Posted on 03/25/2013 6:17:27 AM PDT by marktwain
The latest theme of those who oppose guns seems to be suicide (e.g. here). All those naughty guns lying around makes people pop themselves off, apparently. So the USA with all its guns must be the leading country for suicides?
Far from it. The USA is well down on the list. It comes in at no. 34 on the list of suicides per head. If you indulged in the sort of shallow reasoning that Leftists use, you could in fact conclude that having guns around generates a PROTECTIVE effect against suicide.
WOULD BANNING FIREARMS REDUCE MURDER AND SUICIDE?, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2007 (pp. 649-694)
Nanny states kill.
More points on this.
The Lefty freedom grabbers have been focussing on 3 areas in their latest gun grab attempts:
1) “Assault weapons”. So called “assault weapons” are rarely used and never needed to commit suicide, so “assault weapon” bans will do nothing to reduce suicides.
2) Universal background checks/registration - Again these will do nothing to prevent suicides.
3) Magazine capacity limits - Obviously these limits have no impact on the ability to commit suicide.
When gun grabbers start to include suicides in “gun violence” numbers and use them promote infringing on 2nd Amendment rights, we need to shut those lies down with the facts.
What strikes me most about that country/suicide list is not any particular positive correlation with the availability of guns, but the apparent (remember, if it looks significant, it probably is) strong statistical significance of suicide and the form of government one lives under or the social rigidity of the culture one finds oneself in. Less freedom and less opportunity (or a recent history of such) has far more to do, or so it seems, with a high suicide rate than the availability of guns. OTOH, the most extreme and uncompromising religious taboos against suicide, as in muslim countries, seem to place countries near the bottom of the list, despite social rigidity and lack of opportunity (not to mention prevalence of guns). It’d be fascinating to do an ANOVA on all of the countries of the world. And it might make for a very nice Master’s thesis for all you budding statisticians and sociologists out there (except the libs on your committee would probably eviscerate you).
When they object to suicide, point out that they are objecting to euthanasia, and that far more lives would be saved by outlawing euthanasia than by outlawing guns.
If they argue that the two are not the same, then point out that in Britain, they have legalized medical murder, and even pay hospitals bonuses based on how many people they murder. Some 30,000 people are murdered this way in Britain now, every year. That is just slightly less in little Britain than the number of people killed by guns each year in the US.
Another difference being that those who are murdered in Britain are innocent people, murdered by those who previously swore an oath to do no harm, while many of those killed by guns in the US richly deserved it.
I thought the libs were forever bleating about overpopulation and the need to limit the spread of humanity. People volunteering to pay the ultimate price to reduce overpopulation should be honored, not disparaged. In fact, I wish more environmentalists would do just that since they obviously believe mankind is the scourge of the planet.
Every year a few people stick their heads in gas ovens, so the government should outlaw gas ovens, too.
I’ve heard that there are a lot of foul-play murders that are termed ‘suicide’ by the police to keep their unsolved statistics low; I have no idea if that’s true, or if it is how prevalent it is.
...I’ve also heard that the communist countries would have lots of ‘suicides’ among its dissenters.
When guns are outlawed, too many people commit suicide by car, taking other people with them to the grave.
Who can forget the horrifying Dr. Eric R. Pianka speech at the Texas Academy of Science?
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/030406massculling.htm
What makes it all the more horrifying is that it represents a change in “deevolutionary socialism”. To explain, going back to the early 19th Century, “proto-socialism” had developed the theory of an “elect” or “elite” pseudo-nobility, the 10% of mankind that should rule over the other 90%, the peasant masses, serfs or peons.
This “1 in 10” ratio continued through several iterations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined a de-evolved civilization, where man is reduced to living in isolated peasant villages, and whose efforts to civilize themselves would be thwarted by elite, itinerant “Orphic Poets” (in a 1 to 10 ratio), who would deceive them into remaining primitive and agrarian. And they would be grateful to the Poets for keeping them down. (And this vision is not remarkably different than that of eco-radical Dave Foreman, of Earth First!, today.)
Another example, the slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, who wrote the book Cannibals All! in 1857, imagined that only 1 in 10 people are fit to be masters, and everyone else should be slaves. He even romanticized the masters as having to work hard to maintain control over the slaves, and their “happy, carefree” life of servitude to the masters.
But for modern “deevolutionary socialists”, this has turned far more evil. Like Pianka, they have decided that the 90% of the Earth’s people cannot be made to obey, so the only alternative is to exterminate them. They likely imagine that the “elites” will then repopulate and redesign the Earth more to their liking, and more able to control the inevitable masses when they arise.
I wonder about this as well, especially in high suicide, low homicide countries. We simply cannot know.
I was personally told that sometimes when homeless people are found dead, they are simply listed as “natural causes, even if their head is caved in.
One of the things that statists have in abundance is the “illusion of knowledge”. There are a lot of things that we do not have good information about.
Every study has shown that people intent upon committing suicide will do so whether they have a gun or not! Were the gun confiscated by nanny staters, another method of killing themselves would be found.
But then, facts like these are not important to gun grabbers. Indeed, they get in the way of good excuses for gun confiscation!
thinning the population. enviro libtards should be promoting suicide. their motto could be “a gun in every house saves the planet.” or “save the planet. more guns, more suicide, less people.”
Would the Liberals be happier if people jumped out of windows instead?
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