Chicago and Toronto are roughly equal in size. Yet Chicago averages 450 gun murders per year, while Toronto has fewer than 60. Why are Chicagoans seven times more violent and deadly than Toronto residents? Maybe it’s because Canada has sensible gun control laws.
The Charleston Gazette
August 21, 2011
Gun murders: American curse
[And maybe the Charleston Gazette editors are ignoramuses. My friend from Toronto legally owns 40 guns. Most of them are handguns. Handguns, until recently, have been banned in Chicago. How much more “sensible” than banned do these idiots want the gun control laws to be?—Joe]
“How much more “sensible” than banned do these idiots want the gun control laws to be?—Joe]”
Despite the blatant stupidity in that article I think I know what they want. Executed in the street by government thugs for having a gun. That all 90 million US gun owners be wiped out like the nazi’s tried to do with the jews. To them that is “sensible” as we are of course subhuman animals worth less than cattle. And the sad thing is you would think I’m being sarcastic and yet we have people who are on record implying or outright saying such things.
I wonder what the drug laws are like in Toronto?
“I wonder what the drug laws are like in Toronto?”
Good point. It is drug use more than anything else that predicts impulse control which predicts assault, attempted murder and murder statistics for a jurisdiction. Charles Russell said that alcohol had a way of bringing to the surface thoughts and urges that ordinarily would be suppressed, and the same may be said of drugs. I think that places with more drug abuse are more violent, independent of any gun law. Of course the two areas Leftists want laisses-faire are drug use and sex, so anyone who conducts a story examining any correlation is in for a slanderous ad hominem fight of epic proportions.
I see this so often, I think I need a name for it. Perhaps I should just call it “Alphy’s Pet Gun Control Peeve”: when a gun controller is desperate for an example as to why we need gun control, they instinctively reach for Chicago, or Washington DC, or New York, because they have high levels of gun violence–yet they ignore the fact that these places also have the strictest bans on guns in the nation–and perhaps even the world.
I don’t know why this annoys me so much–after all, it makes our case that gun bans increase violence. Perhaps I just dislike seeing stupidity on display. More likely, I’m subconsciously insulted when gun control advocates think I’m so stupid that I won’t be able to see through their example.
Of course, I’m fairly certain that they aren’t out to insult me. I suspect that gun controllers reflexively have this train of thought: Gun laws in the United States are universally lax; Chicago has a high murder rate; Chicago is in the United States; therefore, Chicago murder must be caused by lax gun laws. The flaw in their “thinking” is the belief that United States law is homogeneous. Or rather, that’s the flaw in this line of thinking. Gun controllers are so determined to be “right” that they won’t hesitate to point to Chicago as a perfect model of what the nation should do with regards to gun control–and that the nation would be safer once we implement it!
But then, if gun controllers were consistent in their thinking, they wouldn’t be gun controllers, would they?