Blog Mirror: Gun statistics — Should they be tortured or gently cross-examined? by Miguel A. Faria, MD | Hacienda Publishing

An interesting article that I saw linked in on a news website.

Gun statistics — Should they be tortured or gently cross-examined? by Miguel A. Faria, MD | Hacienda Publishing

Frankly, I know nothing about this site, but it points out some really interesting things that, if the author is correct, and he seems to be, are very much worth noting.  Some of these items are, I'd note, rather grim and a person ought to keep that in mind. They're still worth reading.

So, for example, consider the topic of suicide. The author notes:

The CNN article therefore further stated, “Gun-related suicides are eight times higher in the US than in other high-income nations.” But why select gun suicides? Why not compare the U.S. with other nations as to international suicide rates by all means? Fortunately, Mr. Frayne also mentioned Japan, which makes this lesson even more instructive. The latest figures (2016) show that Japan ranks 26th in International Suicide Rates; the Japanese commit suicide via hanging, suffocation, jumping in front of trains, and Hara-kiri at a rate of 19.7 per 100,000, much higher than the United States. Americans rank 48th and the rate is 14.3 per 100,000. Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Hungary, and many other European countries have higher rates of suicide than the U.S., and all of them have stricter gun laws. So obviously, worldwide, people use different cultural methods, guns, or whatever means they have available, to commit suicide, and they do so frequently at a higher rate than the U.S. But the liberal media chooses to cherry pick and compare the U.S. homicide and suicide “gun” rates with other countries to make America look bad. But one is just as dead from a gunshot as by a machete chop!

I've wondered about that.  To read the news, you'd think that nations with strict gun control have no suicides, but obviously that isn't true. As it turns out, we're fairly far down the list on what is mostly a Western nation (and for purposes of this analysis I'd include Japan in that category) problem.  And, as we can see, two countries that are often cited as types of paradise, Norway and Sweden, beat us on that list.

Hmmmm. . . . .

Here's another statistic discussed that I saw recently and I was really wondering about:

As for the assertion, “Half of the 265 million guns in the U.S. are owned by 3 percent of U.S. adults.That’s an average of 17 guns each for individuals in this group.”  If the statement is correct, all it means is that 3% of Americans are serious gun collectors. If they were criminals we would not know about their possession. And as to gun ownership, even good citizens, with good reason, lie about their guns. They are afraid of common thieves as well as confiscation by legal predators. Researchers have found that gun surveys underestimate gun possession and gun usage by approximately 36%, which means, for example, that one-third of gun owners will deny gun ownership and even beneficial gun usage in surveys and polls.

I've suspected as much about the last comment, and the point about the 3% figure is one that wouldn't have occurred to me.

Frankly, I think the statistic that holds that slightly under half of all American homes own firearms is way off the mark and its likely way up over 50%.  Indeed, I've met people who claim that they aren't gun owners when in fact they'll one one or more firearms.  They way they figure it, if they inherited or bought it and rarely shot it, they aren't gun owners.  It works the same way that my not figuring I'm a Mopar fan works, when there are three Chrysler's out in front of the house.  Or the people who claim not to like cats but feed stray cats every day.

Indeed, I've known people who claimed to disdain private firearms ownership and yet owned firearms themselves.  They just don't quite acknowledge it, to themselves.  And then there are those who keep firearms, sometimes in surprising places (on themselves, in their offices, etc.) but just never say anything about it as that's their nature.

Here's another one that's well handled:

Lastly, echoing CNN, Mr. Frayne asserts, “The gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 25.2 times higher than other high-income countries.” Notice the caveats, “gun homicides” and “high-income countries.” With gun homicides, the liberal media eliminate the competition from other countries where murders are committed, as with suicides, by whatever means available, from beating to death barehanded to swinging machetes, knifing, and whatever the murderous mind may conceive. “High income countries” means that most of the world doesn’t count. I must suppose that only the lives of wealthy (“high-income”) Europeans count and are worth comparing to the U.S. Why? Most of Africa, including North Africa; Latin America, including our next-door neighbor, Mexico and most of the Caribbean and Central America; and the Eurasian landmass, including Russia and Kazakhstan — have higher rates of homicides than the U.S. In Rwanda, the genocide of Tutsis by Hutus was mostly done with machetes. Liberals can get away with anything, but as a Hispanic I have for years resented this neglect of most of the world by the progressive gun-grabbers, and it is time that ethnic and geopolitical discrimination stops. All lives count, particularly when it comes to homicides — with or without guns — and the U.S. is nowhere near the top.

This is an excellent point. The way the press cites homicide statistics echoes the attitudes expressed in The White Man's Burden in some odd, odd way. The US isn't near the global top by any means, and additionally our national situation, in which we have a very high immigration rate compared to other European nations.  That may sound wrong, but it plays a role in that immigrant populations tend to be more clannish and more impoverished than other demographics and, have over time, this has contributed to American violence in any one era. For example, there have been Irish, Jewish, and Italian criminal gangs in the past, just as today there are gangs made up of other impoverished ethnic groups.

Additionally American culture is much more rootless than nearly any other culture in the world, and that plays an undoubted role in all of this, which makes for another reason statistics of this type are a bit shallow.

Finally, the point about the author being a Hispanic brings up something that I've often noticed which is that  the media seems to feel every gun owner is a rural white male. Far from true.  In this region of the country Mexican immigrants make up an enthusiastic section of the firearms owning demographic, at least based upon the numerous times I've encountered them at sporting goods stores.  Metallic Silhouette target shooting is, in fact, a Mexican sport in terms of its origin that spread to the United States.  Blacks in the West are just as likely to own firearms as whites and indeed the Second Amendment history of the country is strongly associated with blacks as firearms ownership took on a deep personal protective meaning to black Southerners following the Civil War, when a rifle or pistol was often the only thing between them and a lynching.  Over the past year, in fact, I've noticed that white liberals like to circulate Facebook comments about "I wonder what the NRA will say about this" when blacks are shot by white policemen. Well, if you look you'll find that the NRA pretty consistently urges American blacks to consider carrying concealed firearms if they need protection and it always has.

The CNN article claimed erroneously, “When it comes to gun massacres, the US is an anomaly. There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country in the world.” Well, I have debunked those assertions elsewhere. As Gun Owners of America (GOA) has reported, France had more mass shootings in 2015 than there were mass shootings in America in all of Obama’s two terms. Besides, mass shootings account for less than 1 percent of murders in the U.S.

I haven't read the authors other article (which is linked in on that site) but here too, I've wondered.

In part I think the concept that the US is uniquely afflicted in this matter is because  mass violence is treated as an act of war in other nations and by the American press when it occurs in those nations, but not here.  Indeed, I've often wondered about British statistics on murder and whether or not they included Ulster over the years, as there were certainly years when Ulster had a lot of "gun violence".  To bring the example a bit more current, massive attacks in France, Belgium and Spain over the past few years are always treated by the American press as "terrorist attacks" while, at the same time, the nightclub shooting in Florida, and the Canadian Parliament attack in Ottawa, were treated as acts of some random sick man. Those were, dear reader, terrorist attacks, and attacks in aid of the same violent cause.  Treating them as weird criminal activities lacking motivation is way off the mark.

There's more there, and the article, by a physician, is well worth reading.