The recent massacre in New Zealand has brought out the gun-control crowd, big time.
The left is so predictable. Rather than focus on the root cause of the problem, such as drugs, gang violence or terrorism, the gun control crowd immediately seizes on the disaster as an opportunity to confiscate America’s guns, especially after New Zealand’s knee jerk reaction to confiscate guns in their country. And not even Trump’s signature on a document to remove us from the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty has put a damper on their dreams.
A recent study went so far as to lump the U.S. in with Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Venezuela as being responsible for almost half of all the world’s 250,000 death. Other than being in the same hemisphere the US has little to do with Latin America’s drug cartel murders, gun running and human trafficking deaths.
They also like to argue that when it comes to guns, America is just more violent than other countries, especially those in Europe with stiff gun control laws. It’s a progressive shibboleth, but even some conservatives agree. The only problem is, it’s not true.
A study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, proves the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million populations from mass public shootings. Norway is number one with a mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million, followed by Serbia at 0.381, then France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206, Slovakia, followed by Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic. The U.S. comes in at number 11 with a death rate of 0.089. That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.
According to data collected by Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings through media and law enforcement reports, a little over 14,000 were killed by firearms in 2018, That is nearly a 7% decrease from 2017 and, the first decline recorded by GVA in its 5 year history. And as far as deaths from mass shootings which the study above puts at 1,100 in 2018, a search of the web actually gave me figures anywhere from 268 to 340, the latter being from GVA, which showed a decrease over 2017.
To put these gun related deaths into perspective, an average of 40,000 people die each year from automobile accidents; another 500 from plane crashes and 1,000 from train related accidents. In addition, the CDC reports that over 70,000 died in 2017 from drug overdoses, and over one million unborn babies are slaughtered each year by abortion. To really put it in perspective, Socialism, Communism, Marxism and Fascism alone took the lives of over 100 million people since the early 1900’s. Guess how many of those people were armed!
The left wants you to believe that when government enacts gun control laws, those would-be murderers will comply. The idea being that since the law is the law; people can be expected to obey it. The trouble with this argument is that if a murderer is not going to comply with a law against murder, he or she certainly isn’t going to give a hoot about complying with a law against owning a gun. They are going to do whatever they can to get their hands on the guns that are going to enable them to commit murder. Gun control laws are a criminal’s dream come true.
Assuming that the left gets their way, and they will if they retake the White House in 2020, a question naturally arises – who protects us from the government? All you have to do is look at what has been going on in Venezuela to realize that the answer to that question is no one.
To paraphrase Huey Newton, if guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the government has guns, the people are slaves or at the very least, subject to slavery at any time. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution gives the people the right to bear arms to protect themselves from such a government. However, there is a greater right – the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.
Source: Leftist Yearning for a Gun-Free Society by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation; Gun Deaths Dropped in 2018, Excluding Suicides, The Trace; Sorry, Despite Gun-Control Advocates’ Claims, U.S. Isn’t The Worst Country For Mass Shootings, Investors Business Daily
