Gun violence in America is off the chart compared with every
other country on the planet. The gun–homicide rate per capita in the US is 30
times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India, and 4 times that
of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would
ask, ”Does America have some potential cause for this that is also off the
chart?” I doubt that anyone seriously thinks we have 30 times as many crazy
people as Britain or Australia, but we do have many, many more guns.
There are 88.8 firearms per 100 people in the US. In second
place is Yemen with 54.8, Switzerland with 45.7 and then Finland with 45.3. No
other country has a rate above 40. The US handgun ownership rate is 70% higher
than that of the country with the next highest rate.
The fact of the increasing ease with which Americans can buy
ever more deadly weapons is also obvious. Over the past few decades, crime has
been declining, except in one category. In the decade since 2000, violent crime
rates have fallen by 20%, aggravated assault by 21%, motor vehicle theft by
44.5% and none firearm homicides by 22% but the number of firearm homicides is
essentially unchanged. What can explain this anomaly except easier access to guns.
Confronted with this blindingly obvious casual connection,
otherwise intelligent people close their eyes.
Congress passed the first set of federal laws regulating
licensing and taxing guns in 1934. The act was challenged and went to the US
Supreme Court in 1939. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H.
Jackson, said that the Second Amendment grants people a right, that is not one
which may be utilized for private purposes, but only one which exists were the
arms are born in the militia are some other military organization provided for
by law and intended for the protection of the state. The court agreed
unanimously.
Things started to change in the 1970s as various right –
wing groups coalesced to change gun control, overturning laws in the state
legislatures, Congress and the courts. But Chief Justice Warren Burger, a
conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of
the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as one of the greatest
pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by
special interest groups that I have never seen in my lifetime.
So when people threw up their hands and say we can’t do
anything about guns, tell them they’re being un-American – and unintelligent.
Excerpt from Time Magazine 8/20/2012
Consider an evaluation of the people behind the trigger, which create those stats.
ReplyDeleteHave any of the studies with regard to gun violence investigated what areas of those countries and what subset of the population is responsible for the majority of the gun violence? In the United States that would undoubtedly be too politically incorrect. It’s a shame that we have become so liberal that facts and truth have become synonymous with ethnic stereotyping.
ReplyDelete