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.
3 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.
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