Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...
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Doesn't matter that we're right in their minds. Guns are the problem. "Less guns" is the solution and so confiscation is a good thing.
According to the Criminal Justice Council’s Statistical Analysis Center (a Delaware’s Executive Department agency that reports to the Markell Administration), the annual average number of arrests for all firearm offenses combined, over the two most recent two years for which complete data is available (2010 & 2011) was 2426. Less than 1 in 8 of these arrests (311) resulted in convictions far the original charge or a lesser offense.
According to the 2010 Census, Delaware's population is about 917,000.
That is an annual rate of gun crimes of 0.03% of the population (or 33.9 per 100,000 population if you prefer the way the FBI reports crime rates).
And the scariest part of all of this is that the majority of this tiny number of arrests and convictions probably were complete bullshit.