Yup and of course many here belong behind a garbage truck. By the way, I prefer carpentry, gardening, or reading. Never could knit and not really interested in doing so.
It's a common East Coast saying and was used as a retort by an East Coast Minister, (of Defense at the time), to a female East Coast Opposition member during question period. She tried in vain to twist it into a sexist remark, it worked for a but, until everyone realized the idiocy of her angst given the banality of the expression. BTW, he was considered Canada's most eligible bachelor and there were rumours that he and then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had eyes for each other, but I digress.
You do not accept stats of the Government of Canada??? Not my problem!!
Sorry, there's a lot of blank space here, I had a a hard time copying this article as it was and it still didn't turn out right, but here goes;
AMERICA’S HIGH HOMICIDE RATE AND OTHER LIES
by Bruce Gold, Canadian Firearms Journal – January - February 2016
https://nfa.ca/canadian-firearms-journal
The high US gun ownerships rate is frequently cited as the causation of the high US homicide rate. Both are presented as extreme aberrations, far above rates in the rest of the world; a sign of US backwardness or the perverse influence of the "gun lobby". This supposed linkage is then used to support an argument for restrictions and confiscations. Some authors claim that the US homicide rates and/or firearms homicide rates are the highest in the world. More sophisticated versions of this argument restrict the highest rates claim to comparisons with the developed world or to "comparable" nations. These claims have gone unexamined for too long.
We can start by noting that there is a general principle in the social sciences that cross jurisdiction comparisons should compare roughly similar jurisdictions to better understand how factors interrelate. Following this practice researchers often restrict their comparisons of the US to OECD or developed nations where the US stands out with both a high homicide rate and a high gun ownership rate.
However, we can note that anti-gunners are not doing policy studies to sort out policy effects between similar jurisdictions. Anti-gunners are arguing that there is a universal law governing the relationship between two factors, civilian gun ownership rates and homicide rates. Of course if such a universal law exists we should see it playing out across all cultures and societies, not just developed nations. If it is a universal law, then legislation and control efforts might modify the numbers and shift the final results but the pattern should remain discernable to researcher’s investigations.
Following on from this reasoning, let’s examine the homicide rates across all countries where there is data available and look for this universal relationship. The first revelation is that the US does not have the highest homicide rate. We find that some 93 countries have higher homicide rates than the US. The highest, Honduras, has a homicide rate of 90.4 per hundred thousand (all numbers from UN Office of Drugs and Crime, 2012 figures). This is almost 20 times the US rate of 4.7. Some 22 countries have rates 4 times as high including Mexico with 21.5. Some 57 countries have rates more than twice as high as the US. The "horrific" US homicide rates start to look a lot different when put into perspective with the rest of the world where the average homicide rate is 8.6, over twice the US rate. Those who sneer at the "violent" US while praising other cultures have some explaining to do. The numbers also explain why anti-gunners want to limit the comparison to a carefully chosen subset of countries where they get the preferred outcomes.
But how do these homicide rates relate to civilian firearms ownership rates? Let us examine the countries with the top 20 homicide rates where we also have firearms ownership rates:
country
homicide per 100,000
Average firearms per 100 people
Honduras
90.4
6.2
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)
53.7
10.7
Belize
44.7
10
El Salvador
41.2
5.8
Guatemala
39.9
13.1
Jamaica
39.3
8.1
Swaziland
33.8
6.4
South Africa
31
12.7
Colombia
30.8
5.9
Bahamas
29.8
5.3
Democratic Republic of the Congo
28.3
1.4
Trinidad and Tobago
28.3
1.6
Brazil
25.2
8
Rwanda
23.1
0.6
Dominican Republic
22.1
5.1
Mexico
21.5
15
Nigeria
20
1.5
Equatorial Guinea
19.3
19.9
Botswana
18.4
4.9
Namibia
17.2
12.6
average
32.9
7.74
SOURCES: UNODC & Small Arms Survey
If we look at this chart we can see at once that homicide rates are not a determined by the rate at which civilians own firearms. The worst two have very modest firearms ownership rates and the average of all these countries is a mere 7.74%.
Some readers will note that I have not included firearms homicide rates in these comparisons as so many anti-gun authors do. Unlike them, I see no reason to prioritize the means of death over the fact of death. Dead is dead and one wonders at the mental process of those who consider a death by firearm more important, or immoral or ritually unclean than a stabbing or being beaten to death with a tire iron. One might suspect that there is some religious or cult like superstition that justifies the precedence anti–gunners give to one means of death by an inanimate object and consider it more important that other means, also accomplished with inanimate objects – though of a different kind.
There are some other revelations in this little chart and the data behind it. For one, it brings into question the multicultural piety that all cultures are equal. Are we to draw no distinction between Canada’s culture and the incredibly violent culture of Honduras with one hundred and seventy seven
times our homicide rate? Or even more bizarrely, are we to feel morally inferior because we have three times their firearms ownership rate? Perhaps the multiculturalists can enlighten us as to how, specifically, these cultures are "equal" or of "equal worth".
Another revelation is how our little chart explains why Boko Haram terrorists can raid a Nigerian village kidnap hundreds of girls into sex slavery and murder hundreds of villagers with impunity. The gun ownership rate of 1.5 % explains it all. The villagers are completely disarmed and helpless before a murderous military force. What local police protection exists, assuming it exists at all, would be hopeless outclassed and hard put to defend itself much less anyone else. Under these conditions one might conclude that the old Anglo Saxon tradition of a citizen’s militia, which still survives in countries like Canada, was the obvious policy response. The complete absence of any discussion, much less action towards forming a militia is proof that there are powerful people, both in Nigeria and internationally, who quite literally prefer sex slavery and butchery of their citizens to those citizens being armed.
Let us look at the claim of a universal law by examining the homicide rates in the 20 highest gun ownership jurisdictions.
Country
Average firearms per 100 people
homicide rate per 100,000
United States
88.8
4.7
Switzerland
45.7
0.6
Finland
45.3
1.6
Serbia
37.8
1.2
Cyprus
36.4
2
Saudi Arabia
35
0.8
Iraq
34.2
8
Uruguay
31.8
7.9
Sweden
31.6
0.7
Norway
31.3
2.2
France
31.2
1
Canada
30.8
1.6
Austria
30.4
0.9
Germany
30.3
0.8
Iceland
30.3
0.3
Oman
25.4
1.1
Bahrain
24.8
0.5
Kuwait
24.8
0.4
Macedonia
24.1
1.4
Montenegro
23.1
2.7
average
34.6
2.02
SOURCES: UNODC & Small Arms Survey, 2012 data
This second look confirms the findings of the first. That there is no universal law that more guns = more homicide. If anything the relationship is reversed. In the top and bottom 20 countries (with data available) high civilian gun ownership is tied to low homicide rates and low gun ownership is tied to high homicide rates. We can also see the hollowness of the anti-gun argument in Canada. Our low homicide rate of .51 per hundred thousand, far below the world average of 8.6 per hundred thousand, does not justify the crime wave hysteria. We can also note that our finding of more guns = less crime can be identified in the US as well where between 1994 and 2010 the firearms stocks increased by 93 million. Over the same period all homicides dropped by 37%. (ATF and Justice Dept. statistics)
Conclusion
The true state of our violent world is being hidden by studies that conceptualize violence as a problem of the developed world or somehow of a different nature than violence in the rest of the world. This false exclusion seem to imply that somehow human nature is different elsewhere or the use of intentional violence for political power or criminal profit is not a universal problem. Anti-gun activists who insist on demonizing the US firearms policies for high homicide rates without putting it in context are either dishonest of willfully ignorant.
References:
GLOBAL STUDY ON HOMICIDE 2013, TRENDS, CONTEXTS, DATA
UNITED NATIONS OFFICE ON DRUGS AND CRIME, Vienna, 2013.
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
United Nations Small Arms Survey, 2012 data.
Firearms Commerce in the United States, Annual Statistical Update 2012. United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Special Report, Firearm Violence, 1993-2011. U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics May 2013, NCJ 241730.
Canadian Firearms Journal
https://nfa.ca/canadian-firearms-journal
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