Homicide rates in the United States have been declining for 20 years as the number of privately-held guns in the US has increased substantially.
In some states, such as New Hampshire and Oregon, which have very weak gun laws, homicide rates are remarkably low, and these states are among the safest places on earth.
As homicide rates have declined, however, and gun-related homicides with them, gun-control advocates have attempted to create a new category of "gun violence" by blaming suicides on access to guns.
Most "Gun Violence" Is Suicide
Note this recent article from The Washington Post which casts suicide as indistinguishable from homicide, and goes on to point out that there were as many firearm related deaths in 2014 as there were deaths that resulted from automobile accidents.
The article rightly notes that thanks to medical science and safety features on automobiles, deaths from car accidents have gone into steep decline in recent years. The article then notes that suicides have been increasing over the same period, but then attempts to connect this rise with access to firearms.
The article never explicitly says that suicides are indistinguishable from homicides, of course — since any rational person can see a large and obvious distinction — but it does imply the two are more or less the same by classifying both firearm-related suicides and firearm-related homicides as "gun violence."
Employing the usual lazy methods of mainstream journalists, The Post fails to provide hard numbers or to direct links to sources, so I'll do it for you:
No comments:
Post a Comment