By Darren Wolfe
United States -(AmmoLand.com)- Easy to do with Robert Muggah, among other things, the coauthor of “We Need Better Data for a Serious Gun Control Debate”. An article in which he advocates gun control, despite the fact that he claims there isn’t enough good data on the subject to even have a debate about it.
A tad biased, wouldn’t you agree?
Could that be why gun rights advocates don’t want such people doing research on crime and violence?
But I digress. On October 8, 2014 he gave a talk at TEDGlobal 2014: South! in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil titled “How To Protect Fast-Growing Cities From Failing”:
In his talk, he says a number of things that make it clear that guns aren’t the drivers of a high murder rate. Most importantly, he directly contradicts the major gun rights haters’ argument when Dr. Muggah says, “…when it comes to cities, the conversation is dominated by the North, that is, North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, where violence is actually at historic lows.”. He then drives home the point with:
What’s more, we’re seeing a dramatic reduction in homicide. Manuel Eisner and others have shown that, for centuries, we’ve seen this incredible drop in murder, especially in the West. Most Northern cities today are 100 times safer than they were just 100 years ago.
These two facts — the decline in armed conflict and the decline in murder — are amongst the most extraordinary, if unheralded, accomplishments of human history, and we should be really excited, right?
That drop in murder rates includes the United States with all its guns.
The slide from his presentation above clearly shows the US to be in the same low murder rate category as western Europe. So much for the lie that the US is a very dangerous place!
Dr. Muggah goes on to talk about social and demographic factors that that drive violence, all the while making the gun rights advocates’ case for us. Not once does he say that the availability of guns is the cause of the violence. He ends his talk with this:
There is nothing inevitable about lethal violence, and we can make our cities safer. Folks, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to drop homicidal violence in half within our lifetime. So I have just one question: What are we waiting for?
Yes, gun rights haters, what are you waiting for to stop worshiping the false god of gun control and start facing the real causes of the violence problem?
About Darren Wolfe
Darren Wolfe is the former Eastern Vice Chair of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania. His articles have also appeared in American Juror, OpEdNews.com, the Libertarian Penn, and the Nolanchart.com. News services such as the New York Post.com and Rational Review have published links to his work. Darren is the Philadelphia area contact for Come Home America (https://comehomeamerica.us/), a politically neutral peace movement. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IntLibertarian
Gun homicide rates in the U.S. are the lowest in the world. Yes, we do have cities where the gun homicide rate is high due to gang/drug crime. However, we are still nationally very low in gun homicide. In 2013 the GUN homicide rate/100K was 4.095/100K In 2014 the gun homicide rate/100K was 3.87/100K In 2015 the gun homicide rate/100K was 3.93/100K In 2016 to date the gun homicide rate was 0.73/100K Most people will consider these stats BS. However they are real and adequately documented by the FBI and other sources. What we get on the MSM glorifies and… Read more »
According to the CDC&P, 80% of gun homicides in the USA are committed by Inner-City Drug Dealing Gangs of 14-20 year olds who are ALREADY barred by numerous laws from even possessing, buying, selling, transporting, etc. firearms. Of the remaining 20%, a substantial amount are JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDES by law enforcement officers and private citizens defending their persons against armed felons in the commission of a felony. Former Mayor Mike “The Nanny” Bloomberg COUNTS people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev (dead Boston Bomber) and Christopher Dorner, (ex-LAPD cop turned murderer) as “victims of crime”. We are No. 1 in the world in rate… Read more »
The truth doesn’t mater to those with an agenda of disarming American Law abiding Citizens. Once a people are disarmed they are totally vulnerable to the Government, NAZI Germany being a prime example. EVERY Dictator, including ours in the White House, have first disarmed their citizens.
“Most Northern cities today are 100 times safer than they were just 100 years ago.”
Tell that to the population of Chicago…just to name one. Why…it has just about the strictest gun “control”…we can find. Law abiding citizens have to jump through hoops, but…the criminal…that’s another story.
To be fair to Chicago, 100 years ago and a few years past prohibition ended, it was what people see as the old west in movies. Historically it has been a very ready city, population is a lot higher now so it reduces the per capita numbers.
Thanks for the info. I guess that I find it interesting. But, of course, I’m already a confirmed 2ed Amendment supporter, as are nearly 100% of your readers.
If you want to really make us happy, let us know when you get this article to appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times. If you want to save our gun rights, this information needs to reach the Majority of Americans who are not vested in the gun rights issue, but, who form the majority base of support for political candidates, especially Democrats.
I’d love to see a higher resolution version of that map to save and share.
Save as in right click! It is large enough for social media!
Didn’t get any larger for me. I don’t do FB, and I’d like a bigger version.
SiG
High-resolution chart for “Homicide rates, by country or territory (2012 or latest year)” is located here:
It actually has more granular data than the chart shown in the TED video.
It’s painfully obvious what drives anti-gunners is the tried-and-true method of broadcasting the worst first. “If it bleeds, it leads.” This of course is a powder keg just waiting to be lit when that information is directed at a majority of dullards who’ll take it as gospel.
A surprisingly large percentage of Americans believe that violence in America is at record highs. The reality is that 1993 was the record high for violent crime in America. Since 1993 and each and every year since then to the present day, there are fewer and declining violent crimes, including violent gun crimes, and fewer and declining gun accidents according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and the Department of Justice’s published reports through their National Institute of Justice/Bureau of Justice Statistics. During that 23 year period, violent gun crimes and gun accidents are at half of what they were… Read more »
A surprising large amount of Americans are sheeple too…
Which is why we all have to speak out and educate these people by using small words…