Democide: The Number One Cause of Death on Earth is Governments Killing Their Own People: That’s Really Why Guns Are Important
“Democide is a term coined by American political scientist Rudolph Rummel to describe ‘the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.’
According to Rummel, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims, killings by mercenaries and unofficial private groups, extrajudicial summary killings, and mass deaths due to governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines like the Holodomor, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e., killings during a civil war. This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government.
Rummel created democide as an extended term to include forms of government murder not covered by genocide. According to Rummel, Democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.”
--Wikipedia
Again, the number one cause of death on earth is governments killing their own people.
Nevertheless, the sick and twisted irony of one’s indifference to the suffering of foreign lands is that it merely adds strength to a tyrant, and a tyrant will not stop at the domination of foreign counties. A tyrant will dominate his own country with equal zeal and enthusiasm. Domestic attacks on local population are far easier to accomplish than overseas proxy wars, anyway.
Democide covers a wide range of atrocities perpetrated upon an indigenous country:
1) Forced labor and concentration camps
2) Killings by “unofficial” private groups
3) Extrajudicial summary killings
4) Mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglects
5) Deliberate famines
6) Killings by an de facto government
7) Civil war killings
8) Bio warfare
Democide, Gun Control, and Gun Confiscation: The State’s Monopoly On Violence and The 2nd Amendment
Gun control is predicated on the belief that private citizens cannot be trusted with firearms…from Ammo.
Gun control is predicated on the belief that private citizens cannot be trusted with firearms. That the state should have a “monopoly on violence” because it is less violent than individuals. And that firearms should be taken away from private citizens because only the state is responsible enough to handle them.
There is, however, a major problem with this: States are statistically far more violent than individuals. After all, in the 20th century alone, 262 MILLION people died at the hands of their own governments.
The term for this sort of atrocity is “democide.” It is one of the reasons the Founding Fathers included the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution – to allow citizens some form of protection against agents of a tyrannical government meaning to do them harm, as the Founders were forcibly disarmed as colonists by the British prior to the American Revolution.
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What Is Democide?
Democide is the murder of any person or people by their government. It’s an important concept, as it is more expansive than the better-known term genocide. While the largest genocide in history is widely thought to be the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s work pales in comparison to that of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong. In fact, one aspect of Stalin’s terror was the “Holodomor,” the intentional mass starvation of Ukrainians, which killed over seven million victims in less than two years (compared to six million Jews over the four years of the Holocaust).
Sometimes democide is ethnically motivated, as in the Holocaust. In other cases, like Stalin’s Great Purge, having the wrong politics is enough to get one killed. In the Ottoman Empire’s persecution of its Greek and Armenian populations, religion was the motivating factor. However, in all of these cases, it’s difficult to ascertain where the political, religious and ethnic motivations begin and end.
Rather than splitting hairs, democide is a more inclusive term. Government killings tend to have mixed motivations, as religion, ethnicity and politics often overlap. And, after all, do the motivations even matter? Democide treats all mass killings at the hands of one’s government as a single crime, allowing us to better compare apples to apples.
A Brief History of the Concept of Democide
Democide might be a practice as old as time, but it reached new depths in the 20th century. This is when warfare became mechanized and, as pointed out by anarchist philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe, war shifted from being about property disputes over pieces of land into ideological crusades. Democracy vs. monarchy or liberalism and communism vs. fascism are great examples of this.
While the act of governments killing their own citizens is not unique to this century, the concept of democide was first formulated by Rudolph Rummel, a late professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii and frequent Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He studied the political violence of the 20th century with an eye toward doing all he could to end it. In doing so, he quickly noticed that not all mass killings committed by governments fell under the heading of “genocide.” Further, as stated above, the differences between mass killing for religious, political and ethnic reasons are often difficult to separate from one another. Rummel found a far more elegant term in “democide,” which could easily refer to all of this and more.
Rummel’s conclusions were based on empirical study over a period of 15 years. He penned six books on the subject, publishing his abstracts and statistics on his website as a free resource for all to read. The major conclusions that Rummel came to were that despite their other shortcomings, Western liberal democracies excelled over all other forms of government in two major respects:
1. Democratically elected governments were the least likely to kill their own citizens.
2. Democratically elected governments do not wage war against one another.
Rummel employed a broad definition of democide, which included not just lining people up and shooting them, but also deliberate neglect, intentionally poor policy or forced labor. Hence, the Holodomor, a planned famine which is widely agreed upon to have been the result of deliberate Soviet policies directed against Ukrainians, fits squarely in the camp of democide. Although he was an outspoken proponent of international liberal democracy and a critic of communism, Rummel did not support going to war for the sole purpose of replacing a dictatorship with a democracy.
Far and away, the worst offenders in the world of democide are communist regimes. The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia all enter in the “million-plus” club and rank among the most democidal regimes in human history. Other forms of dictatorships, ranging from fascist to quasi-Marxist Third World nationalism, also rank high – with the autocracy of the Ottoman Empire being a relative outlier. The other major example of democide from a monarchy is the Belgian colonial authority in the Congo, which took place at the hands of a constitutional monarch (not an absolute one).
While Western liberal democracies are by no means beyond rebuke, they’re comparatively innocent when it comes to democide. What’s more, most democidal deaths at the hands of democratic powers tend to happen during times of war – such as the firebombing of Dresden. Western democracies have been known to act with undue care or even blood lust with regard to rival nations. They’re not known for wholesale mass slaughter of their own citizens or that of other nations.
While this certainly doesn’t make the victims of modern liberal democracies any less tragic, it does result in an overall body count that is much less than totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships. Incidents like the storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco or Ruby Ridge are noteworthy as aberrations – shocking scandals precisely because of how far they fall outside of democratic norms.
Democide: The Tale of the Tape
While Hitler is often the symbol of ultimate evil in human history, he only gets the bronze when it comes to democide. The worst offenders were on the other extreme of the political spectrum, with the top two spots being occupied by communist governments. So, who are the most blood-soaked dictators in human history? Here’s a look by the numbers:
1. Communist China under the stewardship of Mao Zedong holds the ignoble honor of being the most democidal regime in human history to the tune of 65 million people killed, including 30 million during the Great Leap Forward alone.
2. Second is the Soviet Union, with 29 million deaths. This breaks down into 20 million under Stalin, 9 million under Lenin and 7 million in the Holodomor.
3. As stated above, Hitler comes in third with official estimates of the total dead ranging from 10 million to 12.5 million.
Ten other countries killed somewhere between 1 million and 10 million of their own people between 1900 and 1987:
1. Japan under Emperor Tojo
2. Russia during Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution
3. Pasha’s Turkey
4. Pol Pot in Cambodia
5. Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea
6. Mariam’s Communist regime in Ethiopia
7. Gowon in Nigeria
8. Bangladesh under Yahya Khan
9. Saddam Hussein in Iraq
10. Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh
11. Idi Amin in Uganda.
12. Nearly half – 46.6% – of all deaths in China between 1900 and 1987 were the result of democide.
Five different regimes have killed over 10 million people, with two of them based in China: The People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-hek. The other three are the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the Congo Free State.
· China, in one form or another, has been responsible for fully one out of every three democide deaths.
· The top five democidal regimes are responsible for a combined 219 million deaths.
Though restricted by geography, democide is the leading non-natural cause of death in the 20th century. For example, while the chances of death by government in China were almost half during the 20th century, they were near zero in the United States and Canada.
Hitler, the Holocaust, and Gun Control
The link between gun control and the Holocaust is not clear-cut, despite it being a go-to example of gun control proceeding democide. In fact, the Nazi government loosened gun control for most German citizens, while restricting access to Jews.
The post-World War I Weimar Republic passed intensely strict gun control laws between the wars. In interwar Germany, gun ownership was effectively banned for private citizens. There were two reasons for this: First, post-war Germany was a hotbed of revolution and reaction, often teetering on the brink of civil war. Second, it was a form of compliance with the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which Germany signed upon surrender – requiring massive disarmament of the entire nation.
In 1928, the Weimar Republic relaxed the laws slightly with the Law on Firearms and Ammunition. This law instituted a strict firearms licensing system, while continuing to restrict gun ownership to private citizens deemed “trustworthy.”
Five years later, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. In 1938, five years after his election and well into the Third Reich, the government passed a new weapons law in March of that year, which made it easier for most private German citizens (again, those deemed “trustworthy”) to obtain firearms, with one caveat – the law explicitly stated that “No (gun) permits may be given to Jews.”
While Hitler was liberalizing gun ownership restrictions in Germany for “trustworthy” citizens (and, it’s worth mentioning, to support the German weapons industry), he was also actively disarming people termed “unreliable.” In particular, Jews in Germany. Not only were Jews prohibited from owning firearms, but they also weren’t even allowed to work in their manufacture.
In November of 1938, Hitler’s government went one step further, prohibiting Jews from owning any kind of weapons, including swords, which were popular souvenirs of the First World War. This law came one day after the “Night of Broken Glass,” during which Nazi mobs attacked Jews and destroyed synagogues.
German Jews represented less than one percent of the overall German population, so it’s unfair to say that had the Jews been armed, they could have prevented the Holocaust. They were vastly outmanned and outgunned. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was mercilessly crushed, and at a time when German military resources were being drained elsewhere on two fronts.
Gun Confiscation and Democide
There are a number of cases where a wave of gun confiscation and registration directly presaged a democidal outbreak, including a history of gun control and genocide. Examples of this include:
1. In Turkey, gun control was tightened prior to the Armenian genocide.
2. The Soviet Union instituted gun control in 1929, disarming the formerly heavily armed Soviet populace.
3. China’s gun control program was rolled out by the Republic of China in 1938.
4. Guatemala started gun control in 1964, prior to killing 100,000 Mayan Indians.
5. Uganda’s gun control program began in 1970, almost immediately before an eight-year program of exterminating Christians began.
The question of democide’s relation to gun ownership becomes more complex when we look at which countries own the most guns. Arguably the nation with the longest-standing tradition of personal freedom, the United States, also has the highest rates of gun ownership. Beyond that, things start getting less clear. Switzerland, like the U.S., has a longstanding tradition of both freedom and gun ownership, though far fewer citizens have ammunition than have firearms. Finland, Norway and Sweden are other countries in the top ten classified as “Free” by Freedom House, with high levels of gun ownership, along with Uruguay. However, also in the top ten of gun ownership we find Iraq, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, all of which are rated as “not free” (the last of which has become a bit of a symbol for countries lacking in basic freedom and human rights).
The other end of the spectrum – correlating gun control with a lack of freedom – is much more clear. Most countries without much in the way of freedom also have gun control. However, no one would accuse South Korea, Japan or Ireland of being totalitarian states ripe for democide, despite the extreme difficulty of owning weapons and the near impossibility of owning handguns. While the Imperial Japanese government committed a slew of atrocities during the Second World War, it’s almost certain that no one would place a bet on them to take that up anew any time soon.
Gun confiscation is neither necessary nor sufficient for democidal atrocities. Remember the case of Nazi Germany, where some people had their gun rights restricted, but others had them expanded. However, as we can see from the above cases, removing guns from the populace also removes at least one major obstacle. Consider, as a thought experiment, the chances of the United States government exterminating the people of Coastal California (where citizens owning firearms is frowned upon) versus their chances of doing the same in Greater Appalachia. Also consider that democide against an armed population isn’t necessarily more difficult in this day and age – especially with newer military technologies like directed energy weapons.
Perhaps one thing is uncontroversial: If you don’t resist a democide, your chances of death are almost certain. And if you do choose to resist, you’ll need something sterner than rocks and empty bottles. Firearms, at the very least, provide a fighting chance against the very real possibility that your government decides your group is the next Ukrainian kulaks – or against the far more tangible threats to your daily existence, like street crime or home invasions.
https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/democide-understanding-the-states-monopoly-on-violence-and-the-second-amendment/
Murder And Homicide Rates Skyrocket After Gun Bans
(April 16, 2016)
Every place that has banned guns (either all guns or all handguns) has seen murder rates go up. You cannot point to one place where murder rates have fallen, whether it’s Chicago or D.C. or even island nations such as England, Jamaica, or Ireland.
For an example of homicide rates before and after a ban, take the case of the handgun ban in England and Wales in January 1997 (source here see Table 1.01 and the column marked “Offences currently recorded as homicide per million population,” UPDATED numbers available here). The gun control laws in Northern Ireland (1972 handgun ban) are different than those of England and Wales.
Law-abiding individuals had already registered their handguns and were required to turn in their guns “at designated police stations” by May 14, 1997. After the ban, clearly homicide rates bounce around over time, but there is only one year (2010) where the homicide rate is lower than it was in 1996. The immediate effect was about a 50 percent increase in homicide rates. Firearm homicide rate had almost doubled between 1996 and 2002 (see here p. 11). The homicide and firearm homicide rates only began falling when there was a large increase in the number of police officers during 2003 and 2004. Despite the huge increase in the number of police, the murder rate still remained slightly higher than the immediate pre-ban rate.
https://crimeresearch.org/2016/04/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/
Gun Ban and Genocide, The Disarming Facts
But what are people supposed to do when the government itself starts killing citizens? The genocide in Darfur, Sudan, is the direct result of the types of gun laws that the United Nations is trying to impose throughout the entire world. Millions of people have already died because of such laws, and millions more will die unless the U.N. is stopped.
Like Iran today and Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sudan is ruled by a totalitarian Islamic government. The current regime, which calls itself the National Islamic Front, took power in a military coup in 1989 and immediately began imposing Islamic law throughout the country and perpetrating genocide.
The first victims were the inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan. According to Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch, “The Nuba were grouped into ‘Peace Villages,’ where their women were systematically raped by Arab men, their children stolen to serve as slaves and at least 100,000 people ‘disappeared,’ never to be seen again.”
The next targets were the Africans of south Sudan, who are mainly Christians or Animists. The most recent genocide victims are the people of Darfur, a Texas-sized region in western Sudan.
The Darfuris are Muslims, but like the majority of Sudan’s population, they are black Africans, in contrast to the Arabs who control the government.
The foundation of Sudan’s genocide is, as with almost every other genocide in world history, the disarmament of intended victims.
In Sudan, it is virtually impossible for an average citizen to lawfully possess the means for self-defense. According to the national gun control statutes, a gun licensee must be over 30 years of age, must have a specified social and economic status and must be examined physically by a doctor. Women have even more difficulty meeting these requirements because of social and occupational limitations.
There are additional restrictions on the amount of ammunition one may possess, making it nearly impossible for a law-abiding gun owner to achieve proficiency with firearms. A handgun owner, for example, can only purchase 15 rounds of ammunition a year. The penalties for violation of Sudan’s firearms laws are severe and can include capital punishment.
The practical application of the gun laws is different. If you are someone the government wants to slaughter--such as one of the black Africans of central, southern and western Sudan--then you are absolutely forbidden to possess a firearm. A U.S. Department of State document notes: “After President Bashir seized power in 1989, the new government disarmed non-Arab ethnic groups but allowed politically loyal Arab allies to keep their weapons.”
On the other hand, if you’re an Arab who wants to kill blacks, then Sudan’s gun control laws are awfully loose. In Darfur, there has been a long rivalry between camel-riding Arab nomads and black African pastoralists. The Arabs consider blacks to be racially inferior and fit only for slavery. In Darfur Rising, the International Crisis Group explains: “Beginning in the mid-1980s, successive governments in Khartoum inflamed matters by supporting and arming Arab tribes, in part to prevent the southern rebels from gaining a foothold in the region … . Arabs formed militias, burned African villages and killed thousands. Africans in turn formed self-defense groups, members of which eventually became the first Darfur insurgents to appear in 2003.”
The report states that what provoked the black Africans to rise up against the Khartoum tyranny was “the government’s failure to enforce the terms of a tribal peace agreement requiring nomads of Arab background to pay blood money for killing dozens of Zaghawas [one of the African tribes in Darfur], including prominent tribal chiefs.”
Likewise, Peter Verney, of the London-based Sudan Update, writes that the government armed the Arabs “while removing the weapons of the farmers, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa.”
He points out that the disarmament of the black Africans has been enforced ruthlessly: “Since 2001, Darfur has been governed under central government decree, with special courts to try people suspected of illegal possession or smuggling of weapons … The security forces have misused these powers for arbitrary and indefinite detention.”
While the blacks there are forbidden to possess arms, the Arabs are given arms by the government--five or six guns per person, according to Amnesty International. The Arabs are then formed into terrorist gangs known as Janjaweed (literally, “evil men on horseback” or “devil on a horse”).
You can be confident that when handing out rifles to Arab terrorists, the Sudan government does not follow its law that anyone who wants a gun must undergo a medical examination.
As a result of tyrannical oppression, there are armed rebel groups in the Sudanese genocide regions. That these resistance groups had been able to acquire weapons illegally was a great affront to the United Nations and the gun prohibition lobbies, who denounce any form of gun possession by “non-state actors.” A “non-state actor” is any person or group whose arms possession is not approved by the government. Good examples include the Sudanese who were fighting the genocide in their own country, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and the American revolutionaries.
The Sudanese resistance movements, although able to acquire some arms for their own operations, did not have the resources to protect the many isolated villages in the vast nation.
So, with black villagers disarmed (thanks to Sudan’s strict gun laws) and Arab gangs well-armed (thanks to the government), the stage was set for genocide.
In south Sudan, the genocide program has killed 2.2 million victims and driven 4.5 million from their homes. Those not killed have often been sold into slavery. Rape has been extensively used as an instrument of state terror.
In Darfur, according to Smith College professor Eric Reeves, the leading U.S. scholar on Sudan genocide, the Janjaweed have caused the deaths of up to 450,000 black Sudanese (www.sudanreeves.org). The Janjanweed have also raped untold thousands and have forced over 2 million black Sudanese into refugee camps.
Notably, the majority of villages bombed were villages where there were no armed rebels. Thus, the destruction of the villages should be seen not as an overzealous form of counter-insurgency warfare, but rather as a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire society. The ethnic cleansing of Darfur has been so thorough that, literally, there are no villages left to burn.
The displaced villagers live in squalid refugee camps in Sudan or in neighboring Chad, where mortality rates from disease and malnutrition are very high. The U.N. is, incredibly, pushing for these camps to be turned into “safe areas” under the control of the Sudanese military.
The special representative of the U.N. secretary-general who signed the “safe areas” plan was Jon Pronk, who in 1995 was in charge of the “safe areas” scheme in Bosnia. There, Serbs murdered thousands of Bosnians while Dutch “peacekeepers” stood idle.
The Sudanese victims are generally unarmed. Amnesty International reported the testimony of a villager who complained: “None of us had arms and we were not able to resist the attack.” One under-armed villager lamented: “I tried to take my spear to protect my family, but they threatened me with a gun, so I stopped. The six Arabs then raped my daughter in front of me, my wife and my other children.”
In cases when the villagers were able to resist, the cost to the marauders rose. Human Rights Watch reported that “some of Kudun’s residents mobilized to protect themselves, and fifteen of the attackers were reportedly killed.”
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review asked a U.S. State Department official why there were no reports of the Darfur victims fighting back. “Some do defend themselves,” he explained. But he added that the perpetrators have heli-copters and automatic rifles, whereas the victims have only machetes.
Darfur is one of those places where the government has implemented the Rebecca Peters principle that crime victims should not use arms to protect themselves. The Sudan Organisation Against Torture (a human rights group based in London) reported on March 20 about an incident that took place on March 7:
Two men “in military uniforms attacked four girls from Seraif idp [refugee] camp, Hay AlGeer, West Nyala, Southern Darfur. The girls were attacked whilst collecting firewood outside the camp at 11:30. During the attack, one of the men assaulted one of the girls and attempted to rape her. The armed man touched the girl’s breasts and attempted to forcefully remove her underwear. When she resisted, the man began to beat her. In defense she grabbed a knife that she had been using to cut the firewood and stabbed the attacker in the stomach.
“Following the stabbing, the girls managed to escape and returned to Seraif camp where they reported the incident to police officers inside the camp. The police refused to file the case.”
One of the rapists later died from a knife wound. “Following the news of the death, the officers immediately arrested the four girls inside the camp on suspicion of murder.” They face execution by hanging. The girls are: Amouna Mohamed Ahmed (age 17), Fayza Ismail Abaker (16), Houda Ismail Abdel Rahman (17), and Zahra Adam Abdella (17).
Under intense pressure from President Bush, the Khartoum government signed a cease-fire treaty for south Sudan in late 2004. The government has promised that in 2010, the south Sudanese will be able to vote on a referendum for independence. In May of this year, the Khartoum government and the Darfur rebels signed a treaty, the Abuja Accord, which was supposed to stop the Darfur genocide.
But Reeves argues that there is no evidence that the Islamic tyrants intend to stop their destruction of the people of Darfur. To believe that Sudan will obey the treaties it has signed is to ignore the fact that in 2003, Sudan ratified the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
--and then went right on committing genocide in Darfur. Reeves predicts that hundreds of thousands more Darfuris will die, while the United Nations continues to fail to act in any way that actually protects the victims or hinders the genocidaires.
One reason for U.N. inaction is that the Chinese, Russians and French--each of whom have Security Council veto power--are determined to protect their own lucrative commercial and oil development relations with Sudan’s tyrants.
Because the international community has utterly failed to protect the Darfuris, they have every moral right to protect themselves. The United Nations, however, is hard at work to make sure that genocide victims in Sudan, and anywhere else in Africa, will not be able to resist.
Sudan is covered by a U.N.-backed treaty called “The Nairobi Protocol for the Prevention, Control and Reduction of Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa.” The protocol was signed in 2004 by representatives of Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.
The protocol requires universal gun registration, complete prohibition of all civilian-owned semi-automatic rifles, and “heavy minimum sentences for … the carrying of unlicensed small arms,” as well as programs to encourage citizens to surrender their guns, widespread searches for firearms, educational programs to discourage gun ownership and other policies to disarm the public.
In other words, the U.N. is successfully pushing for gun control even in East African nations with current genocides: Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia. Several other countries subject to the Nairobi Protocol, such as Rwanda and Uganda, have recent histories of genocide against disarmed victims. Quite plainly, the U.N. believes that even resisting an actual genocide in progress is not a sufficient reason for someone to want to own a gun.
A similar disarmament project is being pushed by the United Nations in the South African Development Community (SADC). Two of the SADC nations--Zimbabwe and Congo--are also the sites of current genocide.
Even more extreme U.N. gun prohibitions--a total ban on firearms imports for civilian use--are being imposed in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Among the ECOWAS states are the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) and Guinea. According to Genocide Watch, Ivory Coast has entered the final pre-genocide phase of “preparation.”
In Guinea, the National Alliance for Democracy and Development warns that, “There is a looming Rwanda-type genocide … .”
The gun prohibition lobbies have so thoroughly penetrated the United Nations that at the U.N. anti-gun conference, held last month in New York City, gun prohibition lobby staff actually served as delegates from various governments.
The prohibition lobbies and their U.N. allies will tell you that people never need guns for protection--not for protection from rapists, and not for protection from genocidaires. Governments and the United Nations will protect everyone--they promise.
The tragedy of disarmed victims in Sudan, and all over Africa, shows the deadly falseness of the prohibitionist promise. For decades, genocidal tyrants have slaughtered millions of Africans while the rest of the world has stood idle. Now, the United Nations has become objectively complicit in genocide, by trying to ensure that never again will anyone targeted for genocide be able to use a firearm to save himself or his family.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20060817/gun-ban-genocide-the-disarming-facts-1#:~:text=The%20genocide%20in%20Darfur%2C%20Sudan%2C%20is%20the%20direct,more%20will%20die%20unless%20the%20U.N.%20is%20stopped.
Why Comparing Gun Violence Here To Japan is Stupid
(By Tom Knighton, June 07, 2022)
Japan and the United States don’t have a lot in common. Culturally, we’re quite different, though not necessarily incompatible. After all, while legions of Americans consume bits of Japanese culture as if it were the greatest thing ever, other legions in Japan do the same thing with American culture.
But there are profound differences between the United States and Japan.
You wouldn’t really know that if you saw this story going on about their low rates of gun homicides.
As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports:
1. As the U.S. gun control debate intensifies, some Americans are looking overseas for ideas on how to prevent mass shootings. Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. There were more than four firearm homicides in the U.S. per 100,000 people during 2019, compared to almost zero in Japan.
2. As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports, Japan’s strict laws on private gun ownership have surprising origins in the United States. She met Raphael, a well-known Japanese YouTuber who decided to take skeet shooting lessons. Despite being ex-military, he had to jump through all the same hoops that any Japanese civilian must clear to get a gun license.
3. There’s mandatory training. You have to pass a written exam, plus a physical and mental health evaluation. Even then, the police will go and ask your family and friends whether you have any violent tendencies.
The point, of course, is very clear. Japan good, America bad. (The article later goes on to point out the irony in the fact that their gun laws are the result of American occupation following World War II.)
However, for all of Palmer’s questions, she never bothered to dig beyond the surface level.
Japan’s total homicide rate is 0.3 per 100,000 people. That’s for all weapons, and yes, that is incredibly low by anyone’s standard. It’s easy to see why some would look to Japan and try to see what they’re doing in hopes of replicating it here.
If our gun homicide rate were only 0.3 per 100,000, that would probably be a rate we could live with, right?
Except, our non-gun homicide rate is 1.6 per 100,000. That’s more than times greater than Japan’s total rate.
In other words, whatever is making Japan so relatively safe has little or nothing to do with their gun laws. After all, the Japanese government can’t ban knives, hammers, sticks, or body parts–all of which are used to kill plenty of people here in the United States.
Instead, whatever has created such a low homicide rate is likely something that has nothing to do with weapon restrictions and more to do with culture or, at least, some other regulation.
Unfortunately, that’s beyond the modern media to delve into. That’s a question they never bother to think to ask because they’re apparently conditioned to not think of homicide as anything other than a gun issue.
The thing is, though, if you managed to make all guns go away overnight from every hand in the country, we’d still have a higher homicide rather than Japan–at least five times higher, though I suspect it would increase since you have to assume a large percentage of those who kill with guns would simply shift to another weapon.
So yeah, Palmer skimmed the surface and never dug any deeper, which is par for the course in this day and age.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2022/06/07/gun-japan-stupid-n59094