Help A Blogger Find Paradise...

Heh.

Sean is asking for your help.

Here’s where you can help. My other “meme” category Felons Behaving Badly is limited to North Carolina since the only state I can get reliable criminal record info is here in NC. You really can’t send me stories for that category. However, you can send me Meanwhile in X Paradise stories. Keep your ear out for gun crimes in countries that have strict gun control, and send me a link. Any credible English language news source will work, and if you have a link to news video, that’s even better. I’ll post the stories the same way Weer’d posts “Gun Death” stories and JayG posts Dead Goblin Count ones.

(NOTE: I'd also add in Barron's "State Sponsored Criminal Count" as well.)

I maintain the Dead Dead Goblin Count to show that average folks (read: Not LEOs) use their firearms in self-defense on a regular basis. There are close to 200 separate criminals on this list so far, and that's only been a regular feature for a couple of years. Each addition represents a criminal killed in the commission of a crime by their intended victim or their advocate. Even if I started the count at Day One of MArooned, the nearly 200 additions would be close to one criminal killed a week - and there are a lot more stories out there I miss.

Weerd maintains the Gun Death stories for very similar reasons - the anti-freedom forces ignore the thousands of times that folks are killed with knives, bats, hands, feet, cars, etc. because it doesn't fit the narrative. Focusing on the tool used is much easier than {gasp} admitting that there are bad people and that we have a "criminal control" problem, so they blame guns for violence rather than the goblins who misuse them. Weerd keeps his list to counter that argument.

Barron's list augments this whole idea as well - he maintains a running list of stories that show how police and federal agencies can misuse their powers. "Only the police should have guns" is easily countered by a quick review of how the police can - and sometimes do - misuse the powers they are given. Seeing police officers like Officer Roid Rage in Canton OH should give any thinking person pause to the idea that only the police should have guns.

And now, Sean has another piece of the puzzle. One of the common anti-freedom tropes is that the US is the most violentest nation on earth, and that our lax gun laws are to blame. He's offering to be the repository for information that counters this claim - and to show that gun bans != no gun crime, another tenuous claim the antis like to make. If we make guns illegal, then no one will have them and all gun crime will disappear, they claim. Sean wants to maintain a database to prove this wrong. If you read about a gun-related crime in a gun-free paradise (like the UK), send the story to Sean.

Great idea, Sean, thanks for starting the list!

That is all.