I'm sorry, but I have no use for this love of the Second Amendment. Even if the Hungarians had had guns, they would still have been mowed down.
I just saw the numbers. We have 13.5/100,000 persons dead from guns per year in the US. The next highest (not counting outright war zones) is Canada at around 3/100,000 with many countries at way less than 1/100,000. We are talking orders of magnitude differences here.
Nowl, there simply are not orders of magnitude differences in social structure, income distribution, racism, or what have you, between the US and the rest of the world. What there is an order of magnitude difference in is the sheer availability of guns, 240 million by the last count. It is also true that we have a frontier legacy of guns and that we are the only nation that allows people to own guns without having a license. I suggest that these facts rather overwhelm everything else, thank you. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Margaret <mairead at mindspring.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, May 04, 1999 2:18 PM Subject: Re: guns prevent violence!
>Barkley wrote:
>
>> The real problem with this Lott/Landes drivel
>>is that it does not make a proper comparison.
>>How about comparing the US (or the states in
>>the US with concealed gun laws) with the rest
>>of the world? Guess who has a whole lot more
>>deaths from guns, and I mean a whole lot more!
>
>er, how would your suggestion be a proper comparison?
>I can't make out how it accounts for different
>sociopolitical structures, different ideals of
>socialisation, different national histories....
>
>In my first job, I briefly had a colleague my age who'd
>been a teenager in Hungary in '56. It was a society
>with very few deaths by firearm. Very peaceful, in its
>way. You could at any moment be hauled off by the
>secret police and never be seen again, but not many
>people shot one another, it's true. Personal killings
>had to be done in old-fashion ways: stabbing, slicing,
>clubbing, strangling, poisoning, drowning, etc.
>
>Then the Hungarians tried to break free of the Soviet
>hegemon. My erstwhile colleage spoke bitterly of
>having to try to overcome tanks and infantry with rocks
>and a precious few molotov coctails. He seemed to
>feel, rightly or not, that a more general availability
>of even small-caliber firearms might have allowed them
>to make the game not worth the candle, as in
>Yugoslavia. But, of course, they didn't have them
>because they'd all been confiscated in the name of
>civil order. A similar thing happened in Praha in
>'68, I believe.
>
>Weapon-free societies are very good for the ruling
>class, but perhaps not so good for the rest of us.
>Instead of advocating confiscation of weapons, perhaps
>leftists should be focusing on the socioeconomic
>disparities that give rise to weapons use?
>
>Margaret
>