Juan Williams Bloviates

Juan Williams, a Fox News contributor has penned a screed defending Bob Costas.  Well, so be it.  If Williams wants to defend the indefensible, we'll just give him a little fisking.

Costas is being targeted by the politically correct crowd that muzzles important debate on issues from gun control, to immigration, to government spending and abortion. These are the same enforcers that got me fired from NPR two years ago for admitting my personal anxiety over seeing people in Muslim garb on airplanes.

I don't know where you've been for the past 40 years, Juan, but we've been having this debate at least that long. Get your facts straight.

The body count is too big to ignore. Since the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, there have been over 60 mass shootings. Recently, there was the carnage at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And don’t forget the mass attack at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, or Columbine, or Virginia Tech…

Well, the Aurora shooting was specifically in a theater that didn't allow law-abiding citizens to carry guns. That madman targeted people who he knew would be unarmed. That argument is a strawman at best.

In Georgia, Virginia, Arizona and Tennessee, the laws allow people to bring guns into bars. Members of the U.S. House and Senate have pushed to allow for guns on Amtrak trains and in our national parks. The Assault Weapons ban was allowed to expire in 2004 after ten years of slowing the sale of the most dangerous automatic weapons.

Yep, all part of the debate we've been having for the past 40 years. We've shown time and again that weapons bans don't work, which is why the Ban On Weapons That Looked Like Assault Weapons expired. It had absolutely no impact on crime.

As Bernie Goldberg, guest on "The O’Reilly Factor," said recently people on the right should agree with Costas that something is wrong when there are “more bad things happening with guns than good things.”

You don't know that, in fact, the research shows that the exact opposite is true. Years of gun research shows that more guns equal less crime. Go read John Lott, or Clayton Cramer, or any of the academic researchers who don't start out with an agenda. The fact is that more good things happen with guns than bad things. Some folks estimate that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent two million crimes per year. You've got the argument exactly wrong.

Intellectual honesty and consistency dictates that it is also wrong for Costas to be punished for his speaking his mind over the tragedy surrounding football player Jovan Belcher last week. Belcher was the Kansas City Chiefs Linebacker who shot and killed his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.

Intellectual honesty and consistency dictates that we realize that Javon Belcher was a murderer who took the life of his child's mother, then realized that he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars and killed himself rather than face the consequences of his actions. Bob Costas is being pilloried for being intellectually dishonest. He's wrong, dead wrong, as are you.

I wrote about how difficult it is to have an honest debate about guns and gun control in my book, "Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate." And the need for honest debate on guns remains an American priority.

Once again, we've been having this debate for 40 years. If you'd been paying attention, you'd know that. Freedom rings, and the freedom folks have captured state legislatures, state courts, the Congress, and there have been several cases recently before the US Supreme Court that reaffirm the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The anti-gunners have been consistently dishonest, unscrupulous, and intellectually corrupt. The debate continues and your side has lost it. You'll continue to lose it simply because you have no facts, no verifiable, intellectually rigorous facts to back up your arguments.  There is no assault on honest debate, unless an anti-gunner is involved in the debate.