If you follow my posts at all or are interested in the “Gun Freedom” debate, you have to go back to this post Gun Control Revisited, and read the comments.
There are some really well thought out comments on both sides of the debate.
People are scared of guns because they “believe” firearms have only two outcomes: death or freedom. And freedom (responsibility) scares them more than death.
Feel free to weigh in and add comments on this topic, it impacts all of us.
Krislyn Elliott and Lauren Swanepoel act more like sisters than moms as they take really slow walks through the woods together, looking at and taking pictures of every plant they see & wishing they could remember their names and uses more thoroughly. They also like concocting herbal teas, salves, tinctures and strange drinks.
Krislyn is from Utah and has loved learning about plants since an unusually cool high school biology teacher took his classes on neighborhood botany walks. She has always been fascinated and constantly amazed at the power and beauty of plants.
Lauren is from South Africa, she and her family emigrated to Utah almost 10 years ago. They have fallen in love with the area and know more about this state & the great places to explore here than most Utah natives.
We both feel strongly about taking care of our families with natural methods and the abundant medicine we have growing right around us. We are trying to learn as much as we can about our magical local plants and are looking forward to sharing some of our favorites with you.
Director of Georgic Develeopment
William DeMille is a lifelong vegetable farmer. He studied Horticulture and Agronomy at Northwest Missouri University, Maryville. He holds a certificate in aquaponic engineering and production from Cornell University, NY, and another from GrowHaus Aquaponics in Denver, CO. He also studied soil regeneration and is a graduate of Dr. Elaine’s Soil Food Web School. He is the Director of Georgic Development for The Center for American Legacy Studies.
William is a farm consultant establishing several agricultural startups since 2005 in Missouri, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and he currently manages 2500 acres of grassland for the Ruby Mountain Foods Company.
His latest venture is a market gardening school called Georgic Revolution where he teaches a 17-week course onsite in Nevada covering soil health and vegetable production without the use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and where he operated a soil lab.
William lives with his wife Vernie in the snow capped mountains of Northern Nevada.
World Renown BD Expert
Lloyd Nelson has been practicing the art of Biodynamic (BD) Agriculture for over twenty years. He is a BD preparation maker, builder, artist, farmer, arborist, BD educator & consultant. He is co-founder of Biodynamic Source – a Colorado based non-profit specializing in high potency BD preparations – and he owns and operates a Biodynamic spray, fertilizer and consultation service. He has worked with small and large scale farms, vineyards, and orchards to transition to sustainable Biodynamic land management and Demeter BD Certification.
Educator
Vern Cox is married to Joyce Christensen and they have 8 children. He has 3 earned degrees, a BA in psychology, and both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy.
He has had a diverse and interesting career that started with the Bureau of Land Management, followed by a stint as a Learning Disabilities teacher, and finally a marriage and family therapist, working his way up to executive director of the High Country Counseling and Resource Centers that served two counties in Wyoming.
Dr. Cox served for several years on the board of a charter school. Dr. Cox remains heavily involved in his community and the home schooling movement.
He has extensive background in marriage and family counseling, having held a number of administrative positions during his first career. He holds a BA in Psychology and both a Masters and PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy. He lives with his wife and several married children on their multi-generation farm in Southern Utah.
Educator
Joseph adopted the principles of landrace gardening in response to the harsh growing conditions in a high-altitude, short-season, desert garden. Instead of relying on expensive poisons, labor, and materials to coddle the plants, he encourages genetic diversity, cross-pollination, and survival of the fittest, allowing the plants to adapt themselves to the current and ever-changing ecosystem, thus simplifying gardening and seed saving. Joseph is the author of Landrace Gardening: Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination. Joseph loves eating, farming, swimming, hot-springs, sunbathing, bird-watching, running, yoga, leggings, kilts, playing guitar, singing, and living habitually barefoot.
Educator
Dan Brooks was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. During his first career, he spent 20 years working in and managing high-end restaurants and golf courses including extensive banquet/special events services and ice sculptures.
For the past 23 years, Dan has been a successful entrepreneur and family business owner in Las Vegas. He and his wife have 4 children and 11 grandchildren. He serves as a trustee for The Center for American Legacy Studies.
Director
Shanon Brooks is the director of The Center for American Legacy Studies, an institution dedicated to helping families embrace and incorporate the Five American Ideals; Georgics, Liber, Providence, Public Virtue, and Liberty into their lives and communities. America exists because of Americans. Americans are the beneficiaries of a peculiar culture and way of living.
Over the past 75 years, that culture and way of life have been lost. Restore that culture and Americans will rebuild America to once again be worthy of John Winthrop’s 1630 admonition, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
Brooks has been a leader in alternative higher education for over 30 years, and is the author of two books: AMERICAN: Killing the American Dream and A Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens.
Dr. Brooks is a veteran of military service in the United States Submarine Fleet and holds a Bachelor’s degree in business administration, a Master’s degree in education, and a Ph.D. in constitutional law.
He and his wife Julia reside on the 80-acre conference facility of The Center for American Legacy Studies.
8 Responses
Hi Shannon!
These are the same rhetorical tactics that have been employed by gun activists for decades — to collapse the factual realities of gun violence in our country with abstract ideals about personal responsibility. But it’s a false equation. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people — but they kill them with guns. Of course, personal resp0nsibility is one worthy goal of a life well lived. But the tactic of generalizing the conversation, of resorting to elevated language instead of addressing the facts, derails the conversation. It allows the advocate to aggrandize their position, to feel they are aligned with important, enduring values, but it does not address the practical realities of the correlation between gun ownership and violence.
You used another effective tactic when you argued that guns kill fewer people than other evils, addiction etc. Taken to it’s logical extreme, this would lead to a world in which we never addressed a problem unless it was either the worst or only problem. Of course, we should get a handle on the opiate epidemic, but that has no bearing on the urgency of addressing the particular evils of gun violence.
I would still love to hear what you have to say about the correlation between gun ownership and violence rates in this country.
Respectfully yours!
Julie
Julie,
I would like to thank you again for your continued debate on this subject. I trust Shannon when he tells me what a great person you are, I have no doubt but what I have come to see in this discussion is a person who makes a lot statements of opinion not grounded in facts but rather emotions. I contend that no amount of words from anyone in this conversation is going to change your mind because it has become clear to me that your are paralyzed by a fear of guns. I don’t know if you have suffered a great tragedy or are just afraid of them because of their power. Either way the end result is the same, no amount of facts will change your mind. Only facing your fear of guns will help you begin to live with them, maybe a trip to the range or a gun safety course to introduce you to a firearm will help. Ultimately you make a lot of accusations that Shannon or the others commenting on the subject are ignoring facts or making false equivalencies but it is you by and large who are ignoring facts. It comes down to this, your fear overrides your reason on this matter and if it where possible to remove all guns from all law abiding citizens then you would have two groups remaining with guns, the government and criminals. One group who would intimidate, harm or kill you and the other arriving at the scene too late. This is not a good scenario for any of us. The gun genie is out of the bottle and the only thing we can do is learn to live with it.
I wish you all the best.
-John
Julie,
Yes, now we are at the heart or it…”people kill people.” And as long as bad people have means to kill each other or good people, we can not allow government or anyone to prevent good people from doing what they can to protect themselves.
Directly from the CDC report, we know that there are 300 million guns in America and most indices of crime and gun violence are getting better, not worse. “Overall crime rates have declined in the past decade, and violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past 5 years,” the report notes.
“Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of firearm-related violent victimizations remained generally stable.” Meanwhile, “firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009.”
Accidents are down, too: “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”
But setting aside the CDC Report, most data available is erroneous based on a number of factors such as: the use of cross-sectional data, the “endogeniety” problem, skewed data (for example – ownership vs possession – Israel), etc. To really dig in, check out this study by the Crime Prevention Research Center
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/03/comparing-murder-rates-across-countries/
Afterthought: the flip side of personal responsibility is interdependence. One cannot exercise one’s rights without affecting the rights of others, and this has never been more true than in a world of growing population and shrinking natural resources. So to invoke with any kind of integrity the notion of personal responsibility one must also talk about how the exercise of one group’s or person’s rights affects the rights of others.
In the 70’s it seemed all we heard was that we are running out of oil. It seems that is not really happening. there is more oil in Alaska than all of Saudi Arabia. Canada and our own Midwest is amass with oil. We do not need to import it. By doing so it helps supply the terrorists with needed funds. I have flown around the world and find that the majority of people are concentrated in certain area. some are crammed into cities near the sea. South America proves that. The Amazon jungle was once thought to be just a jungle wilderness. Back in the 60’s we were told that they were losing hundreds of acres a week. Well! I figured it out using math. I guess they should have lost the jungle many times over. And now there has been remnants found of large cities that supported millions of people.
Now on Evil: Evil has brought out terrible things upon this world and its people. When Hitler was attacking his neighbors he let one country alone because ” they have a gun behind every door.” a friend who worked for U.S. Customs was on an inspection of a Chinese cargo ship during Clintons presidency. they found a container filled with AK47’s. that was quite a find, but Clinton was upset, not of the Chinese but the inspectors. His rant was ” How can the Chinese learn to trust us if we are inspecting their ships?”. these rifles were intended for gangs of L.A. government has not stopped the flow of drugs into this country, they have not stopped the flow of terrorists or gangs from south of the boarder. Our students in school are now tested and rated , not at the top but near the 20’s in knowledge. We do need to search our hearts on why is their so much evil? It is interesting that these young killers have been on prescribed pharmaceuticals . New Hampshire was once the capital of prescribed Ritalin for children. I worked in that field of Mental Health and thought it was terrible to place so many boys on this drug, simply because a teacher said they were fidgety. Most boys are fidgety. I was, Its energy that needs to be harnessed and used in the right direction. I was a cub scout then boy scout and then a U.S. Marine. If we can be a little kinder each day to everyone we meet , perhaps we can save the world from impending disaster. A couple decades a go a high school student created a model of an atomic bomb for his science class. government officials said it was accurate. Lets hope that those who have evil intentions don’t adopt new plans for creating mayhem
Interesting synopsis on guns
History has shown that, the first thing tyrants do is take away the right to self defense. Those who were Inspired to write the Constitution knew that God intended for us to have agency and freedom. We see Freedom of speech being curtailed on campuses throughout the country. My daughter experienced that when she attended college. Even professors are threatening to kick students out of class if they mention creationism.
Who failed in Florida?? It was the FBI and the sheriffs department. Judicial Watch has through FIA gotten enough documents to prove that. And they had guns.
If government is the only ones to have guns , then we will see the makings of a totalitarian regime. I believe that our Founders were inspired by God to write the Constitution. so why does it contain the right to Keep and Bear Arms. Well, Old English Law also gave Englishmen that right. when millions of people lose their freedom because of a madman, we need to look at who really benefits.
Dianne Feinstein is one person who has been trying to take guns away from everyone, yet she packs a piece for her protection. We need to take a better look at the Deep State and what they have to garnish from these killings. All could have been prevented. And yet we see millions of babies torn from Wombs and our students are silent. Priorities are in disarray.
Gene,
Thanks for commenting, there is always so much to talk about.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Gene. I agree that we all need to be kind to each other. That would take care of everything, wouldn’t it 🙂