XDA

Every day in America, about 31 people are killed in gun homicides. It's a grisly death toll — one that no other developed nation has to deal with.

No, the gun homicides in America for the 5 years between 2010 and 2014 have been between 8,000 and 9,000 and in 2014, it was very close to 8,000. Let's do the math. 365 times 31 is 11,315. That's closer to the number of total murders not the gun homicide which are less than 70% of American murders each year. A journalist trying to give the facts, the truth, to his or her readers would not make such a transparent mistake. 8,124 (the 2014 rate of gun homicides in America) divided by 365 is 22 murders with guns per day. That seems like a lot, and it is, but for the third largest nation by population, it's 3.9 per 100,000. That's not the highest in the developed nations. Not by a long shot. Here is a partial list of the developed nations with a higher rate: Brazil (18.79); Columbia (23.93); Costa Rica (5.92); Mexico (6.34); South Africa (12.6); Uruguay (4.78); Venezuela (39); Russia (10.7)

So that's two transparently false statements in the first line. I wish I could say it gets better.

The basic recommendation of the VOX article's argument is to have concentrated police involvement in the areas with the greatest amount of gun violence. Sounds racist to me but I'd be willing to give it a go.

The article praises the gun confiscation in Australia in 1996 and '97 and refers to another VOX article which is here and states this:

In 2011, Harvard's David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."
What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.
Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented — so you can't attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines. (Emphasis added).

Why do they only talk about the seven years after the confiscation of approximately 20% of Australian guns? That would take us only to 2004. Have there been no statistics since then. Well, yes there have and I've written about it, a lot. The suicide rate in Australia did decline for a few years and the gun suicide rate, already going down a lot, went down even more. But then the suicide rate went back up and is now higher than it was before and during the confiscation. All the gun grabbing did was change the method of suicide. In what way is that saving lives?

The same is true about gun homicides. Actually the rate went up immediately after the confiscation and then declined but only at the rate it was declining prior to the legislation. That's not saving lives now or then and the non gun-crime rate, especially rape, is much higher than it is here. I'm all for saving lives but not at the cost of helpless female victims.

I'd be willing to meet halfway the people eager to take away guns but not when I don't believe they are being honest.


UPDATE: The mandatory buy back program in Australia in 1997-97 was supposed to take in 20% of the guns but the Aussies are not sheep and there was a lot of non compliance. To fill the vacuum of effective self defense weapons, a black market run by criminals sprang up and is doing land office business to this day. You can get any gun you want, apparently, even full auto. So I'm moving soon.

Labels: Gun Control; VOX: Not Being Straight on the Facts