Discussion for article #237656
I was fortunate enough to live in London for a year. During the year, there were a total of 12 murders in a city of about 8 or 9 million people, if you add all the suburbs.
One of those murders involved a gun, most of the others were domestic stabbings or strangulations of women by men.
I was always amazed when I went out to big crowd gatherings, sports events, concerts, whatever, and the “Bobby’s” as they are called, had no lethal weapons, just nightsticks. Of course, this was 36 years ago. But back in the USA at that time, I think over 900 gun murders happened in NYC that same year.
I spent another 6 months in Geneva, Switzerland, and another 3 months in Paris. In Geneva, there were absolutely NO, (ZERO) murders while I was there. Geneva is a city area about the population of DesMoines, IA, where I also spent a year. In DesMoines, IA, in a year, there were 18 gun deaths mostly murders, a couple suicides.
Oh, and in Paris, 3 months, about the population of Baltimore: 3 gun deaths in 3 months, two of them by Americans against Americans.
We live in an increasingly different culture than Europe, and even different from our neigbor sisters and brothers in Canada, where gun deaths are about 1/10th per million people of what they are here, and many of those are suicide, (cold weather and depression and alcoholism is huge in Canada).
Yes, I do my own little “study” of these things. Of course, one canno t draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence, but the anecdotal evidence matches the broad worldwide statistics over the years. Access to guns leads to more suicides and murders.
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What? They haven’t heard of “American Exceptionalism” or “penis envy”?
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That’s easy. A very large segment of Americans are generally cowards, and the less educated they are, the more cowardly they are.
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There’s a lot of cowards in most western cultures, I find. And a lot of under-educated people, too. Many people in Europe, for instance, never get as far as what we would call a high school education, are slotted into “crafts or trades” apprenticeships at the age of 15. But there’s no guns to be bought on the open market for many of them, so they are less educated, and cowardly, but they don’t get guns and kill each other like we do here. Explanation? Kind of obvious. Guns are too easy to get in the USA.
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American dudery needs Viagra, testosterone and as many guns as necessary to make 'em feel like a manly men.
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Many of these “puzzled” Countries that criticize America treat their citizens like children and have practically no knowledge of personal freedom. That’s why America is America and they are…well… who they are. Not sure many people want to voluntarily move to, say, China.
Hey, IDIOT! There’s plenty of personal freedom in Western Europe. The issue is not that they treat their citizens like children; they treat their citizens like human beings. As opposed to America where the country allows its citizens to reenact scenes from “Lord of the Flies” on a periodic basis and do nothing about it.
Because, you know, freedom.
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I truly believe that the reason non-Americans are baffled about our ridiculous ADDICTION to guns is due to the fact that it’s not a need.
It’s want. And there’s no reasoning at all with someone who wants something that they’re addicted to.
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As an American, I’m totally baffled by our need for guns. Seems the one thing you can count on is that those who want guns the most are those who should have them the least.
I lived in Australia for a couple of years and the worst mistake I ever made was returning here.
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The NRA and the Republicans own the gun violence and all the gun related deaths in this country - PERIOD!
Obama needs to issue an executive order right now directing the CDC to collect and report on gun violence by state across our entire nation - ASAP! It is time for the truth to reach the American people. Right now, the NRA and the Republicans have defended their legislation that prohibits the CDC from collecting, analyzing, and reporting on gun violence.
Gun violence in the US is a national health issue and it is a national security issue!
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A Congressional Research Service report published in 2013 counted 78 mass-shooting incidents over a thirty-year period in which 547 people were killed.
That means 78 out of 118,000,000 gun owners (0.00007% of the gun owning population, or seven one hundred thousandths of a percent) are potential mass-murderers.
Every day in America, another 28 people die in drunk driving crashes. Every. Single. Day.
Compare that to the 20 people per year killed in mass shootings and ask yourself which is the greater danger, guns or drunk drivers?
And never forget that governments, primarily “redistributionist” governments, murdered 262 million of their own citizens in the 20th century alone, and that gun prohibition was the first step in all those democides.
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For those who can deal with comedy today, Aussie stand-up Jim Jeffries sums all of this up really well:
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“Compare that to the 20 people per year killed in mass shootings and ask yourself which is the greater danger, guns or drunk drivers?”
Are you really that stoopid?
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This is a remarkable ridiculous comment.
How many people are killed by cars is irrelevant to how many people are killed by guns.
Try arguing with actual facts that have merit.
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Spoken like someone who has not visited many countries. I have. Many of those countries have more freedom that we do and no guns.
Go figure.
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White Americans are preparing for either Armageddon or the Great Race War. So they need lots of guns per family. Just remember if you ever visit the U.S. (at your own risk, mind you), and you arrive at the Atlanta international airport, white people can carry guns in the airport. Don’t be alarmed. However, if you are a foreign visitor of color, while the white guys are marching around “legally” brandishing their semiautomatics, you will be scrutinized, frisked, and carted off to a little room for further interrogation.
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Reposting a comment I made from a couple of days ago…
25+ people are shot and killed each day in America.
In addition to the above:
There were 870,911 murders in America from 1950-2004 (1)
Compared to WWII and all wars fought since then, America has lost 507,877 in combat. (2)
I guess those number speak for themselves.
1: http://web.archive.org/web/20060929071718/http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/totalstab.htm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war
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The foreign luminaries must also be unfamiliar with corporations being people, with the legal right to promote their products however they see fit. For the hoarding of guns and bullets which reliably follows each incident, is anything but spontaneous. It’s the manufacturers and gun lobbyists promoting their livelihoods.
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@go2goal. Sound conclusion, person of comments, that is only clear when you see your way through the smoke the NRA spokespersons have spewed for decades, the smoke that equates gun regulation with “infringement” of a nonexistent right.
"In 1991, Warren E. Burger, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, was interviewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the meaning of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.” Burger answered that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” TNR 11/18/07
If your goal is to kill and kill lots, there is no substitute for access to easily applied lethal force.
If your goal is to sell a product like guns to maximize revenue, get control over Congress to block any meaningful NATIONAL gun regulation because piecemeal state by state legislation just furthers the commerce of straw purchasers and gun smugglers who will turn patchwork regulation into profit. Sell guns to everyone including criminals and unstable people on the secondary market. Then scare those who buy for self defense to buy more because well “the criminals and crazy people are going to be armed with the firearms we made, so you need to be better armed with ever more lethal weapons,” and the cycle continues until there are 1000 round clips for everyone.
This is where America is headed.
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