By John Seiler

Former SecDef Leon Panetta, also a former congressman from Monterey, on Monday convened a panel on gun control. Although some gun defenders were there, this mainly was a pro-gun control powwow.

It’s significant that it was held in Monterey, which had only five murders of any kind — by gun, knife, tire iron, rolling pin — from 1999 to 2011; an average of 0.38 murders a year in a city of 27,810 people. So your chance of getting murdered in any given year is one in 731,841.

According to National Geographic, “The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000.”

So your odds of getting murdered in Monterey are less than getting hit by lightning.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel news story reads:

“It took a cop to hold down the middle ground in the debate on firearms at Monday’s Panetta lecture on gun control.

“Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson, chair of the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, was one of three national authorities on the issue who came to Monterey on Monday to see whether compromises might be reached.

“‘We believe we know what will further reduce gun violence: Universal gun background checks,’ Johnson said.

“A policeman, gun owner and hunter, Johnson said the fact that the current background check system allows 40 percent of gun buyers through without scrutiny shows it needs to be expanded.

“‘Would you want 40 percent of people going through TSA without being checked?’ he asked the evening’s audience at the Monterey Conference Center.”

It’s curious to see how Chief Johnson thinks. Basically, he wants us to go through life getting TSA pat-downs/molestations for things he doesn’t approve of, such as gun rights secured by the Second Amendment.

He also has his statistics wrong. If 40 percent of people were not “checked” by the TSA, then 60 percent still would be. Given that the 60 percent checks would be random (I assume), that would be enough to deter potential terrorists. For one thing, the TSA and other agencies don’t only “check” people, they also watch passengers for behavior traits indicating potential terrorism.

TSA

Moreover, the TSA is notoriously incompetent and corrupt. So already we have a large number of people getting through the system unchecked. Yet we still have had no successful terror attacks on airplanes since 9/11.

Let me go further. I want the unconstitutional TSA entirely abolished, and airplane security restored to airlines and airports (which all should be privatized). 9/11 occurred because the incompetent federal government itself allowed 19 terrorists into the country, then mandated that pilots be disarmed. If on that fateful day all the pilots and co-pilots had been armed, there would have been 19 dead terrorists, and maybe only a few dead passengers — instead of 3,000 dead victims and our Bill of Rights shredded in panic.

Chief Johnson exhibited the police-state mentality that pervades most police departments today, as well as national and state law enforcement.

Curiously, this came from the conference:

“The panel did agree on one basic fact: overall violent crime has been down in the United States for a couple of decades, even as pockets are seeing increases…. [Former Rep. Asa] Hutchinson said he could also argue that private ownership of guns has kept the crime rate down, but acknowledged he “can’t statistically prove that.”

Well, let’s help him out with the following chart. It ends in 2007, before the great increase in gun ownership since President Obama was elected in 2008. So the ratio would be even more dramatic now, indicating how, as gun scholar John Lott put it in the title of his book, “More Guns, Less Crime.”