What irritates me about that particular talking point, besides how contrived and stupid it is, is that the people who espouse it are basically saying, "if you didn't get hurt or killed by a gun, fuck you because you don't matter."
I haven't heard anyone saying that, and I certainly don't think it's what the GP said.
Next time you see someone making a big deal about gun deaths, point out all the other things that kill far, far more people, then see how they react. No, most people won't come out directly and say that, but the implication is pretty damn obvious.
What a lot of gun control activists do say is that if more people are armed then more confrontations will end up with someone being injured, and if more people are armed with particularly effective weapons like guns, more confrontations will end with someone seriously injured or dead.
And they will ignore the fact that most of the people who get shot and killed in said confrontations are criminals. I presume this is because they think a rapist or murderer's right to life trumps the right of another person to defend themselves from rapists and murderers; haven't seen a decent counter argument, anyway.
FYI, a number of those nations with lower gun death rates have exponentially higher rape and violent mugging rates. So "less guns" doesn't equate to the chocolate-rainbows-and-sexy-unicorns utopia that busybodies seem to think it would.
First, it's worth pointing out that rape and violent crime rates are much more difficult to compare than murder rates - in a Western democracy a murder is likely to get recorded as a murder, while reporting rates and definitions of rape and violent crime can vary.
Actually, they aren't - for example, the UK only counts a death as a homicide statistic if the killer is convicted in court. But that doesn't stop people from blindly making the comparison anyway, because they think it strengthens their argument (when reality couldn't be further from the truth).
Also, you can't honestly deny that regardless of how other countries define "rape" and "violent crime," those numbers skyrocketed after certain nations, such as Australia, enacted gun bans.
If you were thinking of Canada - the GP's example - the top two results on Google (I didn't check any further) agree that the rates of murder, rape, violent crime and overall crime are all lower.
Yea, probably for a lot of reasons: 1, Canada has a different history and culture than the US does. 2, Canada has a much smaller population, and 3 of the people who do live there, many of them live far removed from large population centers, which tend to be the areas with the most violent crime.
Consider this: If you didn't count Detroit and Chicago (cities with strict gun bans, BTW) in the statistics, America would be about as violent as Sweden. Take a couple more major cities out of the mix (STL, LA), and we're one of the most non-violent nations on the planet. Ever.
I'm sure you can find some countries that do worse than the US on some measures. But if that's your argument - that if you're allowed to pick which country to compare the US to, and if you're allowed to pick what to compare them on, then you can find examples that are worse - then you don't have much of an argument.
Totally agree, though I will point out that your statement here applies to every side of every argument.
