Freedom

As a gun owner most of my life of 62 years. I have really never paid to much attention to the political back and forth on gun control. When Clinton implemented the assault weapons buyback in the ninety’s it didn’t affect me that much. When it expired in 2005 I didn’t care that much as I had never owned one.

But then President Obama was elected and things seem to change. The country seemed to become more and more divided along racial , cultural, political and it seems every other divide there is. He came out and said he would not take our guns but after the first mass shooting after he became President his tone started to change. I started to buy guns.

Now the Democrats running for the office of the President are talking about banning assault weapons and red flag laws to remove the assault weapons. But its confusing as to what they think a assault weapon is. Some think its a AR-15 or a AK-47. These are semi-automatic rifles made and sold in the U.S. legally. According to the FBI, 1,604 people were killed by “knives and cutting instruments” and 374 were killed by “rifles” in 2016. Both the AR and the AK are rifles. So I am not sure why the push is on for banning these guns.

Most killings by guns are done with pistols. To be sure most are semi-automatics but not all. Semi-auto guns are the vast majority of guns sold today. But a semi auto is the preferred choice use by most criminals. Well they will use whatever they can get their hands on actually. In 2017, almost half of the nation’s 47,173 suicides involved a firearm. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that about 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide. Now I can’t speak for anyone but myself but I would rather OD than blow my brains out. Now if you want to compare lets look at the Drug overdose problem compared to the gun problem.

Provisional data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics predicted that 68,500 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2018, compared to about 72,000 the year before

The US has been fighting a war on drugs sense the 70’s Its not winning this war by any stretch of the imagination. Of the 68K to 72K that have died from drug overdoses how many of them were suicide? No way of telling unless they left a note. How many die on the street every year due to homelessness. They are picked up and taken to the morgue and classified as natural causes. Then buried as John Doe if no id is found.

Then there are the people that die due to medical mistakes. According to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

Other studies report much higher figures, claiming the number of deaths from medical error to be as high as 440,000. The reason for the discrepancy is that physicians, funeral directors, coroners and medical examiners rarely note on death certificates the human errors and system failures involved. Yet death certificates are what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rely on to post statistics for deaths nationwide.

“It’s the system more than the individuals that is to blame The U.S. patient-care study, which was released in 2016, explored death-rate data for eight consecutive years. The researchers discovered that based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, there was a pooled incidence rate of 251,454 deaths per year — or about 9.5 percent of all deaths — that stemmed from medical error.

Car deaths in the U.S. lets look at that In 2015, an average of 103 motor vehicle injury deaths, 121 suicides, and 49 homicides occurred each day globally.

Vehicles:
Number of registered motor vehicles in U.S. (cars, trucks, and buses): 300 million

Number of vehicular homicides annually: 300

Number of suicides committed with cars annually: approximately 20,000 (mostly through carbon monoxide poisoning)

Number of accidental vehicle deaths annually: approximately 30,000

Total number of annual deaths involving the use of motor vehicles: approximately 50,000

Firearms:
Number of privately owned firearms in U.S: 270 million

Number of homicides committed annually with firearms: approximately 11,000

Number of suicides committed annually with firearms: approximately 20,000

Number of deaths caused annually by accidental gun discharge: 500-1000

Total number of annual deaths involving the use of firearms: approximately 32,000

The accidental deaths by cars is far greater than by gun because the accidental death by guns. But the reverse is true for homicides. The difference is homicides are committed by criminals. suicides come out about the same.

The difference here is owning a car and being able to drive anywhere you want to go is a privilege. Owning a gun for whatever reason you want is a right. The right to bare arms is a Constitutional Right for every citizen outlined in the Bill of Rights under the Second Amendment.

So why do the Democrats or Socialist want to take our guns? Its very easy to see. They want to control what the people can say and do. If the people can’t defend themselves the politicians can enact any laws they want and take the country anywhere they want. If the people can not defend their beliefs against a oppressive government they have lost their freedoms. They in effect become slaves for the rulers.

If you have been paying attention to what the government has been doing the last three years. Ask yourself who has be advocating suppression of speech? What party is talking about taking over vast portions of our economy? How many people running for office on the Democratic side are talking gun control? Some even talking confiscation.

Think about who you will vote for in 2020. Do you want to give your freedom away?

Source: National Vital Statistics System. Mortality public use data file, 2015. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstatsonline.htm.