Blame the cultures, not the tools
Some one needs to stick Mayor Bloomin idiot in a cage and give him this report. he should not be allowed out, or to have any other material until he has the entire report memorized. Same for Nancy P. Lousy and company.
But ultra liberals never let facts get in the way of their agenda. Because they know what’s best for you.
Posted by Paul "No Fear" Weir
08/21/2007 at 06:24 PM
’Nonymouse, you are right. Mostly. Bear in mind that the study was about both murder and suicide, worldwide. That was the best phrase I could think of that would cover both the depressed and despondant ones who kill themselves, and the violent yobs who don’t value any life past today, even their own. Neither group has any hope for themselves. In the USA statistics show that its members of either of two main ethnic groups both “known” to be “victims of society” that are commiting the vast majority of murders and gang related killings. So my phraseology make be gentle but I don’t think it’s inaccurate.
I don’t know what the situation is in many of the European nations that were part of the study. I knew a guy from Sweden once, and learned from him that many Swedes commit suicide because their society is so static. There’s very limited opportunity for many of the younger folks. Is it like that in Russia too? I don’t know. I get the idea that things are pretty bleak now, and were as bad or worse under communism. I’ve never been to those other countries either, so I don’t know what things are like there. But I’m pretty sure that most people who believe in themselves, in tomorrow, and into their own ability to rise up in their own culture don’t kill themselves or risk life in jail.
One very telling part of the study covered Indian women in the Phillipines. Growing up they’re fine and dandy, but when they get married (arranged marriage??) they move into the husband’s household and become low hen in a very rough pecking order, and their new hubbys are fine with that. Many of them commit suicide. No guns available, so they either hang themselves or take the poison paraquat.
Want to do a little research? Read the study, and pick out the countries with high murder and suicide rates. Now look up national birthrates (like Mark Steyn did in his book America Alone). Betcha a quarter that the countries killing each other and themselves are highly likely to also be the countries not having children. So then you’d have THREE indicators of hopelessness ... would that still be claptrap? Maybe it would IF you then included birthrates of the two main “held back and kept down” violent subcultural groups here in the USA. But if you changed “birthrate” to “married birthrate” for them I bet the numbers would line up pretty well there too. And high illegitimacy is another indicator of hopelessness, or at least cultural dissolution.
This topic reminds me of an incident in Juvenile deliquency class I was taking - had to do a paper and so had to hand in a topic. I chose that race was not the main effect on JD rates. Ok, I admit it, at the time I was under the effects of a liberal (or two) bosses and quite crazy from the heat. My professor was so against it - that he would only approve it, if I promised that at mid-term, if I did not have the required sources I would submit a new topic. Well actually race is not the main cause of JD - it is family stability [i.e. two parent families fared best] & socio-economic status - and one of the studies I used was from the university I was attending (DUH). He was surprized to say the least at my results, proofs (best was the Chicago study that has been ongoing since 1920 - well done that proves [and has over and over again] that race is not the primary cause of crime (surprize - NOT).
But we must DO what the liberal losers want us to DO no matter that proof is against their solutions/ideas because they have good intentions. Excuse me - but to he** with good intentions - America needs good policies, good laws and good politics. Nothing more, and more importantly nothing less.
Anonymous #7 - the Harvard study was looking into violent death worldwide and trying to find a correlation to gun usage. What they found is that murders and suicides happen at a high rate in some countries and at a low rate in some other countries, and that no correlation to firearms availability exists. Thus the lefty meme “less guns less violence” has been proven to be utterly untrue.
These results are not skewed; please reread the report to the end and you will see that the numbers are broken down into murder, murder by gun, suicide, suicide by gun, and combined into an overall violent death rate per country. Furthermore the time period under consideration is immense: the report looks at murder and suicide in Europe from the Middle Ages (when there were no guns) to today, and looks at these in America from the early colonial period onwards, specifically looking for a surge in the periods when vast quantities of firearms suddenly flooded the markets (eg, post Civil War). With about 150 cited references, this is truly the most in-depth study I have ever seen.
My analysis and extrapolation of that study and my attempt to merge it with the statistical analysis over at Smallest Minority is refocusing the issue somewhat. Smallest’s analysis focuses on homicide by any means. What it finds is that certain subgroups in American society are doing most of the killing, either with guns or without.
Why those subgroups? What do they have in common with the other countries around the world who tend to inflict more violence on themselves and each other? Anything?My first take on the Harvard report was that certain countries, certain cultures, had a propensity towards violence. Then I stopped and tried to figure out why. The best I could come up with was a lack of hope for the future. That generic “namby pamby” concept allowed me to tie in the Smallest Minority blog’s analysis because the two most violent subcultural groups in America are perceived as having a permanent victimhood aura. The Harvard report points out that it is the urban part of these subcultures that are the violent groups, not the rural, and that is what first got me thinking of Smallest’s analysis which showed the same thing.
A larger study could be done: age analysis of the perpetrators, education level, employment rate, perceived level of freedom, moral strength, etc., could all be tied in with this and the whole thing reanalyzed. This would prove or disprove the “environment theory”. My thought is that, if you could do that, my little thesis would still hold true: people who see life as an opportunity and strive to better themselves (another way of saying “hope") will not be the ones doing the violence to either themselves or each other. If such data could be gathered, and a rigorous professional analysis done, and the same conclusion reached, it would severely damage the “crime is caused by bad environments” meme that goes hand in glove with the gun control philosophy. Both are false in my opinion.
"Gun control does not control violence”? Nonsense, and ‘nuff said.
