Political incorrectness

Wal-Mart just announced that they’ll videotape people who buy guns. Michelle Malkin wasted no time in declaring the end of the world. American society is of course outraged at the prospect of being caught on tape when buying firearms, because clearly the purchase of firearms warrant a lot more privacy than the purchase of chewing gum from that place on the corner, where you’re still recorded on CCTV, even if it looks very inconspicuous, and the clerk is an elderly male sporting a friendly gaze.

This in turn sparked a debate on the pisstake/news relay site Fark.com, noted chiefly for its uncanny ability to bring down lesser sites with an influx of traffic as hordes of users flock to the source of today’s laugh lulz. As one user points out, the way that the thread swings back and forth between “gun nuts” and “gun control weenies” calling each other out and generally attempting to solve their differences through a verbal pissing contest, aptly highlights the way the whole gun control debate really looks from outside. The level of general asshattery and bullshit in circulation on both sides means that if intended as an actual debate – instead of just an unsolvable political issue that “libruls” and conservatives can fight ceaselessly over – it’s failing spectacularly.

Some statistics first. The FBI keeps track of murders and non-negligent manslaughter in an easy-to-comprehend format. One would think their numbers at least represent reality as we know to a respectable degree. Nationmaster concerns itself with a broad array of statistics, and covers just about every nation – which is useful when you want to compare crime rates between nations. As you can see the number of murders they operate with here differs from the FBI numbers – but their footnotes explain it well enough. They operate with numbers from a survey period of 1998 to 2000, a period during which, going by the FBI stats, violent crime was at an all-time low in the US, as opposed to the most recent annual records. Then there’s the distinction between murder and non-negligent manslaughter, which I am going to assume accounts for the roughly 4000 “missing” murders in the nationmaster stats. If then we can assume that the nationmaster stats are not totally off, we can move on to the stats that are related to the matter at hand – guns.
Note: If anyone can provide more accurate – or just alternate – statistics, then feel free. I’ll include those as well.

Looking at the number of murders by firearms, the US narrowly avoids the bronze medal by placing 4th – however the gap between 3rd and 4th place is distinct. The murder rates can be justified by simply pointing to the latest numbers on total population. When humans live together, someone gets killed every now and then. I believe history itself serves as evidence for that. Three hundred million people together means more people in total get killed. Of course, what makes statistics so much fun is that they let you determine more than just totals. Once you get served the same statistics, but in per-capita format, they’re a lot more valuable. Behold now, the top ten Nations with people who like to shoot each other to death list, in all its statistical glory:

• #1 South Africa: 0.719782 per 1,000 people
• #2 Colombia: 0.509801
• #3 Thailand: 0.312093
• #4 Zimbabwe: 0.0491736
• #5 Mexico: 0.0337938
• #6 Belarus: 0.0321359
• #7 Costa Rica: 0.0313745
• #8 United States: 0.0279271
• #9 Uruguay: 0.0245902
• #10 Lithuania: 0.0230748

While ranking 8th may not seem all that bad, consider that the US is the only fully-industrialised western democracy to make the top ten list of the per capita murders with firearms rating. With the other contenders on the list being corrupt, crime-ridden regimes, newly liberated ex-Soviet states and the festering abomination of violence and crime that is South Africa, I wouldn’t see the above as particularly reassuring. A 1997 Police Foundation survey found that there were at the time approximately 197 million handguns in private ownership across the USA, in addition to various long guns (that tend to be owned by people who own handguns to begin with anyway). The abundance of firearms coupled with the high per capita rate of murders by firearm might lend to the theory that guns cause murders.

But there’s a hitch. It’s called Canada, and it’s located directly north of the USA. Canadians spend their time wrestling grizzly bears, battling cabin fevers, and playing hockey. They, too, have a lot of guns – yet for some reason they spend less time killing each other with their guns. At least that’s how it looks if we go back to the top ten list from before, and keep scrolling down:

Murders with firearms (per capita)

• #20 Canada: 0.00502972 per 1,000 people

… ?

Thus one might conclude that the reason why John and Jane Doe have such a penchant for shooting at each other is most likely not attributable to the number of firearms in circulation, or the – by most standards – liberal gun policy. Note that liberal was not used in the “librul” sense just now; it’s a linguistic paradox that across the pond, liberals are advocating less liberal gun laws, while conservatives are fighting for the gun legislation to remain liberal.

Yet the liberals (this time in the sense of anti-gun American liberals) seem to think that if the guns go away, then crime rates will magically drop and people will stop killing each other. For some reason that strikes me as optimistic to the point of foolishness; if every firearm across the USA suddenly vanished overnight, I doubt it would take them as much as a week to start killing each other with whatever else they could: Knives, bats, pitchforks, chainsaws, sledgehammers, vegetables, screwdrivers, phone boots, swords, kitchen appliances, bleach, and so on. I admit, it would in most cases require a tad more manual labour – not to mention a whole lot of creativity in the cases of vegetables and bleach – but they’d still get the job done.

The error I perceive in the pro-regulation camp’s reasoning stems from what I believe is an attempt to apply European logic to American society. It’s not going to work. Yes, there are certain indisputable facts that support the “less guns = less dead people full of holes” thesis: There are less guns amongst the general public of Europe, and we don’t find killing each other to be that exhilarating anymore – I guess it’s gotten old, we’ve spent the past two millennia years doing it already – as reflected in our per capita murder rates that are significantly lower than those of the US, where there are a lot of guns.
However. They’ve had their guns since they still liked the French , cementing a mindset about guns and self-defense conventions that are radically different from European custom (and, before someone starts pointing fingers, not necessarily wrong because it’s different). Had I been born an American, I don’t doubt that I would have felt disempowered and downright stripped of a very basic right if I weren’t allowed to own a handgun anymore.

I can also identify at least one wide-reaching practical issue that would make effective gun regulation complicated on a purely logistic level as well as ideologically contested: The sheer amount of guns in circulation is so massive that making gun ownership restricted today would prove a rather futile effort. Then there’s the issue of people who employ guns in their “trade”.
As the NRA and other pro-gun advocates continue to point out – the criminals won’t go and turn in their guns just because the government tells them to. There are a lot of legal, traceable guns in the hands of Americans, but it seems naïve to assume that the number of “non-existent” guns in the hands of people who will use them for less-than-honest purposes is negligible enough to warrant disarming everyone else.

However, this doesn’t excuse the much-spoken-of gun nuts, who to this day exert a paranoia rarely seen amongst the sane. You don’t need an AK to defend your home (unless you expect that the army will attack your home), nor is it very likely that the demanding of an assertion that you are not utterly batshit before you get to buy your guns is a certain precursor to men in pink suits arriving at your door and informing you in gruff Soviet voices that you must now – for great justice and Komrad Obama – hand over all your guns or face assimiliation and the GULag. As I mentioned initially, both sides tend to blow things vastly out of proportions.

In Europe (and certain other parts of the world), criminals are much less likely to be armed with a firearm. The guns are harder to get even illegally, more expensive on the whole, and if you want to legally own a handgun or a rifle, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. Not to mention you can’t pick up ammo at your local convenience store. For someone outside of the police force or military to get their hands on a submachine gun or an assault rifle, you’d need to be fairly deep in the underworld in order to have the relevant black-market contacts.

Together, this all constitutes a very unofficial “live and let live” agreement between those who enforce the law, and those who break it. With general public not being armed and prone to return fire and start shootouts, and police officers not ready to unholster their guns and fire away at a second’s notice, criminals don’t have to resort to firearms either. While crime still occurs (and organised, large-scale crime of course operates with firearms), it means the average retard mugger won’t be pointing at you with a gun. Burglars won’t be carrying a revolver “just in case”, and liquor store stick-ups are significantly harder to successfully accomplish if you’re armed with a baseball bat instead of a semi-automatic. It also ensures a minimum of innocent victims caught in eventual crossfires. The results can gleaned from the crime rate statistics covering Europe. It’s just less violent overall. I know some people might shake their heads in disbelief upon reading this, but that is in fact how it is. And it works very well.

While this apparently is very appealing to the American gun-control crowd, I sincerely doubt it would work out the way they hope it will if they adopted the “less guns” stance from here. As I’ve tried to illustrate above, American society itself is in a state where taking the guns away from (largely) law-abiding citizens is simply not advisable. If they had done away with guns two hundred years ago, then things would have been different. Per today, it’s just too late to change that part of American society.

In the end, one can do naught but accept that it is indeed not the guns that kill people – it’s the Americans.

References, sources and further reading
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080414/ap_on_go_ot/gun_sales
http://www.nraila.org/
http://www.nra.org/
http://www.fark.com/
http://www.fbi.gov/
http://www.nationmaster.com/
http://wikipedia.org
http://www.cfc-cafc.gc.ca/
http://michellemalkin.com/