If criminals and the irresponsible obeyed gun laws both gun crimes and accidental gun fatalities would virtually cease. Of course violent crime would continue with other weapons… In gun banning Russia criminals and suicides use other methods so successfully that both murder and suicide are four times higher than in the U.S.
Don B. Kates
May 23, 2013
“Easy Availability of Guns” – – Not!!!
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Homicide rates are a poor metric to use for gun violence, or any violent crime, compared with total criminal use of guns, or criminal use of violence.
Homicide occurs after TWO things happen: the violence, and the treatment of the violence. Thus in downtown Baltimore, MD, if you get to the Trauma Center by car or ambulance before your heart stops, you will likely survive your gunshot wounds, whereas in Russia there are far fewer ambulance, paramedics, and Trauma Centers.
However, during a crime if the criminal pulls a gun, shoots a gun at someone, hits someone with a shot, or kills them with their shooting, ALL of those actions should be considered in the rate of criminal misuse of firearms, whether the victim is shot or not, whether the victim dies or not.
Apples don’t compare well with hammers, in my opinion.
I remember reading a blurb about that somewhere not too long ago. Basically argues that when comparing crime stats over time, and across countries, because of changes in medical technology over time, and disparities between regions and nations, the aggravated assault rate is a much better proxy for overall violence than homicide rate. Don’t remember where I saw it. There is less politicization of a punch in the snoot than a shooting, for example, and the medical result will not change much over time or across borders.
Yes; we should be very careful when we trot out murder rates and all the rest to make a moral point.
If we look at principles however, statistics have no bearing one way or the other.
AND I should point out that a society adrift from basic principles (departed from reason) will be more violent and it will have more suicides.
If we want a better metric for predicting crime rates (for all kinds of crime) we should be looking at politics, belief systems and culture, not guns.
To me it is blatantly obvious– A society that truly values human life, property rights and liberty (all the same thing really) i.e. conservative Judeo/Christian in more than name only, will be less violent than one that’s trying to deny the value of human life, deny property rights and define liberty as an out-dated concept.
In other words, leftism is a wholesale crime and conservatism (the real kind– the American founding principles as opposed to the fake, Republican kind) is the wholesale antidote. Still, there will always be individual criminals and there will always be leftist scum trying to take over, and so we need guns.
Just don’t fuck with me and mine and you’re perfectly safe. The left of course wants nothing BUT to fuck with me and mine (and you and yours) and so they see all private gun ownership (correctly) as a threat, as would any criminal. That’s the whole story right there, in a nutshell. Statistics may be interesting distractions now and then, but in the final analysis they don’t have any weight in determining what is right and what is wrong, because right and wrong exist on their own, apart from them
Farmers (and all businesses) have use for statistics, as do communists, and for the same reasons, if they want to determine the outcomes of their programs. The left of course views humanity as their one big “farm” and so they love statistics. Statistics then, in the political context, are for communists. Someone motivated by right principles in the political context has no need for statistics whatsoever.
What is right doesn’t suddenly become wrong, and something that is wrong does not suddenly become right, with the crossing of some statistical threshold.
“In gun banning Russia criminals and suicides use other methods so successfully that both murder and suicide are four times higher than in the U.S.”
Which is to say, tacitly, that if Russian murder and suicide rates, under their gun ban, were one fourth those in the U.S., then banning guns would be considered not only OK, but a good thing indeed. So if rape were legalized, and then later our murder and robbery rates, or say our cancer rates, went down, or our economy improved, or the weather and crop harvests improved, etc., we could say that we’ve proved legal rape to be a good thing for humanity.
That’s not necessarily a proper cause and effect case, you say? Excellent. So what is? I say that it’s attachment to morals and principles that result in a more peaceful society, and also that it is the left that attacks the very notion of morals and principles as we understand them. And so it become a very simple argument of good verses evil, a good society being better in every way (unless you’re a criminal) than an evil one. To isolate guns from the big picture then; protecting human rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, is good and it promotes good, while to disrespect those rights, and that right, is evil and as such it promotes evil, all else notwithstanding.
But we CANNOT isolate arms rights from other rights anymore than one can claim to value human life while practicing genocide. Any moral inconsistencies invite statistics or other arbitrary factors, including brute force, as the argument, rather right verses wrong.