| pokoko said: Actually, a quick look at this is kind of entertaining. In order to minimize the difference in violent crime between the US and Japan, for example, this paper tries to group murder and suicide together. Seriously? It also does exactly what I expected, which is try to make the US look good by contrasting it against poverty-ridden countries, even though overwhelming evidence indicates that poverty is one of the most important factors in terms of crime ratio. Some of the facts are actually correct, once you strip away the spin, but you can read much better papers elsewhere that actually discuss the context and rationale. Handgun bans being ineffective in some countries, for example, because those countries have been unable to stop the influx of black market alternatives. However, just throwing information out as little bits of "fact" makes this a waste of time for anyone who actually wants to understand anything. |
Well... you do realise you're doing the exact same thing, right? For the Japan point, you've taken the side point of an overall argument and that to be the main component of the point. Pasting it in for others to see:
Fact: In Japan, the total murder rate is almost 1 per 100,000. In the U.S., there are about 3.2 murders per 100,000 people each year by weapons other than firearms. This means that even if firearms in the U.S. could be eliminated, the U.S. would still have three times the murder rate of the Japanese. Whereas Japan’s murder rate may be low, its suicide rate is over 20 per 100,000 people. Combined, Japanese are being murdered and committing suicide at a rate of about 21 per 100,000. In the U.S., our combined murder and suicide rate is also about 21.
As you can see, the actual main focus of the argument is that the violence rate would still be larger than Japan's without ANY guns. Furthermore, when combinig murders and suicides, it's talking about via all means, not just guns.
EDIT: I also wasn't aware that Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK were "poverty ridden countries"
