A Hard No… and a few Firm Responses

As I trawl WordPress, I find a lot of posts relating to guns, gun control, and the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment. These are subjects I have tackled before, more than once (the last four words all link to a different post), but the topic keeps coming up, because A: gun violence in the USA seems to be never-ending, and B: there are numerous solutions to it, if only the politicians would stop playing partisan politics.

There are always pro-gun activists who seek to passionately defend the 2nd Amendment and their Constitutional rights. They will cite that guns do in fact, make life safer. However, do the facts truly bear this out?

The latest post of interest to me, is from one Salvatore. Their post, ‘Three Reasons for a Hard NO to Gun Control’, is the primary subject. I am quoting with his permission. Let’s begin.

1. Gun control cannot disarm criminals.  There are 120 guns for every 100 people in this country.  What law will remove the availability of firearms from those who wish to do harm?  This is why the entire leftist agenda is focused on distorting reality; Afterall, if math is now racist and 2+2 might equal 5, such clear logic that proclaims it impossible to remove the object from accessibility due to overwhelming numbers is now contested.  If you imagine it so, it will be!  Make no mistake, every aspect of this agenda is related to the next. 

The USA currently experiences the highest rate of gun homicides among the top 35 developed nations of planet earth. It is also a considerably higher rate of gun ownership, and therefore guns in circulation. Citing the link:

The USA as a gun murder rate of 4.1 per 100 people, and 120.5 guns per 100 people. Second for deaths is Bulgaria, with 0.6 gun murders and 8.4 guns. Australia has 0.2 deaths and 14.5 guns. Norway has 0.1 deaths and 28.8 guns. France has 0.3 deaths and 19.6 guns. Keep in mind, this data is from 2019 – the US murder rate has increased since then, and as of 2020 79% of all US murders involved firearms.

It’s almost as though taking serious, determined steps to address how easily it is to get guns, makes a measurable impact on the rate of gun murders. Keep in mind that you can buy guns in countries like the UK, France, Germany and beyond – but each of those nations practices some form of gun control. They also practice different forms of gun control, which goes to show that doing something, is better than doing nothing (doing nothing being current US policy). Maybe, just maybe, keeping tighter controls on the availability of lethal weapons does have an impact on how easily criminals obtain them.

2. Even if gun control worked, the harm defeats the good.  The estimated number of defensive gun uses, annually, range from 500,000 to 2,500,000 depending on who’s polls you want to believe.  So, here is a thought experiment: let’s say only 10% of the LOWEST estimate matters.  Let’s say 50,000 of those defensive gun uses annually (only 10% of the low estimate) prevents a murder, a rape, an assault, an abduction.  Ask the next gun control fanatic that you interact with, “are you willing to trade that 50,000 victims for the roughly 15,000 ‘gun deaths’ that happen each year?  That is the rough number if we exclude suicide and most of those 15,000 are gangsters shooting fellow gangsters.  About 100 people are victims of the headline grabbing mass shootings, which are all the media care about, since if they actually wanted to save lives they might do something about Chicago and Baltimore.  The mass murderer and gangster will still have guns, but the citizens who defend themselves each year are the ones who will be hampered by new gun control.  Again, by design.  Ask, are you willing to trade that 50,000 victims for the current 100 victims of mass shootings? 

Does the good guy with the gun really save the day that often? As already referenced, 79% of US murders involve firearms. This percentage includes mass shootings, but the vast majority of that 79% will not be based on mass shootings. Clearly, the widespread presence of firearms has not stopped the US from experiencing a much higher murder rate than many other developed nations. Indeed, given that firearms are the murder weapon nearly eighty percent of the time, the opposite appears true.

However, what of other forms of crime? As of 2020, the USA recorded 38.4 rapes per 100,000 people, 73.9 robberies, and 279.7 aggravated assaults. We come to a more difficult form of comparison, for different countries record rape and assault differently. In 2018, France recorded 375.63 cases of serious assault, 61.91 robberies for 2016, and sexual violence cases of 64.10 in 2016. Germany recorded 164.48 serious assaults in 2018, 42.10 sexual violence cases per 100,000 people in the same year, and a robbery rate of 44.22.

All that tells us is that some types of personal crime are worse in some parts of Europe, and others are worse in the USA. The USA’s rape rate is lower than France’s, but only narrowly lower than Germany’s, and the robbery rate in the USA is higher. Assault cases are lower in the USA than in France, but higher than Germany’s rate – more than twice as high.

With that in mind, are guns the deterrent to violent crime that we are led to believe?

3. Even if preventing murders was possible through gun control, which it is not, we won’t disarm and be subjugated under a tyrannical government.  Regardless of your political leaning, there is one political party in this country that wants to disarm the populace.  For me, that is all that matters.  The Russian Bolsheviks, the German Nazis, the Chinese Communist Party, and every other tyrannical political entity in human history has pushed civilian disarmament.  The American political party that pushes this agenda is in good company, as you can see.  No, we are not giving up the guns.  Thousands have been killed throughout history by criminals, but tens of millions have been killed by government.  That is the true reason for the 2nd Amendment, and that is the true reason we will not give it up, no matter how badly the anti-gunners want to rid themselves of the expectation of self-reliance. 

First of all, there is plenty of evidence that gun control reduces murder rates. However, this particular point is all about fear.

Once upon a time, well-regulated militias, armed with weaponry broadly similar to what the military would have had, would have served as a check against this oft-cited bogeyman. Today, the presence of an armed citizenry does not seem like it would have much of an impact upon a war machine that features, among other things: heavily armoured tanks, drones, F-22 fighter jets, cruise missiles, and soldiers with both weapons and training that far exceeds that of the average gun owner. Currently, the 2nd Amendment has protected the US from precisely zero internal tyrants, with a high price being paid in the blood of its citizens.

Bonus Point: And, after all the bashing of a certain political party, because they, indeed, deserve it, let me say this about the other party: stop with the “mental health” crap.  Again, the majority of these killers have been deemed freak shows only after the fact.  What good does harping on mental health do if no steps are ever taken before the incident?  Texas is a solid red state, why don’t all schools have the Guardian program in place?  While the political right does not shamelessly dance in blood and blatantly push to disarm the populace, they have not done anything to mitigate this problem, either.

I sort of agree with Salvatore, in that mental health issues get twisted and demonised, each and every time there is a mass shooting. It is also worth noting that there are people struggling with mental health issues all over the world, whilst these types of mass shootings are virtually unheard of outside of the USA.

Another Bonus Point:  For any of our European friends who wish to see the United States become enlightened and sophisticated like Europe, you can keep your sophistication.  London has more homicides annually than does New York.  Although Great Britain brags about only having 30 gun deaths a year, they fail to mention how citizens are afraid to walk the streets because the homicide, rape, and assault stats are through the roof.  You can keep that.  I don’t find being helpless in the face of knife-wielding thugs sophisticated at all.  Actually, I find it indignant.  But, a majority of Europeans (not all, there are many exceptions) believe in having their betters, similar to our political left. 

This old chestnut again. The idea that knife crime is as rampant in the UK as gun crime is in the USA, is baseless. It is a falsehood. I’ll copy and paste what I wrote for another post:

Firearms account for the single greatest percentage of weapons used in US murders in 2020, as they do every year in the USA. They currently account for 80% of all US murders.

The UK homicide has, as of 2020/21, been recorded as 9.9 per 1 million people, which would equate to 1 per 100,000 people, if we round up. In other words, the US murder rate is around seven times higher than the UK murder rate. In the UK, knives account for the biggest percentage of murders, around 40% or so, which would place the UK murder rate with knives only at 0.4 per 100,000 people. The US murder rate with guns only would be about 5.5.

In percentage terms, the US gun murder rate is 172% higher than the UK knife murder rate.

It’s false equivalence to suggest the UK’s knife problem (whilst serious) is remotely comparable to the USA’s gun problem.

Meanwhile, is London actually more dangerous than New York? The most recent available data gives New York a homicide rate of 5.5 per 100,000 people. London’s current homicide rate, as of 2020, was 1.4. So London, in terms of murder rates, is actually a lot safer than New York.

For Europe, Politicians guarded by guns is fine.  But, the citizen is helpless against the thug roving the streets.  Less shootings in Europe, but mass knife attacks on London Bridge and box trucks killing scores of people in France, that is all good.  Oh, and don’t look behind the curtain to see over 100 people killed in Paris by Full-Auto AK wielding terrorists, and over 80 people killed in Norway by a White Supremacist guy, or any other such thing, despite all of that draconian gun control.  Sorry, Europe, you can keep all of that peasantry to yourself.

These events, whilst terrible, are nowhere near as frequent in Europe as mass shootings are in the USA. Citing a handful of incidents to suggest they are common-place, and that gun control measures are therefore failing, is misleading. The day-to-day reality is that the USA has a unique, horrible problem, among developed countries. I worry about many things where my daughter is concerned. Getting shot at whilst at school? That isn’t one of them.

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