Eric Guster: Bluster, bloodsucking and Good Morning Britain.

So guns are back in the news given the recent tragic mass shooting, which can only mean one thing: British people shooting their mouths off about a subject of which, they know little to nothing. I rarely see a more embarrassing sight then when someone from the UK talks about American gun policy; attempting to lecture the United States from atop their high horse they expose their ignorance. Really, they ought to close their mouths, get off those high horses and go and learn about the 2nd amendment, its history and why guns are so important in the USA (for a very good explanation of this reason see this blog post – Guns; The Baltimore Sun, misquotations and revisionism).

Good Morning Britain, (Wed 21st Feb) was absolutely no different, only this time an American – Eric Guster- was joining in and saying some quite ridiculous things.

This is the video I shall be responding to.

 

At 0:24 we are asked what happens (in the context of arming teachers) if a teacher suddenly had a moment of panic? Presumably meaning – what if a teacher starts shooting children? However, this is ridiculous for a number of reasons;

1. A teacher could already do that now, if they were so insanely inclined in a US school, the fact is laws cannot stop random acts of violence. To the criminal intent on breaking the law, the law is just words written down somewhere to be ignored.

2. We don’t/ought not make public policy (that attacks the rights of citizens) on ‘what if’ statements. The person who starts their day thinking “what if my car exploded on my way to work so I better not go in”, or, “what if the bus driver goes mad and drives us off a cliff so I’ll stay home, is irrational. We live our lives knowing that most terrible random tragedies won’t happen to us and we are largely correct.

3. Okay so what if said teacher decides he wants to kill huge amounts of children with a very dangerous weapon, very quickly and very easily…………..he can, he use his car. In that case, there is nothing we can do apart from punish him after the fact (unless we want to ban cars, which most people do not). In any case ‘what if’ statements are just pointless here.

At 0:26 Kate goes on to say that it…’feels like more guns to us here in the UK can’t be the solution.’ Of course I don’t like her (or anyone) speaking for me, but a simple chart from the AEI will refute that statement quite easily.

Susanna chimes in at 1:28 with ‘why not just ban these people from access to these weapons‘. It’s simple really – you can, but all that will do is to create a black market. There are already around 330 million guns in America, that’s basically one for every man, woman and child. So I’ll give a persuasive parallel. Remember the war on drugs? We tried/try restricting access to drugs by making them illegal, and what happened? Did drugs vanish?  Are they a thing of the past? No, it merely pushed them underground so that anyone who really wants them, can easily get them. Drugs are still here and are all around us. There is no reason it wouldn’t be exactly the same for guns. With a third of a billion guns in America I think we can safely say that the genie is out of the bottle. In any case this is a matter of rights for Americans and the federal government taking away those rights would be a dangerous precedent to set.

Next, we are amazingly (and falsely) told (2:28) that…’it’s easier to buy a gun in Florida than it is to buy cold and flu remedy’. This is typical of the propaganda that the media puts out about guns in the USA. Here are the facts. For every gun purchase in the US from a licensed dealer you have to undergo a federal background check as well as presenting valid government-issued ID. Yes, there are rather arbitrary restrictions on cold medicines but nowhere in the USA is a background check from the FBI required. And this is the minimum requirement by law; some states have certain guns banned, mandatory waiting periods and other regulations. So her claim is just plain wrong.

At 3:30 the infamous gun-show loophole talking point emerges. This loophole is at best, disingenuously named. Put simply, all the rules that apply to sales in a gun shop also apply at a gun show. For all licensed dealers, no matter where, a background check is legally obligated. If you have a spare ten minutes you can watch this comedian exposing the gun show loop-hole by going to a bunch of gun shows and trying to buy a guy without a background check. There can be private non-licensed sales but that is not a loophole.

From 3:35-4:25 Eric Guster comes into his own with a fantastic display of ignorance. He first calls the other guest a liar when the guest (Dr John Lott) rightly points out that the differences between the average semi-auto hunting rifle and the AR-15 are cosmetic not functional. Lott is lying to no one; the AR-15 is in fact a popular hunting rifle and is commonly kept for self-defence. As the National Shooting Sports Federation puts it, the ‘AR-15-platform rifles are among the most popular firearms being sold. They are today’s modern sporting rifle’.

The peak of Guster’s blustering comes when he proclaims that an ‘ar-15 is a weapon to kill multiple people in a short amount of time, a hunting rifle you can take one shot and have to reload‘. Clearly he wasn’t listening. Many popular hunting rifles (as the other guest said) are semi-automatic, like the AR-15, so reload automatically after firing, and calling this gun a gun to kill multiple people in a short amount time, just makes no logical or empirical sense. There’s at least 5 million AR-15’s owned by Americans, and if Guster was right all 5 million would be murdering  people non-stop; there’d be millions being killed if all these guns did was kill. As has been said, they are very popular for hunting and home defence, they are not autonomous and are therefore not out killing people. The stats show this quite clearly. The FBI crime statistics for 2016  put the number of people murdered with all types of rifles at a whopping ground total of……………………. 374! To give that some context, the stats show that more than 4 times as many people were killed by knives and cutting instruments, and almost 2 times as many were kicked or punched to death.

Guster then (4:19) comes out swinging with an unforgivably low blow. He accuses his opponent John Lott, and those who agree with him, of having blood on their hands. This is frankly an immoral thing to say, an obvious sign of desperation and is just plain false.

But it gets sillier, he calls (5:51) the AR-15, a weapon of mass destruction (!?!?!?) that you shoot very rapidly. This is more nonsensical hyperbole. For one thing, semi-automatics, like most guns, can only fire as quickly as you can pull the trigger; this is very standard and is not unique for this gun. And to his claim of it being a WMD……..well that comment really speaks for itself, and has already been easily refuted by the numbers (this man, though he doesn’t show it, is in fact an educated lawyer).

He concludes his error-filled diatribe by brashly claiming (6:10) again that the NRA, Republicans (who he labels bloodsucking) and John Lott all have blood on their hands. These are all just platitudes, they only serve to hurt the discussion, and to reiterate, are deeply offensive and stupid things to say.

To conclude I feel I have to say this. We will never advance the conversation about guns in America when people both sides of the Atlantic continue to refuse to learn about guns, instead, relying on tired old clichés, and insults, instead of doing research and learning about this important topic.  But this is especially true for Brits; so here is some advice. Next time you hear yourself (including Eric Guster) proclaiming that the answers to America’s gun problem are actually very simple and, in fact, YOU have the answers, please just stop, think, and for god’s sake do some googling.