Whenever a mass shooting occurs, a debate about gun violence ensues. An often-cited counter to the point about the United States’ high rates of gun homicides is that people in other countries kill one another at the same rate using different types of weapons. It’s not true.
Compared to other countries with similar levels of development or socioeconomic status, the United States has exceptional homicide rates, and it’s driven by gun violence.
Here are the data:
Homicide rates in the U.S. and peer countries by weapon type, 2013
Source: Global Burden of Disease Study. Access the data visualization here: http://ihmeuw.org/3oi4
In a 2013 article for The Atlantic online that compared gun deaths in U.S. cities to some of the deadliest places in the world, the authors created a map, below, that shows Atlanta has the same gun murder rate as South Africa, Detroit as El Salvador, Phoenix equal to Mexico’s gun homicide rate:
The Atlantic
Another screen grab, below, compares gun homicide rates in the U.S. with countries that frequently make headlines for conflict-related violence (Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan).
The U.S. has higher rates of homicides from guns than Pakistan. At 4.5 deaths per 100,000 people, the U.S. rates aren’t much lower than gun homicide rates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (5.2 deaths per 100,000 people). Annually, the U.S. has about two fewer gun homicide deaths per 100,000 people than Iraq, which has 6.5 deaths per 100,000.
Firearm homicide rates in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States and Pakistan, 2010
Compared to certain countries known for their high crime rates, such as Jamaica, Russia, South Africa and Kenya, the U.S. had the second-highest rate of gun homicide deaths after Jamaica (view data online).
Although the U.S. stands out for its high rates of homicide firearm deaths, its rates look small compared to certain Latin American countries. The following screen grab indicates that El Salvador, Colombia and Honduras had the highest rates of firearm homicides in the world in 2010.
Firearm homicide rates in Latin America and the United States, 2010
Another issue that gets less attention is how many people die from firearms accidentally. Again, the U.S. has much higher rates of unintentional death from firearms compared to other countries.
Unintentional firearm death rates in the U.S. and peer countries, 2013
Source: Global Burden of Disease Study. Access the data visualization here: http://ihmeuw.org/3oi6
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our peer countries don’t have the same homicide and accidental gun death problems that we have in the United States.
After a mass shooting that killed 35 people in Australia in 1996, the conservative government enacted laws banning automatic and semi-automatic rifles and pump-action guns and initiated a nationwide gun-buyback program, as described in this NBC News article.
Switzerland, frequently cited as a country where widespread gun ownership makes people safer, has stricter gun regulations than the U.S. The Swiss government has placed limits on gun ownership and makes gun owners renew their permits 14 times a year.
One inspiring example comes from Cali, Colombia, and highlights the value of using data to identify risk factors for homicide. In the early 1990s, the mayor of Cali decided to use data to improve health outcomes in his city. A physician and epidemiologist by training, Dr. Rodrigo Guerrero Velasco set up a firearm death tracking system to identify different risk factors driving these trends. Guerrero Velasco and his colleagues found that more than half of Cali’s homicide victims were intoxicated. Also, analysis of the data revealed that homicides were more likely to involve young people and occur on holiday weekends, weekends following paydays, and election days.
Based on these findings, Guerrero Velasco implemented several interventions to address these risk factors, such as limiting the hours alcohol could be sold, imposing curfews for individuals under 18 on the weekends, and imposing short-term gun bans on select weekends and election days when homicides were most likely to occur. According to an academic study based on an analysis of the city’s gun death database, homicides declined from a high of 124 per 100,000 in 1994 to 86 per 100,000 in 1997. Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and co-authored by University of Washington epidemiologists found that homicide death rates were 14 percent lower than expected during periods when gun bans were imposed in Cali.
Homicide rates in Cali, Colombia, 1983-1998
Note: Figure taken from paper entitled “La epidemiología de los homicidios en Cali, 1993-1998: seis años de un modelo poblacional” published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health
In 2011, Guerrero Velasco was re-elected to a second term as mayor of Cali. In a Sept. 15, 2015, article for Scientific American, Guerrero Velasco wrote that renewed efforts stemmed gun violence. “Cali’s homicide rate of 83 in 2012 dropped to 62 in 2014. This pattern has continued; the number of homicides in the first trimester of 2015 is less than in the same period in any of the past 12 years.”
Instead of using local data to identify local solutions, the U.S. may largely have to rely on studies done in other countries to gain insight into ways to curb gun violence. Even though Obama lifted a 17-year-old ban on U.S. federal funding for gun violence research in 2013, a congressional ban on funding for this research remains in place, with Congress renewing the ban after nine people were killed in a Charleston, S.C., church.
As a society, we must take serious actions now to curb the threat of firearm-related deaths. Let’s look to other countries for inspiration for what works.
471 Comments
I just want to know, are you naive or just really stupid?
Please explain.
yes, please do go on steve. you have got us all so enthralled. do you know what that word means? enthralled. maybe ask an actual involved question instead of being and instadick then biding your time for a response… you slack jawed mongoloid sisterfucker. at least im an asshole with front teeth.
sticks and stones may break my bones but hollow points expand on impact. brah
*Tries to sound intelligent*
*Uses the term “mongoloid” as an insult*
Yeah okay you’re just another idiot…
Mon·gol·oid adjective ˈmäŋ-gə-ˌlȯid
Definition of MONGOLOID
1
: of, constituting, or characteristic of a race of humankind native to Asia and classified according to physical features (as the presence of an epicanthic fold)
2
often not capitalized usually offensive : of, relating to, or affected with Down syndrome
— Mongoloid noun
It is an insult you dult!
*tries to be an asshole
*thinks mongoloid isnt an insult
Yeah okay you’re just another idiot…
Who keeps statistics on gun death in Afghanistan or Sudan? Just curious…
They can’t be accurate.
Compared to the economic information provided by China and which the world share markets take for granted, Sudanese gun death rates veritable gospel!
> ‘Massaged’ figures and lies make the world go ’round.
thanks trollies. I’ll assume here your argument about bogus numbers is posted here because you favor unlimited guns in the US. Not very smart.
Yeah. The prevalence of weapons of death in the hands of the forever-discontented, capricious, low-IQ, inbreeding proletariat is directly proportional to public safety.
Your powers of deduction are astounding, Mulder… Why aren’t you out solving mysteries, sneaking into Area-51 or some such?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6326c795e2f2bb28bfc119d91410b40c62f429fee1f60d7dc9501c9e7d5cec97.jpg
No. We favor the Second Amendment, law-abiding citizens being able to defend themselves, and honest reporting.
Right – no way they are accurate. They are probably under reported by more than 10X, maybe more than 100X
I’ll have random numbers pulled out of my arse for $1000 Alex…
Because the important point is the US really wants to be compared to Afghanistan or Sudan in order to look good.
gee bob,,,,in denial much?????? The US has EXCEPTIONAL gun homicude rates and EXCEPTIONAL accidental gun death rates. Denial doesn’t change that one iota.
Exactly! This crap was pulled straight from a liberals @$$!
Oh horse manure coker. Besides being a logic moron on guns, you are also likely a creationist and a climate warming denier. Stupid is as stupid does.
Get an education stupid.
Probably ought to look at TOTAL homicide rates. My understanding is that the homicide rate in Russia is four times that of the US, with kitchen knives being the most common weapon there.
“Probably ought to look at TOTAL homicide rates. My understanding is that the homicide rate in Russia is four times that of the US, with kitchen knives being the most common weapon there.”
That is a valid point, although the rate difference between Russia and the U.S. is not 4x, but twice as much (4.7 to 9.2). That said, do we really just need to be better off than Russia to be doing the right thing? In my mind, being behind pretty much every first world country (even in total homicide rate) is a problem.
Guns without a doubt cause issues in our country. People flout the 2nd amendment without understanding the amendment itself. People toss around conspiracy theories about how background checks will lead to an all out gun ban, even though our Supreme Court has essentially made such a ban impossible. The numbers in this article are worthy of a discussion. I just wish it could be done rationally, and by a Congress that was not afraid of special interest groups (Here’s lookin’ at the NRA).
The numbers are complete bulshit. They are supplied by a medical organization with bias against gun ownership. You want real numbers, check the FBI database http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
All the numbers say that we lead in gun violence, so not sure which you are taking offense to. Even the FBI numbers, which are based on UCR data and are also flawed, still say we lead first world countries in gun violence. That is indisputable.
If you want even more trustworthy information, you should look to peer reviewed research. There are a number of studies out there (Hoskins, 2011; Wells & Horney 2002; Donohue 2003; Block 1997; Hemenway, 2004). Those are a just a few that either compare gun violence across countries or discuss it.
As I said, it really is indisputable that we lead our peer countries in gun violence. Now, what we should do about it is worthy of a debate. Preferably, a debate without special interest group’s interfering.
YOU’RE FULL OF SHIT.
Except more than 2/3 of the numbers in your citations are suicide. Counting gun suicide in the US but not suicide by other means in other countries is absurd.
Moreover the US has one of the lowest rates of murder of non criminals
I did some basic math to compare the firearm homicide rates against what the fbi has posted and they are identical. Do you have a calculator?
Homicide is a crime. Gun crime is a fraction of our total gun death/injury rate. The FBI crime statistics do not cover gun accidents, children shooting children, suicide or even some homicides considered justified. When the total of our shameful gun death/injury rate is taken into account, we have the highest rate of all other developed nations.
YEAH BUDDY !!
The FBI database only covers gun crime. It doesn’t list non crime gun death/injury like accidents, children shooting others, suicide, or even some forms of homicide considered justified. However, the medical community sees all forms of gun death/injury including crime when the victims are admitted to the ER.
Those are gun deaths. Like the thread is talking about.
the statistic I looked at was gun deaths. Like the subject of this thread. Not knives. 15,000 here in the USA GUN deaths. 400 and some change in Canada. Only factors were homicides and accidental shootings. They all say the same thing if you find an independent source. First world countries, we are WAY at the top. Pakistan has less gun deaths.
You give too much credit to Voice of “Reason”. His is is not a valid point. If we’re to make comparisons then it should be among developed nations like ourselves. Russia is not considered a developed nation. If you’re going to take that position then why not compare ourselves to Honduras which has the highest gun death/injury rate of all.
It’s sad that we’ve descended to the point that we have to resort to comparing ourselves favorably to nations like Honduras or Russia instead of developed nations like Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, France, Switzerland, England, etc. Of all developed nations we have the highest rate of gun death/injury and that rate is not caused by kitchen knives as implied by Voice of “Reason”.
I would like to see a study of gun ownership within a country compared to freedoms its citizens enjoy. Wouldn’t U.S. citizens spike high in both categories compared to the rest of the world?
Other countries with strict gun control don’t have less freedoms in general!! There there are things you can do in the US that you can’t do in other countries but other countries have freedoms the US doesn’t have… We like to believe that we are the people with the most freedom but if you have lived in certain other countries you might find out that this is not always true…
Yes. It would be really difficult to establish an operational definition of “freedoms enjoyed” that we could rank countries on, BUT it is indisputable that countries with even more guns freely floating around (Afghanistan, Honduras) would certainly be shown to have LESS individual freedoms enjoyed.
Why don’t you LIST some of those supposed freedoms that others have and we don’t enjoy.
BECAUSE BOB PLUGH azzholez such as YOU will simply call them bogus. The freedom I have to protect my life and that of my family is all I care about! If a criminal enters MY home he will DEFINITELY leave under a sheet! Those other countries??? The criminal will leave unscathed and the homeowner will leave brutally assaulted!
This is stupid. Those other countries your odds of dying from gun violence period are lower.
1st. It’s not true. Most of the other countries have way higher homicide rates. Also, what’s up with the gun-death fetish? Do you think a victim cares if he get shot, or stabbed or beaten to death with a baseball bat? It doesn’t matter, the results are the same.
Hey Donnie, take your ignorant gun-fetishing and shove it far up your arse.
* drink a beer in public
* working health system
* free higher education
* from 1934 – 1975 it was illegal for US citizen to own gold
* being topless at beaches 🙂
…..
HAHA. So your huge problem is, that you can’t drink booze on the streets? The health system is not good in other countries, just maybe better. Education is not free, taxpayers pay for it. Also, that’s pretty stupid, because even if people get high education, they can’t find job, or they work in a McDonald’s anyways. The same crap is going on in Europe. 1934-1975? Dude, it’s 2015.
I’m pretty sure that men can be topless at beaches. However, do you want to see ugly,old women naked on the beaches? Because I don’t.
B.S. I moved from Hungary to the US and yes, the US has way more freedom. Like freedom of selfdefense. In my country people get stabbed, harrassed, violently attacked, beaten to death, etc, and they can’t really do anything about it, maybe use some tear gas spray or something other useless crap, but even if they just do that, they can get in huge trouble for that.
Nobody enjoys (though I doubt you’ll believe this because of all the rhetoric) more freedoms than Canada or the UK. Check their/our numbers.
Switzerland is supposedly the happiest country. Lets check their numbers vs ours… 239 gun deaths in 2011 and dropping. Lets take a look at the good old USA and our freedom to shoot each other.15,953 in 2011 but dropping. Canada 476. These are all homicides and accidental shootings. You can own a gun in these places. Explain the difference to me. I’m not getting it?
Fewer blacks…
SAM ROAN CLAIMS: “Switzerland is supposedly the happiest country. Lets check their numbers vs ours… 239 gun deaths in 2011 and dropping. Lets take a look at the good old USA and our freedom to shoot each other.15,953 in 2011 but dropping. Canada 476. These are all homicides and accidental shootings. You can own a gun in these places. Explain the difference to me. I’m not getting it?”
YOU stats do NOT detail POLICE SHOOTINGS that stopped a crime from escalating, they neglect suicides, negligent discharges ……………………… oh hell why should I try; the douche will never admit his numbers are Bull-CHIT!
AND TAXES in those crap-holes are HOW HIGH?
I would draw your attention back to the first graph (Firearm homicide rates in selected high-income countries, 2010). All of those nations listed would have similar (some slightly worse, some slightly better) levels of freedoms enjoyed by their citizens, without the incredible number of gun deaths that the U.S. “enjoys”.
Personally I would think that being murdered is a huge infringement of your freedoms but no doubt my judgment is in question because I also think the U.S. has its guns laws all wrong. I would also note that the annual number of Americans to be murdered by firearms is similar to the number of Africans who have died in the current Ebola outbreak. One is an emergency worthy of worldwide intervention and support, the other is business as usual…
2,500,000 people die in the US every single year. The gun homicides are 8,500-9,000 or so. (Justfied self defense homicide included.) How many murders happen with a legally owned firearm? Even way less.
Most of Europe stands way better in terms of healthcare and affordable education for example, with good justice systems, and they don’t have a “need” for gun ownership like America does…Also, as an American living in China (yes, of all places), there are certain freedoms Americans DON’T have and Chinese do. We have to stop being ignorant and thinking everything we say is right all the time. We’re simply not. It’s totally fine to say America sucks. It does in a lot of ways. But it has a lot of potential too. Why can’t we just put down out egos and work to improve our country instead of feeling (falsely) like it’s already perfect?
Anonymous — Response To Obama’s 2013 Gun Control Policy
I have never spent time in China. Please enlighten me to these vast freedoms enjoyed by the Chinese that Americans do not have.
Yes, focus ONLY on China instead of the point that Europe is better, statistically and factually speaking on things that matter concerning the well fare of it’s citizens.
Cherry picking your arguments, are we?
Why would you say this and not list at least one… I’m calling BS… Go ahead…
Name ONE freedom that Chinese have and Americans do… other than to create and own 100% of a business in China!!!
Now, try spewing your garbage to anyone that protests against the Government in China!
I know it’s hard to believe that we Americans are not the envy of the world these days and we’re not as special as we believe we are. People have become so ignorant. So many Americans walking around talking about having freedoms because we still have guns or because of some other reason. No, clearly we have less freedoms then we used to. If you question this I wonder where you have been the last 15 years. While everybody stays focused on the 2nd amendment and their obsession over keeping it they seem to not realize that literally every other amendment has been violated repeatedly to one extent or another. And dont’ brag about Americans owning businesses in China. That does not benefit us. Jobs in the US benefit us. The rich moved them there because they clearly felt they were not making enough money. Therefore, their workers were shit out of luck. Awesome. Besides China is currently graduating engineers at a 2 to 1 ratio vs the US. They appear to be catching up to us more and more because we’re squandering away our resources and energy on wars. Not the benefit of our people. We have an education system that keeps getting reduced but our military does not. We have universities which are great but the cost vs Euro nations is bullshit. There are no jobs to be had even if one spends 4 or 6 years at uni and just ends up without work anyways and $60,000 in debt. Oh and our government has spent us into a hole so big our grandkids will pay for it. I give a shit about my country but blind patriotism is equivalent to being mentally retarded. Go learn shit.
China is no longer a communist country…
TRY THIS Anonymous — Response To Obama’s 2013 Gun Control Policy
The plan Obama just knows will stop gun violence?? It applies to the LAW ABIDING and even if enacted will DO NOTHING TO STOP CAREER CRIMINALS! They are CRIMINALS and could NOT CARE LESS WHAT IDIOTIC BARACK OBAMA SIGNS! CRIMINALS ARE CALLED CRIMINALS FOR A REASON!
Requires background checks for all gun sales and strengthens the background check system. This would include removing barriers under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act so that states may more freely share information about mental health issues involving potential gun purchasers.
Provides states with monetary incentives—$20 million in fiscal year FY 2013 and a proposed $50 million in FY 2014—to share information so that records on criminal history and people prohibited from gun ownership due to mental health reasons are more available.
Bans military-style assault weapons and limits magazines to a capacity of 10 rounds.
Provides additional tools to law enforcement. The plan proposes a crackdown on gun trafficking by asking Congress to pass legislation that closes “loopholes” in gun trafficking laws and establishes strict penalties for “straw purchasers” who pass a background check and then pass guns on to prohibited people.
Urges Congress to pass the administration’s $4 billion proposal to keep 15,000 state and local police officers on the street to help deter gun crime.
Maximizes efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime. The president calls upon the attorney general to work with U.S. attorneys across the country to determine gaps occurring in this area and where supplemental resources are appropriate.
Provides training for “active shooter” situations to 14,000 law enforcement, first responders and school officials.
Directs the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to issue a statement to health care providers that they are not prohibited by federal law from reporting threats of violence to the proper authorities.
Launches a national gun safety campaign to encourage responsible gun ownership and authorizes the Consumer Product Safety Commission to examine issues relating to gun safety locks.
Helps schools invest in safety. The president’s plan calls for more school resource officers and counselors in all schools through the Community Oriented Policing Services hiring program. The plan also calls for the federal government to assist schools in developing emergency management plans.
Improves mental health awareness through enhanced teacher training and referrals for treatment. The plan calls for the training of 5,000 additional mental health professionals nationwide. The plan also calls for coverage of mental health treatment under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.
No, not of the first world countries. Democracy and freedom are pretty well known already.
I know that the USA tries to make it seem like most of Europe and parts of Asia don’t exist (it infuriates me still how little I was taught in that country about it’s real conducts and always interesting to see how my new country and it’s neighbors see the USA) but they do, they have free speech, freedom of press, right to protest and all that jazz.
Any patriot of the US touting how they’re awesome to be better then most of the middle East and much of Africa (which apparently they aren’t better when it comes to gun related crime and murder) isn’t setting the bar very high for themselves, as most countries are better then North Korea, most of the middle east and Africa. It’s not something to write home about.
The vast majority of gun violence is in the center of major cities, right where the blacks are concentrated. It’s simple enough to reduce the chances of encountering someone – live in a state with a good 2nd amendment, carry your gun(s) with you, and stay out of big cities, especially during night time hours.
…… I don’t think I should respond to this, but I have a bad habit of doing so.
Yeah, no, places where there is a congregation of poor people, no matter the color of skin is where the most violent gun crime takes place.
Your confirmation bias is showing.
Or ya know, live in a country where gun violence is the least of your worries either because there is strict laws surrounding it or those who carry guns are trained to do so, not some average Joe who wants to shoot you because you looked at them funny. Or insulted their bible, or are in the wrong side of town.
You’re also more likely to be murdered by someone you know. How does that fit into staying out of big cities where there are witnesses?
But you just hold your gun at night while you sleep and fear everyone and everything forever.
Seriously dude, do some research into violent gun statistics. America has a pretty damn bad report card. Specifically the bible belt areas.
The highest rate of gun deaths occur due to two reasons. One is suicide and the other is gang violence. Since I control the 1st, the 2nd one is easiest to control by not living in a city. After that there are only minor wack jobs that I have to defend from and yes – if anyone breaks into my house at night they will die with no remorse whatsoever from me.
As to the being murdered from someone I know – not going to happen – I pick and choose my friends more wisely than most.
But as far as I am concerned, gun violence is farther from my mind than, say, the potential of a drunk driver, or a tractor trailer having an issue (there are many that could occur).
From where I stand, getting rid of the scourge of this country – illegals – is probably the biggest threat this country has. Bigger than Russia, bigger than Iran, bigger than just about anything else around.
Wow, that escalated quickly. Why did you suddenly turn it into about “them damn immigrants”? You were making sense until then, that was out of left field.
The most violent gangs tend to come from hoods and cults. In fact, I just read about this yesterday, the gang responsible for 30% of federal prison murders and only makes up about .1% of the prison population is a nazi gang of white guys who pretty much hate everything called Aryan Brotherhood.
They also apparently had connections with the Manson family, so points for cult status fucking people up too. The kinda funny part is that apparently one of the leaders is part native American.
Racism makes no sense, especially among very clear racists. They clearly don’t follow their own rules.
Agreed on the potential of a drunk driver. Luckily the country I live in has a far less tolerance rate than .8 You’re considered drunk at .2
What does “freedoms” even mean though? I’m mean seriously, it’s this nebulous concept that Americans go on and on about, but very few of them can really articulate what they consist of or what they are or why they value them. You can’t conduct a study without two variables and “freedoms” isn’t a measure of anything. If you wanted to compare gun ownership to freedom of speech then that would give you one result. If you wanted to compare gun ownership to the freedom to access excellent medical care regardless of income, that would probably give you a completely different result. If you wanted to compare gun ownership to religious freedom, that might give you something else again. “Freedom” is just a useless buzzword that the American people have been told repeatedly that they have and other countries don’t have. It exists purely so that the people in power don’t actually have to provide things like cheap healthcare and education because hey, “you’re free!” should be enough, right?
Freedom of selfdefense. You can’t be free, if others can just go and take your life/your family members lives or your personal belongings, break in your own home and rob you, kill you. Do you think if a government says you can’t defend yourself, that’s freedom? Nope, that’s called oppression, tyranny.
BAN ALL GUNS
COME AND GET THEM.
I would love to
Plot twist, you can’t use one to do it.
GUNS KILL PEOPLE
knives and blunt objects even more o.o
actually, thats not true
Knives and blunt objects are not the cause of our shameful gun death/injury rate that is higher than any other developed nation on Earth.
Blunt objects are not specifically designed to cause massive bodily harm, like guns are…so…no…no they don’t.
That’s astonishing, how can something not designed to kill people kill more people than something designed to kill people? HMM.
Knives and blunt objects have nowhere near the kill-rates that guns do.
They DO NOT. You are simply wrong!
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Look at the figures – you are simply wrong!!!
Just get rid of Detroit, L.A. and Chicago, and the U.S. falls about 48th in the world, crack down on gang violence and black crime, you will see a difference… Oh crap we can’t do that because we might offend someone, let’s just continue to blame the 80 million legal gun owners who haven’t committed a crime.
Please just kill yourself. This isn’t a joke or a threat. It’s advice. Kill yourself.
How enlightened of you, I thought the progressives were supposed to be the tolerant people, and ‘we’ gunowners the spawns of Satan, But I don’t want you, or anyone else dead, just because you have a different opinion, so no thanks, I will not heed your ‘advice’, I will keep on living, happily, while you stew in your own hate, and self loathing.
I wouldn’t mind him living next door to me so that I could put up a sign “I have nothing worth your dying for, but my neighbor will only call 911 and the average response time here is fifteen minutes.”
I like that idea also…I have made that point before, please feel free to put that “I am a proud none gun owner is this home.” sign in your yard; would love to see how long that lasts….
Please drink some kool aid, you’re as about as Reagan as obama
actually Obama is more Reagan than Reagan
1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.
2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.
3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980’s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.
4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.
5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.
6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.
7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.
8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.
9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”
10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy.
Given the present extremism of the Repub Party, Reagan is more Obama than Reagan.
Thanks for the info. I’ll be using it.
Ah yes, it sure didn’t take long for someone to drag out the old racist trope that US gun violence is an ‘urban black person’ problem–and the real victims here are us law abiding white folk. Keep on believing that one Troglodyte. And ignore all the facts about suicide, domestic partner violence, and accidents.
And if more guns are the solution (surely it must be), then why aren’t “those” people’s neighborhoods the safest places on earth?
In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment and the supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.
Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the liberal intellectuals of that era, as well as by politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals. Popular books of the time, like Karl Menninger’s “The Crime of Punishment,” argued that “law and order” was an “inflammatory” term with racial overtones. “What it really means,” said Menninger, “is that we should all go out and find the n–– and beat them up.”
The late William Stuntz, a Harvard law professor, addressed this history in his 2011 book, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice.” “The lenient turn of the mid-twentieth century was, in part, the product of judges, prosecutors and politicians who saw criminal punishment as too harsh a remedy for ghetto violence,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The Supreme Court’s expansion of criminal defendants’ legal rights in the 1960s and after flowed from the Justices’ perception that poor and black defendants were being victimized by a system run by white government officials. Even the rise of harsh drug laws was in large measure the product of reformers’ efforts to limit the awful costs illegal drug markets impose on poor city neighborhoods. Each of these changes flowed, in large measure, from the decisions of men who saw themselves as reformers. But their reforms showed an uncanny ability to take bad situations and make them worse.”
Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder rate doubled. Cities couldn’t hire cops fast enough. “The number of police per 1,000 people was up twice the rate of the population growth, and yet clearance rates for crimes dropped 31 percent and conviction rates were down 6 percent,” wrote Lucas A. Powe Jr. in “The Warren Court and American Politics,” his history of the Warren Court. “During the last weeks of his [1968] presidential campaign, Nixon had a favorite line in his standard speech. ‘In the past 45 minutes this is what happened in America. There has been one murder, two rapes, forty-five major crimes of violence, countless robberies and auto thefts.’”
As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented among those arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967, blacks were 17 times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape and robbery, according to FBI data. And they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft and aggravated assault.
Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.
“Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, “Crime and Human Nature.” “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later.
“The overrepresentation of blacks among arrested persons persists throughout the criminal justice system,” wrote Wilson and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well make discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.” Yet liberal policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy consistently downplay the empirical data on black crime rates, when they bother to discuss them at all. Stories about the racial makeup of prisons are commonplace; stories about the excessive amount of black criminality are much harder to come by.
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city governments.” The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.
Black people are not shooting each other at these alarming rates in Chicago and other urban areas because of our gun laws or our drug laws or a criminal justice system that has it in for them. The problem is primarily cultural — self-destructive behaviors and attitudes all too common among the black underclass. The problem is black criminal behavior, which is one manifestation of a black pathology that ultimately stems from the breakdown of the black family. Liberals want to talk about what others should do for blacks instead of what blacks should do for themselves. But if we don’t acknowledge the cultural barriers to black progress, how can we address them? How can you even begin to fix something that almost no one wants to talk about honestly?
Jason Riley is a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
Your filibustering comment notwithstanding, I find it interesting that you conveniently never mention the high rate of poverty among the black community. Higher than any other demographic. Gun crime tends to follow poverty rather than race. You can find high rates of gun crime in nearly every area of the nation that is rife with poverty including “white” areas. this has always been the case among our poorer immigrant communities. Our history of immigration by poor Italians, Irish, and more will bear this out.
Racists will claim that such poverty is the result of black laziness or some such nonsense. But that overlooks the fact that this nation became an economic capitalist powerhouse between the Revolutionary War and Civil War solely because of black slave labor in the cotton fields. Meanwhile, the rest of us enjoy the fruit of that slave labor even today while the ancestors of those slaves are relegated to the ghetto and criticized for having to resort to crime to survive.
And I won’t even go into the fact that they are the only immigrant group that had their culture and families torn from them upon entry through official policies that turned them into a commodity.
Just two quick questions with regards to the slave trade aspect that I’m sure you’ll have a well prepared answer for. 1. (Specifically regarding the African slave trade that was set up by European countries) Who was it exactly that captured and gathered the black slaves to have them waiting on the shores of Africa? (here’s a quick hint: Not white men). 2. Are blacks the only group to have been entered into an involuntary enslavement? (another quick hint: read European history before medieval times, Asian history, and Russian history).
Thank you and goodnight.
Black chieftains sold off their subjects to European Slavers to ship to the Americas to work in plantations to supply europe with goods . This was the triangle trade. In the Americas slaves were the equivalent of the auto trade today . Nobody is more or less the better or worse it required every one the treat people like animals . I can’t understand what your point is .
Every one involved is the same morally speaking and it does not matter what skin colour you have. Do all blacks behave has one and are all whites behave as one . Am I responsible for what you do and vice versa .
I am not responsible for what people that I am genetically related to have done in the past nope
EvylRyde, its worth a late mention that it was whites who cranked up the demand, and created slaves as an export commodity. Also it really wasn’t just africans kidnapping africans on the supply side.
Further, while slavery has long existed, the fact that Russian serfs were tied to the land doesn’t lessen what was done to African –> American blacks until the 1860s (or if you count post slavery oppression, through to at least the 1960s).
There is plenty of blame to go around for the state of black culture, but don’t kid ourselves… lots of that blame goes to the melanin deficient of the past several hundred years.
Notwithstanding, its up to all of us to bring all our cultural groups to opportunity, prosperity, kindness, and (for those that chose it) mixing.
Being poor is the reason for killing people? Hard to believe you actually believe that, while totally ignoring the gang culture. Do you know what the culture was at that time, in Africa? It has been documented by British explorers and 75% of them were already slaves to kings and nobles while cannibalism was a common practice as was human sacrifice. The most shocking thing was they did not know what love was, even among family members who offered up their own children. I suspect a lot of slaves were saved from certain death by being sold to the traders by their own people, just as they were regularly sold and traded among tribes.
The truth is hard to stomach.
Your opinions are hard to stomach.
You’re wrong on so many different levels that I wouldn’t know where to begin even if I wanted to. However it is worth noting the irony in this sentence, “The most shocking thing was they did not know what love was, even among family members who offered up their own children (to slavery).” Ironic because Thomas Jefferson sold his own son and grandson into slavery.
Have a good day gofer1 and let us give thanks for the 1st Amendment.
Source on the Jefferson thing?
“Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves”
September 3, 2013 by Henry Wiencek
=======================================================
“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”
2014 by Edward E. Baptist
An unbiased view, no doubt – coming from a Left Wing anti-American who teaches at Cornell – one of the, if not the, most liberal Universities in the country. Gee, what a surprise.
Your point is weak. Most regressives like yourself consider institutions of higher learning to be populated with “liberals”. In fact, they’re populated with intelligent people. It’s just that intelligence and liberalism go hand in hand. It’s a concept regressives can’t seem to wrap their narrow minds around.
And most moronic ad-hominem attackers like yourself don’t have the intellectual chops to investigate bias – particularly your own confirmation bias. No one said that they aren’t intelligent; it’s just that their assumptions are wrong. And intelligence and liberalism go together because universities and academia in general are liberally biased, as has been established more times than you can count on your fingers and toes. But intelligence and good judgement are different things – as is clear from your troglodyte grunts above.
Thanks for making my point. “… intelligence and liberalism go together because universities and academia in general are liberally biased…”
Universities are liberally biased because they’re largely made up of intelligent people. Facts have a liberal bias too. You’re obviously neither liberal nor intelligent, which explains your misbegotten comments. But don’t let me stop you. Please continue.
“Intelligent liberal” is an oxymoron; when I was in grad school, most of the profs ably demonstrated their liberalism. They never amounted to much. If you were a more insightful reader, you would have understood the distinction I made between intelligence – the ability to think – and how you think, which is dependent upon your assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out – syllogistic integrity notwithstanding. So thanks for making MY point – intelligence and correct conclusions are not correlated, in a person who starts off with an inability to collect accurate information. Your post hoc reasoning above illustrates that clearly. Correlation is not causation.
Thinking in broad generalizations is not intelligent so you must therefore be a liberal Conservative does not speak to whether you are intelligent or not only if you are against change The way you have stated it plays against your self. you have determined that liberal is equivalent to unintellegent. so that has restricted you from recognising liberals will be of varying degrees of intelligence
You can not seriously think that conservatism is an indicator of intelligence. that you have never met conservatives that are dumb as a post . Your presuppositions have restricted the way you think so
I am sure you knew more than your professors and that you went to school To learn from people not as smart as you . Maybe you are not as smart as you think you are but who could be ? You probably could use some more oxygen. 🙂 .
Thanks for your smarmy contribution to the national dialog. Now: let’s see if a remedial reading lesson will help you understand the English I wrote. What I said was not that liberals are not intelligent; what I said was that the term is an oxymoron.
For you literacy-challenged readers, that means they don’t go together – because an intelligent person, basing his judgements on bad foundational beliefs, cannot come to a proper conclusion. That is what garbage in, garbage out means.
If you believe that people benefit when they are coddled, then you will conclude that government coddling of people provides a benefit. That’s a logical conclusion. But it is not true that people benefit when they are coddled. Therefore, it is also a wrong conclusion.
So liberals, since they take as gospel the party line, come to unintelligent conclusions. My professors were largely liberals. As a result, they didn’t make much of themselves other than PC academics.
Conservatism is not per se an indicator of intelligence. But the basis of its beliefs mean that if you accept those beliefs as a foundation, then if you can think logically, you will come to a correct conclusion.
As for oxygen, try some when you are looking up the correct spelling in your writing – oh, intelligent liberal.
Gee “rhadak” I must say “georgesteele” sure appears intelligent. At the least in contrast to yourself.
You’re confusing intelligent for educated. The 2 are not synonymous.
Yes and those idiots wanted “separation of the church and state”.
Why should we listen to them?
They also thought stupid stuff like freedom of speech is a good idea.
You wouldn’t have the 1st Amendment with out the 2nd Amendment….but good for you….
Right, the Founding Fathers only wrote the Constitution at gunpoint! Time to retire that stupid notion. We have our rights because we have a country ruled by law, not ruled by fear of armed citizens.
So so wrong….Poor Guy….
We have our rights because our Founders demanded they be added to the Constitution. LAWs DO NOT GRANT RIGHTS…Right cannot be taken away…only freely given by retards like yourself.
Actually the majority of the Founders did not want a Bill of Rights – they only had to add that to get ratification. The right to own guns predates the Constitution, has nothing to do with the 2nd amendment and I am in support of that right, so ease up on the retard stuff – that does not help your argument.
Actually, you are wrong, they DEMANDED a the Bill of Rights, as so it could not be altered in the future…The Bill of Rights is what laid the foundation for the Constitution the bricks, with the rest of the Constitution being the mortar. And it isn’t just a matter of the right to own a gun, it is the Right to be able to defend yourself and family, along with the peoples right to over throw their Government if the need arises…That is why we have guns…Not for hunting not skeet shooting, not for sport; those are added bonus’, the right is there for the people to defend/protect themselves from their Government. They took the guns from Indians looked what happened there, Nazi’s took the guns looked what happened there…China, North Korea, USSR…..All perfect examples of Government run out of control and the people didn’t have the ability to defend themselves….But you are still wrong as the Government isn’t the one who grants rights, unless you want to view the Government as your God….
Open a middle school Civics text and you will see that Goddard is correct… assuming Texas hasn’t rewritten ratification history like they did “black employment” preceding the war between the state.. er, slavery.
well written Bob
Actually, it wasn’t the founders that demanded the Bill of Rights – they wrote the Constitution and submitted it for ratification. It was rejected by the states. It was the states that demanded that an explicit Bill of Rights be included in the Constitution, without which it would not have been ratified. The states were afraid of central government overreach, which was what they had just fought a war to overthrow. Note Amendments 9 and 10. But it is most certainly true that the Second Amendment was – as it was in the constitutions of the colonies – included with forethought; in essence, it was clear that, having just fought a war, they knew that the other rights could easily be pried away by force if there did not exist an equally capable force to keep them.
That is correct, still the founders…”In the final days of debate at the Constitutional Convention, die-hard
opponents, such as Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814), a delegate from
Massachusetts, launched a failed effort to call for a second convention
to secure the rights of citizens. Continued vocal demands for a bill of
rights forced James Madison to propose amendments to the Constitution
almost immediately after the Convention met in 1789.”
I simply meant that the delegates were doing the bidding of the states; the Constitution, as originally drafted, did not include the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights was ratified later, which is why it shows up as Amendments, rather than in the body proper. Actually, Rhode Island did not ratify the Constitution until 1790 – after the Bill of Rights had been submitted for ratification in 1789.
Jeez, you seem to have forgotten the part of the ammendment having to do with “a well regulated militia”, haven’t you? The founding fathers were not including a right for individuals or even paramilitary groups to rebel with arms against the govt. This is proved first hand by the founding fathers themselves putting down the whiskey rebellion and hanging some,of the,leaders.
Also. You are on shake ground about the Bill of Rights being the foundation of the Constitution. Otherwise why would they be amendments arising after the rest of the Constitutional system of government had been outlined? Goddard is right on that point. Bill of rights allowed ppl who feared govt to buy into the new constitutional plan of govt.
I love when people like yourself trot out that “well regulated militia”. Yet you all seem to leave off the “being necessary for the defense of a free state.” (This country is named ‘The United STATES of America’).
Anyway it is more than “guns” being spoken of in the Second. It is ARMS.
If it is not, how then were the people to execute the authority granted to them in Article I Section 8 Clause 11?
So from what you mentioned we can easily construct a view that a well regulated militia… That seems more justifiable than any argument that each citizen os constitutionally entitled to as many AK47a as they can afford. I don’t see mention of “well armed individuals” in the ammendment. Do you suppose that omission is intentional?
“… Being necessary for the defense of a free state” You can argue that the existence of state national guard’s fill the bill and provide the specified “defense of a free state?” You guys are reading stuff INTO the constitution that was not part of the national understanding of the amendment until the NRA crowd invented these misreadings.
Really do not want to address Article I Section 8 Clause 11. eh?
Really? Not part of the National understanding? Then why didntthe Federal government ban automatic weapons until 1986? Almost 200 years, that is 40Lustrum or 20 Decades or if you prefer TWO Centuries after the writing of the Constitution.
As so many ill-informed persons you read “guns” where it clearly states “ARMS”. If I am mistaken then pray tell:
Why are we still as individuals allowed to own tanks? Howitzers?
Note also it is the right of the PEOPLE, not the several states or even the bloated RFederal government’s right.
By the by, I am a”Chick” not a “guy”.
Thought we were talking about 2nd ammendment and whether it allows infringement of your supposed right to own an AK47… or a howitzer if you prefer. Lets quote it in full: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
If there is another less clear ammendment in the Constitution I don’t know of it. Again my thought is that this lack of clarity is intentional.
Why the first phrase if the amendment is talking about a personal and private right to bear arms outside of the context of a well regulated militia? The militia might be thought to be a check on the national army authorized where you indicated…. should that army become an instrument of tyrants in the federal govt.
“well regulated” in the context of the eighteenth century refered to well trained.
As the SCOTUS employs the Federalist letters to ascertain the intentions of the founding fathers and George Mason in particular, so also does Article 1 section 8 clause 18 clarify what arms are being discussed in the 2nd Amendment.
Your glaring lack of knowledge of weapons is blinding to you, to others not so much.
Who wants an AK47? A 74 is so much better. Similar to the difference between an Abrahms M1A1 and the Abrahms M1A2.
You are out of your depth and being schooled by a chick. You have my sympathies Beta male 1b.
It’s amazing how many red herrings the so called gun rights crowd tosses out to distract the course of argument from the fact that the language of the 2nd amendment they so misinterpret is less clear about an individual right to bear arms than they pretend.
In the context of a discussion about the 2nd amendment what idiot cares about the superiority of a 74, whatever that is, to an AK 47? Is it military grade made for efficient and rapid killing of human beings in combat? Then civilians probably shouldn’t have it… and definitely kooks and terrorists should be stopped from buying them by a thorough and,unavoudable background check. But the NRA paix trolls and felliw travellers prefer the slaughter at elementary schools, universities, theaters and of cops directing traffic at Black Lives Matter rallies to continue and accelerate rather than limit access to military grade weapons.
The right of private ownership of such weapons is clearly undermined by the first phrase of the ammendment. The language does seem to lend support to people having access to military arms within the context of a well regulated militia (or the national military). In the context of a welll regulated militia we can easily allow restrictions such as securing such weapons in the well regulated militia’a armory.
The fact that nobody on your side can see any middle ground for reasonable and locally varying gun control consistent with the ammendment is a testament to money well spent by the NRA. You are suckers for arguments defending your point of view, and critical of inconvenient arguments against.
A little English lesson clarifies why the SCOTUS has concluded that it IS an individual right – see Heller and McDonald. “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” is a DEPENDENT clause. It therefore does not condition the independent clause “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” SCOTUS (rightly) concluded that the intent was not to restrict ownership and bearing of arms solely to militias. It’s just that simple.
The rest of the elaborations in the ruling provide background information – in effect, similar to the way the dependent clause provides window dressing – treating past errors of generalization and misinterpretation, but the essence of the amendment is “hands off.” I believe this creates a foundation for an even more detailed revisiting of curtailment of gun rights. Recent changes by states to constitutional carry, for example (see Maine), may well reflect the beginnings of that revisiting.
Well my reply to theBob took issue with the supposed intent of founding fathers to allow arms so we citizens could “overthrow the government”. I don’t think your English lesson defends that interp. For that matter, considering Lincoln’s position on the confederacy, that right isn’t reserved to states or people either.
It is PRECISELY the intent of the founding fathers to allow the citizens to overthrow the government – meaning those in power, should they abuse that power. It enfranchises the exact right that they just exercised during the Revolutionary War, and provides the ultimate check and balance against tyrannical excess – the establishment of which checks and balances form the heart and soul of the structure of the Constitution.
The intent, however, was not to allow disaggregation of the union; that was disallowed by the ratification – that is, the agreement by the states to abide by the binding contract that is the Constitution. And so we went to war to prevent the disaggregation. The south did not operate under the rules of the Constitution to which its member states had agreed; they chose an extra-Constitutional method to get their way by seceding and forming a new, illegal Constitution. There are those who believe that Lincoln was wrong, and tyrannical – John Wilkes Booth among them – but there remained to them other, Constitutional, methods by which to secure their ends. They did not avail themselves of them. Lincoln did not go to war over slavery.
You must differentiate between the right of the people to overthrow the people in charge, vs. the right of the people to overthrow the form of government under the Constitution. They are separate things. Under the Declaration’s justification (“that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends . . .”), we did the latter, and established the Constitution. Under the Constitution, we have but one way to change our government, and that is the Amendment process. That is what is meant by “a living Constitution” – not arbitrary reinterpretation at the will of the Executive or Legislature.
But under the Second Amendment, we (the people) also have a Constitutionally-protected way to remove those in power, should they usurp the Constitution and behave in a manner inconsistent with its limited allocated federal powers – suppressing by force any control by the people of their behavior through the legal system, or the voting process. The security of the free state that we, the people, established, would thus be in jeopardy, and use of force justified. The ability of the people so oppressed to use that force is ensured by the Second Amendment’s proscription against deprivation of the right to keep and bear arms.
When written, it was assumed that such action would be undertaken by an armed militia composed of a significant number of the oppressed population, acting on the will of the majority (not a single wingnut with a sniper rifle that was pissed off at Harry Reid) to re-institute the Constitution that had been so usurped. Such a militia cannot be formed by an unarmed (armories can be locked), untrained (“well-regulated” were the words of the 18th century) and therefore defenseless, people. That is why the Second Amendment must be scrupulously protected as an individual ownership and use right – it guarantees all the other rights we have.
Oh i get it… so the right to overthrow the government if Hillary is elected is what the founding fathers intended, but states taking up arms due to supposed federal gotv over-reach is extra-constitutional. Haha. You make the argument the best it could be made, I think, but it still doesn’t pass the smell test of 200 years of actual history. What American who has taken up arms against the government or even the person in power has been excused for acting within the intent of the founding fathers? Nobody. Ruby Ridge was based on the arguments you make. What happened to them? Agsin, while I am not a lawyer I do think the mention of a well regulated militia is key… at least some of the founders seem to suggest with this that this is the context within which the right of the people to keep arms is protected. The ambiguous way this amendment is written reflects,the existence of disagreements whose resolution was put off to a later date. Too bad, because it has led to the current debate here, and worse, the bloodbath all around us occurring from a misunderstanding of gun rights that leads to the war of all against all (or at least a prepper state of readiness for that war) It is a HobbsIan predicament that is great for the gun industry profits but bad for the victims of slaughter occurring continuously in this country.
Nope. For example, the RI State Constitution makes it clear what the intent of the day was, prosaic embellishments in dependent clauses (see above) notwithstanding. It states: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Period. No militia, no weasel words. Simple.
You conflate taking up arms against a government of tyrants who abuse our system and succeeding in doing so and being allowed to do so. They are three separate issues. We have the right to guns. Period. In fact, we have the right to Arms – not limited to guns. That’s so we can protect and defend the Constitution if the government inhabitants don’t. Obama’s refusal to enforce immigration law, in contravention of his oath of office, is but one example of arbitrary interpretation and overreach which the Second Amendment was put in place to provide corrective action for in extreme cases. Tyrants do what they want. Citizens can stop that.
Then there’s the issue of whether or not such citizens would be successful in restoring order. That is most likely a function of the number of them vs. the size of the militia or army (posse comitatus can be arbitrarily ignored, as well), and the power of the weapons (“arms”) that they can bring to bear on the conflict, and the loyalty of the militia or army to a government directing oppressive force at its citizens seeking to restore order. Overwhelming numbers could turn the tide, but nothing’s certain. Same argument as the guarantee of equal rights vs. equal outcomes.
Finally, there’s the issue of how such an insurrection would be viewed. Ultimately, the power rests with the people. If a large enough number of the citizenry were outraged, then all the disapprobation of the government wouldn’t matter. More Americans wanted to stay with England than wanted to declare independence. But the patriots won the argument -by skillful manipulation of public opinion and bravery. And a small band of highly motivated patriots who were oppressed by their overlords, defeated the greatest army in the world at the time – against ridiculously impossible odds.
Finally, if you look at the statistics, the bloodbath to which you refer is largely carried out by young men, operating within gangs preoccupied with turf wars and defending drug-selling monopolies in inner cities. They don’t buy guns in gunshops, they don’t go through background checks, they don’t have 3 day waiting periods. They buy guns on the black market that are stolen or smuggled in across the border by the Mexican drug cartels to support their business interests by arming their soldiers. France and Belgium and hosts of other examples are proof positive that disarming the citizenry does nothing to remove guns from the hands of criminals.
At Ruby Ridge a young woman and her infant were murdered in cold blood by the FBI sniper HORIUCHI. And the shooting in the back of a teenage boy.
But at least they were not killed in a mass shooting… oh that is right they were.
Central Gov’t, was the fear, which has been realized within the last 50-75 years. And you are very wrong with your opinion on the 2nd Amendment. You, I, we, can go back and read the founders documents by what they meant regarding the 2nd Amendment. “A well regulated Militia, (COMA) being NECESSARY to the security of a FREE STATE,(COMA AGAIN) the right of the PEOPLE to KEEP and bear arms, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. All gun laws that limit law abiding citizens rights to bear arms are all Unconstitutional….A well Regulated Militia. This is not the National Guard this is a MILITIA which consists of private FREE Citizens…The National Guard is a State run/Federally Funded organization not a Militia. That right is meant to allow the people to keep their States from running rampant. Same for the Federal Gov’t. Which is also stated in our Constitution we have the right to over throw if the people deem it right to do so…Again WE THE PEOPLE deem it Not the Gov’t. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms. This is exactly as it says. To keep and bear Arms for the PEOPLE. Shall not be infringed, this statement is pretty self explanatory. The right to bear Arms was not for hunting or skeet or lively hood, it is, and was intended the right for one to defend themselves and their property, everything else is just a bonus. I will contend, the Constitution was passed first, but most of the states did not and would not ratify the new Constitution with out the Bill of Rights….Which with out them makes everything pretty much mute, which is why I say it is the foundation of the Constitution, Bill of Rights are the bricks and the rest of the articles are the mortar that binds it all together to keep the power in the hand of the people.
All those commas are indicative of lawyer language… which (though I’m no historian) suggests disagreement on the subject among founding fathers,and the expectation that legal minds would wrangle this subject to a sensible conclusion in future. Indeed, in “the future” of the founders the subject has been resolved sensibly and variably according to local circumstances numerous times… It is mostly in this generation, thanks to NRA, that the thoughts of the founders are considered settled and simple, and expansive of gun rights to include kooks advocating the right of sedition.
HUH? None of that makes any sense. A Coma is a Coma, it is a pause; nothing legal about it…Not sure what your point is….
Laws grant and rescind rights all the time. Your right to vote for instance is restricted by citizenship laws, residency laws, voter ID laws, anti-felon voting laws, and not so long ago Jim Crow laws.
But Constitutional ones are special, and require more than the usual majority to pass or repeal.
Constitutional rights such as gun rights are limited all the time by both legislatures, course and executive signings. Requiring background checks, or banning guns to felons does not require 2/3 majority for,instance.
“The most shocking thing was they did not know what love was…”
Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and yours is particularly shitty and needs a good cleansing. Please provide legitimate academic sources for this preposterously ludirous statement.
Love = chemical reaction in the brain relating to companionship.
As such, if one’s brain’s neural pathways have been fashioned such that the applicable chemicals and enzymes intrinsic to the function of “love”, do not elicit this feeling, said fanciful notion does not apply.
The idiotically idealistic, entertainment industry perpetuated myth of “love conquers all”, is fundamentally inane and about as applicable to modern day thinking as religious dogmata are.
Oh, but it does have to do with ability If you look at statistics, blacks as a race, have a lower overall IQ than White, Asians, and many others. So, while there are always some at the top of the curve, the entire curve is, indeed, shifted to the left for blacks.
No, they don’t. IQ is not genetic so can’t be racially determined. It is largely the result of environmental factors including family environment, early childhood nutrition/abuse/trauma/education etc. If a particular race experiences more impoverishment due to things like, oh I don’t know, a history of slavery and systematic oppression, then you will see that reflected in outcomes including IQ. Given that IQ tests are not even universally acknowledged as being all that useful given that they test things that white, Western males (who designed the tests) consider to be useful signifiers of intelligence, there is not a single reputable psychological researcher who would support your ridiculous assertion. And I say this as a psychologist. But feel free to provide even the slightest shred of evidence to support your view.
ALI2044 asks: “But feel free to provide even the slightest shred of evidence to support your view.”
All one need to is watch the news from Los Angeles. The “mammas” speak the language of the street and all seem to feel….: My baby be a gud boy what the po-lease keeps followin and arrestin witffout any reason! He be a gud boy what was home prayin to jeezus when dat sto’ gots robbed. They be settin him up fo no reason! I gonna be having him and me a lawyer man whats gonna sue for diskriminashayun. Yous kin bet that the po-lease hates we’uns and truff be saided we’uns hates dem po-lease.
Blithering idiots SOUND like blithering idiots!
and blithering racists sound like blithering racists. You, Donnie and gofer are blithering racists.
Actually, a great deal of American English sounds exactly like this to the “rest” of the English-speaking world. I think I’d be laying the blame at the feet of the blithering idiot education system in the US. One should NEVER confuse intelligence with education. “Intelligence, it seems, is something that allows a man to get on without education. Education, it seems, is something that allows a man to get on without intelligence.” And there is plenty of evidence to confirm the latter.
you have to be kidding if you were intelligent you would not go to school to prove you could get on with out education. How is that working out for you .That gets you a job at McDonald’s or down at Walmart
Not going to school guaranties a low wage job . Your ability to understand what is evidence is suspect . please supply any evidence of this if you can
I think you’re not clear on what constitutes intelligence. School might create an educated person (perhaps even someone who learns by rote) but it doesn’t necessarily create an intelligent one who can apply the learning in an intelligent way.
Education: is the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.
Intelligence: has been defined in many different ways including one’s capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving.
Animals (mammals, reptiles, birds, etc.) are intelligent, but they haven’t been to school. They have intelligence, not education. See the difference now?
BTW, the quote wasn’t mine.
Here’s another one, which also isn’t mine: “Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.”
Blithering? Listen to any redneck or poor white trash try to – ad fail – to speak English!
Exactly and your command of the English seems a bit
Challenged This is the way all people except for the very few write on youtube .
“IQ is not genetic so can’t be racially determined. It is largely the result of environmental factors”
Although IQ per se is not inherited, epigenetics now tells us that anything the parents experience will then exhibit itself as traits in their progeny — e.g., an abused mother will have a child more predisposed to depression / violence. To say nothing of parents who expose themselves to substance which may affect the foetus — alcohol, drugs, tobacco, poor diets etc.
It’s long been convention that parents who are musicians will potentially have a child more inclined towards musical pursuits. Today, we have the scientific evidence to buttress these suppositions. Therefore, it’s not much of a stretch to join the dots between ‘dullard’ parents and academically retarded children.
“reputable psychological researcher”? Are you referring to people the likes of which have tormented children (baby Albert) or abused animals (Pavlov’s dog)?
Anyway, what you probably meant was sociologists. (Although their ethics are not so squeaky clean either.)
So you provide two examples and they will fill in for the rest . You pick two extremes to secure your argument against what guest has written and don’t realise you have provided a straw man argument. You have simplified what he said to counter that rather than his.that shows a lack of critical thinking.Which sociologists have ethics that you disapprove?
None because they have no ethics.
All one need do is LISTEN to the blacks of (example – not all inclusive) Los Angeles, CA …. Compton, CA ….. Chicago, IL …. Philadelphia, PA to name a few and it is evident their jargon, accents and demeanor is “black street talk” that confirms they have been raised by parents who are proud to appear and sound like blithering idiots.
“Yea when my bros Tayshaun, Deron, Rau’shee, Raynell, Deontay, Taraje, Jozy, Kerron, Hyleas, Chaunte, Bershawn, Lashawn, Sanya, Trevell, Sheena, Ogonna, Dremiel gets hear we be goin ta kicks us some cracker butt. We be tired ov beein kept down and dem people gonna pay.”
THAT is mild compared to the monkey-boy, knuckle dragging scumbags plastered across news media DAILY!
no different than the confederate flag waving rednecks of the south and their violent heritage they hold so dear. Have a conversation with them sometime and listen to the oozing violence they speak of.
You haven’t listened to Ben Carson, Neil deGrass Tyson or even Bill Cosby? All well spoken and black. And have you gone into a North Florida or Alabama Walmart and listened to a large sampling of whites speaking a language that sounds very “ebonic”? Language is a function of region and education, not melanin.
There you go again you create your own parody and claim this represents all black people. That is ridiculous Your prejudicial opinion is not a valid argument for any example of low IQ except yours.
Again, if a particular group of people are retarded in some way – be it due to socio-economic circumstance, environmental impediments, congenital disorders / sicknesses, wars etc – their measurable intelligence will naturally drop.
The Arabs gave us the base-10 counting system, algebra, were leaps and bounds ahead scientifically than the Europeans… before Islam. Now… well, you can see for yourself how far the ‘post Al-Ghazali Arabs’ have fallen.
lt;dr — Simplistic IQ tests demonstrate little about a specific group of people if the forest is not viewed beyond the trees.
Al-Ghazali wasn’t Arab, though he was Muslim. He was of Persian descent. The famed scholars, mathematicians and philosophers of the Arab world were all Muslim and thus not before Islam. And Omaral-Khayyam, Abu Marwan Ibn, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), al-Rumi, Ibn Khaldun, Cahit Arfand countless other important Muslim scientist, authors, mathematicians and scholars post-date Al-Ghazali.
Also, beyond the trees there is no forest.
Think he meant in the forest not beyond
The spread of Indian “arabic numerals’ along with algebra, along with the reintroduction of the west to much lost Greek philosophy science and math that helped lead to the enlightenment was a by-product of Islamic expansion into India and Europe (Spain), not to mention much peaceful cross-cultural polination.
Look you are all Americans it would be folly to argue one stupid point against another and think that any of you can think. This is ideologies clashing and logical fallacies that make few valid points.
Come on have you met many white people . I have lived amongst them and if any are thicker than whites there would be no way they could motivate themselves. Have you ever been to North Carolina . ?
I cant believe there are people dumber than that. Where are you reading these statistics anyway.
“Being poor is the reason for killing people?”
Pretty much — yes. For “being poor” entails myriad deleterious offshoots to one’s very existence; and (as glorified animals) humans are naturally predisposed to surviving and propagating.
Poverty is an anathema to the perpetuation of one’s genetic lineage — the very reason why birth rates are so high in Third World nations and dangerously low in rich countries.
>The proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
So, “being poor” is little more than a glib dismissal of far deeper problems that issue from lacking the wherewithal to… well, live!
GOFER1, this reply is late but it’s strange you don’t see the connection between poverty and gang culture. Blacks aren’t the only “immigrant group” where gangs grew out of Poverty. Watch “the Godfather” movies or “Gangs of New York” if you don’t want to read a book. And again, where gangs don’t have guns, gun deaths are fewer.
Thank you for your bogus race card aka racist comment. There’s a subculture in the US that rejects education… Black and Hispanic students are way disproportionately represented in that sub culture. Been going on for generations. And yes, they will wallow in poverty all their lives. Not because of “whitey” but because of their own choice to reject education.
What is the point of getting educated and being successful if the Government is there waiting with 85K a year in benefits…There is no motivation or a need to do so, until the system collapses upon itself…Then lets see who is out rioting in the streets…oh wait it will be the same people demanding their free stuff…
This isn’t about what is right or wrong. The numbers in this article do not represent the truth. Out of the some 38,000 gun deaths over 21,000 of them are self inflicted suicide. Bringing the gun crime death rate way down to some 8,000 deaths….from 2014…There are more people killed by blunt objects in murder than by a gun….They also include the police shootings and self defense gun deaths in these numbers….So yeah they are totally messed up….It is propaganda….
I see arithmetic isn’t one of your strong points either Thebob!
WTF does that mean, It is pretty simple if you do the math…ducking libtards….can’t even see it when it is right in front of their face…
SUICIDE is a crime, sin or just horrible tragedy depending on how you look at it. So when it occurs due to guns you need to include it in numbers for gun deaths. Guns make suicide attempts vastly more successful too…. so the suicide rate could be greatly reduced,by restricting access to guns.
While you do have a good point that reducing the accessibility to guns would reduce not only the suicide rate, but gun violence in general, is there really a practical way to do this? There will always be some sort of access to guns illegally like in the black market, similar to the vast access to illegal drugs. I was just curious as to what you would propose to solve this issue because increasing gun control would also restrict law-abiding citizens from potentially having guns to protect themselves in their homes or even the government if it was really bad. No matter what your view is, at least to me it seems like there is no really viable solution to gun violence, at least not yet.
The practical way. Is simple… Australia and western euorope have already done it with no reductions on their freedoms or democracy. Outlaw assault rifles. Reduce clip capacity in handguns. Background checks without exception.
We don’t need to outlaw handguns kept for self defense or hunting rfiles to reduce or eliminate weapons used in most mass shootings we hear about every 3 weeks.
Which are hand guns a majority of the time…Also guns don’t kill people only people kill people…That isn’t ever going to change…
Suffice it to say, disenfranchisement and poverty always incentivises anti-social behaviour.
E.g., the Middle-East: arguably the most wealth disproportionate place on Earth, where trillionaire, pathological money junkie oil sheikhs hoard insane wealth, as the majority of their nations’ populace wallow in Tatooine-like hovels. And where do the Islamo-terrorists hail from…? *drum roll*…
If one feels one has no hope for a propitious future, the instinctual ‘fight or flight response’ kicks in – ‘fighting’ being self-explanatory and ‘flight’ an analogy for drug / gambling / alcohol use / abuse / recidivist behaviours – and from there, any excuse can be proffered for one’s actions; be it religion, ideology, political disagreement etc.
The rub, of course, being that for the poor to become prosperous, those with ‘too much’ must be content will less — if everyone is rich, no one is. Cue: the universal human foible dubbed “greed“.
OK Trollius, let’s say you are right… what’s your proposed solution? Even if we don’t agree with your LaMarkian understanding of “epigenetics”, we might agree with poverty and hopelessness as causes for gun violence and the “flight” responses you described.
There is no solution under the usury banking system capitalism thrives under. Coupled with cancerous human foible dubbed “greed”, there can never be parity or such a system which works.
If everyone is a millionaire, no one is rich.
There was a ‘final solution’… but that was frowned upon and ‘the victors’ have etched history such that it is now unwieldy to sought the factual wheat from the copious propaganda chaff.
Ok, eliminating your qualification of no solution “UNDER THE USERY BANKING SYSTEM CAPITALISM THRIVES UNDER” the question remains. Without the qualification, what’s the solution? If you think casting aside the above system is required, what do you put in it’s place and what ultimate solution does it make possible?
Also it’s cute to say “if everybody is rich then nobody is rich” but that’s not true. As there is relative and absolute poverty, so is there relative and absolute wealth. Your statement applies, perhaps to the relative condition, but not to the absolute. Absolute wealth is not comparative to other people but only to wants and needs. A person is absolutely wealthy if he is not subject to scarcity or want, regardless of how greedy and extreme the wants.
Trollius, you seem to be aptly named.
So you have diagnosed the cause but reject the Cure?
Can you read? That was an editorial by Jason Riley – a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. And he is black! Obviously, you are intellectually incapable of overcoming your confirmation bias.
Perhaps you should read more; that stretch of “words he typed” was from a Wall St. Journal editorial written by Jason Riley – who is black. But of course, you didn’t need to read to the end, because as soon as you saw something that didn’t agree with your religious bias, you dismissed it. Typical lack of diligence and emotional overreaction to the truth.
I have this trinity of words, if acted on, can help avoid problems; Self respect, respect, acceptance of responsibility. Try them, you shall love them.
What do you say to the studies where black people are pulled over far more frequently to be searched for drugs and the like, and are found not to be carrying anything, whereas a higher percentage of whites are (but are not checked as frequently)?
Does that not indicate to you that surely part of the reason why their might be an “overrepresentation of blacks” is because people are LOOKING for reasons to lock them up?
The numbers might even out a bit if people expected white people to be criminals the same way they seem to expect black people to be criminals.
As an African American I used to become easily upset over what I would think was my race being mistreated because of the color of their skin, but when you gather your information from biased sources one tends to get that kind of impression. Truth is that many African Americans that get pulled over because they fit the description of the major population of criminals are today. At one time it was young single white men around their mid twenties, and now its a majority of my race that is committing these crimes. It pains me at times to admit it but its true, but after some time it will be Asians, then Mexicans, then Whites, etc…. and the cycle will continue.
J-dub, its not often to find a black person that understand these things. But can I ask you to clarify somthing for me? You say “As an African American” so where you born in Africa? Or America?
The African part of African American identifies one’s origin and one’s place of residence or citizenship. Hence, Native Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, etc. The only people in America who can rightfully call themselves Americans are Native Indians. Everyone else is an immigrant. Everyone! So, perhaps everyone in America who is not Amerindian, should have an identifying prefix to indicate what country or continent they originally come from.
Hmm… If you are born somewhere, would that not be your origin? Yeah, it would be. How about this, drop the prefix. There is no need for it, period. Secondly, even “Native Americans” are immigrants, and why in the hell would they call themselves “Americans?” That was not the name they used for America. The Anishinabe called America “Turtle Island.” Educate yourself.
I might be born in Switzerland to Pakistani parents. I would be a Swiss citizen but my origins would be East Indian. I might be born in “America” to a South African couple and be an “American” citizen, but my origins would be South African. I might even be born to an “American” couple in Vietnam and be a Vietnamese citizen, but my origins would be North American.
What do “they” – “Native Americans” or “Native Canadians” – call themselves? From what I gather from Natives themselves is that amongst themselves they prefer to call themselves “Indians”. But “we”, non-native Americans and Canadians, have chosen to call them “Native Americans” because “we” think that “Indian” is a derogatory term. I have never heard a North American Indian describe him or herself as a Turtle Islander, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a world map showing Turtle Island either.
“The Americas” is the name given to all of the countries of South, Central and North America. For some odd reason the United States has chosen to call its citizens “Americans” when really everyone in the Americas is American just as everyone from all 54 (or up to 57 depending upon the source) African countries is African, or everyone from all 51 or so European countries is European.
Never mind dropping the prefix, just drop the term “American” because it is a misnomer (a wrong or inaccurate use of a name or term).
Well hmm. You want to break it down, no one is native to anywhere,
except for Pangaea of course. But then again Pangaea is everything so,
everyone is native to everywhere. You cant pick and chose how far back
in time you want to go to start saying… Whatever.
Before I forget and get sidetracked, map of turtle island
***Shows map of North America drawn to look like a giant turtle that caused my post to be “pending” for way way too long, google “native american turtle island” Also removed links because, why pend?****..
8th paragraph down
“Douglas George-Kanentiio, born to the Bear clan in Akwasanee, said, “We are not American, and we are not Canadian.”10
Political prisoner Leonard Peltier (Gwarth-ee-lass, “He Leads the
People”)
said “with no disrespect … I don’t consider myself an American citizen.
I am a citizen of Great Turtle Island. I am of the Ikce Wicasa —the
Common People, the Original People”
See, Indians believe that the
world was all water, then the great turtle came up and there ya go. Ok
ok, its quite a bit more involved then that, interesting too, maybe
check it out. I am supposedly 1/16th Minnesota Blackfoot not enough to
be of any benefit and really, I doubt it. But growing up my mom was
always taking me to pow-wows and whatnot. Learned a lot. The world
turtle is their creation story.
K now back to the task at hand.
Your use of “origin” would be a misnomer. Regardless of where your
parents “originated” from, your place of birth is your origin.
Nomenclature is key.
South African couple give birth in America.
South African couples origin is South Africa. Childs origin is America.
Child stays in America and never leaves, grows up in a nice suburb,
never hungry, never dying of thirst, doesnt know pain and death. Sure,
seen it on TV, but cant relate and doesnt really care cause said child
is, after all, an American. The parents may try and show/teach/give the
child some of its “heritage” and “legacy” through songs, stories, dance,
items, etc. You could say the childs lineage is South African, or that
the child is descended from South African parents, or even South African
descent, which would mean the childs ethnic make-up would be mostly
South African. That is until mid to late teens when the child starts
thinking its cool to be from South Africa, adopts a bad accent, and
starts claiming it, and fully deserves every *** whoopin they get.
“The
Americas” references the two “continents” of North and South America,
hence the “AmericaS,” not countries. “Americans” are from the “Country”
of America, or “United States of America,” parts of which are not all on
the same continent. A country is “a nation with its own government,
occupying a particular territory.” Continent is “one of several very
large landmasses on Earth.” Hawaii is not actually part of a continent.
Europe and Africa are continents, not countries. That is why someone
that is Russian can say “I’m from Russia, I’m Russian” OR they can say
“I’m European, From Europe.” Just like an American can say they are
American, or from North America. A Canadian cannot say they are
American, even though they are from North America, they are Canadian.
But they can say they are from North America.
Dropping “America”
would only serve to further separate us within this country. The same as
the current prefix does. We should be one, “should be,” never will be,
but there is no reason to further separate us.
Nope. Pangaea broke up during the reign of the dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago – long predating the existence of even the precursors of the proto-apes that ultimately gave rise to the human branch of evolution around a million or so years ago. We’re all descendants of African natives that moved somewhere else. Europeans are white because the brown ones died off from a lack of Vitamin D (the “sunshine” vitamin) that was screened out by melanin. The farther north, the less melanin, because the less sunlight. Africans are black because the lighter-skinned ones died off from Vitamin D toxicity – their skin didn’t screen out enough sunlight. It’s called natural selection.
I see you didn’t respond to the reply to your comment. I just did. Here it is: “The African part of African American identifies one’s origin and one’s place of residence or citizenship. Hence, Native Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, etc. The only people in America who can rightfully call themselves Americans are Native Indians. Everyone else is an immigrant. Everyone! So, perhaps everyone in America who is not Amerindian, should have an identifying prefix to indicate what country or continent they originally come from.”
As for who creates trouble, I have worked for 25 years in scores of inner city schools with a high ethnic mix and also in many suburban and rural schools. In one school there were 53 languages and 42 different nationalities among 250 students. Another school had 84 different languages. Easily, the worst behaved trouble-making kids I ever came across in the schools were white North Americans.
Wrong as America didn’t exist with the Native were/still here..They the Indians do not even call themselves American they are Native Indigenous people’s. But history sucks they mostly got sick and died off…And yes, I am not proud of some of what happened to them either with fighting and such, but it didn’t really matter as the Natives also fought each other over land etc…etc.. The survival of the fittest….
Being rude and trouble-making in school is completely different than the gang culture who push kids to drop out of school and like lots of gangs you must be “jumped” in usually by committing a crime usually with a gun, robbing someone or even with some of the gangs in Chicago you have to shoot someone….
I don’t agree. Trouble-making kids are likely to be more susceptible to older trouble-makers who are often admired by the younger set of trouble-makers. The gangs start somewhere. They don’t suddenly materialize when a child reaches adulthood.
No, it usually means they are acting out usually with no father in the home or an abusive home….Kids look to gangs as a means to replace their family unit….That what all this comes back to. A boy’s brain isn’t fully developed till about 22-24, so as teenagers or kids they are very malleable.
Canadians?
Not sure which post you are responsing to. Maybe to “So, perhaps everyone in America who is not Amerindian, should have an
identifying prefix to indicate what country or continent they originally
come from.”
Canadians are people from the country called Canada, so both country and citizens are identified. Still, Canadians are Americans too because they are from the continents of the Americas. “African American” basically means “a person from any country in Africa who is a resident of any country in America (the Americas). “African Canadian” means “a person from any country in Africa who is a resident of Canada, a country in the Americas”. Why generalize “African” and specify Canada? Of course, I agree with specifying Canada, but why not also be specific about the African country of origin? For example, Algerian Canadian?
“Everyone *else* is an immigrant. Everyone!” No, EVERYONE is an immigrant or descendant thereof; aboriginal Americans migrated from Asia across the Bering land bridge. They were just earlier immigrants. And they, in turn, were immigrants from Africa, whose ancestors settled in Asia. The only NATIVE humans were those that evolved from an ape-like variant in Africa over the last million years. So there are really only Native Africans; everyone else is an immigrant descendant of one kind or another. But also, there was no “America” until 1789 – there was just a whole mess of forests and plains that people squatted on. So the members of the tribes that were encountered by the European explorers were really African-asian immigrants, not native Americans.
But that was at least 10,000 years ago and they had squatters’ rights. They also looked after the “whole mess of forests” and did not destroy the land as the recent immigrants have done or turn it into the disgusting polluted mess it is today. The Asians were also the first arrivals and didn’t kill millions of people as the European immigrants did. The Africans were brought to North America as slaves so they hardly qualify as willing immigrants.
Did you know that Native American Indian remains share the same DNA as Siberians?
As to your last point, I think that would not at all be surprising, since Siberia is in the fan-out path of migration from Africa on the way to the Bering Straits. Most estimates put early colonization of the American continents at something around 24,000 years ago, suggesting that the first crossings were either aided by boat, or conducted during one of the precursor glacial advances; the peak of the last glacial age was 18,000 years ago.
As for squatters’ rights, they don’t give you rights to the whole continent. Even with 320,000,000 people today in just the United States, there are vast swaths of flyover country that are very sparsely settled. Wyoming, for example – as big as it is – has fewer people than the state of Rhode Island, which is 30 miles wide and 40 miles long, and is about 1,000 square miles of land (Narragansett Bay takes up a lot of the middle of the state). Yet there are many areas of Rhode Island that are unsettled woods. And it is estimated that the total pre-Columbian population of the entirety of the Americas – from the arctic circle to Tierra Del Fuego – was about 54 million. Lots of room for company.
As for the myth that they were earnest squires of the earth, that’s simply not borne out by subsequent study. Most were nomadic, and hunted until the local wildlife population was depleted, then moved on. One of the preferred methods of hunting was a drive, using widespread prairie fires to bring game their way; not exactly eco-heads. Had they been 20 times as densely populated, as is the case today, my guess is that there would have been just as much of a mess. In fact, that’s going on right now in the Amazon basin where large areas are being deforested and converted to farms.
They didn’t kill millions of people the way the European immigrants did because there weren’t any people here to fight with or kill when they arrived. Until there were. And then, if you have any knowledge of the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Toltecs, etc. you know that they were brutal warriors that engaged in genocide of competing tribes, and human torture and sacrifice. Europeans didn’t have a lock on savagery; they just had better weapons, developed in a more competitive, warring, population-dense environment.
Africans were brought here by slave traders; but they were bought in Africa. Who were they bought from? The people who captured and enslaved them – native Africans and – in particular – Arabs. When, after slaves and ex-slaves (freemen) were sent back to Africa to populate Liberia, after its founding for that purpose in the early 1800’s, one of the first things they did was undertake violent confrontation with native Liberians, isolate the natives from their repatriated society, and allow slavery.
So don’t get suckered in by the romantic notion of the noble Amerindian or the uniquely murderous Europeans; you don’t have to be white to be tyrannical or warlike. Not everything you read about cultures is factually-based. Look it up – don’t take my word for it.
If you are an African American I am mickey fuking mouse….You are an American that is black…Where you born in Africa no not likely….Nor were your parents or their parents…..Sorry you are one or the other please pick one preferably American…..If you want to label yourself as something else please feel free to leave the America that I fought for and am proud to called an American….
SIMPLY because the “black people” when pulled over far more frequently to be searched for drugs and the like,…. HAVE DRUGS! The contention that they never have drugs is ridiculous. If you watch pro-black they show only the “po boys” who were pulled over for supposedly no reason. Selective reporting can make even ISIS look pure as the driven snow.
Focus is on the abused ‘black people” because that is where CRIME THRIVES! Take a gander at the “big cities” across the country and I GUARANTEE blacks and brown are at the top of the CRIMINAL ACTIVITY lists!
I bees so sicks ov seein dem balck folk persecuted by the establishment. Dem BLACK PANTHERS just bees folk what wanna help other folk dispose of their hard earned “goods”! Pee-Pee on ’em.
What an ignorant racist un-American you are Donnie. Perhaps time to move out of Momma’s basement & oh, try dating a girl?
A trooper I knew spent a morning sitting by the side of the highway. He pulled four cars over. He searched two cars after talking to and releasing two drivers. In each of those two cars, he found about 10 kilos of cocaine in their trunks. Both black drivers were released, because the policeman was found by a judge to have been ‘profiling’. Although lawsuits were filed, the cocaine was not returned.
Profiling on this day produced 100% accurate stops. Why do so many policemen want to use it? It works.
I worked beside a fine young black man for a couple years, and he lost two friends in that time. One was shot and the other died in a high speed chase, running from police because he had a few ounces of weed on him and a long prior drug record. They made some bad choices and put themselves in bad situations, unlike the guy I worked with. Bad choices = high risk of death and a less than nice living. Good choices tend toward a much better and productive life.
Although lawsuits were filed, the cocaine was not returned.
Stop making shit up.
Oh, it’s true whether you believe it or not, but happened quite a few years ago, back when profiling wasn’t such a well known term. It was about 1984 on I-95, the “cocaine Highway” as it was called then. And probably still in areas. Cocaine flowed up the coast to NYC in large quantities. And the Columbian drug lords were arrogant enough to force their lawyers to try to get the cocaine back.
Let’s see – maybe we should frisk grandmothers and let young arab males through security without checks. Cops HAVE to use statistics because cops are available in limited numbers. You don’t look for drug peddlers in Scarsdale instead of Harlem if you are trying to stop as much crime as possible and protect as many as possible. The numbers are undeniable – under Giuliani’s stop and frisk and focus on high crime areas, crime went down; under numbnuts De Blasio’s suspension of that policy on “racist grounds”, crime has skyrocketed and Manhattan is becoming an armpit. You look for crime where crime is; if it’s in black neighborhoods, that’s where you look. It’s not racist – it’s practical!
tl;dr — Penal-Industrial Complex
Good job, John! There will always be people who try to justify ethnic crime rates, based on poverty and education! This mentality, is in fact the end of civilization based laws due to preorchistrated allowances! If you make allowances for one group, then eventually you’ll have to make allowances for all, as society continues to break down! The libs still won’t take responsibility for what they’ve done! …so far, the left has had no solutions to the problems that they’ve created!
Blu… you are confusing justification with explanation. There is a difference. Nobody is “justifying” ethnic crime, but pointing out that there are causes that have nothing to do with melanin and laziness. Knowing the REAL causes allows the possibility of remedying them… with education, living wages, and economic opportunity. If you remove poverty “black crime” disappears. BTW, so does Islamic fundementalists murder by ISIS, Boko Haram, etc. Ditto prostitution among the poor in the first to the 3rd worlds. Too bad problem solving based on accurate reasoning isn’t something people critical of “libs” consider.
There is plenty of non-fundamentalist murder in the ME. You clearly don’t have a good grasp of the Arab world. Long before ISIS, Christians were getting out. Look at Lebanon, destruction began with the PLO and now Iran/Hezbollah run the show and Lebanese Christians are a very tiny minority.
If you look at the long history of ME affairs you will find that the modern view of jihad arises from a Marxist influenced view of history transposed to Islam. It predates post colonial nations in mideast. The original and continuing complaint of mideast was colonialism and more importantly economic subjurgation. This was and is the basis of secular and Islamic nationalism (and even at base of caliphate). I will still contend that IF a middle class life is available to Iraqis, Palestinians, etc, IS IS whithers away because the economic &political injustices for which it offers remedy (a poor remedy to be sure) disappears.
Ditto Rhadak reply. The correlation is nore with poverty than race, though black culture has been warped by generations of poverty and racism., So even if a stratification of murder by race and income shows black murdwr rates higher for cimparable incomes, poverty is still the culprit. Further support for thus comes when you include Latin murder rates in Nicaragua, Mexico, etc. More poverty –> more murder.
Now if you look at national murder rates stratified by number of guns u will se stratified by
hey robel,,,,,,,,,it turns out fruitcake that Zimmerman continued to be involved in gun incidents and domestic violence. He CLEARLY stalked and killed that black kid. Dumbass
John Robel… Well I won’t agree with rhadak that your comments reflect racism… but I think he is right that you ignored the high rate of poverty among the black community. It is poverty, along with racism that closed off legitimate opportunities to blacks (particularly black men) that has created the “culture” about which you complain. It is a culture of violence-within-poverty from which, for blacks, there has been little legitimate means of escape until (maybe) the last few decades. It is a similar culture, without so much melanin, that drives high murder rates in Central America and, in the past, in new immigrant communities in America (as rhadak said). I definitely think you should factor poverty and racism into your thinking as you criticize black culture.
Of course you are right that black culture needs to “man-up”… in the way Obama has encouraged. Black fathers should be at home with their wives, raising the kids, setting a good example building careers and yelling at their kids to study. But even that depends on the existence of a path that allows blacks to join the middle class (which seems a hard task considering that even the traditional white middle class is being shrunk in our current “guilded age”). Witness all the whites kids now sporting tats like some soviet prison zek and speaking ebonic.
It’s not an “urban black problem.” It’s a “cities with the most restrictive gun control laws” problem. Criminals have no fear in those cities because they don’t have to worry so much about the victims shooting back.
“More guns” are not the “solution”. An outright ban on private ownership of handguns would likely have a significant impact. So, get busy repealing the 2nd Amendment, or STFU.
They ban the guns in “those” places so only the criminals have the guns… moron.
It’s not a “racist trope” if the statistics prove it out – it’s just a fact. It isn’t race-related; it’s geographic and poverty-related. But apologists like you want to wash it under the rug through use of the “racist-label” card against anyone who brings those statistics up, instead of looking at the problem and saving urban black children trapped in drug-infested ghettos by poverty from a runaway murder rate. That’s the worst kind of racism. Those people’s neighborhoods aren’t the safest places on earth, fool, because law-abiding people are too poor to own guns; only the drug dealers and criminal gangs own them. Do you ever hear yourself?
Nobody said more guns are the solution. The problem is that liberals believe guns are the problem! But guns have no agenda! People do. And I think what he is referring to is the fact that those cities are bastions of liberal leanings people politically who call for gun control yet THEY are the ones who are killing people!!
Agreed! Cities with the most restrictive gun control measures also have the highest death rates due to gun crime. That’s because honest, law-abiding citizens have no means to defend themselves….and the gun-carrying criminals know that!
We don’t live in your fantasy world where everyone’s a crack shot cowboy. And to answer your straw man you basically do what we already do, wait until they are done shooting and then tackle them. Australia has proved no assault guns=no shooting sprees. And seeing as the majority of crazy shooters end up turning the gun on themselves, more guns usually doesn’t do anything but add to the chaos, just like Waco. Keep the guns in the police station (or very least in the vehicle) like all the other civilized countries, if you get a report of shooting, then obviously use them, and we have plenty of nonlethal guns and weapons in case you weren’t aware of modern technology.
What is your definition of “assault gun?”
You know, like gatling guns, RPGs and 50cals — staples for every Bible Belt household!
I live in the bible belt and I have none of those. I don’t know anyone who has any of those.
>”I”
>318,000,000
>Texas sharpshooter
You were the one who posited that “EVERY bible belt household” had those things. Nice job overstating there. I just refuted it. 318 million is the total population of the US – not the so-called Bible Belt. You can’t have your own “facts.”
Using “every” for the majority is far more reasonable than declaring oneself as the archetype for all.
That, and if those 350 million guns aren’t in the hands of hardcore, conservative, mostly racists, fretful, bible-clutching republitards, then who? “The n***ers…?“
I didn’t declare myself as the archetype – I just refuted your assertion. 🙂
Refuting facts is futile.
You have a very loose definition of the word “facts.”
LAUGHING UNTIL I WET MY DEPENDS!
“We don’t live in your fantasy world where everyone’s a crack shot cowboy. And to answer your straw man you basically do what we already do, wait until they are done shooting and then tackle them.” YEA RIGHT “BRO”! That’ll work! Put of a video of how YOU doo’eded that; it should make hilarious viewing at “yo’ funeral”!
Let me know when and where you plan to hold your next shooting spree and I’ll show you personally, gramps.
You have no clue or you don’t live in the real world dude….If anything take away the guns from the Cops as they have free license to kill anyone and walk away with out any repercussions even if they were in the wrong….I’d rather have everyone armed than just the Government….
you mean like the unarmed french police officer at the charlie shooting
he left his gun at the station or home now he is in his grave
he would have been dead with or without a gun
but he might have shot the perp but unarmed he was sacrificed
French police armed with Star Wars laser weapons still could not have stopped something they did not know was going to take place!
Of course, if they were attuned with the Force…
You’re preaching to the hardcore fundamentalist, mate.
Ameritards are so inured to their “right” to sport boomsticks – predicated on a generations-old, error-riddle parchment – and so ingrained with fear – through perpetual wars and egregious societal inequality – that the AU model simply does not fit for their situation.
After all, with more guns than people in the U.S., without some deus ex machina -like interjection, tighter gun laws would have just about ZER0 effect on the war zone -like state the nation has descended into. I mean, they would need the equivalent of the current U.S. national debt to conduct an Aussie-esque buy-back scheme! …and money’s all that that Gordon Geeko dogma inculcated society will listen to.
The U.S. are culturally fucked. That’s their problem.
Actually you are incorrect. There is a growing problem in Australia of home made firearms, and the criminals are getting better at manufacturing. So it is only a matter of time
::sniff sniff:: Smells like a non-issue. Nice try, ammosexual.
BS. In Chicago their is one gun store who sells right outside the City limits of Chicago, his guns result in 95% of all gun deaths in Chicago. Why his because of greed he doesn’t give a damn.
Gun control however want work unless it’s nationwide.
I call BULLSHIT right back. 95%? Are you fucking kidding me? Most gun murders in Chicago are from illegally obtained guns, not from a single gun store. If you dispute this, let’s see your “facts.” Where to you get that statistic? What is the name of the gun store?
Lastly, even if part of what you say is true, you are proving my point. Taking away guns from law abiding citizens makes them MORE vulnerable to violent crime – not LESS.
So why is the usa so different from europe? Are you saying that americans cant feel safe without a gun in the hipholster? If it works in europe why won´t it work in the USA. Are you less capable? Are you genetically inferior or is it that the NRA is very big and powerful and you have just turned the corner from being hillbilly cowboys who needed a gun to shoot wild injuns? Heres the good news, you wiped them all out.There´s no more danger from them. Oh, ok, I get it, you had a load of black slaves you havent fully redressed and so they are eking out their vengeance slowly but surely and its just like the injun situation. Well, you reap what you sow. Cmon guys, make some sense. In europe we had slaves too and they don´t have this chip on their shoulder.
“So why is the usa so different from europe?”
EUROPE is full of ridiculous GUN LAWS! So criminals use baseball bats, pipes, knives and a multitude of other “tools” to beat and kill!
The crappy mutterings about EUROPE being safe because their people have no firearms is BULLY-CHIT!
Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.
Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
The figures comes on the day new Home Secretary Alan Johnson makes his first major speech on crime, promising to be tough on loutish behavior
The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:
The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.
It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.
It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.
But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.
In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.
EUROPE “SAFE”???? HOGWASH PURE AND SIMPLE!
Oh, sorry, I beg your forgiveness , people in the usa only get shot, you don´t have knives or baseball bats (?) to hit people with and of course nobody raids anyone elses home. How stupid can a comment get.
A baseball bat or a knife would take ten minutes to carry out the slaughter a gun can do in a few seconds.
10 mins you need to spend some time in the batting cage. Work on that form.
A gun could kill hundreds in a few seconds. I don’t think even Babe Ruth could manage that with a baseball bat. Clearly from your comment, you could though. Congratulations.
What kind of gun can ‘kill hundreds in a few seconds’ ? Even a fully automatic weapon generally has a magazine of no more than 30, though there are exceptions of up to a hundred. But, contrary to most television shows, people do not often just fall over dead with a single shot, nor do most mass murderers have high accuracy when shooting. So a couple of 30 round magazines might result in a half dozen deaths.
And fully automatic weapons are regulated, and I don’t recall a mass shooting that wasn’t a semi-automatic weapon, rather than full auto. Full auto is scary, but wastes more ammunition, since there are many more misses.
A baseball bat or a knife can kill that many, just look at the Chinese knife attacks that can leave a half dozen or more dead. One of the worst school massacres in this country was the Bath school massacre. Only one person was shot.
“What kind of gun can ‘kill hundreds in a few seconds’ ?”
AK-47’s… wielded by ideological lunatics… inside crowded theatres hosting rock concerts.
Responding to inane statements only lends weight to the stupidity therein.
Invaluable contribution. ?
we are talking deaths here. Not overall crime rates, stick to the subject please, try to keep up……
Talking deaths? Really, in all the studies not 1 shows the number of deaths cuased by criminals, or how many are death by cop, the number of criminal on criminal, the number of deaths that are do to home or self defense. Balling them all up in to 1 big number will scare anyone into believing this crap of an artical.
but what is your point? They are all guns deaths and the point is that guns are a major cause of death in the usa because its so much easier to kill from a distance than up close with a knife or bat or any other weapon. I would almost be happy if guns were kept just to personal revolvers or a smaller calibre but to be able to buy semiautomatics and other repeater rifles where you can kill a whole bunch of people in one fell swoop seems to me to be verging on the insane. Would there be a case of 10 thousand plus deaths per year without such guns? I really believe the number would drop significantly.
“the point is that guns are a major cause of death”
Really? So you truly think that guns kill people?
Last time i checked a gun is an inanimate object!
What is my point.. well lets see this article is all aboit scare tactics, my op was referring to this very thing.
What they are leaving out is the largest group of GUN DEATHS which was in 2014 I believe over 21000 self inflicted gun deaths either accidental or suicide of the total 38,000 gun deaths that is 2/3rds of gun deaths were self inflicted then you need to break out Cop shootings and self defense this only leaves about 8,000 gun deaths do to crime/murder……
so having all those guns around with people who have no idea how to use them causes 2/3 gun deaths? American gun policy is more dangerous than Isis terrorism!! I rest my case.
That comment makes no sense but good luck if you want to get ride of guns then try to get your Rep. to propose revoking the 2nd Amendment…But good luck with that Guns are part of the American way of life you don’t like it then too bad, you can always move to the EU and have your children raped by all the “immigrants” there…
I live in the EU, I have no vote in us politics, Im just pointing out that 30 thousand us citizens die every year from guns. We get less than 100 a year. US gun policy is a danger to us citizens, especially to the two thirds who haven´t a clue how to use them and shoot themselves, if it werent tragic Id be splitting my sides with laughter but we speak the same language and have some common background so I feel kind of united to you guys. Some of my family are american as well. It just seems crazy, the more you fear getting attacked the more guns you buy, the more you shoot yourselves. Is that scientific? Cmon buddy, wake up.
2/3rds are self inflicted doesn’t mean they don’t know how to use them they are using them to kill themselves. If it wasn’t a gun then it would be pills or a bridge….The tool used doesn’t really matter. And being in the EU plz just STFU you have no right nor say in this issue. So plz sit down and stfu and mind your own business we have already saved EU TWICE because of you pussified asses…Maybe if you all had guns we wouldn’t have had to come to the rescue FOR FREE that I might add…You all STILL OWE the US billions in payback….Or Millions of AMERICAN lives….
Oh, Ok Thebob, you are obviously someone who can´t take any criticism of any kind. With a gun in your hand I might also be in trouble, so I rest my case, you are a bunch of cowboys, those of you who believe guns are good for you. You have just proved with your aggresive attitude that guns and madness go together. Incidentally, you didn´t save us during the war, you saved your own economy and we had reached impasse and the european forces would have rallied and thrown Hitler out without your help given a bit more time but that´s it. There were huge US economic interests as there are now with the Translatlantic Trade deal which we don´t want whatsoever, we are fine as we are. There´s more variety and more history in europe but don´t forget, you aint just american, you are all ex europeans plus a load of ilegal meccies. So its a bit stupid to argue that I can´t have a say. I can and I will, like it or lump it!
This just proves you have no idea what you are talking about, nor do you know your history…You limey POS….Go read a real history book and no with out the US the UK would be Germany to day along with France….It was the US bombers that broke the Oil supplies for Hitler’s army it was the Million’s of American lives that saved EU from Hitler not the EU themselves…They were out numbered and out gunned until the US entered the war….Oh and btw with out the US invented Guns you still would have lost the war as it was our Fully Auto and Semi Auto Rifles that the US supplied to Allied forces that helped win the war…SO once again you are proven wrong on your point Have fun in your crime ridden country of backasswardsness…
The Battle of Britain was won without any us help except a couple of voluntary fighters. It makes no difference. Just hope your gun doesn´t backfire, read the label in case it was made in China
LMAO, you wouldn’t have had a battle if we didn’t ship you planes and guns and ammo to do the battle with you retard you don’t even know your own history…..You also lost most of your planes in the battle of Britain….Those FLAK guns were shipped over by the US….The ammo shipped over by the US…the planes shipped over by the US….
Thebob, I don´t understand your sinonym insults so they are wasted on me. But please feel free to abstain from explaining them as I am not interested in insults. Insults are violence and this seems pretty prevalent in your capacity to discuss. You lose the argument each time you use insults and they won´t work with me. Facts will. Fact is you guys either shoot each other they moment you think you might get shot or attacked, you shoot yourselves cos you don´t like the life you have or you accidentally shoot yourselves at a phenomenal rate each year. Its a gun culture and its stupid but its your country. It affects people outside of the us which is why I am in this discussion because in “saving the world” you go and shoot everyone else. Basically, it s about your right to shoot others. I simply don´t agree on that one. But hey, my own homeland goes along with every foreign action you guys get into. We are still paying you back for saving us Thebob. The bill is pretty huge.
Damn straight it is huge!!!….You guys were next if we hadn’t stepped in to stop Hitler. But I just get the impression you live in this libtard fantasy world that will never exist, yet you seem to think it does. Putting your faith in humanity is going to get you killed….Hope you like your muslim brothers there….They will come a choppin those heads off the first chance they get.
99% islamics are less dangerous than a gun slinging yank, my friend. And now we are looking to Russia to sort out the ISIS guys which is the best option.
That is laughable, as with their own reports of the what 2 billion muslims on the planet even if the number low of 1% of them are extremist that is 10 Million Raging head chopping Islamist’s out there, which I believe is about 40% of your countries population. But it is more like 10-20% which would put that number close to 100-200 Million Islamist’s and if they are a true Islamist they are the ones who are the extremists as they are called….Isn’t there a Provence in Spain right now that is Majority Muslim, that is trying to become their own country?
You guys couldn’t even keep and control Portugal…What makes you think you will be able to defend against the Islamist’s?? Also; side note to my previous comment, your population in Spain has been declining, not as bad as Norway or Sweden but still declining. So it may work out that the Muslims just push you guys out or breed you out….
And I have given you facts you just simply ignored.
To quote probably the greatest leaders ever “Never, never, never give up.” With out our guns and ammo you would be a Nazi citizen today….Yeah keep it up no balls Mr nice guy. Will gladly let you be a human shield for someone who is willing to defend themselves….Lay down stfu and just give up please.
I actually think you love this Thebob, I´ve worked out that if it wasn´t for the fact that we exported a load of europeans to America over a couple of centuries you would still be firing arrows at other tribes from off a pony but why waste time on such historic truths? You think you are the best country in the world. You can keep it. I live in Spain on the sunny south coast which is similar in some ways to Florida. I´ve also worked out what stfu means. It means stuff you. At least i think it means that.
Shut The Fck Up = STFU….Fcking Europeans….Just made my point even more….Your people are the ones who slaughtered all the Indians and Indigenous peoples of Mexico and South America…The Spanish are by far one of the worst offenders of human rights in history….Rank right up there with Stalin and Mao….Yet still a bunch of sissy boys…
I love how you rise to the challenge, its so easy to get you worked up. You are fast becoming a great sample test for my thesis that american gun toters are rather off centre. You are simply reinforcing my belief, thank you thebob. What is bob by the way?
Simply Thebob….that is it…You don’t even know me you leftist pos….How can you do a thesis on gun owners when you aren’t one, nor do you probably even know how to use one or have ever used one. Will be biased opinionated thesis not based on facts…..
fact is I have had rifle range training and practiced on a gun range in Spain with a friends pistol. Just fact. I know a little. I know nothing about semi autos and fully fledged machine guns. Not sure I´d want to either.
How about you do your thesis on how many people your country has slaughtered over its history…probably close to 100 Million or more….
give the usa half a chance at it will nuke everyone else. You will soon catch up, don´t worry!
I don’t buy any weapons made in China all of mine are Good ole Made in the USA….But actually the Chinese AK is one of the best made AK’s that is authentic…You wouldn’t know that though as you don’t even know your own history….
I would avoid chinese makes, they tend to explode in your face.
Basically my response to your previous comment is that you didn’t even read what I wrote and your comment about 2/3rds not knowing how to use the guns is just idiotic as most of them knew how to kill themselves with it….You ever hear of something called SUICIDE??? Or do you not have but only a 100 of those in the EU….Again our Politics don’t concern you so no you have no right to speak up; you can care all you want but doesn’t change the fact you will never have a role in our politics so please stop interjecting your Socialist views that’s why you are in EU, which most of them are wishing they had guns and a 2nd Amendment right about now with the Muslim invasion that is going on in EU right now…Hope you like sharia law…and being a Muslim cause if you don’t they will kill you….At least I can defend my family if needed….Unlike your ball-less ass…
Thebob, its fortunate that you at least know europe exists which is more than can be said of a lot of you. Don´t worry about the extremist islamics, they are being picked out and picked up daily in Spain which is expert on islamic terrorism. I´m just north of Morroco so I should be shitting myself but you know what? We are OK. Rota base will cover us and Gibraltar too. You have little idea of what goes on down here. Its one of the safest countries in europe. Majority of islamics are trying to get away from their own countries. They are welcome.
What does off center mean? You have no idea what I have been through. Ever seen what an AK does to a mans head, I have….Also don’t trust your Islamist neighbors they would rather lop your head off than be your friend if they are your friend they are faking it….Unless you are Muslim then you are already set….But don’t hedge your bets on them, if they don’t hate you then they are not a real Muslim…So then I guess you are safe also…I can also so from what I saw in Afghanistan of Spain’s Military was really laughable, I remember one convoy that shot up themselves….It was rather entertaining to learn they have no clue how to conduct military operations. But good luck with Russia covering your ass, as they are only covering their own. But yes, they are kind of striking ISIS, but I do agree as the US Gov’t/Shadow Operations created ISIS and armed them….Just great. You can talk all the shit you want about Yank’s we will still be ones who come to your rescue when the time comes. As long as we aren’t nuked no one else has anything to worry about. But I do feel it will get much much worse before it gets any better.
I am not talking shit about Yanks in general and I respect your military background, one of my brothers son in law is an extremely well trained officer in the spanish army and I would trust my life with him. The debate is about letting the general public access to arms with little real control (you know this is a major issue) and all we are really debating is how good an idea it is given the amount of deaths. Too many people die and I would simply argue that there is a marked difference between how many people die from guns in the us compared to other eu countries (we are comparing civilised countries only). I do think the stats bear out. 270 million firearms in the us i reckon is way too many. As a trained g.i I am pretty sure you´ll agree that its too much.
Nope not at all, I think there shouldn’t be any restrictions on gun ownership even fully automatics available to the public should be allowed. Unlike your country or EU our gun ownership is a right and it is a way of life in our country….Deaths are not caused by the tool used they are caused by the person behind the tool. So I would agree we have a violence problem in the US, but not a gun problem…More people die from cars, should you need a back ground check to purchase a car then? More people are killed, murdered by blunt objects and knives more than gun murders….Should need a background check be the age of 21 to buy a bat or how about a knife…Sorry I am not a socialist like you. Our guns are meant to a right as a means of protection for person and our country and way of life, as when the government over steps their bounds we have a means to defend ourselves. This is also the main reason I feel, believe we have never been invaded. No one is willing to take on a populous that has a gun for every man, women, and child. Sorry you don’t live in a free society…You don’t truly know what it means to be free as you have never truly felt it. Kind of like Texans here, the only state in our union who was their own country first. That history is live and well in Texas and in Texans.
well, given the latest situation in Paris I reckon a lot more europeans are gonna be thinking like you The bob. I might have to concede the point. The trouble is that you don´t need to worry about islamics, just worry about the crazy coots who get a gun in their hands. Yes, you might actually gun one down but so far in all the mass killings you´v had I think its the police, not Charlie Brown, whove gunned the killers, right? That says something for me.
Depends, several have been stopped by a Concealed Carry person when those situations arose they didn’t get much air time as they shooter only got 1 or 2 before someone took him out. But most of these shootings, as I stated earlier, target schools and movie theater’s etc, which don’t allow person’s to carry their gun. Now I am getting to the point I may just ignore those “rules” as defending MY life and my family comes above any dumb rule….And yes, this Paris situation is/was messed up. I felt helpless just listening to it on the radio of the reports coming in…1 armed or 2 armed person’s in that theater, Not over 100 people would have died, 1 armed citizen could have saved lots of people…I also wouldn’t go down with an execution style you put that gun in my face I am going to take it away or die trying.
Do you see any way of reducing guns or at least keeping them out of the hands of the crazies? Noone is going to try to invade the US of A because you have nuclear weaponry so I would think there has to be a lot of sense in finding a better solution. For example, much more stringent testing, proper firearm training. Real engagement rules. Collecting up unlawful firearms and only allowing hand guns in cities. NO semiautomatic rifles, machine guns etc except for special forces. That kind of way forward. Would that work? If you have served in the army you would be extremely sensitive to guns in the wrong hands, I´m sure. Hey, If I bore you then drop me out but I am learning a whole lot more discussing with you.
A gun is a gun doesn’t matter, and NO I don’t ever seeing a way of reducing or even getting rid of them unless they do it by force. To get a Concealed Carry every state that allows it requires you to take a course in order to have a Concealed Carry, although that is not the case for most guns, only if you want to conceal and carry. Although, if you want to hunt I believe most states require you to have a hunter’s safety course which teaches gun safety also. Most people who own guns know how they work and how to be safe with them. If you ask the police, the handgun is the most dangerous as they can be concealed or hidden…So your only handguns in cities is pointless. And I have already explain, yes I was in the military, combat vet, I think more people should have guns, more so to the point that then criminals think they every person is armed…And “Collecting up unlawful firearms” Um…There aren’t any illegal guns in this country unless you are a criminal and purchase the guns illegally anyway…To a criminal it doesn’t matter as they are A CRIMINAL…..If you purchase a gun you buy it legally….If you don’t purchase a gun legally, meaning you are buying on the black market or you are a felon and can’t buy a gun at a store….So that kinda blows your statement out of the water…Most if not all of the guns used for crime here are purchased illegally i.e. straw purchase, someone who can buy legally then gives the gun to the criminal, which straw purchasing is illegal. Or you buy it on the black market or steal it….As far as crazies go, you can’t stop crazy from happening, if it isn’t a gun it will be a knife, or bat or bomb….Crazy is crazy and they do crazy shit….If someone want to commit murder or mass killing they are going to do it taking away guns won’t stop it…
Thebob, I guess you guys have grown up in a gun culture whereas we havent. For example, in Spain last year there were 302 violent deaths total out of a population of 47 million people. I forget now the rate of violent deaths per year in the usa but it is proportionately far higher. Would you say that without guns the numbers in the usa would be even higher? I think the matter hinges on this point when it boils down to facts. In any case, I would feel safe almost 100% that going out downtown on a weekend in Spain there is no probability that I would be involved in any kind of trouble unless there was alcohol involved and in the wrong areas which are always very contained. All police use guns here but it is rare to hear of regular gun fights. Essentially, lets say I lived in the States. Would you recommend I get a gun? I have family living way back out in Montana and they have several guns mainly for vermin and farm pests but also to ensure protection. Here people would have a hunting rifle at the most and only people in remote areas. They require police permits and psychological checks and tests on a yearly basis I believe.
Yes, I would say violent crime would skyrocket here with out guns, it is already proven; in the areas where carry is allowed, mugging’s, burglary, and violent crimes drop, where as areas like Chicago or NYC that don’t allow carry by lawful citizens, the criminals still have the guns, hence why those cities are not safe. I don’t live my life in fear, but then again I am not afraid of guns, nor having a gun in face if it were to come to that. Getting shot at will change you though.
clearly its a view based on custom. We don´t have the gun carrying custom and we don´t feel we need it. The Usa is a gun culture and being without that right makes people feel they are unprotected. Our traditions are radically different although worldwide insecurity is drawing our views closer.
And, Yes I recommend you get one even over there. It is always better to have the tool and not need it, but to need the tool and not have it is crazy.
Look at France, they don’t have guns…Still had a massive terrorist attack with GUNS….I’d be those guns were moved through Spain also…Coming from Morocco or Libya across the Gibraltar Strait or Across the Mediterranean.
Thebob = Don’t forget the medical deaths they are even higher than firearms…..
Are you referring to Prescription Drug deaths? Or just Medical in general?
To elaborate on this, I think College’s and High School’s should offer Gun Safety and training classes like they use to. Skeet shooting in HS and College’s are pretty much gone. Do I think there should be some checks and balances yes, but everyone every single person has a right to protect themselves with equal power, so whatever LEO’s get we get. I personally think every single person should own a gun in one form or another. It is proven fact by many many reports that the area’s that have more guns have lower overall crime rates, unlike places that are “gun free zones”…BTW every single mass shooting here has been in a “gun free zone”….If Chicago allowed guns and concealed carry I’d give it with in 6 mo. to a year the death rates and crime would be cut in half…Why do you think Texas is one of the safest places to live in the US. There is a town in Georgia that requires every head of house owns 1 gun, they haven’t have a violent crime in that town since the implementation, robberies literally don’t exist anymore.
And we have controls, it is called background checks…..But even with that you can’t stop crazy people from doing crazy things.
Off centre means either a little imbalanced or prejudiced, biased. It can also mean you are missing a screw or that its loose.
Just wanted to make sure…I maybe a little off in your book but I am right of centre not left….So to me you are the one with a screw loose….
i got a screw loose alright! haha
This just sucks, I feel for those people in Paris….
For a leftist you are very pleasant to talk to.
Hitler was on the verge of many technological advances that would have given time taken EU but Hitler was going of the deep end we the US went to war we sent fresh troops and D-Day happened the only reason you did not pay the debt is because you paid it in blood but we also had causalities I believe you did not pay because you did not have enough money to pay for it because war is expensive and I disagree about your statement about the US being gun-toting cowboys I believe a gun is just a tool in the right hands a man could theoretically kill over 50 men.
(ignore my awful grammar)
I´m not saying gun toting cowboys about all americans but it is in your national history. I know there´s a hugue divide betwen types of gun owners, some just have it on farms for shooting the odd intruding animal and that´s fine by me but the sheer weight of gun deaths in comparison to any other civilised country bears up. Its an industry which is so powerful that you guys cannot stop it. I just wonder about Obama´s intntions. After his speech on gun control Smith and Wesson sales rocketed. Maybe he has shares in the company?
fallacy, millions of american lives were not given up in the wars, they would have if you hadn´t bombed Japan twice. . You had your own civil war where you like every other country in the world practically decimated your own population.
*rid…
Don’t forget they only count offenses that have been solved…If a homicide has no suspect and isn’t solved it isn’t counted in their numbers unlike the US we include those in our totals…
yeah, but we don´t shoot burglars to death, we let them in and then claim from insurance. Normally this means they don´t come armed with guns and if you don´t overreact normally you get away without harm. That´s why we dont die so much as you guys. Never mind, this is a sterile conversation. USa is best as usual, whose going to convince you of anything else. You only believe what you want to believe.
I guess you didn’t bother to look at the chart above. The situation in the US isn’t even in the same league as Europe. We have almost as many gun deaths per year as Iraq.
That chart is messed up, yes we have more guns per capita than any other country on the planet, that is probably one of the only reasons why we haven’t ever been invaded….Also the numbers above are just total deaths by guns….This includes police shootings, mass shootings, self defense shooting and the largest group at 21000 deaths Self inflicted either accidental or suicide…
“So why is the usa so different from europe?”
In short, no culture.
(1) Chicago’s violence problem is directly linked to the number of illegal guns available
in the City;
(2) Sixty percent of guns recovered in crimes in Chicago were first sold in other states,
many with weaker gun laws; and
(3) A small handful of gun stores, three from Cook Country and one from Gary, Indiana,
continue to be responsible for a disproportionate number of crime guns recovered
on Chicago’s streets.
(from may of 2014)
You can’t purchase a gun as an Illinois citizen outside of the state you must have it transferred to an gun dealer located with in Illinois…Just FYI, so unless they have someone who lives in Gary Indiana buying the guns for them which is illegal making that an illegally purchased gun….And according to the Left most black people don’t have a photo ID which is also needed to buy a gun. Oh yeah we also have this thing in Illinois called a FOID Card (Firearm Owners ID) issued by the ISP with a background check. YOU MUST HAVE ONE OF THESE TO EVEN OWN A GUN IN ILLINOIS; We are the ONLY STATE to do this….for ALL GUNS….
Yup, and the FOID is also required to buy ammunition, without which a pistol is merely a short club or paperweight.
That’s about right.
Bullshit! Almost no one I know owns a gun. And none of them has ever been a victim of crime because of not owning a gun. I DO know that every day legal gun owners in the U.S. shoot friends and family members, or shoot themselves, accidentally or on purpose. It’s an NRA lie that ‘most gun deaths are with illegal guns’. EVERY mass shooting has been done by some White guy with legally purchased guns, & the shooters were law abiding gun owners right up till the second they killed their first victim.
@Todd – BULL FUCKING SHIT on you, you fucking LIAR. Really? EVERY mass shooting has been done by a white guy? Let’s see about that…
Virginia Tech shooting, 2007 – Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean man, kills 33 and injures 23.
The Binghamton shootings, 2009 – Jiverly Antares Wong, a Vietnamese man kills 13 people;
The GMAC office shootings – James Edward Pough, 1990, a black man kills 11 people;
Long Island Railroad Massacre, 1993 – Colin Ferguson, a black man, kills 6 and injures 19;
LA shooting spree, 1973 – William Ray Bonner, a black man, kills 7 and injures 9;
Wisconsin hunting murders, 2004 – Chai Vang, a southeast asian man, kills 6 and injures 2.
Dallas night club shooting, 1984 – Abdelkrim Belachheb, a Moroccan man, kills 6
Kirkwood City Council Shooting, 2008 – Charles Lee Thornton, a black man, kills 6 and injures 1
Texas Rampage killings, 1983 – Eliseo Moreno, a hispanic man, kills 6 over a 3 day period.
Hialeah shooting, 2013 – Pedro Alberto Vargas, a hispanic man, kills 6.
…and there are OTHERS. See? FACTS prove your pulled-out-of-your-ass statement WRONG.
The DC sniper was a black man…
oh, right, they were all “foreigners, not whitey white. What happened to the us of a´s big melting pot theory? Its just a theory that´s all. It doesn´t really exist.
Hey Dumbass, I didn’t say that all mass shootings are by foreigners. I was replying to Todd Anderson who said, “EVERY mass shooting has been done by some White guy.” I was simply refusing HIS so-called “fact.”
95%??? Seriously in doubt. But continue with the fairly tale!
95% ?!?! If that were true, the Chicago PD would shut them down so fast, everyone’s heads would spin. A totally ridiculous statement.
on the day the guns were bought but as Evans the game waiter was with him and pick the guns out himself
Conservatives this is why I and most of the known world hate you all. Facts you disregard and base everything on this belief that somehow you all are more intelligent than the rest of society but outside of your own narrow minded group people think you all ass dumb as a rock. But continue the stupidity. I would imagine Jefferson if alive today would say ” You must be ignorant to try and solve todays problems based our solutions of 1776.”
DESERVES TO BE REPEATED since it is correct:
likeyoudontalreadyknow Douglas Green • SAID just a month ago:
“I call BULLSHIT right back. 95%? Are you fucking kidding me? Most gun murders in Chicago are from illegally obtained guns, not from a single gun store. If you dispute this, let’s see your “facts.” Where to you get that statistic? What is the name of the gun store?”
“Lastly, even if part of what you say is true, you are proving my point. Taking away guns from law abiding citizens makes them MORE vulnerable to violent crime – not LESS.
Pretty much nailed it there “likeyoudontalreadyknow Douglas Green” WELL SAID! VERY WELL SAID!
the name of the gun shop is called chucks gun shop? it was rated as the nation’s number one source of crime guns?
its current inFamy, yes for the guns winding up at crime scenes over 1,500 guns that were recovered and traced to crimes in Chicago over the past 5 years.
Chuck’s gun shop has never face criminal charges despite mounting evidence that is a surplus store for criminal activity in Chicago.
officer Michael Cordell was all a drug surveillance in a housing project when he was fatally shot with a 357 magnum that was gun shop? a straw buyer name Ezra Evans purchased in late 1997? they said the Magnum was one of nine guns purchased by Evans on that day for James Jackson Gangster Disciples gang leader?
police officers family tried to sue Chuck’s gun shop stating that the gun that killed their son was sold under circumstances that should have worded that this was a straw purchase made for the benefit of the gangster disciple street gang..
the lawsuit was dismissed.
it appears to me that our side is trying to solve the problem! your side wants to point the problem and bitch about it? if you don’t have a Quit your bitchin.
That would mean those guns were purchased in an ILLEGAL MANNER…as straw purchases in ILLINOIS are ILLEGAL….You cannot sell a gun to a none FOID card holder even as a private transfer….So fact still remains those guns were illegally purchased…
Typical right winger. If presented facts just disregard as lies and keep going. You are typical of why this country no longer can debate a topic on merits because if Rush, Fox news did’t tell you it’s a liberal lie. Just go about your ignorant way for even Jesus would loose patience with the right.
You know Police are always armed in the US, but still get killed by armed criminals on a regular basis. So, just relying on your own gun to keep you safe from bad guys is a risky bet at best.
“regular basis” Define that.
The one-in-a-million grandmother who shoots dead a thief about to mug them, hardly excuses the ~15K p.a. who die as a direct of indirect result of the U.S.’s non-existent, trigger-happy gun laws.
>eisegesis
The real question is:
Do the U.S. want to leave their wild west heritage behind and evolve into a civilised society?
Like your name says, you’re just a troll. You’re here just to argue. You’re taking a position just because it’s contrary to the article. No soup for you.
Stopped reading at “troll”.
Thanks delineating our stark intellectual disparity so soon in the piece and thus not wasting my time further ?
You picked the name, moron.
>irony
(…bye.)
You know something; if you try hard enough, you can blame the patient for the Doctor’s bad days. You being innocent means nothing, if someone has a hard noise for a political agenda.
Because I’m sure all the illegal guns didn’t original below to a legal gun owner. They are the source.
Every modern gun massacre in US history has been committed by white people btw…
Wrong….REALLY WRONG….WAY WRONG learn your facts or just stfu and sit down….the DC sniper a few years ago, was a black man….Just FYI…Credit to @likeyoudontalreadyknow:disqus :
BULL FUCKING SHIT on you, you fucking LIAR. Really? EVERY mass
shooting has been done by a white guy? Let’s see about that…
Virginia Tech shooting, 2007 – Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean man, kills 33 and injures 23.
The Binghamton shootings, 2009 – Jiverly Antares Wong, a Vietnamese man kills 13 people;
The GMAC office shootings – James Edward Pough, 1990, a black man kills 11 people;
Long Island Railroad Massacre, 1993 – Colin Ferguson, a black man, kills 6 and injures 19;
LA shooting spree, 1973 – William Ray Bonner, a black man, kills 7 and injures 9;
Wisconsin hunting murders, 2004 – Chai Vang, a southeast asian man, kills 6 and injures 2.
Dallas night club shooting, 1984 – Abdelkrim Belachheb, a Moroccan man, kills 6
Kirkwood City Council Shooting, 2008 – Charles Lee Thornton, a black man, kills 6 and injures 1
Texas Rampage killings, 1983 – Eliseo Moreno, a hispanic man, kills 6 over a 3 day period.
Hialeah shooting, 2013 – Pedro Alberto Vargas, a hispanic man, kills 6.
…and there are OTHERS. See? FACTS prove your pulled-out-of-your-ass statement WRONG.
Can you back up those assertions with actual links and facts?
No, because it’s complete BS. Those three cities are only a small portion of US gun deaths, which occur overwhelmingly in red states.
The US has more children killed by shootings than Canada has every man, woman and child killed by shooting. It’s not just due to population difference, it’s because the US has 6 times the number of deaths due to shootings, the highest in the industrialized world.
Many more US children are shot and live, by an order of magnitude. Many of which are maimed or crippled for life.
The US is the ONLY first world country that regularly has toddlers shooting themselves or other people.
Be proud.
Sorry but there are more people killed in Chicago on an average weekend than most of the mass shootings….You just don’t ever hear about it in the news cause it is black on black crime. I think it was last weekend, 3 kids were shot and killed. Along with another dozen wounded….
So you’re saying that 80 million people have a registered gun? They have it, of course, for hunting, too? Crack down on “black crime”??? Looking at the latest shooter – he wasn’t black… So please leave black out of it. It is undeniable that the US is on top of mosts lists when it comes to comparing crime, mass shootings, gang violence etc. I live in a country where we have gun control, and we are on the bottom of the lists. I can walk the streets without fearing of getting killed by some trigger happy person, including our police who, if they have to shoot, do not shoot to kill, but to disable. They are actually capable of shooting in the leg. They learn that at the range. Your only seem to learn to hit the biggest part of the body. And then they go rambo when they have the chance of shooting a live target. Oh, did I say that rape is low, too, because prostitution is legal???
Why L.A.? It falls way below Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Baltimore, and a few others. A little biased I’d say.
that is just stupid..first if you got rid of major cities.. all the other smaller towns would suffer b/c the economy would collapse.. major cities pull in more money.. living in a city is not the problem.. its ppl who are the problem.. legal gun owners or not.. alot of ppl who murder others using a gun are legal owners.. its ppl who believe violence is the answer to things that are the problem.
I would rather live in the city’s with the highest crime rates then live with selfrighteous bigots like you, no offence
Yet…
The were 68 homicides in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. We all know the political leanings of the citizens of Chicago! The UCLA shooting is a fine example of how worthless liberal gun policies are. That’s a state that has all of the dream gun laws they so covet AND it was a GUN FREE ZONE! Of course, these stats are all made up because they don’t keep these records in any of these third world countries! They can’t even tell you how many people died from natural causes in these countries!
troglodyte,,,,,,,there it is!!! Lets blame it on the minorities and make believe it isn’y happening !!!!!!!bwahahahahaha
I couldn’t find the additional data that talked about suicides… because the FBI documented that in 2012, fully 61% of all firearm deaths were due to suicides… kind of puts a different perspective on things…
Surely you’re not suggesting that gun suicide isn’t worth consideration?
People will use the best available tool when offing themselves. If it wasn’t a gun, it would have been something else. How do gun suicides compare to the total suicide rate and items? How does gun crime compare to all violent crime? How do gun deaths compare to all assault deaths?
It’s minute. A distraction. It is so far down that the only reason to pursue it before any actual issues is because someone’s critical thinking ability has been impaired. These sort of articles are framed to entrap the low information voter.
So gun suicide is a “distraction”. Nevermind the fact that suicide by gun precludes any second chance. Nevermind the fact that most gun death is by suicide as per the CDC. It’s not minute as you would have others believe.
A distraction is when a gun enthusiast resorts to trying to change the subject to other means of violent death. It’s along the same lines that the NRA cult uses to distract by claiming that bats, bottles, knives, cars etc. can kill too.
This sort of sophistry is used in order to distract from the fact that the U.S. has the highest rate of gun death/injury of all other developed nations. Other objects of death are not the cause of our shameful gun death/injury rate. Unfortunately, you would have us believe that we can do nothing about it.
And then you have the gall to resort to ad hominem arguments by questioning other’s “critical thinking ability” or as “low info voters”. Attacking those you disagree with rather than addressing the issue is a sure sign of a weak position.
I’m astonished that you would so casually dismiss all of the vastly more prevalent forms of violent death to focus on the one that occurs the least. I prefer to look at the whole and focus my attention and resources where they will have the most impact. Not solely on the smallest segment.
Unlike low information voters.
You do not quote any figures for your ‘vastly more prevalent forms of violent death’ so I will do it for you- in 2013 ( a typical year – in fact quite a low year in the homicide stats )) there were 14,196 homicides in the USA – 11,419 were killed with firearms. Over 80% of all homicides were carried out with firearms. Now would you like to rephrase your statement as it is obvious you got it completely the wrong way round?
From the World Health Organization
The latest Murder Statistics for the world:
Murders per 100,000 citizens per year.
Honduras 91.6 (WOW!!)
El Salvador 69.2
Cote d’lvoire 56.9
Jamaica 52.2
Venezuela 45.1
Belize 41.4
US Virgin Islands 39.2
Guatemala 38.5
Saint Kitts and Nevis 38.2
Zambia 38.0
Uganda 36.3
Malawi 36.0
Lesotho 35.2
Trinidad and Tobago 35.2
Colombia 33.4
South Africa 31.8
Congo 30.8
Central African Republic 29.3
Bahamas 27.4
Puerto Rico 26.2
Saint Lucia 25.2
Dominican Republic 25.0
Tanzania 24.5
Sudan 24.2
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 22.9
Ethiopia 22.5
Guinea 22.5
Dominica 22.1
Burundi 21.7
Democratic Republic of the Congo 21.7
Panama 21.6
Brazil 21.0
Equatorial Guinea 20.7
Guinea-Bissau 20.2
Kenya 20.1
Kyrgyzstan 20.1
Cameroon 19.7
Montserrat 19.7
Greenland 19.2
Angola 19.0
Guyana 18.6
Burkina Faso 18.0
Eritrea 17.8
Namibia 17.2
Rwanda 17.1
Mexico 16.9
Chad 15.8
Ghana 15.7
Ecuador 15.2
North Korea 15.2
Benin 15.1
Sierra Leone 14.9
Mauritania 14.7
Botswana 14.5
Zimbabwe 14.3
Gabon 13.8
Nicaragua 13.6
French Guiana 13.3
Papua New Guinea 13.0
Swaziland 12.9
Bermuda 12.3
Comoros 12.2
Nigeria 12.2
Cape Verde 11.6
Grenada 11.5
Paraguay 11.5
Barbados 11.3
Togo 10.9
Gambia 10.8
Peru 10.8
Myanmar 10.2
Russia 10.2
Liberia 10.1
Costa Rica 10.0
Nauru 9.8
Bolivia 8.9
Mozambique 8.8
Kazakhstan 8.8
Senegal 8.7
Turks and Caicos Islands 8.7
Mongolia 8.7
British Virgin Islands 8.6
Cayman Islands 8.4
Seychelles 8.3
Madagascar 8.1
Indonesia 8.1
Mali 8.0
Pakistan 7.8
Moldova 7.5
Kiribati 7.3
Guadeloupe 7.0
Haiti 6.9
Timor-Leste 6.9
Anguilla 6.8
Antigua and Barbuda 6.8
Lithuania 6.6
Uruguay 5.9
Philippines 5.4
Ukraine 5.2
Estonia 5.2
Cuba 5.0
Belarus 4.9
Thailand 4.8
Suriname 4.6
Laos 4.6
Georgia 4.3
Martinique 4.2
And ………
The United States 4.2 !!!!!
ALL (109) of the countries above America,
HAVE 100% gun bans.
It might be of interest to note that SWITZERLAND is not shown on this list, because it has…NO MURDER OCCURRENCE!
However, SWITZERLAND’S law requires that EVERYONE:
1. Own a gun.
2. Maintain Marksman qualifications … regularly .
Honduras does NOT have a gun ban much less a 100% ban… keep trying!
Dont you dare pull Switzerland into this. Yes we have a lot of guns but NO FUCKING AMMUNITION. Stop talking about things you dont understand. We are free and dont have to live in the constant fear of getting shot every day. We dont need to tell ourselfs that we are better than everyone else because we are a more mature society and at least we are not as fucked up as the US.
As an American who wants our country to speak about gun control, I truly thank you for your comment. I’m so sick of morons who pull out the Switzerland argument. Either way, I don’t think our society is near that maturity yet or even close. Hell, after 23 kids were shot and killed no politician had the balls to take on the fucked up NRA. It’s a joke here.
no one had the balls to begin having someone armed and taking the gun free killing zone away where the lunatics that want to kill will not kill.
Advocating that guns should be allowed in schools, churches, hospitals, grocery stores or other “Gun Free Zones” is absurd. The NRA cult has created the euphemism “Gun Free Zone” in order to obscure the fact that their argument would be obviously ridiculous if they actually said outright that they want more guns EVERYWHERE. How else would they be able to keep the arms industry in business.
The fact is that the NRA cult is little more than a front group for the arms industry and their push for guns everywhere is the proof.
The blame is held by the corrupt justice system that encourages crime by protecting the criminal and punishing the law-abiding. From politicians to judges, to cuts to police departments in order to give local government officials raises and more vacation money, people have no one to defend us but ourselves, and until reform of both local and state government, we the people have to protect ourselves from anyone wishing to do harm. But truth is not what your after, NRA cult, really? you have no clue what the NRA is really about or what they even do nation wide.
Firearm death happens every 37 minutes, a rape happens every 6 seconds this according to the FBI. Criminals and the mentally unstable having access to firearms is the problem, the reason liberals and progressives can’t admit to this is because they are the reason for their ease of access, NOT the NRA, NRA wants criminals and the mentally unstable peoples access removed from society, prosecuted, laws designed to stop gang violence, enforced, laws already on the books to stop the Adam Lanzas, enforced. You think an “Assault Weapons” ban will fix it, we’ve had an “Assault Weapons” ban since 1932, It’s called the National Firearms Act! 2011 80,000 people were denied firearm purchase through background checks, 44 of those prosecuted, how many of the rest obtained firearms and committed crimes?
Instead of whining and crying about how many people have guns, lets shout about how disgusted we are about how the criminal justice system continually allows felons to obtain illegally purchased firearms, to obtain firearms confiscated in crimes to be used in other crimes. Officials turning people like Trayvon Martins loose on the street so your crime stats look good to the public.
Your blaming the wrong people, my friend. But thats how the system works, keep you focused on anything but the real problem, so business can continue as usual, and you are oblivious to the real threat. Trust me, it’s not the law-abiding gun owner you need to worry about.
The NRA showed it’s full of shit when it banned guns from it’s own convention in certain areas. They know some of their members their are nuts. They just don’t know which ones because they don’t want background checks. And why leave Switzerland out, just because they figured it out?
Oh, so you would rather NRA members break local laws and ordinances in order to “save face” in your eyes? Spin it how you like, but what it really shows, is how responsible the NRA and it’s members really are! If you were a gun owner you would know we already have a “background check” system in place, it’s just not enforced by the Federal government when someone fails the background check when trying to purchace a firearm! So, it pretty obvious who’s really full of shit…Sam!
Advocating that guns should be allowed in schools, churches, hospitals, grocery stores or other “Gun Free Zones” is absurd.
NOT ABSURD! If your pathetic life is ever saved by a citizen carrying a LEGALLY PERMITTED FIREARM you had best THANK HE OR SHE! YOUR pathetic crybaby crap won’t do a THING to stop the assault! MY GUN WILL PAL!
Yeah, and IF frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their ass. Your ABSURD hypothetical is so far out in EXTREME RIGHT field that that it makes you look like a RAVING LUNATIC.
Such rants cannot substitute for sound national policies on firearms which, to date, we don’t have.
You’re very young for your age aren’t you Donnie Boy. When you finally grow up and do away with your ridiculous John Wayne fantasies, we’ll talk. Until then we don’t have anything else to say to each other.
Hey man I agree with you they don’t have enough sense to know that this way of thinking is exactly why in the near future everyone will need a tank to be safe. Mark my word somewhere one of the John Waynes are going to make a mistake and shoot and kill an innocent person.
It’s really the drop in money for mental health care that has allowed people like this to get guns. That and people not taking proper care of their personal firearms (and these people are in the vast minority).
If you look at shootings like this historically there really has been almost no difference, the biggest issue now is the “round the world” instant communication system that lets everyone know what’s going on everywhere instantaneously.
YOU PEOPLE SICKEN ME! Just what the F-U-C-K will imposing new laws on the LAW ABIDING DO?? It is NOT GUN OWNERS who set bail so low virtually even a career criminal can be out in 24 hours! LAW ABIDING MEANS JUST THAT “LAW ABIDING” and no gawddamned law ill make them MORE LAW ABIDING! NOR WILL laws imposed on the LAW ABIDING do a F-U-C-K-I-N-G THING TO DETER CRIMINALS from breaking the law!
If you define “mature” as, having a huge and growing muslim problem, a population of “law abiding” people unable to do jack shit about it, a government foolish enough to encourage it, well, that speaks for itself. I guess you can boing them with watch springs or throw chocolate at the problem. WE WILL NEVER HAVE THAT PROBLEM.
You sir, are a classic example of a person who should NOT have a gun. You are clearly unstable and present a threat to yourself and those around you.
We the people have religious freedom. Also 1/3 of the world is muslim. If they wanted you, they could get you. Columbine, Oklahoma city, Sandy Hook. Muslims don’t corner the market on crazy. How many people were killed by the 9/11 attacks. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to how many of our own we kill. The guy is right. YOU are the kind of person who doesn’t need a gun. Unstable, bigot, hot headed, kind of simple. Yeah we’d all feel safer with you around.
FLORINA! You don’t have AMMUNITION but you have the highest rate OF ILLEGAL AMMUNITION known to man! Switzerland is a land of pussies who believe THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS BEST! That alone is BULLY-CHIT!
The list above is all third world, undeveloped nations. It’s a shame that we’ve descended to the point that we have to compare ourselves favorably to third world nations in order to defend the indefensible. More accurate would be to compare ourselves to developed, first world nations like Italy, France, Spain, England, Netherlands, Australia, etc. In that regard the U.S. has the highest rate of gun death/injury of all other developed nations.
And regarding Switzerland whose murder rate is much lower than the U.S. It’s worth noting that Switzerland allows their citizens gun rights but at the same time they are able to pass effective gun safety regs. We can’t because unlike Switzerland, we have an NRA cult that obstructs, filibusters, and loopholes all regs through the efforts of their legally bribed politicians. Nor does Switzerland have a 2nd Amendment while at the same time allowing gun rights. We could learn a lot from Switzerland if we could overcome the destructive NRA cult.
Oh come on. The NRA isn’t so bad. Hell they don’t even let their members pack a loaded gun at their convention. They just want you to be able to pack a loaded gun where they won’t be shot by an idiot. Sounds like a good move for the NRA. They are at least smart enough to know they aren’t safe.
I’m late to the game here – just saw this article. My 2 cents is that you aren’t doing much of a balanced graph in comparing the ‘high income’ countries with gun violence because most countries have quite strict gun laws and not the militia minded 2nd amendment. Now. if you include all homicides / murders with any weapon in accordance to population size may show a better comparison. Why is there such a bias for gun owners, the majority are law abiding. It’s just too bad so many are available for criminal intentions, that’s my only pause.
At the risk opening a flood gate here but has anyone ever noticed or wondered if immigration had an impact on the occurance of gun violence in the US? If you look at the gun violence rates of ALL countries, regardless of economics, most south and central countries are right up at the top, far above even the US. Now, if we factor in immigration from these countries to the US, especially in recent years, has it affected the gun violence ratio? Just curious….
A more relevant issue is the fact that most guns obtained by Mexican drug cartels come from the U.S. So maybe the gun death/injury rate in Mexico might be because of lax gun regs in the U.S. rather than the other way around as you’ve suggested.
Perhaps, from a Mexico point of view, but that wasn’t my question or suggestion at all. My question was in regard to central and south American countries that have even higher gun violence rates than we do (Mexico is neither central nor south America) and the recent influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from these countries…..
If we’re to make comparisons then it should be among developed nations like ourselves. Central/South American nations are not considered developed nations. Honduras has the highest rate of gun death/injury in the world. Should we compare ourselves to that undeveloped, Central American nation in order to make our shameful gun death/injury rate look better?
It’s sad that we’ve descended to the point that we have to resort to comparing ourselves favorably to nations like Honduras instead of developed nations like Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, France, Switzerland, England, etc. Of all developed nations we have the highest rate of gun death/injury and that’s a statistic that no one including the NRA cult is denying.
I was not comparing us to these undeveloped nations, or any nation for that matter. No offense here but did you actually read what I said and comprehend it? I did NOT compare us to any of them in any way or deny any statistic, I only asked if anyone had considered the influx of immigration to the US from these countries when considering this statistic; it stands to reason that it could, and probably does have at least some bearing. When people immigrate they bring with them ideas, beliefs, behaviors, etc from their native land, whether that land is considered developed or not.
I see your point and it’s a good one. Thanks for the clarification and advice. I’ll read more closely next time.
In fact, your point is one of the reasons given for the high gun death/injury rate in Chicago. The Mexican Suarez cartel relocated to Chicago because it’s centrally located for distribution. And there’s a direct correlation to when the cartel moved there and the rate of death/injury escalating.
However, it does raise an interesting question. The developed nations I mentioned might feel the same about those who immigrate from the U.S. given our high rate of gun death/injury. It works both ways.
Perhaps “Vivek Murthy, a renowned Boston-based physician” should address a REAL public health threat in his own sphere of expertise. The Journal of Patient Safety estimates there are between 210,000-440,000 deaths due to poor hospital related care. Oh, but 8,000 gun deaths are so much more sensational! And it takes the heat off the medical community so they can continue to ignore their own little disaster. Reality is that gun deaths pale by comparison to most everyday fatalities, like drunk driving. Priorities, gentlemen, priorities.
Hospitals, DUI etc. are not the cause of our shameful gun death/injury rate that is higher than all other developed nations. Your priorities are misplaced. Focus on the issue at hand instead of trying to change the issue to other priorities.
You guys are really spin doctors. Gun violence. How about all violence. Russia has a very low rate of gun ownership, however their murder rate is 5X that of The USA. Also. FACT taken directly from the New York City Police Department internet site, statistics of all violent crimes broken down by type of crime and then by race. When you take all the numbers from all the violent crimes add them together and keep them separated by only race this is what you get. Between 87% and 93% of all violent crimes in New York City are committed by blacks and/or hispanics. Period. I don’t think any more of an explanation is necessary.
Yes, that has nothing to do with the rates of poverty among that race. Nope, they’re just genetically predisposed to be assholes, right?
New York is not America. That speaks for very little to use that as a defense.
Also, it’s not hard to be better then Russia, just as it isn’t hard to be better then North Korea or most of Africa.
You know jearkoff I grew up poor in the Bronx. I did not I did not go into a life of crime. You know I never even mugged any body. You Know why When I got home my father would beat the crap out of me if he found out. You know life intimates art what is the most confusing day in harlem ‘FATHER’S DAY’ Apparently you have the memory of a goldfish you know 1.5 seconds. When Dinkins the mens room attendant was mayor he ordered the NYPD not to arrest panhandlers and do you remember one of dinkins aids sonny carson a convicted murderer helped him to take businesses from the Koreans? Now let’s not forget the LIRR shooter who said he waited for the train to get out of NYC to shoot people so dinkins would not get blamed ,BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, every word out of your mouth is BULLSHIT. Now this is not hearsay I was there. You guys should ought be sent back to Africa you guys borne here would die in Africa because over there if you do not work you die or get eaten. The Africans who come here now should be ashamed they might even be related to you, you know why? THEY WORK FOR A LIVING. You should try it. They hold their own by working, I guess the possibility of being eaten by a lion would give you enough of a push to work. So tell me how you feel about what I said. First the guys coming over now work you know why and they should be treated as well as you have been. They will put you to shame.
That response was incredibly non-sequitur.
I had a hard time understanding what you’re even trying to say.
But from what I did gather, you just proved my point. You’re saying the cultural based indignation that is a stereotype prevalent in America. among blacks and Hispanics is the problem. Which is my point. It has nothing to do with race, but the said cultures situation in America, which is usually poverty stricken.. That was my fault if it came across as if poverty is ALWAYS the cause, because it’s not. But it does contribute to it in many cases with statistical evidence to show that it is very often related. That’s what I was trying to say.
Basically generations of racism, poverty caused the ghetto culture.
And for the record, I’m not even African or black, so I don’t know why you jumped down my throat as if it’s relevant to the discussion
Over 60% of those firearm deaths in the US are suicides…not crimes of violence. This is a mental health issue, not a gun control issue.
Are you claiming that gun suicide is not worth consideration in our total gun death/injury rate? Your effort to minimize gun suicide in order to defend the indefensible speaks volumes.
And yet so many Americans still insist that the solution is more guns…
“What can the US learn from strategies these countries are taking to address gun violence?”
Nothing. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.”
No strategies allowed. Sorry.
Honestly, I kinda hate our Founding Father’s for putting those last four words at the end…because of them, there’s little we can do to curtail this ridiculous trend.
Realize though the guns they had back then and the conditions they were under. This should of been amended years ago when automatic weapons were even available.
The founding fathers had the rules at least somewhat correct for their day and age. The real flaw is that anyone would ever think rules from even 50 years ago still make complete and total sense with no reason to change it, or at least make it more clear.
Also, a well-regulated militia should be people TRAINED to handle guns, not some regular joe who thinks his neighbor is out to get him. A lot of people bring up Switzerland as a card to show that lots of guns works, but everyone there is trained, or only has it for hunting. Even still, they have higher gun related deaths and crimes then their stricter neighbors, so it still proves the point that while people kill people, the gun is a sure helps.
“The US has higher rates of homicides from guns than Pakistan”.
Yeah, it’s kind of hard for guns to beat out car bombs there.
Okay to be fair about this why don’t you add all those that were slaughter by their Governments right after their guns were taken away. I guarantee you outside of a war unless the war was started by taking the guns the United State would be Saints by comparison to the other countries so this study is flawed already.
56,000,000 people were slaughtered after the guns were taken from the people. Chine, Soviet Union and Germany led this with the most.
As I stated above this is flawed and from this day forth shall be dismissed as an incomplete study because not all the facts were presented nice try.
What? Can u provide evidence where comparable countries to the USA had that happen? When? Where?
The rest makes no sense to me. The US would be saints? 56 million? Huh? Where is that from?
Do you not care that USA has the highest number of people killed by guns in the comparison countries? All those people are and have Mums, Dads, Brothers, Sisters, close relatives, friends. The research SHOWS the extraordinary number killed by guns in USA. No where else is it so high. Too many innocents killed. SO sad. Do SOMETHING!
Before banning guns please ban automobiles, knives and hammers each of which are used in more deaths per year than firearms.
Phillip Karsten. The article is about gun deaths. What you seem to not get in this article, is this is a comparison to other similar “first world” countries, where the USA has far and away the highest kill ratio.
All murder, or accidental deaths, however caused, are sad. Are you suggesting that “gun” deaths somehow are less sad? Guns are specifically made to kill. Owning them just can’t be justified using your idiotic comparisons. Stop the killing of your fellow citizens. Do something about gun ownership, particularly the small hand guns and automatic weapons for a start.
Curious if there are statistics on non-gun related violent crimes and how those stack up against gun crimes. Also these numbers are only taking into consideration the crimes that are reported. Places like Mexico, Columbia, Afghanistan,Sudan etc. I suspect have figures that deviate from what is actually occurring.
2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S.
That’s 30,000 people killed the U.S. That’s more than failure of the liver. and Parkinson’s disease.
That’s more than AIDS.
Every time there is a “Sandy Hook” tragedy 500 million Europeans wonder why a nation with some of the world’s smartest and most influential people cannot prevent it happening again. And again.
Put all the other countries in the picture and the USA is actually 111 place! Many of the top 110 placed countries have strict gun laws. Then remove the gun free zones where many of the gun deaths occur and the figure drops dramatically.
The stats are per 100,000 people. It accounts for the difference you talk about. Or there is this quote:If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan,
Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you’ll get a population
roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last
year, they had 112. Do you think it’s because Americans are more
homicidal by nature? Or do you think it’s because those guys have gun
control laws?
There are numerous opinions about “why” (& who is involved), but these (& numerous other) facts show that gun violence in the US is dramatically higher than in other “first world” nations. There are “whys” in other countries, too, but it is simple fact that our guns & gun cultural result in more gun violence.
Women! Geesh.
Take black deaths out and we fall off the chart. They effect the death rate the incarceration rate the education levels. I can go on and on. You know, all the truths we are not aloud to talk about.
Get rid of blacks and US will be at the bottom of the list.
How much of the gun violence in the US is committed by immigrant scum? Did you even try to find out? Or are you just shitting on America so your friends will think you are cool?
(Eight months later): Create your own graphs using only data that makes your study appear so much more detailed than any other. These articles mean no more than the polls taken on any given subject. Hand pick the data that appears favorable and discard any that diminishes the shock value.
Obama and Company (the left wing nut jobs) time and time again stand at the pulpit and profess that their “sane and logical gun laws will stop the mass shootings. Laws applied to long time gun owners who are and have been LAW ABIDING with not even so much as a traffic ticket are ridiculous and would accomplish absolutely nothing. All one need do is look at Obama’s old stomping grounds of ‘Chicago’ solidly prove this to be true.
The post by JOHN ROBEL shown down several ‘spots’ is dead on when it comes to these idiotic “graphs” we see at every turn. I cite his contention and agree fully.
“In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment and the supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.”
AMEN JOHN AMEN!
ALSO DESERVES TO BE REPEATED:
“Troglodyte • 8 months ago
“Just get rid of Detroit, L.A. and Chicago, and the U.S. falls about 48th in the world, crack down on gang violence and black crime, you will see a difference… Oh crap we can’t do that because we might offend someone, let’s just continue to blame the 80 million legal gun owners who haven’t committed a crime.
ANOTHER THAT DESERVES REPEATING:
“Gunut Rhadakrishnan • 3 months ago
The blame is held by the corrupt justice system that encourages crime by protecting the criminal and punishing the law-abiding. From politicians to judges, to cuts to police departments in order to give local government officials raises and more vacation money, people have no one to defend us but ourselves, and until reform of both local and state government, we the people have to protect ourselves from anyone wishing to do harm. But truth is not what your after, NRA cult, really? you have no clue what the NRA is really about or what they even do nation wide.
Firearm death happens every 37 minutes, a rape happens every 6 seconds this according to the FBI. Criminals and the mentally unstable having access to firearms is the problem, the reason liberals and progressives can’t admit to this is because they are the reason for their ease of access, NOT the NRA, NRA wants criminals and the mentally unstable peoples access removed from society, prosecuted, laws designed to stop gang violence, enforced, laws already on the books to stop the Adam Lanzas, enforced. You think an “Assault Weapons” ban will fix it, we’ve had an “Assault Weapons” ban since 1932, It’s called the National Firearms Act! 2011 80,000 people were denied firearm purchase through background checks, 44 of those prosecuted, how many of the rest obtained firearms and committed crimes?
Instead of whining and crying about how many people have guns, lets shout about how disgusted we are about how the criminal justice system continually allows felons to obtain illegally purchased firearms, to obtain firearms confiscated in crimes to be used in other crimes. Officials turning people like Trayvon Martins loose on the street so your crime stats look good to the public.
Your blaming the wrong people, my friend. But thats how the system works, keep you focused on anything but the real problem, so business can continue as usual, and you are oblivious to the real threat. Trust me, it’s not the law-abiding gun owner you need to worry about.
I’m all for the 2nd amendment, but lets face it, unless you believe our founding fathers were homicidal maniacs, that somehow psychically knew about the evolution of the modern firearm, you know that document refers to musket’s–and that’s it.
Comparing a country as big as the 50 states to a country like Spain, England, etc., is disingenuous. The U.S. has much more people. Compare a comparable size state and the stats will not be as skewed.
The stats are per 100,000 people. That accounts for the difference in populations sizes you talk about. Or there is this quote:If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you’ll get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year, they had 112. Do you think it’s because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or do you think it’s because those guys have gun
control laws?
How about we do a study that considers how many violent criminals are released from prison after serving a fraction of their sentence in other countries.
Comparing gun death statistics is a very deceptive and very common strategy among Democrats these days.
I guess the best way to explain this is with an analogy:
Suppose there was a worldwide epidemic of a fatal disease, we’ll call it ‘wakosis,’ that was killing hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Then someone came up with a drug, we’ll call it ‘Dumex’ that was, say, 95% effective at fighting wakosis. The only problem is that the drug has a side effect that sometime causes death itself in say, .2% of cases.
Now suppose that someone did a study about this drug and reported that, in regions, countries, cities, whatever, where the drug was used more, there were, of course more deaths from side effects, and cited them as ‘Dumex-related’ deaths, but didn’t say anything about the effect of Dumex usage on overall wakosis-related death in those areas.
They also reported that some people used intentional Dumex overdose to commit suicide.
Now if you could show that Dumex saved many thousands of lives in areas where it is used, and only caused a few hundred deaths, that’s a good result. But when people talk about those deaths from side effects without considering lives saved, it sounds like a bad result.
When we compare gun-related deaths across different areas without looking at violent crime overall, it’s a lot like comparing ‘Dumex-related’ deaths in our scenario without comparing the overall death rates from the disease.
If you increase gun ownership in a region of course gun-related deaths will go up, but if deaths by other violent means go down, and the end result is that violent deaths go down overall, that is a good result, and this is what we tend to see where gun control is less stringent and legal gun ownership is more common.
(P.S. before you pick at the names ‘wakosis’ and ‘Dumex’ just know I used a random name generator. The names don’t matter that much.)
Miss Katie forgot to do something – remove Democrat strongholds with the toughest gun control laws in the US from the statistics then compare it to the rest of the world. Those Dem strongholds with the toughest gun control account for the vast majority of gun deaths in the US. When they’re removed from the statistics, the US has among the lowest gun death rates in the world.
Don’t bother approving my comment I removed it since posting facts is not what your website is about.
What she is leaving out is that a majority of guns deaths are self inflicted suicides. So the real question is what do we do about that?
and they still feel safe to own the gun, sorry US friends but you are so brainwashed
This is bias as hell
The punchline:
With 300,000,000+ (and growing) guns already in the U.S., no law can change anything — they’re a lost cause!
Homicide rates ~ Same data set ~
Guns do make one safer, as long as one always uses them as intended. Look:
May I ask for a statistic that provides the gun deaths in a way that I can actually use? comparing a country like Finland, for instance, to the US is absurd, the size differential has to be taking into account. Are there any statistics out there that are actually comparing apples to apples?
Err.. That’s what those charts are, per capita statistics are (x) out of one hundred thousand.
You should probably do a little research on how statistics work.
? I made a comment fifteen hours ago. Wondering why it is on hold?
Gun violence felons would be transported back to their neighborhoods; no taxpayer money should be used to support their rehabilitation. Neighborhoods would quickly recognize the need to protect neighborhoods from potential gun violators. Illegals, green card, and visa persons who have been convicted of gun violence must be sent back to their home country by the cheapest means available. American lives are our first priority; we must protect them!
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C. Penalty
1. Rapid Sentencing with new minimum sentencing laws. (establish new courts to address gun violence)
2. Conviction of a crime when is a gun is fired and a victim is injured–shooter pays EACH victim $2,000 per year for ten years and loses one eye or hand for each victim injured–no prison time for the gun crime.
3. Conviction of a crime where a person is killed with a lethal weapon–shooter pays each victim’s family $100,000 and looses both hands or both eyes for each victim–no prison time for the gun crime.
4. Transporting to sell or selling lethal weapons in public or in private without going through the national registry will result in a $25,000 fine for each lethal weapon sold or loss of eye or hand for each violation if fine cannot be paid.
5. Conviction of stealing a lethal weapon will result in a $5,000 fine per weapon and loss of eye or hand for each weapon stolen.
6. Possession of a stolen lethal weapon will result in a $5,000 fine or the loss of eye or hand for each stolen weapon. (possession penalty under the age of 18 is left to the states.)
7. Modifying a weapon for the sake of increasing its capacity or rate of fire–$5,000 or loss of hand or eye for each weapon modified. (penalty under the age of 18 left to the states.)
Gun violence felons would be transported back to their neighborhoods; no taxpayer money
B. Police
1. eliminate police “shoot to kill” as a first response unless a shot has been determined to have already been fired. Simply stated, once an individual fires a lethal weapon his/her protection from a potential lethal response has expired.
2. equip police with long range weapons to rapidly disengage or temporarily disable violent gun users in a vehicle or a crowded environment. (i.e. bazooka type devices shooting paralyzing/tranquilizing gas projectiles, etc.)
3. police car front doors would be reformed and heavily shielded to allow the officer to evaluate the a potential harmful situation from the safety of the vehicle. End exit and shoot.
4. equip police with ten foot stable shaft with taser tip or tranquilizer tip.
5. automated flame throwers as a last resort and only where non-combatants are safe.
6. urge federal government to return armored military vehicles formerly assigned to law enforcement (addressing mass violence) but were removed by the current administration this past year.
We have the worst record of gun violence (murders+ injuries) per 100,000 people of any major developed country. Shame on us. For those here who don’t understand that, get help please. Here’s one idea how to minimize ALL gun violence:
Given: NRA money and US politics have prevented the U.S. Congress from passing universal gun control laws. (For 19 years Congress has refused to even authorize funds for the CDC or NIH to study gun violence in the US although funds for studying vehicle deaths, pool deaths, etc. have been authorized in the past.)
We can achieve a politically acceptable, dramatic reduction in gun violence injuries and deaths, but it will require a multi pronged approach: Prevent-Police-Penalty.
We have the worst record of gun violence (murders+ injuries) per 100,000 people of any major developed country. Shame on us. For those here who don’t understand that, get help please. Here’s one idea how to minimize ALL gun violence:
Given: NRA money and US politics have prevented the U.S. Congress from passing universal gun control laws. (For 19 years Congress has refused to even authorize funds for the CDC or NIH to study gun violence in the US although funds for studying vehicle deaths, pool deaths, etc. have been authorized in the past.)
We can achieve a politically acceptable, dramatic reduction in gun violence injuries and deaths, but it will require a multi pronged approach: Prevent-Police-Penalty.
We have the worst record of gun violence (murders+ injuries) per 100,000 people of any major developed country. Shame on us. For those here who don’t understand that, get help please. Here’s one idea how to minimize ALL gun violence:
Given: NRA money and US politics have prevented the U.S. Congress from passing universal gun control laws. (For 19 years Congress has refused to even authorize funds for the CDC or NIH to study gun violence in the US although funds for studying vehicle deaths, pool deaths, etc. have been authorized in the past.)
We can achieve a politically acceptable, dramatic reduction in gun violence injuries and deaths, but it will require a multi pronged approach: Prevent-Police-Penalty.
The US has the worst record of gun violence (murders+ injuries) per 100,000 people of any major developed country. Shame on us. For those here who don’t understand that, get help please. Here’s one idea how to minimize ALL gun violence:
Given: NRA money and US politics have prevented the U.S. Congress from passing universal gun control laws. (For 19 years Congress has refused to even authorize funds for the CDC or NIH to study gun violence in the US although funds for studying vehicle deaths, pool deaths, etc. have been authorized in the past.)
We can achieve a politically acceptable, dramatic reduction in gun violence injuries and deaths, but it will require a multi pronged approach: Prevent-Police-Penalty.
Folks I have submitted an idea–a three point plan to address gun violence which the NRA/Congress could support. Unfortunately this string places prevention on hold of it on hold.
a. the national gun registry resources must be expanded and the waiting period for purchase of lethal weapons must be increased to ten days from three. (reason: Charleston mass murderer was able to purchase gun because legal three day limit expired–discoveries after three days are not considered!)
b. a 10 day waiting period and the national registry approval would be required for all sales (include web sales and all private sales, including gun shows. Currently this is not done in most states!)
c. National effort to require the use of gun lock boxes in homes where young children are present or a family member is seeking help with mental health issues.
Wow, this article is great at using statistics to lie. Don’t believe me? Go to that first graph and use the link to the graph and add other countries like Russia, all the Eastern European countries, Mexico etc… and ask yourself why they left those out. In the Russia/Eastern European countries, check how the mix of guns to sharp objects and “other means.” It proves that when guns aren’t available, people will kill by whatever means they can. Don’t take my word for it, go click on the link and play with the graph. The fact that they leave these counties out shows they’re lying to us.
Despite the fact that the U.S. has more guns per 100 residents than any other country, there are ten countries in the world that have higher gun-death rates per 1,000 residents than the U.S. Those who favor stricter gun-control laws are quite skillful at selectively using statistics to support their case. They apparently either are unaware of the simple fact, or unwilling to admit, that the only way to effectively reduce gun deaths is to ban private ownership of handguns.
Manipulating, or selectively using statistics, is very naughty.
what’s Jamaicas annual homicide rate /100,00 people??
Where is Honduras, Bolivia, Venezuela, South Africa, Palestine, Turkey, also do the statistcs include suicides by gun???
Why doesn’t the graph show Mexico? Its a stark contrast when you show the U.S. next to Finland and New Zealand. I guess the narrative would change if you put a graph showing the Mexican drug war.
Im pretty sure if you stacked up the rates from each of the other countries listed, the ‘visual’ would be a lot less shocking & a lot more factual. If you take 50 quarters and lay them next to each other & compare it to a roll of 50 quarters, yould have this graph.
How many “homocides’ are suicides?
You forgot to mention that the “gun deaths” that graph is based on include suicides.
Remove them, and the US is basically tied with that dangerous Belgium place
Exclude the 5 cities with the most restrictive gun laws, and the US is second lowest in the world
Now tell me again what more restrictive gun regulations will achieve?
Also, while gun.deaths have declined in Australia ALL other violent crime spoked and continues to be FAR above what it was before the Government gun grab
Where can I find gun deaths based on innocent people? (Away from organized crimes, drugs, etc.) People will always kill people. I am only worried about someone willing to shoot me for no reason. Many of these homicides have no correlation to me as I am not involved in any gang violence, etc.
Reading the comments below would be hilarious if it wasn’t so damn sad. We live in a country where many many people care more about guns, or even inconveniencing gun owners, than they will ever care about the many victims of gun violence. That meets the official definition of ‘insane’ in the world I live in.
The author clearly shows all of her sources, people who are claiming these numbers are made up should actually check the sources, before opening their mouths
Try this by percentage of population gun control fools
This study neglects to compare gun ownership per capita to gun deaths. For example, if one in four people own a car, you could expect to have significantly less car-related deaths than if 3/4 people owned a car.
The US has 112.6 guns per 100 people. Finland has 29.1. Normalized, that sets the Finnish death rate at a little over 7, compared to the US rate of five.
“Compared to certain countries known for their high crime rates, such as Jamaica, Russia…” but no Russia’s statistics here.
I appreciate the consolidation of some of that information. I am more curious about the fact that in the first graph our sharp object and other assault deaths per capita place us at a rate above the rest of the countries in that graphic for all three assault types. The bottom line is that we are a developed country but our violent tendencies or more in line with less prosperous countries. Quite possibly due to our desire to have more power, money, status, etc… being more in line with the less developed countries.
I’m convinced that our violence is driven by two things:
1. The drug trade, and the gangs which facilitate the bulk of it, and,
2. Our cultural “individualist” mindset.
Note, however, that our per-capita homicide rate is middling (we rank #102 of 192 countries), as is our suicide rate. Putting qualifiers onto these points (“gun”+deaths, “developed”+countries, etc.) is more often deception and data manipulation than truth seeking. Human nature and human needs remain a constant.
Interesting that the non-gun homicide rate in the US is higher than the total homicide rates in the “developed countries” that those pushing gun control want to compare us to. That is simple proof that it isn’t “guns” that makes us more violent than those nations. Take every single gun homicide away and we are still a more murderous nation.
“Another issue that gets less attention is how many people die from firearms accidentally.”
That’s because it is so rare as to be a non issue. Compare around 600 accidental gun deaths to close to 40 thousand accidental poisoning deaths. Guns don’t remotely rate in top causes for accidental deaths. It is amazingly low. Pointing out that it is higher than those other countries is as silly as saying we have more DUIs than Saudi Arabia.
This is not “the rest of the world” this is mostly the EU. You really feel confident in telling me there is less gun crime in Pakistan? Move there. I dare you.
The is on mention of the frequency of government overthrow or changes of administrations. Anyone happen to notice that none of the former Soviet countries are included? One example, Russia, began and continues loosening regulations. I think these statistics have been carefully formulated as often they are for this issue.
The first map is misleading; it compares selected (meaning highest gun homicide rate) US cities with the homicide rate in whole countries, on a per 100,000 basis. How about comparing those cities with the worst cities in those countries? The US ranks 28th on the list of countries, on a gun homicide per capita basis – but you wouldn’t get that from the dishonest “cook the books” approach shown above. That brings the credibility of the whole article into doubt.
If these figures are true, rather than artfully manipulated, then why does the World Health Organization rank the US homicide rate as 107th in the world?
to any gun control freaks, I’m sorry, “advocate”, my first question is, what is your ultimate goal? If you were in charge, what would you do? You see, with all the rhetoric and bullshit they throw around like, gun show loop hole – there is no such thing – Universal background check, we already do that – what they want is background checks on private property sells. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? They want to confiscation of every privately own weapon and the government will be in control of every gun in the country, i.e. law enforcement and the military. That is unequivocally the bottom line, the agenda of the left. It always has been. They use Saul Alinsky’s tactic of taking an issue, freeze, let it sit, allow people to polarize on it and demonize the other side with emotional dribble or attempting to shame or guilt the other side. We do not have a gun problem in the US. We have a thug culture, not a gun culture, which is another left bullshit rhetoric phrase. like “assault” rifle. the labels you put on things are the labels that can be attacked.
Compare all you want. We are not the same culture, society. We do not bow to the government idiots.
NO assessment of gun deaths can be made without evaluating who is committing the homicides. In this country 6% of the population, black males, commit almost 40% of all homicides. In Chicago it is 70%. Most are with illegal possession of firearms. Remove those homicides as well as those committed by latino bangers and our stats are quite different. So instead of talking about gun control lets talk about who are committing the homicides and why.
question why compare the United States with countries who outlaw firearms?
Anything the US does is mimicked thoughtlessly anywhere n the world. Elsewhere, laws on gun control actually serve government’s purpose to defend itself, side-by-side with the preservation of the political & economic elites ( that monopolize wealth, power & resources). Despite significant allotments for security, peace & order —the increases/expansion of forces of relevant institutions are debilitated & ill-trained/ equipped/ managed (as evident even from high profile sensationalized incidents). Meantime, responsible & compliant gun owners are burdened by laws with onerous requirements (documentations, clearances, trainings, laboratory test, written examinations, official photos & biometrics etc etc), without regard for the number & kind of arms. The first stage the permit to own and the second stage, for the gun(s) license(s). The lengthy (years with no end in sight as to issuance)process is centralized at HQ at the country-capital. This is tantamount to deprivation of ordinary citizens to protect themselves, with a privileged few who possess arms (legally) as well as the greater unaccounted number of loose & illegal firearms sourced from the underground market (that surface in activities of organized crime & petty crimes against properties & persons). Who are the perpetrators of crime & gun violence (legal or illegal)? Considering ordinary responsible & compliant gun owners are constrained from defending themselves … who decide the luxury/chance (?) to live (with) or die from gun violence?
I suspect these statistics have been manipulated so out of any semblance of truth, they can be honestly labeled a crock.
The thing about australia is that even though they did ban those weapon the murder rate went down for some years it is now up to the same murder rate again so it didnt really change anything really other than what is mostly used to murder with in australias case it rose in murders by sharp-objects