This blog contains excerpts from the book “Fighting Back” from Eric Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America.
All but two of the world’s 25 worst mass shootings have occurred outside the United States.
Residents of other countries think Americans have a “love affair” with guns. The media tries to fraudulently tell us that in countries like Australia and England, each of which has banned guns entirely and in doing so, has completely wiped-out mass shootings. But the realities are that after gun control was enacted, crime rates have actually risen, and mass shootings have not stopped. A comprehensive international study showed that by the turn of this century, Australia had one of the highest crime rates in the world, a rate well above that of the U.S. And now just over 20 years into this century, murders and gun crimes are higher than before the gun ban of 1996. Australia responded with strict gun control in 1996 due to a massacre that left 35 people dead in the town of Port Arthur on the island of Tasmania.
The anti-gun leftists claim that America is the murder capital of the world. They selectively choose countries with low murder rates to “prove” that America’s murder rates are higher. They cherry-pick their data. The reality is when it comes to murder rates, America is not even in the top 100. In fact, America is in the safe, bottom half. What the media is not telling you is those countries with high murder rates also have the strictest gun-control laws.
The media ignores countries like Venezuela, which banned private gun ownership in 2012. Then the Venezuelan government enforced that ban by confiscating guns, similar to what the Nazis did in pre-World War 2 Germany. Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world, over 20 times higher than here in the U.S.
And in North America, the media focuses on Canada and ignores Mexico. Mexico’s murder rate is 6 times greater than ours.
And guns are not the reason. If guns are banned, criminals will use other means to achieve their desired ends. Here is a small list of 6 other types of weapons used to commit mass murder:
- * 2,996 murdered with utility knives and airplanes (September 11, 2001)
* 918 murdered with cyanide laced fruit drink in Jonestown, Guyana
- * Up to 500 murdered with machetes in Nigeria
- * 168 murdered at the Oklahoma Federal Building with fertilizer and a U-Haul truck in Oklahoma City
- * 87 murdered with matches and gasoline in the Bronx
- * 86 run over and murdered with a box truck in Nice, France
- * 50 murdered in a coal mine attack in China
In order for these other countries to justify their draconian gun control policies, such as Australia and England, these nations have been accused of under-reporting their actual crime statistics. In England, “officers said that pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to ‘massage’ statistics”. According to Sgt. Mike Bennett, officers have become increasingly frustrated with the practice of manipulating statistics. He said “the crime figures are meaningless. Police everywhere know what’s going on.” A report from the British Inspectorate of Constabulary concluded that because of the “differences in reporting criteria, comparison of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham.”
And England is not alone. In Australia it is happening too. An Aussie newspaper reported that “the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally.” This revelation came to light because police down under were also under-reporting the crime data.
Bottom line is that banning guns across the globe is not working. When an anti-gun leftist claims that other countries do not experience mass killings compared to the United States, that’s a lie. When an anti-gun leftist claims that banning guns, Americans will be safer, that is also a lie. Banning guns does not prevent evil hearts and minds from getting firearms. And if guns were ever banned, these bad guys would use other deadly instruments to carry out their crimes.
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