...Bryan Appleyard on blogs and the Web 2.0.
And Murad Ahmed on Virginia Tech, if only for this amazing paragraph:
In 2005, there are 14,000 gun related homicides in America. In around the same period, there were 73 in the UK. In Japan, just 2. In America there is an average gun-killing rate of 3.97 per 100,000 of the population; in Switzerland, where it is legally mandatory to hold firearms, it is 0.51.
I'm obtuse: Is Mr. Ahmed pro-gun or anti-gun?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell him that my orange is much better than his apple.
Also, check out my thoughts on the Virginia Tech massacre.
ReplyDeleteSo the Swiss numbers prove that it's not about the guns.
ReplyDeleteOr it shows you can trust the Swiss with guns but not Americans. I don't know what any of it shows.
ReplyDeleteThis was the strange twist in Bowling for Columbine. Moore set out to prove that America had a problem with gun death because of the proliferation of guns. Then he found they had just as many guns in Canada but none of the violence.
They get a lot of headlines but mass murders in schools are very rare events.
ReplyDeleteMost of the US's gun murders occur in a few concentrated urban districts. Outside of those, I don't think rural and suburban areas are any more dangerous than Canada\the UK.
The other countries have urban areas too.
ReplyDeleteIt's not fair to compare Switzerland with any other place in the world. The Swiss are trained from a very early age to be totally law-abiding. But could there be something in the fact that all able-bodied males have to attend military training and are therefore trained in the proper use of firearms?
ReplyDeleteI would be interested to know if there is much gun crime in rural areas in America. I imagine that where fathers teach their sons to handle guns from an early age for hunting, they pass on a healthy respect for the weapons. That's a far cry from going into a city gun store to purchase a gun simply because you have the right to bear arms.
he found they had just as many guns in Canada
ReplyDeleteYes, and if you all chip in and pay me $5 million, I'll share the Canadian secret of how to be a tolerant, law-abiding, peace-loving people armed to the teeth.
But this says a lot more about Michael Moore than Canada, because it is wrong. Handguns are effectively prohibited and urban Canada make you Brits look like wild and crazy cowboys on this issue. It's all about rifles vs. handguns, urban vs. rural.
On this issue all the stats seem to contradict each other.
ReplyDeleteYes, if anybody can draw coherent conclusions from these statistics, there are much cleverer than I. What is with Estonia and Taiwan? (Also, note those pre-gun 13th century stats. I'll bet Harry knows who to blame for them.)
ReplyDeleteHow much of the gun violence in the US is due to black-on-black crime?
ReplyDeleteAccording to blackamericaweb.com, gun violence is the number-one killer of black 15-to-24-year-olds in America.
ReplyDeleteAli:
ReplyDeleteApparently just under 50%.