The Free Press is holding a debate about whether we would be safer without the Second Amendment. In announcing it, Isaac Grafstein writes the following:
Among wealthy nations, the United States is an outlier. Our rate of deaths from gun violence is about seven times higher than Canada’s and nearly 340 times higher than that of the United Kingdom. No other country at our level of prosperity faces the same level of risk from gun violence.
I tire of having the same argument repeatedly. I have to assume that the writer has at least been exposed to the idea that the important number would be the overall rate of homicide, not those specific to guns. In other countries, people blow things up. They stab people with knives. They run over bystanders with vans. Yet somehow this does not stick in the mind, even among those who are specific gun control advocates. The idea just hangs on that if there hadn't been guns available to the killers, those people wouldn't be dead. It's ludicrous. I used to say that I knew almost a dozen people who murdered or were accused of murder, but when I counted it up it's more like two dozen over the years. I don't know the means of death for one of the ones who killed his father, but of the rest, none had used a gun. I know my sample is unrepresentative, as all had some mental health involvement and all were white, but still, that's a remarkable percentage.
I don't know how one even has the discussion if one of the key facts does not even penetrate. There is something sticky in some minds about the idea that those people wouldn't be dead were it not for gun availability. And that's not even counting the "lives saved" part of the equation. Male suicide probably go up because of gun availability. The rest of the deaths don't seem to by any measure.
8 comments:
Safer from citizens with guns, or safer from a tyrannical government?
I have frequently argued that the United States is safer because of guns, and not just because of the homicides and other crimes stopped. It’s safer because the mass killers choose guns.
There’s an outer limit to how many people you can kill with a gun in the low double digits. After that, even when there are no armed citizens to stop you — and shootings stopped by armed citizens normally don’t get out of the single digits, on average not even high enough to count as a “mass shooting” of 4 or more — the police will arrive and stop you.
By contrast, in Iraq where every child seemed to know how to make homemade explosives, we frequently saw mass killings in the dozens. If guns weren’t available, it’s really not that hard to make bombs. The convenience of the guns itself protects us from much worse.
It used to be that both Canada and Europe, like Japan, were protected from the social disruption of mass diversity. That’s not as true now; and how’s that bombing problem that’s suddenly cropped up in Sweden these last few years?
A few years ago it seemed as though the fraction of attacks with automatic weapons was higher in Europe than here--though what with every other gangster using Glock switches these days that may not be true anymore. But it made sense--what with the wars just a truck drive away, if it isn't that much harder to get automatic weapons, why not? Sweden is seeing grenade attacks.
Steve Sailer has started using the phrases 'point of sale' and 'point of use' with regard to gun control. Most gun control advocates, like this guy, strongly favor 'point of sale' controls. Quite obviously those are far easier, and safer, to administer than the other kind. There are already pretty stringent laws implementing 'point of use' restrictions. People with felony convictions are pretty much universally barred from possessing firearms. Ditto people possessing stolen guns or unregistered guns in jurisdictions with such laws. Start enforcing those laws with some rigor, and the amount of gun violence would likely go down.
I would also be wary of whether these figures include suicides by gun shot, which IIRC dwarf the number of murders committed with firearms, and are often included in gun death statistics to increase the overall count. So in addition to looking at homicides rather than gun deaths specifically you should probably also include suicides in the comparison.
Yes, the obsessive focus on GUN killings, rather than murder with whatever weapon. I don't know what the fungibility of weapons choice for homicide might be, but I'm sure it's not zero.
Anything can be a weapon: People are born armed. I've seen martial arts weapons that were essentially just old garden hoes and boat oars. I heard a story once about a guy who was strangled to death with a woman's slip. An unopened champagne bottle can be used a club. And let's not forget about various kinds of poisoning.
One of the funniest times going through TSA screening was when they confiscated 2 out of 3 cigarette lighters in my purse but never mentioned the 2 fist-sized rocks I had. (I collected rocks for my "memory" garden from places I visited.)
Post a Comment