Rash

Friday April 27, 2007 - 9:26PM EDT

I've seen a rash of articles concerning guns since the VT thing happened. The most peculiar articles are the ones encouraging gun ownership as a means to prevent "additional deaths". That somehow the answer is allowing everyone to have guns so that "additional deaths" are prevented. The people who believe in this philosophy are really stupider than it sounds. What these ass clowns fail to recognize is that the clowns causing the "original deaths" are the people that need to be stopped. It is general gun ownership that needs to be controlled so that you just can't go buy a gun easily and shoot up a place. Putting more guns in the hands of people to stop the people already shooting is the MAD. I hope someone gets my MAD reference. The desire to uphold such free gun ownership is symbolistic of pure selfishness. Pure American selfishness like no other thing can symbolize. I just can't believe how people don't see that these shootings are the result of such free gun ownership coupled with violent tendencies. The least we could do is eliminate the gun issue.  But no one wants to give it up for the good of the rest of society. I just don't get how some people don't see that someone having a gun in the first placed caused such carnage. How can the best answer be to give guns to everyone else instead of taking away guns. That is why the arguement for gun ownership in relation to these situation comes with the caveat of  preventing "additional deaths".  It is like they don't give a damn or don't think we can eliminate or greatly reduce death related to gun violence. 

The other thing is using these rare situation such as the one at VT as platform for any kind of gun debate. These are the worst examples to use. The ones we need to look at are the statistics that tell is the black males aged 18-24 living in an urban environment are most likely to be killed by gun violence than anything else. That is the dirty stat that no one likes to look at. Guess what, a whole bunch of people in the ghetto have guns and it ain't helping to make anybody safer. So this idea that letting people or encouraging people to carry guns will prevent deaths is bullshit. Complete bullshit and there are countless real-world examples and evidence to show how stupid that idea is.

I read a curious thing the other day. It was about Japan. I know Japan is generally known for its low crime rates. Especially Tokyo when you consider it is the largest city in the world and has one of the highest population densities in the world. Two things that usually point to higher crime. The curious thing I read was that there were 53 shootings in Japan in 2006. 53! Japan is not a small country there are about 125 million people there yet only 53 reported shootings. 30 something of them were between gangsters in shootouts between themselves. So only about 20 people got killed in the whole country in one year due to gun violence. I live near Philadelphia. In only 4 months so far of 2007 there have been over a hundred murders and no doubt more than half of them were by guns. Philadelphia has about 4 million people. If you look at those statistics and don't see something then you are probably illiterate. Japan has very strict gun control laws. Personal hand gun ownership is illegal and hunting guns are strictly regulated. In fact most of the guns involved in killings are illegally smuggled guns.  Now that low number of shootings can also be related to other things in their society but the link between their control of firearms and lack of gun violence is undeniable.  You can't shoot people unless you have access to a gun.  53, that number is still insanely low to me. There are thousands in the U.S. every year. 53! Damn.