PA Bill Number: HB2663
Title: Providing for older adults protective services; and making a repeal.
Description: Providing for older adults protective services; and making a repeal. ...
Last Action: Referred to AGING AND OLDER ADULT SERVICES
Last Action Date: Nov 19, 2024
If there’s ever been a better time for car control... :: 05/22/2022
Back in 2015 I remember reading a Forbes article that’s worth bringing up; “Should Guns Be Regulated Like Cars?” While this may seem like dated material, recent reporting from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) notes that there were approximately 42,915 motor vehicle fatalities in 2021, and I promise there’s relevance. This total number shows a rise of 10.5% from 2020. The issue with this number is that the 40k+ deaths is at a 16 year high since 2005, according to the NHTSA.
The Forbes piece highlighted a MEME that was circulating at the time stating:
Cars kill as many people as guns, you say?
Let’s treat guns like cars:
Licenses that prove competency, registration, insurance, education for misdemeanor offenses, suspension of license for multiple offenses, severe jail time for weapons used while under the influence.
Yes, let’s make cars and guns equal.
ONE MILLION MOMS AND DADS AGAINST GUN VIOLENCE
The first irony that’s worth pointing out, the facebook group, which seems to be the only place online associated with the name taking credit for the MEME, has under 40,000 followers, not even close to one million. They must have lost a lot of followers in the last 7 years even though they seem to be currently still active?
Getting past the specifics here, most people reading this, and that MEME, know gun owners are pretty much already subjected to what’s being stated there and then some, without any blanket license. This is about saving lives, right? So what about a comparison between responsible gun owners and responsible motorists? Chris Conover for Forbes had something to say about that (keeping in mind these are 2015 numbers).
In short, the typical car is 25 times as likely to kill someone accidentally as the typical gun.
And yet one progressive proponent of regulating guns like cars, Nicholas Kristof, brags about how safe automobiles are, claiming that regulation of automobiles has reduced fatalities by 95% over the past century to only 1 per million miles of driving. In light of these statistics, it would appear that the average car owner is FAR less responsible than the average gun-owner at ensuring that innocent victims don’t die as a consequence of accidents involving this type of property. However, it is Kristof who claims that the nation has a blind spot when it comes to guns, overlooking his own rather flagrant blind spot when it comes to the riskiness of automobile ownership.
So again, in light of these eye-opening but indisputable facts, why is gun ownership so vilified by progressives? They could save literally 25 times as many lives by convincing a single typical car owner to drive more responsibly than convincing a single typical gun owner to use their weapon more responsibly. Instead of derisively sneering at those who “cling to guns” out of bitterness, perhaps they ought to ask themselves why guns rather than cars invite their scorn.
The historic number of deaths due to traffic fatalities did not go unnoticed by statistic minded entities. Facts and figures may escape our esteemed president and his disastrous cabinet, but that’s okay. We have people that’ll look at the data. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) recently reconnected these dots, which are worth revisiting from time to time.
Alarming new data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows 42,915 people were killed in traffic accidents last year, so the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today suggested a crackdown on automobiles.
“Maybe we should ban cars,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, sarcastically. “After the CDC reported more than 19,000 gun-related homicides in 2020, there was a renewed push to ban certain types of firearms as the solution. No sensible person could honestly believe that placing new restrictions on cars, or guns, would result in a dramatic reduction in tragedy.”
According to the NHTSA, last year’s traffic fatalities were up 10.5 percent over 2020 when 38,824 people were killed and even more over the 2019 count of 36,096. Gottlieb noted far more people died in car crashes than were murdered with firearms in 2020, and it is likely the pattern will continue for 2021. FBI crime data for 2021 will be released in September.
“If you apply the same rationale to cars that gun prohibitionists apply to guns,” Gottlieb suggested, “politicians would be demanding Draconian restrictions on cars and people who drive them. There would be efforts to ban ownership of any vehicle that could cruise along at more than 70 miles-per-hour. We would prohibit young adults from owning cars with automatic transmissions, and there would be efforts to ban big engines with more than six cylinders.
This unfortunate irony is 100% relevant. Especially when the gun grabbers want to regulate the Second Amendment, a right, with a greater threshold than driving/owning a car, a privilege.
The roll out of a very draconian bill that Cam recently reported on proves this point. The rubbish of legislation would leave the issuance of a national firearm permit, for simple ownership, subjected to may-issue standards (in addition to other unconstitutional check boxes to mark off like mandatory training). These are the same standards we’re seeking to abolish through NYSRPA regarding our carry rights. The regulation of firearms is already much stricter than those surrounding the use and ownership of vehicles (or for being in office as an elected official for that matter).
Gottlieb goes at the jugular in his statements:
“I can imagine Joe Biden or some other anti-gunner demanding gas tanks hold no more than ten gallons of fuel on the argument that ‘nobody needs more than ten gallons to get back and forth to work’,” he added.
“Yes,” Gottlieb acknowledged, “it sounds absurd, but this is the same irrational approach Biden and other gun prohibitionists use to justify their efforts to ban semiautomatic rifles and pistols. Blaming cars or guns for the carelessness or criminal intent of the people using them isn’t just wrong, it is wrong-headed.
“Cars aren’t mentioned in the Bill of Rights,” he stated, “but owning firearms is a right specifically protected by the Second Amendment. People like Joe Biden should keep that in mind when proposing solutions to violent crime.”
One of these things is not like the other…
I supposed we could also cast this all to the wind, and divert our attention towards another epidemic. A real epidemic. One that we don’t hear the Biden-Harris theatrical troupe talking about much.
Shortly after Kade Webb, 20, collapsed and died in a bathroom at a Safeway Market in Roseville, Calif., in December, the police opened his phone and went straight to his social media apps. There, they found exactly what they feared.
Mr. Webb, a laid-back snowboarder and skateboarder who, with the imminent birth of his first child, had become despondent over his pandemic-dimmed finances, bought Percocet, a prescription opioid, through a dealer on Snapchat. It turned out to be spiked with a lethal amount of fentanyl.
Mr. Webb’s death was one of nearly 108,000 drug fatalities in the United States last year, a record, according to preliminary numbers released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Law enforcement authorities say an alarming portion of them unfolded the same way as his: from counterfeit pills tainted with fentanyl that teenagers and young adults bought over social media.
Where’s sleepy Joe and cackling Kamala on those 108,000 deaths? If the Biden-Harris administration is going to pretend to care about lives lost, innocent or otherwise, why are they not seeking to crackdown on both the drug overdose deaths and traffic fatalities?
Overdoses are now the leading cause of preventable death among people ages 18 to 45, ahead of suicide, traffic accidents and gun violence, according to federal data.
Supplies of tainted pills, crudely pressed by Mexican cartels with chemicals from China and India, have escalated commensurately. Fentanyl, faster and cheaper to produce than heroin and 50 times as potent, made for a highly addictive filler. Last year, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized 20.4 million counterfeit pills, which experts estimate represent a small fraction of those produced. Its scientists say that about four out of 10 pills contain lethal doses of fentanyl.
I don’t know if I’m going to be as forward to suggest that an open and porous border contributes, if not completely enables this kind of stuff to happen, but it sure does look that way.
When it comes to preventable death, violence, traffic fatalities, all of it, the left of center anti-freedom caucus focuses on one thing, and one thing alone. With such a high level of pompous pageantry, the focus is on firearms and the law abiding citizen. The feather boa adorned pressers of holding up a finished frame or unfinished frame (is the verdict out on that yet, and are there charges against Biden on that?), in grand dramatic fashion have to do with limiting the civil liberties of the law abiding citizen. Clearly this administration has made it a priority to disarm Americans. For what purpose? Who knows. Americans are expected to just roll over and ignore all of the Biden-Harris continued failures, while they stigmatize the perennial boogieman; guns n’ gun people.
If we take all those gun homicides, and for this argument, we’ll throw in the suicides by firearm, then add them up with the motor vehicle fatalities, it looks really bad. But drug overdoses have only one thing to say towards that, “hold my beer,” and no permit’s required for those.
