Hit And Jog: With Stern And Aussie Gun Control

Heard Howard Stern interviewing Mike Tyson today. Good stuff. In fact, this past week Stern was off so they replayed past interviews with athletes. One can only but come to the conclusion those interviews are better than the ones we here on sports shows.

Stern really knows how to make things entertaining and interesting. None of all that boring "we gotta regroup" and "it's gut check time" and all the other cliches that infest sports journalism crap.

One of the reasons why it's so good is because Stern really doesn't give a shit about sports. Add that the athletes already know what their getting themselves into and the result is gaining insights into them we normally don't see.

Conversely, sports journalists are so wrapped up in predicting and trying to out-scoop one another it distracts them from the entertainment value. And when they're not doing that, they're busy being judgmental and or turning a blind eye to stuff.

Stern out ESPN's ESPN.

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From time to time Stern makes, what I consider anyway, inconsistent political statements. I won't get into them here but I don't think he ponders political philosophy all that much.

I'm not interested in dissecting it because Stern is not a political pundit nor does he pretend know shit like Bill Maher who, for example, has a remedial grasp on religion and libertarianism but blurts out opinionated nonsense about each.

However, I will bring up a comment he made today about Australian gun control inviting people to listen to Jon Stewart's three part "report" on it following that with a very short-sighted "since 1995 there have been no mass shootings."

Yeah, Norway too has tight gun control and look what happened there. Chicago commits murders that basically add up to several massacres and Illinois has, from what I read, strict gun control laws.

Stern should perhaps, like all of us, go beyond what the liberal line is and research things.

There's plenty of literature arguing that gun control hasn't worked in Australia.

In this link alone you get access to Australian government statistics that reveal interest patterns. Which is basically the pattern, from what I can see, in most Anglo-Western nations with gun control - violent crime rates that actually are higher than in the United States. There are also reports that Aussies are quietly rearming themselves.

Liberals tend to think where there are guns, a saloon bar fight is not too far off. Conservatives think criminals will think twice in a place known to be armed.

To me, the latter makes more sense. Like this comment:

"Except that random massacres aren’t where guns prove their true value or their true danger. Those events are vanishingly rare — and because they’re also unpredictable, they’re incredibly frightening.
The real value of guns is in their almost invisible, everyday presence. A prohibitionist society like Australia or the UK leaves the field wide open for garden-variety criminals to do their worst. Take a look at muggings, theft, armed robbery, home invasions, rape, and assault.

If you take away guns and those crimes don’t go down, then you haven’t fixed anything.

I dunno about anybody else, but I’ll accept a small increase in my already remote risk of death by gunshot in return for a huge decrease in the likelihood that my family gets victimized via rape or armed robbery."

B-b-but, what about the "we?" The children? Who needs a gun!

Link to gunsandcrime:


"Thirteen years after the ban/buyback there is now plenty of data from which to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures put in place.

A lot of the peoples' money was spent buying firearms.  A lot of Australians became alienated from their governments and institutions.  Irrational fears of people unfamiliar with guns may have been eased.  Gun accident deaths inexplicably rose.  Robbery rates popped up for several years (until '04).  There was no perceptible, definite impact—good or bad—on burglary, serious assault, homicide, gun homicide, suicide or gun suicide.

The gun controllers continued to do something similar regarding handguns, which rose in prominence since long guns had been reined in.  If handgun crime becomes less significant, some kind of handgun or long-gun crime will gain in significance and the gun controllers will target that category, and so on as long as there is a firearm."

"By '87, a lot of government and community leaders and activists were already convinced—based on ignorance, assumption and a bit of junk science— that guns were a problem they needed to fix.  They were able to add a lot of like-brained people to their ranks.  They eventually included much of the medical community, educators, social workers, churches, woman advocates, child advocates, the press (to sell papers), Duncan Chappell, the AIC, police leaders, John Howard, television media (to deflect attention from their violent programming), and the Commonwealth government."

 Sounds pretty much like what we see with the Obama administration.

They talk as if all the facts are on their side.

No they ain't.

The "real common sense" is to leave people alone.