What happens after gun control?

[BadBrain]

There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

You opened this thread with statistics. With no attribution. No credibility. At least I provided a link, with footnotes and cited sources.

The source for the stats from the US -- the country which despite being almost identical to Canada in terms of music, clothes, diet, standard of living, ethnic diversity, distribution of wealth, and popular culture; where a citizen is nine-times more likely to be murdered by firearms than in Canada -- come from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations Uniform Crime Reports for 1999:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

 

[Gonz]

in the simplest terms available...gun control means hitting your target

 

[PT]

in the simplest terms available...gun control means hitting your target

My thoughts exactly.

 

[Jeslek]

ah Badbrain? Those are not really statistics anymore... They are facts. Ask any high school student (hopefully) and he should be able to quote most of those facts.

 

[ris]

the 'facts' as presented are presented in a biased form that does not take into account the specifities of each situation, some are wholly inaccurate [as pointed out by luis]. they propose a connection between gun control and state actions, and as stated earlier in this thread there is no affirmation that the ownership of a gun would have prevented the actions.

as statisitcs they require further data with regard to other countries that have undertaken similar actions but there was no gun control, the nature of the government action, the details of the legislature, etc. as facts they have become reduced to intersting, but empty, information.

 

[BadBrain]

To elaborate on Ris' point you absolutely failed to draw the correlation between gun control and the extermination of a nations own people.

The are other, much stronger, correlations that can be made with your examples:

all examples cited were of totalitarian dictatorships. Many other 'rights' were also curtailed -- including freedom to gather, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to critisize the goverment.

These types of atrocities happened in other countries as well: Chile in the early 70s, Iraq's extermination of the kurds in the 90s to name just two.

A strong correlative argument can be made, therefore, for the direct link between Fascism and the extermination of a nation's own people (or a subset thereof). In fact you would be hard-pressed to cite a totalitarian dictatorship where such atrocities did not occur.

On the other hand, you utterly failed to make the correlation between gun control and those atrocities by conveniently ignoring the fact that in the second-half of the 20th century (and the first 2 years of the 21st) the following countries have instituted gun control:

Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Kuwait, Great Britain, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Finland

and you will be unable to cite any examples of similar atrocities in any of the above-mentioned countries.