Tab Clearing — March 28, 2018

Please excuse this "filler" post: My browser is starting to get overloaded with open tabs that I haven't yet used but want to keep handy. Maybe you'll find them useful and/or informational, too.

David B. Kopel has a two-part series about the "assault weapon" hoax over at Reason.

• The History of the 'Assault Weapon' Hoax. Part 1: The Crime that Started it All
• The First "Assault Weapon": Banning Guns Based on "Style" Rather than Function

A reprint of a 19th century essay by Frédéric Bastiat: The Law.

Open Letter to Virtue Signaling Gun Grabber. Highly quotable.

Another series, this time by BJ Campbell at Medium.

• Everybody's Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide. In a nutshell, it's the "gun death" vs. "gun homicide" argument — how "gun deaths" inflates the numbers by including suicides-by-firearm — fleshed out with examples and graphs and real statistical analysis.
• The Left is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths. Here's a Better Case. Basically, since 2/3 of "gun deaths" are suicides, helping suicidal people will do more to reduce "gun death" numbers than any other single effort.
• The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn't. Explores, among other things, public perception of violent crime rates — the public believes crime is going up, but the numbers say otherwise. Money quote: "What we really have, is not an epidemic of homicides, but an epidemic of news stories about homicides."

NRA-ILA on Oregon Ballot Initiative to ban "assault weapons" and "large capacity magazines".

Jesse Kelly at The Federalist: Why a Good Father Prepares His Sons for War. Interesting read, and not for the reasons the title implies.

Sultan Knish: Who Runs March For Our Lives? As always, follow the money. Daniel Greenfield does, and as you might have guessed, it's not "organized and led by students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School".

Sarah Hoyt, writing at PJ Media: Of Laws And Men. Challenging the "There ought to be a law" crowd.

Enjoy!

Stay safe.