Or, perhaps they were just say what they meant.
"As our population is 5 times that of England’s (300 million vs. 60 million) we should expect 5 times their gun homicides each year or 375. In fact we have 12,000 each year. But in our country, not only do criminals have all the guns they want*, but so do the law-abiding citizens.
There is only one explanation for these facts: It is the law-abiding citizens with guns, not the criminals, who are committing the majority of the gun homicides. (emphasis supplied-OP)
We would have a fraction of the gun homicides we have if only the criminals had guns. Criminals are interested in getting money, not in killing people. Over 50% of U.S. gun homicides are due to arguments not criminals. (FBI Annual Uniform Crime Reports)."If your primary goal is elimination of gun violence, and you feel that a particular group (in this case law abiding gun owners) is causing most of that violence, then any rational person would try to disarm that group. They do want to take your guns away. Of course we need to remember how this colors the Brady campaign as well.
I will leave it to those better suited to fisk the nonsense regarding the percent of homicides due to argument vs criminal behavior, but here's a hint-criminals have friends, family and associates that they argue with...
Due to arguments? Yep, arguments over drug debts and arguments over drug turf.
ReplyDeleteGood catch. I didn't read far enough. I saw that they were comparing us to Great Britain and that doesn't pass the laugh test.
Always blame the law abiding citizen. That is always their plan. They want nothing less than the complete disarmament of the American people. Crazy Joan is always saying gun owners are law abiding until they are not. Except the facts show that most of the killing is done by previously convicted felons killing each other or people they know. But that doesn't fit their agenda.
ReplyDeleteNGVAC has almost exactly the same board of directors as the Brady bunch. Who changed their name from Handgun Control Inc. Then you have CSGV who changed their name from Coalition to ban handguns. The names may change but the players remain the same.
The one statistic I NEVER see out of the anti-gunners is a direct per-capita comparison of assaults (with weapons) and all forms of homicide. We have more gun deaths, sure, but we have more guns too. How does the overall number of homicides stack up? Do the British kill five times as many of each other with knives/shives/cricket bats? How is the assault rate, are more people per capita in Britian assaulted and hurt but survive? The anti-gunners love to point out events like that Arizona shooting as an example as how America is a violent, crazy nation. But I never see these left wingers condone some Soccer riot that leaves 30 people dead and a few hundred more injured. That's just par for the course through out the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteSean-maybe Thirdpower can get another 25 bucks out of Fineman over this?
ReplyDeleteRobert-we must remain vigilant-watch the hands, not the words.
Anonymous-I don't have the data in front of me, but it's my understanding that in the UK, the rate of homicide by knife is also much lower than ours. IIRC, the ratio of our gun homicide to theirs is roughly equal to the ratio of our knife homicide to theirs. The implication being that the disparity in gun homicide rates is due to other societal factors and not the gun laws. Another tidbit that these guys leave out is that the ratio of ours to theirs was unchanged when they enacted their laws, again meaning that the disparity has nothing to do with hte law and everything to do with other social factors.
Wow. That NGVAC webpage is just chock-a-block full of non sequiteurs, is it not?
ReplyDeleteYes, our "gun death" rate is higher than that of once-Great Britain. However, simply because that is true, that does not mean "law abiding citizens" are the ones doing the killing. There is no logic in the world that would hold that to be true, and yet they treat it as gospel.
Amazing. Disturbing, but amazing.
One of the problems of comparing any crime here in the States to any crime over in once-Great Britain is that we both define crimes in different fashions (and have different ideas of what constitutes "violent"), and the latter has a known, documented history of not recording crimes in order to keep their statistics low. The last rumor I heard is that a precinct (or whatever their equivalent is) was not booking crimes unless there was an actual arrest made, despite there being a bleeding, wounded victim on the ground. I have no substantiation of that, see here for the rough idea.
Aside from that, though, Kevin has a great series of posts documenting how our violent crime rates and once-Great Britain's violent crime rates are converging, indicating our laws are not the problem.