#2 in a series of information leaflets from The Stentorian, www.stentorian.com
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How Handgun Control Incorporated misleads American voters
Consider the statement, "Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point lost half the major battles in one of the United States' biggest wars." This statement is absolutely true, and someone who didn't like West Point could use it to suggest that the USMA does not train competent officers. Now for the complete story: the war in question was the Civil War, and West Point-trained officers were usually commanding both sides. There was obviously no way that West Point officers could win more than half the Civil War's battles.
Handgun Control Inc. distorts information to mislead and deceive the American people. HCI and its allies have developed the science of lying while telling the literal truth into a fine art. The following is an exact quote from Handgun Control Incorporated, http://www.handguncontrol.org/firearm_facts.htm:
"Thinking of buying a gun to protect your home? You may want to remember that guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense."This sounds like a good case for banning guns until you consider the fact that "family members" include abusive spouses who are often under court orders to stay away from the spouse who is in the home. If a woman kills her estranged husband as he is trying to break into the home to attack her and her children, for example, he falls into the "family member" casualty statistics. "Friends" (or, more accurately, associates- "someone you know") include drug dealers and other criminals. If a drug dealer kills a supplier, customer, or rival, the killing counts toward "associates" who are killed with firearms. A pimp (criminal) who kills one of his "girls" is killing "someone he knows," and vice versa.
Now examine the words, "43 times more likely to kill," which suggest that a gun that is kept for self-defense is unlikely to prevent a violent assault on its owner. From police instructor Massad Ayoob's, The Truth About Self Protection, page 327. "For every one shooting thirteen to fifteen criminals are deterred or driven off just by the sight of the gun, and this fully accomplishes what the homeowner bought the gun for in the first place. When you also consider the fact that only about one out of four people who are shot actually dies, you realize that for every home intruder shot dead by the resident, there are ninety-nine others who don't get killed, but who give up their assaults."
Brochure from Doctors for Integrity in Research & Public Policy, located at 5201 Norris Canyon Road, Suite 140, San Ramon, CA 94583. "Gun prohibitionists would have us believe that most murders involve ordinary people driven to kill in a sudden fit of rage, only because a gun was present. This is based on HCI's distortion of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report statistics. To the FBI, a murderer that lives in the victim's apartment building or drug criminals that know each other are 'acquaintances.' ... Almost all the 'relatives' killed each year are the very same men, well-known to the police, that have been brutalizing their wives, girlfriends, and children for years - those men are killed in self-defense."
People who have valid arguments do not need to lie.