One of my pro-gun friends sent me a link to a YouTube video about gun murders, voiced by Bill Whittle. The video was pro-gun and filled with snarky remarks about gun control and its proponents, such as: our country’s obsession with guns is “dangerous and frankly embarrassing when facing our European film critic friends.”
I’m not sure if he meant all Europeans are film critics, or all film critics are Europeans. At first I took it to mean that all gun control proponents are liberals and all liberals are film critics; ergo, all gun control proponents are film critics. But I may be over-thinking this. Perhaps he means only that film critics are liberals because to be a film critic you must be able to think. And also, you must be able to write grammatically correct sentences. Liberals can do that.
He also refers to “our moral betters on the left.” Though this sentence is intended to be snarky, it’s probably accurate. (I can be snarky, too.) He refers to the “left-wing weenie case for banning guns” – something that literally no one of any political stature has suggested. In fact, banning the sale and ownership of guns would be unconstitutional. Banning guns is a prevalent right-wing paranoia that is promoted, I suspect, to boost gun sales. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn the NRA is behind it.
Whittle makes his case against gun control by first pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, the US has the highest per capita gun ownership of any country. Then, he makes the claim that the US is not #1 in gun murders; the US is, he says, #111 in gun murders. The reason for our relatively low ranking could be because there is a long list of violent 3rd world countries ruled by drug cartels and warlords with private armies.
But even though I trusted Whittle to be straight with his viewers, I remember what Ronald Reagan said: trust but verify. So I went to Wikipedia and found their list of countries with firearm related deaths per 100,000 population per year. By default, countries in the table are sorted alphabetically by name, but clicking on a column header (such as Homicides) sorts the table by ascending values (one click) or descending values (two clicks) found in that column.
According to this Wikipedia article, the US is in 18th place for gun murders. A string of Central and South American countries (plus Swaziland, Philippines, and South Africa) is above us, with Honduras in the #1 position. If we sort on total gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) the US is in 11th place.
Whittle points out that Detroit, Michigan, with strict gun control laws, has a gun murder rate of 54.6 per hundred thousand compared to 10.54 for the entire US. He then points out that Plano, Texas, where apparently everyone is armed to the teeth with pistols, shotguns, and assault weapons as well as knives and pointy rocks (backup, one assumes), has a gun murder rate of only 0.4 per hundred thousand. He does this to make his point that gun control increases gun murders, whereas arming the populace like they’re going into combat reduces gun murders.
According to Whittle, Detroit’s gun control laws must be the problem, not the fact that Detroit’s per capita income ($14,717) is one third that of Plano ($40,920); not that Detroit’s inner city has collapsed as Detroit’s auto industry has dwindled; not that the inner city has few job opportunities and has neighborhoods where drug dealers and gang-bangers roam. Whittle must be very astute to figure out that gun control laws are the problem, because frankly, I would have naively bet all those other things were the problem.
Whittle ends with this mind-blowing conclusion, “maybe it’s not the guns … maybe it’s the people holding the guns.” No kidding, Whittle.
Of course it’s the people holding the guns! That’s why it’s a bad idea to sell guns to violent felons, dangerous lunatics, and people with restraining orders against them. That’s the whole reason for background checks.
Gun control proponents primarily want two things. The first is universal background checks at the point of transfer for every person buying any type of firearm. Currently only eight states and the District of Columbia require such checks. Two more states require such checks for handguns. The second thing gun control proponents want is a ban on the sale of weapons designed primarily to kill a large number of people quickly.
I’m a gun owner and I support the Second Amendment, as long as we sell reasonable firearms to responsible people. Society has to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere should be personal and family protection, hunting, and recreational and competition target shooting. No citizen needs weapons of war for any legitimate purpose.
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