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I’m not going to debunk The Young Turks’ pro-Australian-style gun control logic, such as it is. He makes his main point at 6:05: “You think we’d have more firearms and suicides if we had less guns? You don’t believe that. You can’t possibly believe that. No one is that irrational.” That’s what passes for reason in Cenk Uygur’s mind, who singularly fails to clock humanity’s past and current record of government-sponsored mass murder of disarmed populations (including the Armenian genocide of 1915).  The question here: why listen to this nonsense? I mean . . .

I’m a professional gun blogger. I have to watch this stuff. You? Not so much. In fact, not at all. You’re free to go about your life without ever having to expose yourself to anti-gun vitriol and illogic. Personally, I think you should watch hate-filled antis like Cenk Uygur, if only to know that they’re out there, somewhere, working to degrade and destroy your natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. I consider it motivational. Your thoughts?

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83 COMMENTS

  1. Question of the Day: Can You Watch This Video All the Way Through?

    Answer of the Day: No. I’d rather shave my eyeballs with a straight razor.

    • LOL… That’s a keeper (along with the testicles/earrings saying and many others over the years). My neighbor thought I was choking on a bagel …. Thank you Sir… 🙂

      • Just transferring this here from another gun blog — says it all.

        “Geoff Day • 3 hours ago

        Being from Australia, I can tell you that the gun buy back didn’t work. Only the law abiding citizens handed their guns in and the criminals kept theirs, that being said there are far more murders now in Australia than there was when guns were freely available. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and if guns were made illegal they would find something else to kill you with”

    • I would rather take a wood planer to my shin but not shave the skin all the way off. Just back it off and take the sliver and put it in a sardine can key. Then roll the skin down. Then wear wool socks doused in a salt and vinegar solution.

    • Cenk must think that John Lott is irrational too. Alan Derschowitz certainly does, as he shouted that more guns means more gun crime, “It’s common sense!!!!”

      • Cenks is taking facts out of context and removing perspective from the analysis. The facts are that there are more guns than there ever was. The fact is that crime was going down dramatically, 50% or more in the last 20 years, until this year where crime is going up in cities. It isn’t quite clear why but it is likely because of the discontent that has been seeded to the most hopeless in the worst urban areas from the almost constant race and police brutality news.

        The perspective that he is missing is that guns in the hands of law abiding citizens do not cause harm and the guns in the hands of those that wish to do harm cause harm. He has left out the fact that those that cause harm are most effectively stopped by law abiding citizens that are using the most effective tools available, guns fall into this category.

        • Cenk missed a couple GINORMOUS facts:
          (1) The murder rate in the United States is higher than the murder rate in most/all European countries even if you exclude murders in the United States where the attacker used a firearm as the murder weapon. That’s right. Violent criminals in the United States used their hands and feet, knives, clubs, hammers, cars, fire, poison, and suffocation to kill people at a higher rate than Europeans used all weapons combined to kill people.
          (2) Violent criminal gangs are responsible for about 80% of ALL violent crimes in the United States. Other violent criminals (many who are ex convicts) are responsible for almost all the rest. What does that mean? Violent criminal gangs and other violent criminals are NOT going to turn in firearms if government passes some law requiring them to turn in their firearms.

  3. Nope… I couldn’t even get through the first ten seconds. The cast of that propaganda house needs to be dragged out not the street and beaten.

  4. Nope… I couldn’t even get through the first ten seconds. The cast of that propaganda house needs to be dragged out not the street and beaten.

  5. “You think we’d have more firearms and suicides if we had less guns? You don’t believe that. You can’t possibly believe that. No one is that irrational.”

    How interesting that they’re only interested in reducing the number of suicides with guns. So, hanging yourself, carbon monoxide suffocation, stepping out into traffic, overdosing, or jumping off a building are A-OK, just don’t use a gun?

    What kind of sick logic is that? Oh, wait, it’s gun control “logic”. Because nobody ever died before modern firearms were invented.

  6. What can I say? Come the revo, he’ll be the first to go? I have a distinct feeling that, if guys like him are in charge, that would be us. What’s working within this guy’s hubris and condescension is fascism. There’s an authoritarianism loose in the country right now that is generated by the same kinds of social forces that fueled fascist and “progressive” ideologies in the first part of the 20th century. What’s different between then and now is that we have the ability to counter every second-hand-news diatribe like this with a better, infinitely more effective, counter argument.

    At least you get paid to watch this stuff, Robert.

    Molon Labe. Gun Up.

  7. Has anyone ever looked up world-wide suicide rates?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate (hint, you can sort the table by column)
    http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/suicide/by-country/

    Here’s two links. Look at Japan, 18.5 per 100,00, look at the US, 12.1 per 100,000. Japan has very strict gun control. Lot’s of countries with very strict gun control far higher than the US on the suicide rate list.

    So, please tell me how gun availability and suicide are the least bit related?

    • Lower rank is “better”.

      UK heavily restricted (hand)gun access ranks (105). US easy(ish) access to guns guns (50), Switzerland easy(mandatory?) access to guns 77. South Africa restricted access to guns (148). South Korea heavily restricted gun access (2).

      Almost as if gun control and suicide rates have *** all too do with each other. Folks who wish to end their lives will do so, those that want to make a “cry for help” won’t.

      So removing guns wont make people who really want to end it switch from bullet to back of mouth to aspirin (3ish days to reconsider) “overdose”. It will just mean more people throwing themselves under trains and walking into traffic, a horrible and messy sight esp. for children in the area.

      Why wont antis think of the children?

      • @GRW
        Sir or Maam, Well Done.

        “Folks who wish to end their lives will do so, those that want to make a “cry for help” won’t.”

        You have just debunked the whole gun control through mental health angle in one sentence.

        The real problem is when you penalize making that call for help.

  8. he should publish his street address, a pic of his wife, kids and prized possessions, and leave the front door unlocked . . . . . after all, he is a real man and doesn’t think he needs to defend himself with a penis enhancing gun. I am sure a bunch of the local welcoming committee will stop by and dissuade him of that silly notion.

  10. Not interested in antis’ click bait strategy. It’s like reading that magazine that photoshops Michael Jackson’s resurrection.

    • Neither of which has anything to do with why every single cell in the ape’s body has been 180 degrees off course dead wrong since the moment he was conceived. Jew haters, Muslims, Nazis, Pedophiles, Drug dealers whatever, can be whatever they bloody well want and remain entirely harmless.

      Cenk is dumb enough to think government is some sort of useful institution. That the rest of us should look to, respect and kowtow to. That’s the reason he is a net negative, compared to those of his liberal comrades who instead split into pieces and took up residence in abortion clinic trashcans before they got to do much damage. Whatever else he may or may not be, is just irrelevant trivia.

      • I’m no fan of our bloated bureaucracy, but I have to disagree: government IS necessary. It’s not an end in itself or inherently desirable (and people like Cenk Uighur who practically worship it are a danger to the rest of us) but it’s a necessary means to a desirable end.

        If you want to see what a society with no government looks like, Somalia is one. Humanity can do a lot better than that, but without some form of government, it ain’t likely.

        • The trick is granting only the absolute necessary powers and finding some method to insure it’s power remains limited to those powers. The founders made a pretty good stab at the former, but history has shown didn’t quite succeed at the latter.

  13. And this just goes to show the differences in perspective.

    Nobody wants more violence, of any kind: knives, drano, gasoline, guns, cars, chairs, baseball bats, etc.

    But, not to discount every single personal tragedy that occurs due to violence, of any kind, modern crime incidents are small potatoes to the large scale mass murders of the past. They’re not even close to “catching up”.

    Consider the Rawandan Genocide. The simple truth is that if those people were armed, there would have been no genocide. A Civil War? An insurgency? “Instability in the interior?” Absolutely, but not a genocide. Not wholesale, rapid, mechanical slaughter of human beings.

    Syria is a basket case right now, with untold suffering and strife, and I don’t wish it upon anyone. But it is not a genocide, it has not come close to what happened in Rawanda, and it has taken a very long time. The Syrian Army is a modern war machine, and it’s stalled against the various armed factions taking root inside the country. Eventually, someday, I know, sooner than later, I pray, peace will come to Syria. But they won’t be looking over the remains of millions of dead.

    “But that’s overseas, those people are all crazy.” Well, I don’t “think it can happen here”. Not today, at least. Despite the crazies and their blogs and commentary and stupid lashings out. It’s not happening here. Today.

    But a generation from now? Who can say. A generation is a long time. Which is why an armed citizenry is a generational issue. Why as a TRADITION it needs to be maintained, even if the specific utility of it is perhaps less necessary today as the world gets less and less violent. Because no one foresaw what happened in Germany, China, Russia etc. 10 years before they happened. No one knew. In times of peace, when maybe you can let your guard down, no one knew. No one suspected. The perpetrators didn’t even know.

    But we know now. We know now that without an armed citizenry, you get Rawanda.

    So, I dislike all of the crime figures, their impacts on the families and communities, their impact on how we view the world. Each victimization IS a tragedy.

    But, I’m more concerned about when the killings become statistics.

    • It’s happened in Sudan, too, 25-30 years ago or so. They had the unique tactic of executing journalists as soon as they entered the country. Didn’t take many, before no more came, they were left alone.

    • You are 100% correct about Rwanda, almost all of the killing was done with weapons like pick axes, machetes and farming implements. No doubt one fully armed town with decent leadership could have at least made a dent in that army of sub human cannibals… somebody remind me again how Africa is better off post colonial?

  15. NO! That being said invoking dead Armenians(did Cenk kill any of ’em?) is not the way to go RF. I’m of mostly German ancestry-and I didn’t kill any Jews during WW2. But Cenk is a total left azzwhole…

    • I disagree. The original Young Turks were responsible for the Armenian Genocide; these youtubers thought it was a good idea to name themselves after them, for some reason. That would like you naming yourself “Adolf Hitler” or “Willy Nazi-meat” or something similar. If they wanted no comparison to the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, then why did they name themselves the Young Turks?

      • Well he WAS young and-wait for it -Turkish! I can’t tell you what goes on in the head with this left-loon. Young turks isn’t always a reference to 100 years ago Mister Fleas(but it may well be)…

      • It probably has to do more with the fact that the Young Turks were the revolutionaries of their day, and that “young turk” is idiomatic for “a young person eager for radical change to the established order.”

        • Technically it was the Committee of Union and Progress. The term Young Turks is very much akin to Nazi or Khmer Rouge. At least to the descendants of genocide survivors.

  16. Whenever someone dares me to watch a video all the way through, it means either A: some statist idiot is spouting off about gun control again, B: it’s a horrifically disgusting sex act involving farm animals, or C: yet another time-wasting prank like the RickRoll.

    If a video involves Cenk Uygur, then it’s probably all three.

  17. ” Personally, I think you should watch hate-filled antis like Cenk Uygur, if only to know that they’re out there, somewhere, working to degrade and destroy your natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. I consider it motivational. Your thoughts?”

    The Art of War teaches to know thy enemy, but it does no good if we have to appease the enemy to our deaths or disarmament.

  19. So you’re telling me that if there is something that people die from if you significantly decrease the number of that thing then people will die less frequently by that thing you decreased?

    Yeahhh right… Next this kook will try to tell me that people in San Diego die from skin cancer more than those in Alaska. If we just get rid of the sun look how many lives we’ll “save.” Or perhaps he’ll claim something as asinine as America having less hippo deaths than Africa; if we ban hippos 10s of lives will be “saved.”

    Convenient he left out non-gun homicide rates, what a moron.

  20. Well, I’ll give him one thing. I don’t think we’d have more firearms if we had less guns. Firearms and guns are pretty strongly correlated. Suicides, not so much though.

  21. No. I do not. In my first forays into the interwebz I thought, why not, and clicked onto mikeybnumbers site.

    I could hear and feel brain cells dying from the absolute stupidity that is the rank and file anti gunner.

    In my retirement job I drive the short bus. And I get a better level of conversation from those folks than I do from the likes of the anti’s.

  22. TYT has always struck me as Millennial leftist clickbait. Having some rambling doofus banging on his desk about issues that he has zero knowledge about strikes me as pointless and inane.

    And Cenk has a bad historical memory. His country has been ruled by bad people that were only unseated by other people with guns.

    But unfortunately Millennials fall for obnoxious people and washed out production values.

  23. Suicides, really??? If guns cause suicides then why is it that the Japan with less than 1% of the population owning guns has a 50% higher rate of suicide than the United States where almost 90 % of the population own guns?

    Checkmate (a term that even that idiot can understand).

  24. I mean if we are to be honest we also need lightsaber control. I mean who gives one to a teenager with no more than a five minute formal lesson. Vader was simply trying to apprehend Obiwan for his illegal transfer of a dangerous weapon. And by all evidence once Luke was given that lightsaber that started him down the path of a killer, the force I mean “mystical powers” started to tell him to do things that no one else could hear. How do we know the lightsaber didn’t tell him to do that? Lets also not forget that Luke failed to practice safe storage laws on Hoth, what happens as soon as Luke forgot to unload and secure his lightsaber? Han Solo, a smuggler no less, take it and carves up the first dead animal he sees. How much clearer can we get of future mental instability? Clearly it is the lightsabers that have caused all the evil of the Star Wars universe and Mark Hamil sees that. I bet without lightabers there would have been no Sith, no Anakin slaughtering children, no empire to oppress people. I implore then J.J. Abrams in the new trilogy to show proper lightsaber storage and usage and for every lightsaber featured in the film that one is destroyed in real life.

    • Don’t forget, The Empire was the legitimate government. The senate legally voted to empower the Chancellor as Emperor. Now, aren’t you glad people beside the legitimate government’s officers had weapons. Also see Germany around the 1930’s.

  25. Well I guess I won’t be seeing the new Star Wars movie. But then again I wasn’t too excited about it. The prequels sucked and I lost interest.

    It’s just another case of a franchise that’s been milked dry and a case of a washed up actor who thinks he’s oh so important.

  26. The way the numbers are presented show bias. If you notice they give totals but do not exempt justifiable shootings. They also show the drops in firearm related suicides and homicides neglecting to mention that it’s not like criminals, crazies and suicidal people are all like “welp, that’s all the guns are gone now I can’t murder and/or commit suicide.”

    On the suicide topic, as mentioned Japan is a leader in it with 50% more than the US yet they have heavily regulated firearms. It’s so bad in fact they have a forest people go to in order to end their lives and they’ll charge your family if you jump in front of a train. It’s a problem of society and firearms are merely a tool being misused and the issue of firearms violence and suicide is merely a symptom.

    And what constitutes a “mass shooting” I could see mass shootings happening in a lot of countries every day in the third world. I mean, think about countries that have had flat out genocide happen in them. They just don’t get counted due to being by “military agents.” What about Mexico? They have very heavily regulated firearms for civilians yet it doesn’t seem to be quelling their murder rates.

    As it was once put “the most insidious thing in the world is nonsense that sounds just plausible enough to listen to.”

  27. Mark Hamill’s head must be in a galaxy far far away. He seems to have completely forgotten his other iconic role, who was a perfect example of why gun control is wicked.

    • It looks to me like he has spent too many nights sleeping on a park bench, the beach or under a bridge. I guess that happens when you haven’t had a decent job since you were in your twenties.

  28. Hey,he looks like an aging Mark Hamill. “Luke……I am your father “.

    Will not waste time watching

  29. I’ve said this before here and now I get to say it again: total amount of guns is NOT indicative of gun crime rates. I DO think it’s ridiculous to believe that if we had fewer guns that we’d have more crime. I also think that it’s ridiculous to believe that if we had more guns that we’d have more crime. Is that a contradiction? No, not at all. I think the gun crime/suicide rate is insensitive to firearm ownership rate. The violent crime in this country has dropped significantly even as gun ownership has increased. This DOES NOT mean that more firearms means less violent crime. It just doesn’t. What we should focus on is what it certainly DOES imply and I think what leads to a much more convincing anti-anti argument. Lets assume for the sake of argument that the proposition “Fewer guns implies less gun crime and suicide-by-gun” is TRUE. If that is the case, what can we say about the magnitude of that effect given the drop in violent crime and the increase in gun ownership? We can say that whatever that effect may be, it must be either very small or of indeterminate magnitude in the opposite direction! That implies that no matter the validity of the above assumption, arguing that point completely misses the other major factors contributing to (and largely controlling) gun crime and suicides-by-gun.
    In a vacuum, I think that if we could magically remove all guns that we would absolutely see a reduction in gun crime (certainly suicide-by-gun), and possibly even overall violent crime (but not necessarily). The first part of that shouldn’t be very controversial. At least SOME of the black market guns got there from legal markets. If all market (including black market) availability were magically reduced to 0, the ensuing black market for firearms would necessarily be smaller than it was before because it lost a significant source of goods. The second part is much more debatable and I’m not really that confident in it, but that’s really not relevant to my point.
    In real America today, I think that gun crime rate is pretty insensitive to gun ownership. I don’t think a 20% reduction in firearm ownership would lead to any noticeable change in gun crime. Ditto for a 20% increase. I don’t think a 50% change in either direction would have a significant impact either. Part of what frustrates me so much about the debate is that people rarely actually think things through or try to understand where people are coming from. To me, it’s easy to see why someone might assume that fewer guns would mean fewer gun crimes precisely because of the magical 0 gun argument above. It’s in the same direction, so a step in that direction should lead to some incremental effect. That is, of course, mistaken because it almost completely requires the extreme of 0 legal market to work at all. But I can understand how someone who hasn’t thought about it that much would believe that. I don’t think the quote that led off this article is ridiculous at all (I didn’t watch the video, it might be awful). The fact is, I don’t think it would change at all. Worst case for us? The anti’s are right and there is some positive correlation between total guns and gun crime. But the empirical data shows that it would necessarily be an insignificant effect, which still means they’re missing the point if they want to reduce gun crime.

    • Among law-abiding gun owners, 100 million strong, the crime rate is zero. By definition. All “common sense gun control” is aimed directly at law-abiding gun owners. Obviously, because no one else would pay any attention. Why is this difficult to understand?

  30. I cannot stand this guy who’s name I don’t even know because I don’t care and I have detested every single
    opinion he’s ever had the times I accidentally stumbled across a Young Turks video.
    I want to brake both of his legs and bludgeon him with a f**king hammer.

  31. I’ve tried watching an anti-gun Young Turks video in the past but I started having weird symptoms like nose bleeds, cold sweats, and double vision, so I gave up on it.

  32. 3 minutes, when he talks about the people problem, and then suggests the solution is to remove one tool available to people problem.

  33. In between his unintelligible attempts at imitating a conservative this Cenk character can’t even win an argument with himself. There are also a lot of gun owners that are not conservatives saying the same things that he attempts to ridicule.

    He has a face and presence for radio (maybe) and comes across as an idiot so if someone is going to be a representative of gun control/pro-victim/pro-slavery please let it be more idiots like this guy.

  34. I can’t but I am weak.The real test would be to see if Frankie and Willie would/could watch it.

  35. I really hate it when people say. “Few guns then fewer death by guns”. And then they act like we dont know that and ignore that simple fact. We dont ignore that fact. We know if they dont have a gun, they will use a knife, a hammer, or a car to kill you. That is a fact THEY ignore. They also ignore the fact that violent rapes increased in each of the countries that confiscated guns.

    Also, the stupid strawman of homogeneous countries in europe. They are no more homogeneous then the US. Infact they have a worse growing militant subculture that we have seen exposed the past few years. And they dont know how to deal with it.

    • If there is only one gun in a given population, sooner or later it will end up in the hands of a criminal or a crazy, and at that time the number of potential victims is equal to the population minus one. These assertions assume the readers are simply stupid.

  36. This was my first time making it all the way through a Young Turks screed. Bad as it was, anything put out by that fvcktard Thom Hartmann is a thousand times worse.

  37. Ohhh actors should STFU and stick to their limited skill set pretending to be people they are not. While they believe people care what they think, we do not.

  38. Someone told me last week what i’ve heard so many times..They were telling me how good gun control was in the UK..They went on about how i could google and see just how low their gun crimes were..I only had the following to say and it was sincere.

    I said i had nothing against the UK ,but i wasn’t planning on visiting,i wasn’t planning on moving there,so i didn’t give one bit of a damn about their gun control or gun laws..It doesn’t concern me.The same goes for Australia

  39. Cenk Uygur

    In addition to hosting TYT, Uygur appeared on MSNBC as a political commentator in 2010, later hosting a weeknight commentary show on the channel for nearly six months until being replaced by Al Sharpton.

    Shortly after leaving MSNBC, Uygur secured a show on Current TV that aired from December 5, 2011 to August 15, 2013.

    Uygur was from 2012 to 2013 the chief news officer of Current TV, succeeding Keith Olbermann following his departure from the cable television network until Current was acquired by Al Jazeera Media Network.

    So he was replaced by Al Sharpton on MSNBC Enough Said …

  41. What a rambling, incoherent mess of a video. He seems to think he’s pretty clever but he flat out fails at being funny. It was painful to watch the part where he was making fun of the tweets. How is he so popular?

  43. I just don’t know why anyone would listen to someone who named themselves after the Young Turks. The genocidal Young Turks. I mean seriously? Is this a joke?

  46. Watched it all the way through.

    Cenk is right. After the U.S. passed the The National Firearms Act of 1934, gun related crime (including mass shootings and homicides) fell dramatically.

    In 1968, Congress had the courage to pass the Gun Control Act. What was left of gun related crime dropped to near nonexistent levels. Suicides by firearm were cut in half and suicides by other means did not increase to fill in the gap.

    After the success of these gun control measures the U.S. was freed up to focus on other problems and no one ever tried to pass any more gun control laws at the state or federal level.

    These gun control measures worked so well that as I typed this a simian was dislodged from my anus, sprouted wings, and flew to a unicorn grazing on a nearby hillside.

  47. Don’t the anti’s just love apples to oranges comparisons? Especially without offering any context that might clutter up their well thought out opinions. For the most obvious. Australia’s population: 22 million. America’s population: 320 million. Almost 15 times that of Australia. Not an inconsequential difference. Not that this douche would care. But let’s look at the “mass shootings” as a point of reference. Apparently, “mass shootings” only applies to those in Western societies, how clever. Odd that he doesn’t include any countries under the control of Islam, or it’s equally murderous communist cousins. Mass shootings? How about mass graves? Despite libraries of historical documentation, his inconvenient fact goes unmentioned. Curious, n’est pas? But no, not really.

  49. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” – Han Solo

  51. “Can You Watch This Video All the Way Through?”
    I love the Young Turks. Watch it.
    This is hard.

    Here in Norway after [Breivik] massacre: ‘This are the semi-automatics you are allowed to own’. Is 24 or so named ‘allowed’ rifles.
    Hate it.
    My rifle wasn’t banned.
    Norway is homogeneous.

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