In the debate over whether or not we should immorally and unconstitutionally seize firearms from American citizens, the anti-liberty community repeatedly throws out statistics about “gun crime”. These statistics are used to make these United States, look like a very violent dangerous place because of all the guns.
My dear people, “gun crime” is a made up category that has nothing to do with actual safety, particularly when the crimes are ranked based on “how many” crimes occurred or what “percentage” of crimes in “x number of countries” occurred in these United States.
The premise, that “gun crime” deserves its own category is completely disingenuous as well as disrespectful to the thousands of crime victims who were harmed using some other implement. Criminals will continue to commit crimes using whatever implement they happen to have at hand. Trying to create a separate category for guns is just a creative way to make the statistics say what you want them to.
The raw “numbers” also tend to make the United States appear to have more crime in general. This is done when the number of murders, robberies, etc. in these U.S. are compared with some other nation. This is pure junk mathematics. Many U.S. states have a population greater than many nations in Europe or South America. Trying to use the numbers to illustrate “greater violence” in the U.S. is just bad math. Instead what needs to be examined is the occurrence of crime relative to population. If you’ll google the daily mails report on violent crime per hundred thousand, you’ll find that the UK has nearly 4 times as many violent crimes as these United States. In fact, of the countries examined these U.S. doesn’t even make the top ten.
So when you see numbers tossed out on this issue, your best bet is probably just to ignore them. Focus on common sense and reasonable arguments and don’t rely on numbers to make your point for you. For example, we know that The State (nation in question doesn’t matter) is the greatest mass murderer of all time and that The State is greatly assisted by an unarmed opposition.
While raw data seems like it should be helpful, the problem lies with the assumptions made in the gathering of the data. Reason and common sense prove to be much more reliable, as usual.
thetonedeafbard 