“The NRA say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. I think the gun helps. Just standing and shouting BANG! That’s not gonna kill too many people.”
- Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill (1999)
Homo Sapiens have been murdering each other on this planet for at least 10,000 to 100,000 years, and have only used burning-powder projectile launch tubes for roughly the past 1000 years. (Poison darts launched from a blowgun are a more ancient form of killing tube.)
When convenient projectile launching killing tubes aren't available, Homo Sapiens will rapidly revert to 10,000+ year old murder methods, and thus a husband inflamed with murder-rage who just learned his wife's ovaries have been voluntarily fertilized by another man's semen will not infrequently use punches or a nearby blunt object (hammer or rock) to fracture her skull and destroy her brain function, or use his hands to crush her windpipe, or bleed her out with a knife. This has been happening essentially every year for at least the past 10,000 years. If his wife had been armed with a handheld projectile launching killing tube she could have defended herself, but women frequently don't carry projectile tubes and frequently vote for restricting access to projectile tubes, because projectile tubes are loud and scary and make them feel unsafe.
Homo Sapiens have been killing each other on this planet for at least 10,000 years, and only used nuclear weapons for roughly the last 75 years.... If his wife had been armed with an M-28 Davy Crockett firing an M-388 round using a W54 Mod 2 with a yield of 84GJ, she could easily have deterred him, but she would not be legally allowed to carry military weapons.
Maintain the purity of your bodily fluids, friend!
Izzard is from England which has a high degree of gun control. The murder rate doesn't seem to be strongly correlated to regulation, however. This lends less credence to Izzard's conjecture. Maybe people who may murder will use whatever tool is available or aren't concerned about breaking gun laws?
The murder rate seems a lot lower than the US. Also the "murderers aren't concerned about gun laws" line is specious; a criminal isn't concerned about laws by definition - that doesn't invalidate the reasoning behind passing a law.
Doesn't seem like China is rolling out the welcome mat for many folks.
In 2016, China issued 1,576 permanent residency cards. This was more than double what it had issued the previous year, but still roughly 750 times lower than the United States’ 1.2 million.
Well, it's partially because police salaries are based on the rate of solved cases, no? Surely there is underreporting. And the homicide rate in Canada (which includes unintentional manslaughter) isn't much higher than the reported rate in China and we're fairly well armed by international standards:
so think about this. Do you want to give up your right of protecting yourself and be "protected" by the government? Or, do you want to keep your individual sovereignty and the right to say "no" to the government, meanwhile, also face the consequence that there are evil people and you might get hurt?
Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK. Meanwhile, Japan has incredibly restrictive weapon laws (including knives and swords), and they have a fraction of the rate of everyone else.
And before you point to Switzerland, I am all for gun ownership by certified, well trained, responsible citizens. But the US doesn't have that. Either decrease access to guns, or enact 2 years of compulsory military service where you are trained to respect your weapon and know precisely when and how to responsibly use it AND store it. If you do neither, you get the US.
And in either case, we need to improve the mental wellbeing of everyone in the US by giving more people access to "free" healthcare and not stigmatizing mental health.
Some people seem to be blind to the fact that access to a firearm lowers the cost of killing (by making it easier to do so); and what lowers the cost of something will encourage that behavior at the margins. But Switzerland! Sure, they've managed to thread that needle through education and regulation. But just relaxing gun laws without counteracting that in some way will of course increase homicides (and suicides, similarly). The US is case in point.
Making it easier to kill (access to a firearm) doesn't necessarily lowers the cost of killing.
The cost of killing lies on the consequence of killing.
Some people seem to be blind to the fact that less penalty and defunded/broken police and justice system lowers the cost of killing (by making it hard to bring murder to justice and the due penalty)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/world/europe/anders-breiv...
> Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK.
That isn't germane. If the rate of something fluctuates without connection to the action taken to change the rate, then the action isn't effective or is confounded by other more significant factors.
Izzard's implicit conjecture is that if guns are not present, then murder is less likely (please let me know if I am misunderstanding it). Izzard's country of primary domicile is England which has a recent history of making guns less available. However, the murder rate in England appears to increase and decrease without regard to the timing of key legislation. Since a murder may or may not be performed with a gun, if murders do not decrease in the absence of guns then it follows that a gun may be a particular method but is not necessary for the commission of a murder.
I suppose a counterfactual could be asserted: the murder rate would have been even higher without England's gun laws. I suppose that is possible and would be plausible with more information about the natural variation in murder rates of various methods. Maybe something like Narwal tusks aren't a replacement for guns but have their own natural rate of usage in murders.
