The media has been in a bit of a tizzy over the outrage directed at Target due to the announcement that Target stores will allow transgender people to use bathrooms and changing facilities of the gender they identify with.  This has prompted a boycott of target, which as of the time that I was writing this post, has over 1 million online signatures.  The media has been quick to condemn the outrage and boycott as overblown and trans-phobic.

The CBS out of Minnesota (Target is based in Minnesota) defended Target by saying “But there’s no evidence of dangerous predators pretending to be transgender in American bathrooms, even though Minnesota supporters of a bathroom ban say it’s true.”

I guess nobody at CBS Minnesota bothered to watch Fox News in Pennsylvania about the man taking pictures of a 10-year old girl in a bathroom stall or CBS Southern California dressed as a woman recording hours of video in a Macy’s.  Or any of the other cases of policy abuse that Breitbart News recorded.

But the point of this post isn’t to attack Target for its policy.  The point of this post is to point out the media and pop-culture reaction to two Target policies.

As many readers of this blog and the wider gun community know, Target allowed itself to be bulled by Bloomberg’s minions into releasing a statement that Target does not want guns carried in its stores, even when state law allows it.

“This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create.”

*On a side note, I love the irony that allowing CCW in Target “creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping” but allowing a man in the woman’s room does not.

The best estimates on the subject put the number of Transgendered individuals in the US at about 700,000 or 0.3% of the population.  The state of Florida has over 1.4 Million active state issued CCW permits, meaning that Florida ALONE has twice as many permit holders as there are total Transgenders in the US.  The average national rate of CCW is 5.2% of adults have permits, which is more than 17 times the percent of Transgenders in this country.

Shortly after that, the gun rights community opted to boycott Target.  That is progressiveness for you, Target has no qualms about turning away 12.8 Million potential customers because they are gun owners, but they are loathed to be seen as non-inclusive for 700,000 trans-people.  And of course the media was silent about the Target anti-gun backlash, and cheered on Bloomberg’s minions when they turned their sights on Kroger.

Fortunately for CCW permit holders, some important people were paying attention.  When the CEO of the largest supermarket chain in America was put in the spotlight, he decided that Kroger was going to follow whatever the local law said and put the burden of store policy on state legislatures.  That is how you don’t alienate a customer base.

Walmart seems to be taking a play out of the Kroger books on the trans issue.  Walmart is the largest retailer in America, and Target’s primary competitor.  When asked what Walmart’s transgender bathroom policy is, Walmart cracked open a family size container of STFU and started chugging.  Much to the disapproval of the media.  You don’t become the largest company in the world by revenue by being stupid.

Openly tell gun owners you wan’t them them as customers and the left will cheer you on.  Gun owners respond by not spending money where they are not welcome and all you hear is crickets.  Risk the safety of women and girls in your store to appease a tiny minority of people and you are a hero.  Refuse to hand over your money to that store and you are a bigot.

These policies aren’t about money, they are about virtue signaling.  Personally, I’ll take my cash to the same place that allows me to take my gun.

That should go double for the ladies.  I believe the best response to an up skirt camera flash is muzzle flash.

I found myself over the weekend being subjected to the ignorance that was a defense of magazine capacity bans.  Not feeling like getting into a protracted argument, I made a point that I shall repeat here, the quite effectively shut up my opponent.

Trying to stop shootings with magazine capacity bans is like trying to stop internet child pornography by restricting everybody’s bandwidth.   At the very best, you have slightly inconvenienced the person engaged in the criminal act, and you had to significantly interfere in the lives of millions of innocent people to accomplish that.

I watched Jurassic World again, now that it is on HBO.  You always get something more out of a movie or book the second time around.

There is a scene towards the end of the movie where Owen and the mercenaries security forces take the raptors against the Indominus Rex.  The Indominus says something in Dinosaur to the raptors and the raptors turn on the humans.

A bunch of people get eaten, Owen is facing off against one of the raptors, and then some human shoots the raptor with a rocket launcher and kills it.  Owen gets suddenly sad, and you are supposed to feel bad for the raptor getting vaporized.

It suddenly hit me WTF!!!

OK, Vincent D’onofrio’s character Fatty McStupidnbelligerent  may be an asshole, but the rest of these guys are ex-military who have been hired by a theme park to provide security for the guests.  These guys are probably regular working Joes who thought they got a good job in the private sector after getting out of the Army and have wives and kids and such.  Why should I feel bad for the cloned raptor instead of all the human are going to end up as dino shit in a Coasta Rican jungle?

Why the moral dubiousness?

Not, 30 seconds later, one of the other raptors tires to eat Owen’s girlfriend’s nephews.  Am I at this point still supposed to be sympathetic to Owen’s pet “six foot turkey?”  How can I root for Owen to score one with Ms. Orange-Hair PrissyPants if his raptor buddies end her status as an aunt?

Sure, blue comes to Owen’s rescue at the end when fighting the Indominus, but just how many of Owen’s human coworkers did just take out 15 minutes previous?

I’m all confused.  Jurassic Park was much less gray area on this subject: humans good (except Nedry), dinos bad.  Why is that so hard?

Fine, maybe the dinosaurs (except for the Indominus) aren’t malicious.  So what, that doesn’t mean that they are less likely to eat you.  Didn’t Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend learn that the hard way when he went to commune with the bears in Alaska?  Does a bear shit environmentalists in the woods?  Even Roy of Siegfried and Roy got nommed on by his tiger, and they trained together for years.

Don’t try an complicate the morality of the movie for me.  I like animals, but if I have to choose between the last lion on earth and some tourist on photo safari; pass the H&H.   I would love to see dinosaurs in real life.

During the legislative battle to implement concealed carry in Illinois – the battle being between Conservatives who wanted easy and wide CCW vs. liberals who wanted restricted CCW – the City of Chicago managed to have CCW banned on public transportation.  A person with an Illinois CCW permit can carry in Chicago, but not on a bus or train.  As you can imagine, this has created some problems.

A woman was attacked, beaten, and robbed on Thursday on the Blue Line.

In January the Orange Line was shut down after a fight that resulted in a man having he ear bitten off.

In February three men attacked a women outside of a Green Line station.

Just as was predicted during the legislative debate, criminals would use the CTA as a “safe haven” where they could attack and rob people, knowing that if they were getting on or off the trains, they would be unarmed.

Good job, Chicago!

Fortunately, not all hope is lost.  State legislators are trying to update the law to allow carry on the Metra, and it is receiving bipartisan support.

“There are many individuals throughout the state of Illinois who rely on public transit as their primary mode of transportation,” [Democratic state Rep. Jerry Costello of Smithton] said. “I do not believe their Second Amendment rights should be infringed upon simply because they take a train or bus rather than driving their own vehicle.”

DAMN STRAIGHT, JERRY!!!  Well said.

Hopefully this law will get passed, and for readers in Illinois, I urge you to contact your state reps and encourage them to pass this bill.

If it does, I predict that the criminal element won’t know about it until some punk tries to rob a CCW permit holder on a Metra platform and takes one to the chest.  Then watch the muggings on the CTA promptly end.

I know it is photoshop, but you’d buy it too.

Hat tip to Mark W.

I like to argue. A lot.

In college, I was invited to join our two-time defending national champion forensics team. Naturally, that involved a trip to D.C., so naturally, I dropped out of school instead.

But I kept arguing.

Except now, I’m not an idiot 20-year-old, and I’ve distilled my focus down to a single issue — the single issue: gun rights.

It’s a good fit.

Too bad it’s mostly a giant waste of time.

After all, the practical outcome of any argument with a #GunSense* advocate is this little beauty right here:

While the above represents perhaps the deepest, most profoundly meaningful treatise on the nature of fundamental human rights and interaction that’s capable of being conveyed in four words or less**, it usually takes an actual living brain on the other side to piece together its multilayered implications.

So Gonzales is and always will be the TL;DR of the never-ending gun debate.

If you’re like me, though, that TL;DR mic drop is considerably less fun than wading waist-deep into the Stupid. You probably view anti-gun zealots on the Internet just as I do: a sort of shooting gallery to test and refine your own logic and internal consistency. They are practice. This series, then, is for you, and in each new part, I’ll be discussing a single debate tactic or gambit typically used by one side against the other. I’ll do my best to present these in order of most to least common, but there’s a distinct ebb and flow to the politics of the day to day that makes that more or less impossible.

Why is this important?

Because even as #GunSense hemorrhages capital and capitols (there is more restored legal support for private firearms carry today than at any time in the last several generations), the ferocious rhetoric of anti-gunners around the country continues to heat up. Much like your typical rifle barrel, the hotter it gets, the less accurate all the blather becomes. As custodians of Gun Culture 2.0, we can’t afford to respond in kind. Rather, we ought to pace ourselves cooly and calmly, refuting every onerous, fallacious claim with unassailable logic, remembering all the while that an argument is only an argument when proper reasoning is the aim. No shooting from the hip here.

So, without further ado, I present:

Argument 1, “The Problem”

• #GunSense claim: “There is a gun death problem in America.”***
• Gun Rights response: “Prove it.”

Okay, yes, that’s a pretty TL;DR rebuttal, but it’s just to get things framed up properly. With something as crooked as gun control, that’s sort of a basic necessity, and it’s best handled at the outset. Indeed, for most claims, this one phrase will almost always be a valid first play. More often than not, the grabber will take the bait and cite the number of “gun deaths” from the latest batch of annual statistics. (Note: It would be apprpriate at any time to simply share a telling chart or two demonstrating the US’ declining “gun death” rates even as private arms ownership is at record highs and climbing, but these will be dismissed as “memes” and ignored outright, sourced or not.) After reminding them that suicide makes up two-thirds of the total and is a perfectly lawful natural right, both sides will settle on an average figure of roughly 10,000 to 14,000 such events per year. In 2015, according to this otherwise disingenuous pile of propaganda, there were approximately 13,500 “gun deaths” in the United States.

While there is no way to reliably qualify or quantify what exactly constitutes a statistical “problem,” it is possible, via some basic arithmetic, to put this seemingly large number into perspective.

First, consider the US population. At the time of this writing, there are an estimated 323,461,940 people living in America. To be conservative liberal, round this down to 320 million.

Now, the math (or “maffs,” for our redcoat friends across the pond):

• 13.5K/320M
  = 0.000042
  = 0.0042%
• 320M/13.5K
  = 23,703.70
  = 23,704
  = 1:23,704

Unlike the raw “gun death” total the antis like to toss around tethered to hysterical, childlike emotion, the above figures are actually contextually rooted. The first equation reveals that only 0.0042% of the US population is likely to die as a result of “gun violence.” That means, as the second equation shows, that any given person on US soil has a one-in-23,704 chance of being killed “by a gun.” Since so many antigun activists claim that “gun violence” is an “epidemic” that should be “treated like a disease” and “studied by the CDC” (more on that delightful bit of backfire in another post), let’s do that, just this once, for the sake of argument:

In medicine, what is the threshold for a disease to be considered an “epidemic”?

An epidemic is defined thus:

[T]he slow spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time, usually two weeks or less. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.

The aforementioned “15 per 100K” rate is the most-cited baseline I can find regarding infectious diseases, so let’s go with that. For “gun violence” to be an actual epidemic, the US would need to experience a whopping 3200 “gun deaths” per week. All. Year. Long.

Since there aren’t anywhere near 166,400 “gun deaths” each year in America, “epidemic” is right out.

Hell, by medical standards, even Chiraq’s “gun death” rate is well below the necessary threshold. There were 445 “gun deaths” in Chicago throughout all of 2015. For “gun deaths” to be an epidemic there, there’d need to be 405 per week (for at least two weeks in a row). Not. Even. Close.

Clearly, “gun deaths” are not an epidemic. The bigger question, then, is: Are “gun deaths” even statistically significant?

You already know the answer.

Most mathematical models define statistical significance as at least five percent (0.05) of a given sample/population, but this can vary down to one percent depending on the area of study. From the initial calculations above, “gun deaths” occur at a rate of 0.0042% (0.000042), which is several orders of magnitude beneath either threshold for statistical significance.

In other words, US “gun deaths” are statistically insignificant.

If at this point the target of your overwhelming scientific acumen is still trying to argue (“Tell that to their families!” is not an argument, albeit I’ll write about how to handle that sometime down the road), he or she will posit that it doesn’t matter. He or she will insist that 13,500 “gun deaths” are simply and self-evidently “too many.”

Good.

Here’s your trump card: Respectfully ask them what number of “gun deaths” would be “juuust right.” The savvy-ish remainder will give up here, but a few morons may grasp at straws and, perhaps, cut the number in half.

Good.

Now you bust out this link (or, better yet even, its CDC source) and proceed to explain how approximately 80% of all “gun murders” are committed by known violent criminals against other known violent criminals (usually in gang- or drug-related events). Be sure to ask why it’s a “problem” that hoodlums and gangbangers are killing each other. Since there is no viable answer for this (unless it comes from the smelliest, flower-in-their-hairiest, most emaciated hippie on the face of the Earth), you can successfully and legitimately reframe the argument around the new number of “gun deaths” of innocents: 2700.

Reworking the original math, that leaves us with:

• 2.7K/320M
  = 0.0000084
  = 0.00084%
• 320M/2.7K
  = 118,518.52
  = 118,519
  = 1:118,519

In the US, “gun deaths” of innocent people are even less of a “problem,” way less of a epidemiological imperative, and way, way more statistically insignificant.

Oops.

But dont despair — the antigun parrot will come to the conclusion that “even one gun death is too many.”

Congratulations, you’ve won the debate.

But #GunSense will never give up, so we won’t either. I just need to decide whether to cover “militia” or “nukes” next week.

*Linguistically speaking, #GunSense is a blending of the term “gun control” and the word “nonsense.” Logically speaking, it’s a redundant, pathetic portmanteau, more French**** in spirit than even the word that describes it.

**Technically, “molon labe” gets the same point across in only two words, but that serf language, like most serf things, is dead and irrelevant.

***#GunSense drones will almost always say “gun violence problem” when they actually mean “gun death problem,” as all of their citations will invariably focus only on deaths rather than total casualties. For the one antigun activist you ever meet that actually gives a shit about the people who dont die from their wounds, you might want to adjust this article’s math a bit. Obviously, this will not change the thrust of the argument’s general conclusions.

****I will stop***** ridiculing the French continent the moment its subjects sack up and wrest power back from the overlords that disarmed them.

*****Continue