Hatred in the public sphere: why is it there?

We all know there's plenty-plenty hate out there pointed all over the place. I'm going to talk about a specific and extremely virulent hatred, that of liberals toward gun owners, because I found a great example of it: "How Guns Literally Go to Men's Heads" by Thom Hartmann, a "writing fellow" of the "Independent Media Institute." (I'd be fascinated to know where they get their money.)

Mr. Hartmann is also the author of "The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment" which is one of the most breathtakingly false books about American history I've seen in a long time.

So let's see what Mr. Hartmann has to say about men, shall we?

People are asking why the shooter in Virginia Beach used a gun to settle his workplace score. The answer is probably pretty simple.

When a man has a gun, he literally holds the power of life and death in his hand. That kind of power is extraordinarily seductive.

The Virginia Beach shooter was seduced by the Power of the Gun. That's his whole take.

With a gun in his hand, a man can look around a room, a building, or a public area and specifically identify who will instantaneously die and whom he will allow to live. It's a power that traditionally has only been held by doctors, priests, police and soldiers.

I can tell you from personal experience of carrying a gun, that isn't what I was thinking when I got into a "situation" one time. I was thinking "If I have to shoot this prick, I'm going to lose my job and probably go to jail."

Also, that whole "doctors, priests, police and soldiers" list is bullshit. Every adult male in the world has the power of life and death in his own two hands from puberty onward, and he knows it. You don't need a gun to kill somebody. You can do it with your fingers. Or feet, elbows, a nice handy rock, whatever.

This is largely a male problem because men commit 85.3 percent of all homicides and 97 percent of all homicides where the shooter and victim don't know each other. In the case of school and workplace shootings, the shooters are also more than 97 percent male.

As a result of this male aggression provoked in part by handling guns, in America guns are the second leading cause of death (just behind car crashes) among children between 1 and 19 years old.

Couple things here. First, extending childhood to age 19 is a way to lie with charts. They want to bring in that huge number of teenage shootings which is gang-bangers killing each other over drugs.

Second, "male aggression" as the prime motivator in gun related murder is an interesting notion. We can TEST that theory right now.

Here's Mr. Hartmann's "science" section:

This goes way beyond the joke of the Small Penis Gun Club or its Facebook site. Men, it turns out, are actually hardwired by evolution and biology to react to having power over others with a boost in testosterone and an increase in aggression.

A 2006 study published in Psychological Science by Klinesmith, Kasser and McAndrew found that men who simply handled a gun were significantly more likely to give other men a higher dose of hot sauce (a commonly used research measure of aggression) right after handling the gun than were men who handled a child's toy.

For men who feel that they've lost control of their lives, or who feel dismissed or disrespected by others, this is pure catnip.

Firing a gun, in addition to raising testosterone levels like simply handling one does, actually produces a feeling similar to intoxication. As UCLA Law professor Adam Winkler points out, shooting guns triggers higher levels of adrenaline and endorphins, producing a high like riding a roller coaster.

In this regard, guns can be thought of as a drug — an intoxicating, mind-altering, power-conferring drug that leads to aggression and, in the United States, to around 40,000 deaths a year.

That whole section and all those linked studies are obvious bullshit, and If I had the leisure I'd go over each one and show y'all why. Study design, sample, all chosen to prove the hypothesis. Which isn't science, its propaganda.

But, because I'm busy, we are going to take all that at face value. For the sake of the argument, we will assume a gun in your hand is a powerful drug that makes you want to kill people.

That would mean two things. Where guns are most common, that would be the place where the most murders happen. Right? The gun is a drug, you take the drug and you go kill somebody.  That's the thesis.

Testing time, what do we actually see out there in the world? 50% of murders happen in 2% of US counties. But it is actually worse than that, because a county is a big place. When you break it down, you find that the vast majority, by which I mean over ~75% of murders in those hot-spot counties, are restricted to a few bad neighborhoods. Many neighborhoods in the "bad" counties have zero murders.

Conversely, more than half the country has no murders at all. None. And those counties which have no murders in them, do they have men there? Yes. And do those men have guns there? Yes, usually ALL of the adult men in those counties have guns. More than one, in fact. The usual number is three, a .22 rifle, a "full power cartridge" rifle like a .3006 or .308, and a shotgun.

So much for Mr. Hartmann's theory, right?

Next question, and the point of this post, there's a whole host of Leftist organizations out there beavering away, publishing bullshit like this piece every single day. All of it can be refuted with a 30 second Google search, yet they persist. WHY BOTHER?

Well, here's why:

If a driver must carry liability insurance because his car could kill somebody, why not a gun owner? Why is it that if the Newtown or Parkland kids had been killed by a drunk or even malicious driver, their survivors would have gotten a million bucks each from Geico, but the families of kids killed with guns don't?

Required liability insurance, by the way, is the most Republican/conservative of all gun control measures; it's a "free market solution."

Just as no insurance company will cheaply write insurance for a driver with a few DWIs, so, too, would they restrict people with domestic violence charges, etc. No government involvement necessary for this one, other than the simple requirement to have the policy so long as one owns a gun.

Money.

I'm sure the insurance industry would LOVE to write mandatory policies on every gun in America.  We're talking about a market of roughly 9 million new guns a year. Roughly half the households in the USA will admit to owning a gun, a wild guess tells me another 25% won't admit it. There are more guns in the USA than there are people, by a healthy margin. And the other thing we know is that none of those guns will ever kill people. How do we know? Because all the murders are concentrated in 25 large cities, leaving the entire rest of the country essentially murder-free.

Mr. Hartmann is spreading lies and hatred for money.

I'm glad we cleared that up.