Jim Carrey points out that over a million people have been killed by firearms since John Lennon was murdered.
By gum, he's right.
But he's skipping over some of it. A bit more than half are suicides. No matter how you slice it, someone who uses a gun to check-out is serious and when a gun isn't available will use other means.
But in the past 32.4 years since the death of Mr Lennon, over a million people have been killed by a firearm in the USA. Just a bit under 31 thousand a year.
Well, Jim, got some news for you...
In the whopping 12 years of the Third Reich, they managed to off some 12 million people (and most of them in the last four years of it). It will take us 388 years to catch up Hitler.
In four years Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge managed to at least tie our "score" and might have doubled or tripled it (unlike the NSDAP they didn't keep good records).
36 years of Stalin killed more than 40 million people in the Soviet Union. I think we'd have to use nukes on ourselves to catch up not just rely on small arms.
Chairman Mao snuffed about 35 million people and did it in about five years. He's got us stomped for rate.
Why do I bring up these four dictatorships, Jim?
You'll never guess what they all did before they started murdering their own people.
They took away all of the guns from the everyday citizenry.
The false argument is "If there were no guns, those people wouldn't have died."
ReplyDeleteThat completely ignores centuries of mayhem and murder before firearms.
It completely ignores current countries with strict firearm laws and high homicide rates.
Joe Huffman's "One Question" is certainly apt in regards to the tyrants you listed -- did gun control make the average person safer?
The answer is in the numbers.
I'm always amused by people who howl that murders are done with firearms, not least because I'm a serious true-crime buff. The "classic" true crimes were almost all done without so much as a single gun. Same-same goes for most of the best-known serial killers.
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