Bob Hennessey
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Feb 2010
Location: off the res.
Posts: 3415 |
There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed. U.S. population 328,735,259 as of Monday, May 6, 2019. Do the math: 0.000912588% of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:
• 65% of those deaths are by suicide which would never be prevented by gun laws
• 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty
• 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – gun violence
• 3% are accidental discharge deaths
So technically, "gun violence" is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100. Still too many, Right? Well, first, how are those deaths spanned across the nation?
• 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago
• 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore
• 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit
• 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)
So, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause.
This leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others. For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1.
Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand; This is not guns causing this, it’s a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equally, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.
Sure, 5,100 deaths per year is horrific…How about in comparison to other deaths? All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime, but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault all is done by criminals and thinking that criminals will obey laws is ludicrous. Hence the reason they are labeled criminals.
Gun homicides are overwhelmingly tied to gang violence. In fact, a staggering 80% of gun homicides are gang-related. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years
But what about other deaths each year?
• 638,169 legal induced abortions in the US (CDC – 2015, nothing more current)
• 40,000+ die from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!
• 36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths
• 34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide)
• For the last 19 years, from 1999 to 2017, there were 2,467 children killed in fatal accidents involving bicycles, versus 1,994 children killed in fatal accidents involving a firearm. Are we ready to ban bicycles?
Now it gets good:
• 200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors. You are safer in the Chicago streets than in Cook County hospital!
• 600,000-plus die each year from cancer.
• 710,000 people die per year from heart disease.
It’s time to stop the double cheeseburgers, and any other ‘bad-for societal good food’! So what’s the point? If our lawmakers and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc.). A 10% reduction in medical errors would be 66% of the total gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides......Simple, easily preventable 10% reductions!
So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns? It's pretty simple:
Taking away guns gives control to governments.
The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace of the colonies. It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace is a controlled populace. Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S. Constitution. It must be preserved at all costs.
Remember, when it comes to "gun control," the important word is “control," not “gun."
“In his paper titled “How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution,” Kopel claims that various gun control policies by the British following the Boston Tea Party, including a ban on firearm and gunpowder importation, tells us not only the purpose of the Second Amendment, but its relevance within the context of today’s gun control debate.
“The ideology underlying all forms of American resistance to British usurpations and infringements was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights,” Kopel writes. “From the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant. The philosophy was not novel, but was directly derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke.”
Kopel writes that two important things underlined the American response to the British policies. One was the practical concept of self-defense, which British disarmament measures was making more difficult. The other, and more relevant concept, was that “Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government.”
Further reductions in violence in America can be attributed to the sheer numbers of citizens exercising their right to bear arms. In October 2019, FBI 2018 Crime in the United States report revealed that Concealed Carry Permit Holders increased again, now 304% more CCWs than in 2007. That means 18.66 MILLION citizens now have a concealed carry permit and represent the largest cross-section of Americans imaginable ---- again, violent crimes continue to go down, almost as if criminals know they just might be on the wrong end of ‘a good guy with a gun’.
Researchers such as Gary Kleck and others estimate that firearms are successfully used for self-defense many more times than most people imagine: "The estimates of the annual number of defensive uses of guns in the United States range from 760,000 to 3.6 million, with the best estimate, derived from the NSDS, being 2.5 million, compared to about a half a million incidents in which offenders used guns to commit a crime (Kleck 1997, pp. 149-160, 187-189; see also the more recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of Ikeda, Dahlberg, Sacks, Mercy, and Powell 1997, which estimated 1.0 million defensive gun uses linked with burglaries in which the intruder was seen, compared to 0.9 million such incidents derived from the Kleck-Gertz survey, 1995, pp. 184-185, estimates within sampling error of each other)....." Why don’t feckless politicians include statistics that find firearms SAVE peoples’ lives? Because control over the people IS impossible IF the people can defend themselves against the tyranny of Government.
ANY politician or bureaucrat, including judges who would infringe upon our inalienable rights as described under the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be denied public office, and removed from office, if serving, for abdicating their oath to office –
Please feel free to share this information far, wide and often – American citizens deserve to know the truth!
*** Stats were gathered from the FBI’s Crime Database, the CDC’s fatal-injury database, and various search engines…
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12-27-2019 01:58 AM
