That Americans have historically been more homicidal than the English is almost never discussed in the contemporary gun control debate... [More]Hold the phone right there, pally. I'm an American and I'm not homicidal. Neither is anyone I've ever known.
This collectivist lumping of all of us together to form a general pool is misleading and deceptive. Those of us who conduct ourselves responsibly and with self-control do not belong pooled in with the degenerates who don't.
I'll bet you could take the 5 million or so members of the NRA, arguably the most heavily-armed civilian population on the planet, and you'd find our general and homicidal violence rates are lower than just about anyone's anywhere.
"That Americans have historically been more homicidal than the English is almost never discussed in the contemporary gun control debate..."
ReplyDeleteI bet the millions subjugated and murdered in British colonies would beg to differ.
As would our founding fathers. They simply better understood the nature of the state, and retained the right to bear arms, rather than cede that right to an armed master.
Piers may know nothing about guns, but this guy knows nothing of history.
Plus there is the issue that the way the Home Office across the pond calculates "murder" rates is absolutely, completely different from the way the US does. In fact until someone is convicted of the murder in the UK, the death is not listed as a murder and then it is recorded as a murder for the year in which the conviction occurs and not when the murder actually happened. Frankly, their "murder" rate stat is seriously useless and I'm pretty sure that's not an accident.
ReplyDeletehttp://rboatright.blogspot.com/2013/03/comparing-england-or-uk-murder-rates.html
Their explanation does make some sense though. The logic is that declaring a death "murder" prejudices any court proceedings that follow, which makes some sort of sense in a "innocent until proven guilty" framework.