A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths (theatlantic.com) |
A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths (theatlantic.com) |
Which is utter nonsense.
British gun restrictions mostly got tight after the 1987 Hungerford massacre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre ); prior to that point, ownership of handguns and semi-auto rifles like Ryan's AK-56 (semi-auto Chinese AK-47 clone) was legal, with a license. Go back further: guns weren't licensed at all prior to the Pistols Act of 1903 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_King... ). Many rifle clubs historically existed, able to trace their origins origins to the early 19th century as semi-organized volunteer militias ready to defy a Napoleonic invasion. In other words, see also the 2nd Amendment to the US constitution, British-style, in the shape of organized militias.
TL:DR; Author of article is mistaking the current-day UK political consensus for a long-term historical status quo. It just ain't so.
What else are they getting wrong?
* They compare gun homicide instead of absolute homicide. Are we expected to believe that killers, in the absence of firearms, decide that maybe they'll be peaceful and productive members of society instead?
* They do not perform any normalization whatsoever. Not only do they fail to account for cultural differences that might affect all forms of homicide and/or crime in general, they don't adjust for population size at all
* They happily compare gun ownership rates in the US with conflict-dense areas like Yemen, but make no effort to correlate this with crime rates, which they only compare between "rich" countries.
* The title states that Japan has "virtually eliminated shooting deaths" but provides no evidence that shooting deaths were ever a serious problem in Japan
* The article implies that "a land without guns" having next to no shooting deaths, a logical truism, is a useful observation in the absence of any correlation with actual crime rates, let alone normalized ones.
Whatever your opinions about gun control may be, it should be clear that the author has some very strong ones, and isn't afraid of pushing them with misleading publications.
"... the right to bare arms in order
to defend against the government."
And on a slightly more serious note, can anyone honestly envisage the American people bonding together to topple the government, using their legally owned weapons against what the US government can bring to bear against them?
Honestly?