Another Mass Shooting, Another Grab For Guns: 6 Gun Facts
Tony Cartalucci
LandDestroyer.blogspot.com
October 3, 2017
Nothing is more deplorable than hijacking human tragedy to push an unrelated political agenda. A mass murderer taking the lives of some 60 people in Las Vegas this week has nothing to do with the majority of lawful firearms owners in the United States who aren’t and have no intention of ever killing another human being.
Yet the knee-jerk reaction of many emotionally-driven people in the face of an overwhelming tragedy is to shift public debate back to gun control and even banning guns altogether.
Emotional and irrational responses in the face of overwhelming circumstances is part of human nature and require patience.
Yet another part of being human is then appealing to our ability to reason. To reason we must have facts.
Upon examining the following 6 facts, we will see that access to firearms has no significant relationship to violence – and that violence is driven by another entire set of factors that must be addressed if we honestly want a more peaceful and prosperous world.
1. According to the FBI, more people die of barehanded assaults in the US per year than all rifle violence (“assault rifles” included) combined. In fact, homicide via personal weapons like hands and feet is more than double homicides carried out with rifles.
Most gun homicides are carried out by handguns in some of America’s most destitute communities where national and local governments have failed to keep up with infrastructure, providing education, or economic opportunities – cities like Detroit who have had their industry shipped overseas and their infrastructure left to – in some cases literally – rot.
2. According to the Small Arms Survey conducted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, the United States has the most guns per capita of any other nation on Earth at 112 guns per 100 people. Second place goes to Serbia at 58.21 guns per 100 people.
Based on this and assumptions that access to firearms equates directly to more violence, we would expect to find the United States and Serbia at the top of list regarding both homicides, and gun related homicides, yet this is not the case at all.
3. Highest homicide rate on Earth goes to El Salvador with 108.64 murders per 100,000 people. The United States comes in at number 94 with a murder rate of 4.88 per 100,000 people.
4. El Salvador’s gun homicides are at around 26.49 per 100,000 people while the US comes in with 3.60 gun homicides per 100,000 people. Honduras comes in first place with 66.64 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Nations topping the list of gun homicides together with total homicides reveal little relationship between the number of guns per capita and actual violence. In fact, despite the immense amount of firearms in the United States, the United States has a relatively low homicide and gun-related homicide rate. This is why gun ban advocates often attempt to cite “gun related deaths” which includes accidents and suicide instead of citing gun-related homicides – even when advocating gun bans after high profile mass shootings and murders.
The Rest…HERE
