Myths of American gun violence

[mmckee1952]

Myths of American gun violence
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BY John Lott
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In the wake of the murders in Charleston, President Obama has made more exaggerations and false claims about gun violence in America. He made two public addresses this past week — one to the nation on Thursday and one to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Friday. On both occasions, he gave distorted impressions of how rates of violence in America compare with those in the rest of the world.
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In his address to the nation, Obama claimed that, “We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”
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But Obama overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated. Three of the six worst K-12 school shootings ever have occurred in Europe. Germany saw two of these — one in 2002 at Erfurt and another in 2009 at Winnenden. The combined death toll was 34. France and Belgium have both faced multiple terrorist attacks over the past year.
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After adjusting for America’s much larger population, we see that many European countries actually have higher rates of death in mass public shootings.
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Let’s look at such mass public shootings (four or more people killed, and not in the course of committing another crime) from 2009 to the present. To make a fair comparison with American shootings, I have excluded terrorist attacks that might be better classified as struggles over sovereignty, such as the 22 people killed in the Macedonian town of Kumanovo last month.
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Norway had the highest annual death rate, with two mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Macedonia had a rate of 0.38, Serbia 0.28, Slovakia 0.20, Finland 0.14, Belgium 0.14, and the Czech Republic 0.13. The U.S. comes in eighth with 0.095 mass public shooting fatalities per million people, with Austria close behind.
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Read More: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john ... ?cid=bitly
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My Thoughts: John Lott didn't start out to try and defend gun rights and info, he's just a numbers guy and as he was researching some gun info the ball started to roll and that's where his book "More guns’ Less Crime" came from.

[MarcSpaz]

I wish people would understand that there is no such thing as "gun violence", but rather only "violence".

A gun is just a tool. In one man's hands, it feeds a family. In another man's hands it defends a life. In yet another man's hands, it defends a nation. An still in another man's hands, it can do terrible things.

The only common denominator is the goals of men... Not the tool. Some men choose to be good. Some men choose to be great. Some men choose to be a monster. All of these men will walk their chosen path, regardless of the tools at hand.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

[Mindflayer]

I wish people would understand that there is no such thing as "gun violence", but rather only "violence".

Amen.

[dorminWS]

I wish people would understand that there is no such thing as "gun violence", but rather only "violence".

Amen.

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+1. Also, the only true "gun control" is that which is exercised by the bearer; a corollary of which is that gun control is really people control. That's probably at the base of why we all find it so abhorrent. I am bemused by the idea that the same liberals/progressive who are so much in favor of taking my gun away because I might commit a crime with it (and indeed, they WILL take away my gun if I commit a felony) would be horrified by the prospect of castrating a rapist because he might commit rape again. Yet it seems to me to be about the same thing.