage, the NRA and its cohorts express sympathy for the victims, express that guns are not the problem, and we as a nation must work on providing mental health for those who need it.

You'll take away my right to lose insurance from my cold, dead hands!

I have two problems with this single-minded, overly simplistic, vague solution to the scourge of mass shootings and everyday gun violence that plague America today.

First, when Barack Obama called on Congress to pass the Affordable Health Care Act, aka "Obamacare," these same assault-rifle wielding, bed-wetting, "Tea Party" types were carrying guns to health care rallies and calling for armed insurrection if insurance companies were to be forced to provide services that customers paid for. Oh, the humanity!

The second problem cuts right to the core of the gun culture. These "Second Amendment Enthusiasts" don't view treatment from mental health professionals as the solution to gun violence in America. No, they think that guns are the solution! That's right. If you hear voices in your head, don't see a psychiatrist ASAP, go to the shooting range and pop off a few rounds.

Think I'm being naive? I wish I were, but I'm going off of the information that we have concerning Adam Lanza at this time. This was reported by the Associated Press, and it cannot be repeated often enough:

"Friends told NBC's Today show on Monday that Lanza was a devoted mother, especially to her son Adam, and that shooting guns was simply a hobby for her. Russell Hanoman said Adam Lanza was 'clearly a troubled child.'

"Hanoman said Nancy Lanza told him she introduced guns to Adam as a way to teach him responsibility. 'Guns require a lot of respect, and she really tried to instill that responsibility within him, and he took to it. He loved being careful with them. He made it a source of pride.' Hanoman said."

In less time that it takes Wayne LaPierre to say,"But wait! That was an isolated incident!" We can examine the murder of ex-Navy Seal Chris Kyle. Yes, he did take Ray Routh, a person who described his own behavior as "psychotic," to a gun range. Yes, Kyle was trying help Routh with his mental ailments.

And if we do get mental health care, we're gonna shoot up the place!

And no, this isn't a recent development. Before Sandy Hook, and even before Columbine, high school sophomore Kip Kinkel murdered both his parents, drove to Thurston High School in Springfield Oregon, and unloaded 50 rounds of ammunition on his classmates, killing four and wounding another 24.

Kip's father had taken the boy off Prozac and had allowed his son to collect guns as a mature hobby. Seriously. Just a reminder that medication has more stopping power than a Glock.

Super Bowl Myth: Busted!

Didn't you hear? Today, Super Bowl Sunday is allegedly the biggest day for spousal abuse. In fact, more women are victims of spousal abuse on this day than on any other day of the year, with domestic violence centers reporting an increase of 40 percent.

Except problem: It isn't true. Not in the slightest. Snopes.com does an excellent job detailing the history of this whopper from its origins.

Must . . . Attack . . . Women??

It's also important to examine one tremendous flaw with this logic: In football, players are hitting other men. They are not hitting other women. If the object of a football game were to have the male players attack the female cheerleaders of the opposing team, this argument might have some merit. Then again, if a football game really were played with men routinely attacking women, the NFL would have a serious problem attracting fans. Most people would find such activity abhorrent.

If people really were that impressionable, wouldn't Call of Duty video games have sparked a massive increase in U.S. military enlistment? Behavioral psychologists know better.

And yet the fact the a statistic so absurd could gain such widespread currency for so long is a reminder that our brains are programmed to take mental shortcuts. As humans, we have cognitive process that is designed to filter out garbage and decide whether something makes sense based on what we already presume to be true. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

Are we doomed, then to eternal suffering based on our own mental shortcomings? I think not. I think we can do better. In the last half century, the American public has endured a seismic shift on equal rights based on race, equal rights based on sexual orientation, and automotive safety. Can the tackling of today's gun culture be far behind?

The Right and Wrong Way of Kicking the Brits Out.

An unwanted, imperial British government exercised its rule over a foreign land. Protesters against the government were fired upon in a bloody massacre. The people took up arms to send a clear message: Kick the British out!

Is this the best way to achieve independence from Britain?

And, um, they were not successful.

Dolours Price, an unrepentant member of the Irish Republican Army got her own write-up in the New York Times this weekend after she passed away this Thursday. Price participated in and later served prison time for a London bombing that injured one and left one person dead from a heart attack. 

What happened to Ms. Price, and the movement of which she was a part of, is perhaps best e summarized in her New York Times obituary:

Ms. Price spoke often of the personal toll of her terrorist activities: years of depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Among the suspected informers she drove to their executions, she said, was a longtime family friend. In prison, she staged a 203-day hunger strike in which her jailers force-fed her every day through rubber tubing.

Suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments, Ms. Price was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1981 after serving seven years of a life sentence.

Ms. Price told interviewers that she might have spared herself and her victims had she known that the struggle would end with a peace that left Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority, in her view, where it had started: under British rule.

“When we starved together on hunger strike,” she wrote in a 2004 essay in Fortnight, an Irish journal, “it was not to ‘move the process forward,’ it was not for seats in a British government.” It was, she said, “to rid this land of any British interference.”

Her life and death serve should serve as a reminder that the American Revolution was not a band of "minuteman" waging guerrilla warfare against the British. On the contrary, most members of the militia were veterans of the French and Indian War. The battles of the American Revolution were fought with contemporary military tactics. And it wasn't until the French were kind enough to supplement General Washington with 6,500 soldiers that the Continental Army was able to deliver a decisive enough defeat to end the war.

Fighting on a battlefield between soldiers is far, far different than the car bombings, kidnappings and forced executions that Belfaster's refer to "the troubles" that plagued Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s. Although the Good Friday agrement in 1998 failed to address once and for all whether or not Belfast would remain under British rule or finally join the rest of Ireland, the condition of peace was better than the condition of war.

That should be the bottom line. Public disputes are best resolved through the political process. Saying that any person, anywhere, should have whatever gun they choose to keep the government from doing things they dislike essentially advocates domestic terrorism.

Gun advocates really aren't helping their cause.

The truth comes out. Five weeks after Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders in less than three minutes, a merry band of delusional gun-toters declared that the AR-15 was not to blame.

"It's not an assault rifle," said Elizabeth Mais, of Prospect, Connecticut. "It's a modern-day musket."

Right. I say it's horrifying that Adam Lanza was able to kill an entire first-grade class in less than a minute, you say po-tah-to.

Normally, after a mass shooting, the NRA's strategy has been to keep quiet, lest somebody point out the host of logical inconsistencies in their mantra. How many people normally get shot at a gun show? I don't know, because normally, accidental shootings don't make the news. Then again, yesterday was "Gun Appreciation Day." In that case, it tends to grab the headlines.

At Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh North Carolina, Gary Lynn Wilson accidentally fired a round from his shotgun as he tried to unzip from it's shotgun case, injuring three people. Real smart Gary. You might want to do a better packing job next time.

I guess Stanley McChrystal is no expert guns. Or maybe he is.

In Ohio, a proud owner of a new semi-automatic handgun was displaying he recent purchase to a friend. According to police reports, the owner of said handgun had removed the magazine, and then, upon further examining the gun, accidentally pulled the trigger. The bullet ricocheted off the floor, injuring the friend in the arm and leg. Quite and acrobatic bullet.

Perhaps the best of the three stooges routine belongs to a man named Emory Cozee, who accidentally shot himself in the hand as he was leaving the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show, according to state police.  Why was he loading the gun after he left the gun show? Apparently, loaded personal firearms are not allowed at the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show! I guess the organizers realize that guns are inherently dangerous, and it would be ill-advised to let just anyone walk around with a loaded gun.

This would be funny if not for the fact that a man was shot and injured a Martin Luther King Day parade in Jackson Mississippi, yesterday. And in New Mexico, a teenager shot and killed two adults and three children. The weapon of choice? An AR-15.

We don't have all the horrific details from the New Mexico shooting, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a case of domestic violence, and that the parents were killed by a gun they purchased to protect them from the home invasion that never happened. If so, do you think Wayne LaPierre is going to use his influence to warn families about the potential danger of owning an Assault Rifle? I wouldn't bet on it. 

Then again, he might unwittingly say something really stupid and really comical that might provide comic relief in the face of the bloodshed. Apparently, "law-abiding citizens" are quite proud of their less-than professional use of firearms.

Speak up against ignorance and misconception.

Freedom doesn't come from the barrel of a gun. It stems from a mutual agreement among people.

The next time your Congressman, Senator, State Representative, or any elected official says otherwise,

Call them on it!

There is a difference between a “loophole,” a technical term that derives its name from the narrow slits in castle towers of the Middle Ages, and a giant gaping hole in legislation that allows roughly half of all gun sales to be conducted without a background check.

"Good guys with guns" did not deter John Hinckley

Call them on it!

There is a difference between a legitimate, gun safety organization that advocates for all owners of such weapons to use them responsibly, and an organization that calls for guns in the hands of virtually everyone, anyplace, anywhere. The percentage of Americans who believe that all gun sales should be subject to a background check is the same across party lines. With little margin, nearly 90 percent of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters support universal background checks. Oh, and among NRA members, it's nearly 90 percent, too! Can the same be said by NRA leadership?

Call them on it!

Even Antonin Scalia does not believe that the Second Amendment should serve as anything more than an adjunct to law enforcement. If you raise your gun at a police officer, a U.S. Marshall, or any other “Jack-booted thug,” no one is going to pry a gun from your cold, dead hands. Instead, your corpse will still be warm when the forensics team arrives on the scene.

Call them on it!

If Ford makes a faulty car, the purchaser of said car can sue the manufacturer for selling shoddy product. If Cerberus Capital Management manufacturers a faulty gun, the purchaser of said gun has no legal recourse against the manufacturer. Why?

Call them on it!

Trying to overthrow one's government, against the will of the majority, through violent means does not make one a person into a patriot. It makes him a terrorist.

Call them on it!

Elected officials should be able to make decisions based on the consensus of a majority, not out fear of assassination. People should have the right to go to work, or school, or any public place without having to worry about guns or bombs going off.

Call them on it!

Inanimate objects, be they guns, swords, or toasters are not human beings, and thus, not entitled to “rights.” Only people are entitled to human rights. It is self-evident.

Call them on it!

Every time Wayne LaPierre opens his mouth at a press conference or on TV news, he turns himself into a strawman. LaPierre figuratively puts his own fallacious logic in the cross, and invites anybody with good reason to figuratively shoot him down.

Yes, figuratively. Only someone with a severe case of schizophrenia would take such rhetoric literally. And how do you stop a schizophrenic from going on a shooting spree? Is it with concealed carry permits, powerful handguns, and hollow-point bullets?

No, no, and no. The correct answer is thirty milligrams of Thorazine, give or take.

Call them on it!

Tanks, fighter jets, and nuclear missiles are all prohibited from civilian use. Yet these are all “arms.” Why are they restricted, or to put it differently, “infringed?” Because they don't belong to you if you are not in a militia!

The list is endless. There is much more to be said. This conversation must go on. And go on it shall. This time, we as a people, as a nation, must not let a small band of dangerous extremists and trade industry lobbyists enable the next mass murderer. We are capable of being better people. We can do this. But only if we speak.