Firearms homicide stats (courtesy forbes.com)

The headline above the forbes.com chart above makes my blood boil. Where Lethal Violence is Fueled by Firearms implies these countries would’ve had a lower homicide rate if there’d been less firearms. So all we have to do to reduce homicides is . . . get rid of guns! Context much? Nope. What’s not stated . . .

The number of defensive gun uses (estimated at more than a million in the U.S.). Or the prophylactic effect of an armed populace. In other words, the lives saved by guns. As the Jewish son of a Holocaust survivor, I reckon that consideration should include genocides that didn’t happen.

Anyway, it’s clear that gun control advocates are obsessed with firearms. Despite any and all evidence to the contrary, despite common sense analysis of human behavior and past (pre-firearm) history,  they believe that controlling guns is the “answer” to firearms-related violence. Why? Why are they so obsessed with guns?

 

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68 COMMENTS

  1. Because they fear anything that the government can’t control, and at the top of that list is freedom loving firearms owners.

    • And the first up at bat hits a triple. Good swing, Steve.
      The gun bigot leaders don’t care about guns at all. They are interested only in controlling gun owners: who can own them. What kind they can own. How many they can own. Where they can bear them. How they function. How they store them. Etc. Ad nauseum.
      Until they have complete and total control of you (yes, you) and your civil rights, they will not stop.
      So we need to get into the habit of calling it as it really is: it isn’t a Gun Control Law, it’s a Gun Owner Control Law.
      🤠

      • I fear that the Disarmists of the Left are very much concerned with firearms specifically; It’s not that they merely seek to control unarmed people, but that they fully understand that ultimate control is in the hands of those who wield lethal power. To that end, what better, localized means of wielding lethal power is there than with firearms?
        The Left takes to heart the maxims of their founders, such as Chairman Mao: “Political power comes from the end of a gun.” The possession of firearms, more so than any earlier weapon, separates ruler from ruled, master from slave, government bureaucrat from mere ‘citizen.’
        Only the truly stupid and naive Leftist believes that government agents should be disarmed; The true dedicated Leftist understands that only armed government agents can ensure that the means of power rests and remains in the proper hands.
        THAT is why The Left wants YOUR guns, and not those of Government.

  2. In Puerto Rico the process to obtain a firearm, not being able to carry outside of the home, btw, is more lengthy and expensive than getting an NFA item here in CONUS. So firearm ownership is very, very low. The high amount of firearm death will be due to police and criminals.

    • Whenever people hit me with the Australia banned guns and now its unicorn farts and rainbows I counter with PR. The 2nd doesn’t really apply there, the process to attain a weapon, much less carry it is absurd, there are functionally no CC’ers save LE. Not to mention the limits on the number of weapons and ammunition owners can have, and the generally anti-gun, anti-capital punishment culture make the 2A functionally dead.

      Yet the numbers don’t lie. Violence, gun or otherwise, is and order of magnitude greater there than CONUS. I have a good friend from PR who decided to never move back once he took a job and started living CONUS. He was actually a beat cop and told me that largely the issue is cultural as well as organized crime. Very confrontational culture combined with large gang and criminal drug enterprises make for high violence.

      • The answers you are looking for are culture and demographics.

        Switzerland has a machine gun in virtually every house. It is easier to buy a machine gun in the Czech Republic than the U.S. Yet why do these places rarely have shootings?

        They all share a common, First-World culture and values along with being racially homogeneous. America has lots of competing cultures and values as well as being racially heterogenous. We are very Balkanized except we are powerful and stable enough to keep it under wraps for now until we can’t.

  3. It’s more about control than anything else. Society can be conditioned to behave in a certain way given enough effort and a critical mass of followers. Guns are a symbol and a tool of self reliance and individualism. Neither is appreciated by the powers that be. Instilling fear and ignorance of their own environment in the minds of the “community” leads to a strong desire to control it by any means necessary.

  4. First and foremost, gun-grabbers are literally (as in clinically) hysterical with respect to firearms. Unfortunately, because there are a fair number of such people, they hold the position that their hysteria is legitimate, rational, and reasonable.

    Since we are talking about truly hysterical people here, their minds race around and will latch-on to pretty much anything and everything in a desperate attempt to soothe themselves. Obsessing over how to eliminate firearms is thus entirely predictable — every bit as predictable and rational as dogs that howl at sirens.

  5. I noted this on another thread…

    It’s a special kind of projection: It scares them to imagine someone like them – incompetent and clueless (not to mention untrustworthy) – being in possession of a firearm.

  7. They aren’t obsessed with controlling guns. They are obsessed with controlling YOU. Socialism must have two things in order to survive; an endless supply of other people’s money and absolute control over the individual.

    Your dependence is the source of their strength. They want people to be impoverished and to live in crime filled neighborhoods. They want you to need subsidized housing, subsidized healthcare, subsidized school lunches, food stamps, WIC cards, “Obama-phones”, etc., etc. etc. They need you to need them. The more you need them the bigger their budgets get. The more forcefully the dependant will fight to keep them. The more likely you are to look the other way when you see corruption. They need your dependence and the fastest way to ensure that is to take away your means of making a living and defending yourself (from them). Crush the middle class and take away guns.

  9. Because it is so much easier to blame implements (guns, knives, baseball bats, whatever) than it is to acknowledge that the failed social policies of the left are directly responsible for the abject, and now self perpetuating cultural failures which have given birth to the crime, anarchy, and endemic violence from the conditions, and communites those failed policies created.

  10. They don’t have a firm grasp of reality, I think, is the most basic answer. They don’t understand human nature, physics, supply and demand, and how easy it is to actually make a working firearm. If I were being interviewed or had my own show I’d show them the futility of banning guns by having/demonstrating a 12 gauge zip gun that was put together for less than $20 (that I was holding in my hand until they asked what it was!). If you want to source vids for this site , Royalnonesuch, has many vids on how to make zip guns. And I think he started making them when he was 16 yrs old or so. That’ll male a lib’s heads explode!

  11. Look at the reactions of these types of folks any time they see something they don’t like, hate, vitriol, and violence. Never Trump! or whatever the target of the week may be. They know their own tendencies and fear what they might do with a weapon, then leap to the assumption that the rest of us are like them. Ban Gunz!

  12. “Question of the Day: Why Are Gun Control Advocates Obsessed with Firearms?”

    BECAUSE YOUR RTKABA KEEPS THEM FROM BEING ABLE TO DO POS COMMUNIST TYRANNY AT-WILL AND WITH IMPUNITY.

    Contact 360.

    Engage, people

  13. And why are you nuts obsessed with the debunked myth of the “good guy with a gun”?

    There was never even a single legit case of a “good guy” ever stopping an attacker, The incident in texas still does not count as 20+ innocent people are still dead because people like the NRA and the putin’s puppet thought that denying the violently deranged was “tyrannical”.

    These incidents don’t happen everyday in Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. Your claims of the world going to utter hell in a hand-basket is still complete shit, As someone who can became from British Columbia a few weeks back proves your claim is bullshit. And I plan to head to the dutch Netherlands for the Xmas holiday which has strict gun laws and one the best countries next to japan of having the lowest murder rates in the world. Go ahead and ask for a firearm for self-defense in the rest of the civilized world and you will be blacklisted after having your ass laughed out of the police station and possibly parliament.

    The founders still objected to the idea of citizens being armed. Even ben franklin didn’t support the right.

    You can post these quotes, as if the Founding Father was on YOURside. Franklin meant the opposite of what gun rights morons mean. But at least you had enough IQ not to omit the words ESSENTIAL and TEMPORARY. I’ll grant you that. But your IQ wasn’t high enough to note the difference. ESSENTIAL liberty and TEMPORARY safety. Got it, Einstein? There is nothing ESSENTIAL about a gun and there is nothing TEMPORARY about the common welfare. Do you see the difference? Only a moron would claim that owning a gun is ESSENTIAL LIBERTY.

    As for what Franklin SPECIFICALLY said about guns, he warned recipients of guns he sent them to be very very careful with them and to be sure to return them after their mission was over. And he condemned both guns and wealth compared to knowledge. I’m not going to waste time quoting it. Find it yourself. Use your fingers if you can’t use your brain.

    All criminal and psychos was ONCE A LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN.

    The gun rights ideology is the greatest DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.

      • Atleast I don’t live a deluded lie of needing a gun to keep me safe.

        Go back to wasting Mines and America’s tax dollars on supporting your selfish “right”.

        You crave your guns more than keeping your bills paid and your family fed.

        And just pointing this out there, The civilized world still has yet to suffer any mass killings, Despite a knife attack at Amsterdam stopped by trained police.

        https://www.yahoo.com/gma/knife-wielding-man-shot-amsterdams-schiphol-airport-172003836–abc-news-topstories.html

        And a sword fight in japan that resulted in two deaths.

        https://www.yahoo.com/news/japanese-priestess-stabbed-death-shrine-apparent-family-feud-032709926.html

        These types of shooting incident sdon’t happen in the rest of the world ever-day. It’s easier to survive being attacked with a knife or sword than a gun.

        Since people like you are incapable of figuring out why they are shooting each other at astronomically higher rates than any other developed Western country, nothing will change.

        Unfortunately people like you and the nuts on this fake news hate site doesn’t care enough to stop its systemic shootings, averaging 30 gun murders a day. In fact, it’s infamous for them.

        • “You crave your guns more than keeping your bills paid and your family fed.”

          …..mmmm…. yup. That pretty much sums it up. If it were not for those other needs, I’d have a lot more things that go “bang” and punch holes in meat.
          🤠

        • “The civilized world still has yet to suffer any mass killings, Despite a knife attack at Amsterdam stopped by trained police.”

          The lulz. Sweet, sweet lulz.

          A short list of just a few of the recent mass killings outside the USA: (All numbers exclude perpetrators.)

          Brussels Bombing. Brussels, Belgium. 22 March, 2016. 32 dead. 350+ injured.

          Île-de-France Attacks [Charlie Hebdo Shooting included]: Paris (and other locations), France. 7-9 January, 2015. 17 dead. 22 injured.

          Nice Truck Attack: Nice, France. 14 July, 2016. 86 dead. 434 injured.

          Manchester Arena Bombing: Manchester, UK. 22 May, 2017. 22 dead. 512 injured.

          Norway Attacks: Oslo/Utøya. 22 July, 2011. 77 dead. 319 injured.

          Bataclan Attack: Paris, France. 13-14 November, 2015. 130 dead. 413 injured.

          That’s six mass attacks just off the top of my head in the last six years, all outside the USA. Stats below.

          Total Deaths: 364
          Total Injuries (non-fatal): 2050
          Average Deaths Per Attack: 60.66
          Average Injuries (non-fatal) Per Attack: 341.66

          So yeah, tell me again how the “civilized world has yet to suffer any mass killings”.

          Put on your dunce cap and make your way to the corner. You may cry if you like. Someone will be along shortly with a juice box and a blanky.

        • More projection on your part, sparky. I’m debt free, well fed and I lose money to the tax man every year.

          But judging by the quality of statements you make here I have no doubt you are on the dole. Can’t hold a job and just a waste of space and resources.

          It’s thanks to guys like you that we have Trump in the whitehouse.

          And, just to correct still another of your false statements, the US is the only civilized country in the world.

        • He’s right, you know. Nobody else in the entire history of forever has ever shot anyone outside of the US, and nobody in the entire history of the US has EVER, a single time, in over 200 years and with hundreds of millions of people, stopped or prevented any kind of crime with a gun. Nope, not once. Not even as a statistical anomaly. Charlie Hebdo? Hoax. The times a woman has stopped a would-be rapist by partially drawing her pistol? Lies. Etc.

          /sarc (that tag shouldn’t be necessary, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to hear an anti gun coward making such a claim)

        • Yo RealAmericanPatriotsAgainstFreedomHatingFascistLovingProGunners, how many more years you got before you begin collectin’ that sweet, sweet .gov pension? Snap!

        • Well, patriot, does YOUR house or apartment or mom’s basement have a nice big “GUN FREE HOME” sign on the front door ? If not, then YOU ARE A HYPOCRITE !!!!!

    • you are an out right LIAR. the ONLY way you can say “a good guy with a gun never stopped any one” is if you are WILLFULLY ignorant of news stories that contradict your biased, preconceived, sheltered ideals.

    • Someone turn on a light so the cockroach can scurry off into the shadows again… And, fumigate the place afterwards; liberalism is like a virus….

    • I guess you finished your liberal kool-aid just like the “good” democrat centrist state asked you too! Funny thing, if a law were passed requiring you to have a certain level of education, pass a written test, and then be licensed to speak or write (subject to review and omission by a government commission) what you call the real truth is, would you be so inclined?
      I thought not. Time to go back to school and learn what real freedoms are and how to protect them.

      • A small number – or any number – of additional dead is a fair trade in exchange for the ultimate solution of disarming the law abiding. /sarc

    • I know you’re just trolling, but if you love other countries so much, why don’t you just stay there?

    • Actually in Japan a few years back a man with a knife stabbed to death 20+ people in a retirement faculty. So your claim of no mass murders in the civilized world is incorrect as well as your other claims touted by the fake news MSM community.
      Like many on the left, your rants are that of a violence prone individual. Hardly an indicator of the civilized world.

      • Yes, 20+ people were stabbed to death in one incident, but I know what the anti-gunners reply to this will be (because I’ve heard these kinds of thing from anti-gunners myself):
        “Sure, 20 people were stabbed to death, but at least they weren’t shot, because then instead of being just dead they’d be double-plus-ultra dead!”
        Or more likely they’d say, “Sure, 20 people were stabbed to death, but think how many more the killer could have killed if he’d had a high-capacity semi-automatic assault-weapon extermination-device ghost-gun that shoots 50 rounds-per-clip-per-second of armor-piercing hollow-point exploding bullets! Then instead of 20 dead it would be 200 dead!”

        My anti-gun friends call guns ED for “extermination devices.”

    • @RealAmericaBlahBlahBla….

      Things a bit slow for you? Not going your way lately? Pet projects strangely in the toilet?

      Welcome to the real deep state. The one the founders encoded in the US Constitution.

    • “All criminal and psychos was ONCE A LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN.” Therefore, all law-abiding citizens should be treated like criminals. Right?

  15. on the surface it looks that way but i think, to the core, these people are fascist control freaks. if they don’t like it or think something else is better, then they think it shouldn’t exist. And if you like something they don’t then you are a flawed human and there is no debating it. they will NEVER admit or even contemplate any idea or scenario were their logic is wrong or not applicable. this guy above with the long obnoxious troll name is a perfect example. he has created an alternate reality where nothing he says needs to be validated and nothing you say can EVER be validated. people like him are BEYOND reason and rational thought. they let their emotions fuel and pick their ideology and they can’t fathom as to why that is unwise.

  16. RAPAFHFLG,

    Your arguments are unassailable. You’ve convinced me.

    Since you’ve worked out new definitions for “essential” and “temporary” (and maybe “moron”), how about sharing your new definitions for “shall”, not”, “be”, and “infringed”.

    And if you haven’t noticed, if you ask members of the recent immigrant community in the EU to please stop raping the local females or to please stop molesting grade-schoolers , you’ll be blacklisted, too:

    https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9771/germany-censorship-propaganda

    It’s not all fun and games in the Netherlands either:
    https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4129/islamization-belgium-netherlands

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/18/loverboy-child-prostitution-netherlands

    http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/disturbing-reality-muslim-sex-grooming-gangs/

    Oh, while you’re there , avoid the Kolenkit district in Amsterdam, especially after dark:
    http://freewestmedia.com/2017/04/14/as-no-go-zones-riot-the-next-dutch-government-could-be-more-leftist/

    You’ll probably be fine. Have a safe trip

  18. First they went after alcohol, then abortion…pornography…tobacco. If guns were banned, it would just be something else to squawk about. It’s usually a group of bitter, old people who have nothing better to do.

  19. I’m shocked that the US is at the low end of the spectrum in this graph. Relatively speaking, the US has next to no gun-control relative to the other countries.

    What information-value might be taken from this graphic? (I don’t think it really informs what gun-controllers might hope to achieve.) I think we need a breakdown of data on suicides and homicides.

    First, suicides is where the big numbers are. Who commits suicides; with what gun-type and acquisition scenario? Not young black males (curious why not). Suppose we were to find that OFWGs use handguns to kill themselves; and, that these suicides also have a rifle or shotgun they have owned for years. What would that tell us about how we might cut-down on suicides if we had more control over handguns?

    Second, homicides is where the only other significant numbers are. We know most of these are black-on-black. What accounts for the other black-on-black homicides? Clubs? Cutlery? OK, let’s grant that a handgun is a much more effective tool for a homicide than a club or knife. However, to the extent that these are substitutable, a reduction of gun black-on-black homicide is apt to be offset by an increase in clubs or cutlery.

    These effects are apt to be negligible in Puerto Rico; but, significant in the US. We need CDC or FBI detailed data to do a useful analysis of this question.

    We PotG are pretty clear that gun-control will be ineffective in reducing the number of gun suicides, homicides or accidents. But it’s hard to get this message across to our fellow voters. The message we need to package is the one of “substitutability”. I.e., even if draconian-enough measures were taken to reduce the civilian gun inventory, what might that do to the total number of deaths? Sure, theoretically, it might reduce MASS-killings; but, how could it reduce the number of suicides and 1-on-1 homicides where other means are nearly as popular and just about as effective?

  20. Most guns are black, gun control is their legit way to express their fear and hatred towards blacks.

  21. Its simply a politically expedient target. I’m sure there are some true believers out among the base. Those too naive or dense to wield the tools of logic and reason. The priest class up top like Watts and Feinstein know damn well gun control is a red herring but they don’t care. I listened to Watts on 1A yesterday and that woman has absolutely no shame. She’s clearly intelligent enough to know she’s spouting nonsense but like a true professional she knows her audience and speaks to it.

    Anyway, the base will never disconnect “gun violence” and violence. That’s not their place in life. Useful idiots through and through.

    Replace “gun” with literally any other object and all else will remain equal. The UK has demonstrated my his nicely. Eventually “hug violence” will be singled out as the politically expedient target to keep the base in line and maintain the power and control of the priest class.

    I’m convinced most people really want a dictator to rule over them and any popular effort to overthrow a dictatorship is simply a vehicle to install a different dictator. One who better hits the politically expedient targets of the day.

  22. Part of it is stupidity. Part of it is not having a good enough of a data set for real analytics. Part of it is fear. Part of it is a desire for control.

    How difficult it is to get real, hard data that’s detailed enough to toss into SPSS and get the program to spit out something useful something useful suggests to me that 1) no one really cares to collect the data or 2) they have a reason not to collect the data/record it in a way that’s public and researchable.

    I suspect #2. Police reports would generally contain all of the requisite data and those reports are, for the most part these days, digitized and easily searchable. In the modern world it shouldn’t be very hard to figure out generally how many people of what race and sex were killed by what caliber weapon in a specific geographic area. You know, like how many black males age 16-35 were killed by .223/5.56 in Chicago in the last year.

  23. This is neat. Let’s look at homicide rates (per 100,000) for the same countries using 2016 numbers:
    Puerto Rico: 20
    Venezuela: 59
    El Salvador: 81.2
    Guatemala: 27.3
    Paraguay: 8.8
    Trinidad/Tobago: 463/1.365M or 33.9
    Bolivia: 10.8
    Honduras: 59
    Albania: 2.3 (2015)
    Brazil: 25.7
    Colombia: 24.4
    United States: 17250/323.1M or 5.3

    The US is #2 from the bottom. Go numbers.

  25. Compare the anti-gun attitude of the condescending, the fearful, and the envious with their attitude toward individual transportation, for example, toward SUVs. Some people don’t want certain others to be free because they will not trust or empathize. They have a need to elevate themselves above the great unwashed.

  26. I’m not sure why – I’ve tried to understand but their thought process is so convoluted I can’t follow the logic. This is about the best I can come up with as a summary of what those I talk to seem to think.

    They start off with a premise: Guns are used to kill an awful lot of people. (This depends entirely on what you define ‘an awful lot’ to be.)

    They expand on this premise thusly: It would be a lot harder to kill those people without guns. (again, lots of assumptions here)

    They add a dash of: Guns aren’t really necessary for anyone to own and I don’t like them so …
    Lets just get rid of them all and then all the bad things will go away or at least be substantially reduced.

    This is about as deep a train of thought as I can find in most of the people I discuss it with IRL.

    Obviously, this line of argument is not compelling and can easily be shot full of holes but, the typical response I get from antis is to stick their fingers in their ears and chant, “I don’t like guns, guns are made to kill, get rid of the guns, I don’t like guns, guns are made …”

    I go on and on about actual homicide rates and how they are distributed both geographically and demographically and I point out that only a tiny fraction of a percent of guns and gun owners are ever involved in any kind of crime and I talk about all the positive uses for guns and the logistical near impossibility and lack of utility of further regulating and/or removing them and the philosophical issues of freedom and rights and defense of self and so on and then I get the finger-in-the ear chanting.

    My favorite anti line is, “I don’t believe in guns!”
    To which I reply, “Oh, I assure you, they exist. Want to go shoot one?”

  27. “…Why are they so obsessed with guns?”

    Because firearms are one of the few ‘safe’ outlets many of them have to channel their bigotry.

    Way back in the day you could tell the black man to go to hell and get away with it. Now not so much.

    Way back in the day you could tell a woman to shut up and make a sammich and get away with it. Now not so much.

    Not so long ago you could call someone fat and get away with it. Now not so much.

    Not so long ago you could call someone a retard and get away with it. Now not so much.

    These days you can only ‘other’ people based on their belief in Climate Change, being a Republican, being a smoker, or being a Firearm Owner.

    It has nothing to do with the firearms, really. It has everything to do with them wanting, needing, to feel superior to you. If they can try and belittle you, demean you, make you into the ‘other’ the way Alinksy described it, then they think they ‘win.’

  28. Sooooo people kill each other using guns when they can, or other ways when they can’t, in about the same numbers for any particular culture or nation whether guns are legal or not?

    It’s like it’s not the guns.

  29. I don’t think of it so much as they want to control us – I think that they want us dependent upon the Government. If we posses firearms, then we may not be dependent upon the Government for everything because we can, to a greater extent than others, take care of ourselves.

  30. Then of course, the number of victims in any mass-killings, both here and abroad, committed by the occasional lone lunatic, absolutely pales in comparison to the mass-killings perpetrated by such persons as Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol-Pot, after their citizens had been disarmed!

    Happy Motoring, Mark

  33. What do they want? A totalitarian government system.
    What harms their system? People who effectively refuse their rulership.

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