Than what? What are gun rights more important than? According to one Brandon Smith, they are more important than false security, but that notion assumes guns make situations more secure. Do they actually accomplish this? And is the UK really as dangerous in comparison to the US as Brandon claims?
I left a few comments, and this is one of Brandon’s replies:
Did you know that the UK has one of the highest rates of knife attacks and deaths in the world, and that this violence has expanded into the UK public school system? Did you know that Europe has suffered multiple mass murders by guns and other means over the past decade despite your gun control measures, and that when this happens you have no means to fight back, just like the teachers in that gun free school in Texas? Just because a country is a gun free zone to law abiding citizens does not mean it is gun free for criminals. Also, the UK is a joke comparison because it is a tiny island and it is easier to lock down the flow of weapons there than on a CONTINENT. Did you know that the UK and Europe are under defacto control of corporate elitists with zero chance of escape because you are disarmed and have no ability to rebel?
You are in the UK and are clearly happy to be enslaved, but we here in America think it is worth the risk of potential gun crime so that we may retain the tools to keep our freedoms. The views of outside nations are irrelevant, because you have no freedoms, only privileges that can be taken away at any given moment as we just saw with covid.
Emphasis mine. I have looked for anything that might back up Brandon’s claim, but so far, nothing. I did provide a number of links that suggest Europe is in fact statistically safer than the USA, but that particular comment did not seem to make it through the moderation queue. I’ll provide them here, so that Brandon might see them, and consider them.
https://www.gvpedia.org/gun-myths/europe-and-us/
The fact remains, the UK is safer than the USA. The UK is far from perfect, but I am less likely to be murdered, and my daughter is not facing being shot at when at school. As for the ‘freedom’ argument, as I mentioned to Brandon, defining freedom via the barrel of a gun isn’t the brilliant symbol of freedom he thinks it is. If anything, to me, it looks fragile when defined through a gun. Plus, it’s a false sense of freedom. If the US military directed its highly-trained soldiers with military-grade weapons at the US people, the presence of guns would not prevent tyranny from emerging. Does the average gun owner have the means to shoot down a gunship or F-22 fighter? What would they do against cruise missiles or tanks? This antiquated idea that guns hold back dictators is costing children their lives.
Brandon goes on to make arguments around knife crime in the UK, as though it’s comparable to gun crime in the USA. Whilst knife crime is a problem in the UK (40% of murders here involve blades), does it truly compare to gun crime in the USA? The UK murder rate in 2021, with only knives, works out to 0.48 per 100,000 people. The US murder rate with guns only is 5. In other words, you’re four and a half times more likely to be murdered with a gun in the US, than you are to be murdered with a knife in the UK.
Brandon referenced other countries’ per capita deaths in respect of mass shootings. To give him the benefit of the doubt, via such a mechanism, some European nations record worse data, such as Norway. What Brandon is presumably unaware of, is that Norway’s homicide rate comes in at 0.6 for 2020, and that’s the total murder rate, meaning you’re once again nearly four and a half times more likely to be murdered by a gun in the US, than you are murdered in Norway via any means.
Serbia was another country named and shamed by Brandon, and as of 2020 Serbia had a murder rate of 1. Again, substantially lower than the US murder rate. There is an excellent resource for studying murder rates across different countries, which can he found here. The data is not necessarily from the same year, but it is pretty close. Perhaps Brandon would consider taking a look?
There is still more. One ‘Rodster’ chimed in, and his comment was permitted, but mine… well, another attempt to put forward facts and evidence was quietly ignored. Does Brandon have a fear of evidence?
Rodster had the following to say:
Thank you for teaching anti-gun idiots. You are totally correct about knife attacks. A few years ago SkyNews U.K. had coverage of knife attacks. Let’s not forget Jo Cox MEP who was killed by a knife welding lunatic or more recently conservative David Amess.
Yet we don’t hear a mass uproar to ban knives in the UK. It doesn’t matter wether it’s a gun, knife, club, brick etc. If a person wants to kill they’ll find a way to do it. Have we forgotten how in Europe, people were using trucks or buses to kill people in crowds?
Never EVER, give up your damn RIGHT to own a gun. Guns were put in the constitution to protect us not from our neighbors but from Government. The framers and founding fathers were forward thinkers. Now more than ever, it has become a neccessity because the Federal and State governments no longer are working for “We The People”. All they care about is more and more power and centralized control.
Poor Rodster. He appears to believe Brandon is correct, but Rodster is only getting half the story from this alt-market.us site. As mentioned already, the issue of knife crime in Britain, whilst serious (I am well aware of how serious it is), is nothing in comparison to the problem of gun crime in the USA. Guns are not proven to make situations safer, but there are many examples of them making a situation more dangerous.
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That’s odd that he talks about the flow of weapons on a continent, when the US isn’t a continent. Canada has strict gun laws, and our homicide rate in 2019 was 1.83 per 100,000 residents, compared to 5 per 100,000 in the US (as per Statista). Gun homicide rates in the US are over four times higher than rates in any other developed country: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019_Gun_ownership_rates_and_gun_homicide_rates_-_developed_world_-_scatter_plot.svg
It’s truly bizarre how much pro-gun people like to bury their heads in the sand.
It certainly seems like Brandon wishes to… shall we say deny certain things? I reposted an earlier comment (one that slipped into a moderation queue, then vanished), and it disappeared again. It may be because it contains links to evidence that directly contradicts him… and one thing I’ve noticed about the conservative right, is that they don’t handle being contradicted very well.
You are absolutely right RE Canada. It is one of several countries that demonstrates gun control measures work, and works well.
My response to those who make claims that ” a knife can kill people, too”. Can you run away from a knife? Can a knife kill 20 children in 20 seconds? Can two or three people stop a man with a knife? Can you use some object to keep a knife attacker at bay? The false equivalency of these gun nuts is easily punctured.
You’re absolutely right Joseph. Unfortunately people like Brandon aren’t willing to listen to facts, as you’ll see with a cursory look at his post. He declined to post some of my comments, where they contained factual links, which says it all about him.