Fighting for Peace: Put Down That Gun

Fighting for Peace: Put Down That Gun

Weapons and warriors are the oldest protection racket

Cooperation solves problems; competition causes more. Why do Americans think the rest of the world hasn't faced and dealt with the problems generated by widespread and rampant firearm use and abuse without resort to universal gun ownership? Why do those in the U.S. seem to think it's all right to solve problems with weapons of destruction, mass or otherwise, and to invade dozens of other countries at will? It's all part and parcel of the same violent mentality.

Peace has to start somewhere, and it doesn't start with offensive 'self defence'. Does any gun owner realise what the ‘lore of attraction’ really means? Social Darwinism is the opposite of enlightenment. Many  guns are owned by people who believe they might solve a problem with them, due to overcompensation and insecurity. If guns are so good at defending people why does the U.S. have so many fatalities compared to gun-free societies?

The large numbers of people killed by guns in many of the regular U.S .massacres means that free gun ownership is obviously a pretty useless self defence measure. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted by Founding Fathers who believed it was a way to circumvent the establishment of a standing army, thereby rendering the sort of militant adventurism for which the nation has become infamous over the last few decades. It had nothing to do with the prevalence of modern handgun ownership. Don't think for a moment that owning a popgun will protect you from any modern military force - it'll just get you shot faster. When the cops come to your door and find you have a gun you will be dead, not protected. They come in much larger numbers & with absolute force when you're armed.

What most Americans don't seem to realise is that guns are the problem, not a solution - brainwashed as they are by the likes of Charlton Heston and decades of Westerns and ‘patriotic’ war movies and news reports. Don't believe the self-interested lies of the gun lobby. The only people who profit from gun ownership are weapons manufacturers and warmongers. Anyone ever read the ten commandments btw? America seems to think they only apply to other people.

Rampant televisualised violence is on all the TV sets all over the world; censorship won't work to stem the tide of course, any more than banning guns will (in the near term) - but regulating (licensing) them more carefully and really  tackling the kind of corruption and inequity that leads to regular murders and massacres by gun-wielding louts will, eventually. Many statute laws are crimes in themselves, but guns won't help solve any real problems - for instance the fact that no nation can be a viable democracy without a fair and transparent electoral system free of rorts and corruption, or a fair, just and inexpensive legal system for all, or an open and diverse press and media, or a decently educated population!

Here in Oz the Aborigines held their own against the invading gunmen right up until the introduction of repeat fire weapons - musket reloads were much slower than woomera-launched spears  (and less accurate). In the US the indigenous people were outgunned - including occasionally by cannon for instance, as well as by more accurate repeat fire rifles with faster action and effectively unlimited ammo - and utterly outnumbered when their land was stolen from them by 'pioneers' who also used bacteriological weapons to steal their prize. Brave warriors all.

What kind of times do you want to inhabit - and to have your children inhabit? We can all turn a corner, kicking and screaming if necessary, and give up our addiction to the IDEA of violence; it’s certainly much easier to begin by abandoning the pretence that every average person needs a deadly weapon to feel safe and happy

I may live in a fool's paradise where I never need to fear guns, but at least I live in paradise. I understand things are different for people who have constructed different reality tunnels for themselves, and that fear is the greatest tool for keeping people separated and therefore seemingly powerless. But it doesn't have to be that way. As Gandhi proved, it's possible to defeat the greatest empire on the planet with peaceful nonviolence, if you're willing to sacrifice (downsize) enough; today's semi-equal rights for Negros in the US and for indigenous Australians weren't obtained at the barrel of a gun, or via militias. Violence begets violence, not peace or security.

Either you believe that you create your own reality tunnel or not. It's tempting to say that it doesn't matter whether someone believes they create their own experiences or not - they create them anyway. The real issue here is what kind of reality do you want to create?

5% of the world - the US - still extracts 50% of the world's resources at the point of a gun, usually literally of late. It is thus with all empires. The warmonger fractal is reiterated at all levels within the culture, from kids' TV to venerable ancients’ reenactions of ancestral battles on tabletops, open fields or other people's countries. It's all part of the same kind of thinking that says you need warriors to protect you, when in most cases it’s the warrior mentality people need protection from.

Peace and disarmament begin at home.

-         R. Ayana

Firearms Tutorial

Gun Control Issues, Public Health, and Safety

 

Gunshot wounds impact severely on the criminal justice as well as health care systems. Some basic statistics are important in understanding the magnitude and severity of the social and economic burden to the U.S. The subject remains contentious. (Glantz and Annas, 2009)

In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. The number of firearms-related injuries in the U.S., both fatal and non-fatal, increased through 1993, declined to 1999, and has remained relatively constant since. However, firearms injuries remain a leading cause of death in the U.S., particularly among youth (CDC, 2001) (Sherry et al, 2012).

The rates of firearms deaths in the U.S. vary significantly by race and sex. The U.S. national average was 10.2 deaths per 100,000 population in 2009. The highest rate was 28.4/100,000 for African-American males, more than quadruple the rate of 6.3/100,000 for white males. (CDC, 2009)

The number of non-fatal injuries is considerable--over 200,000 per year in the U.S. Many of these injuries require hospitalization and trauma care. A 1994 study revealed the cost per injury requiring admission to a trauma center was over $14,000. The cumulative lifetime cost in 1985 for gunshot wounds was estimated to be $911 million, with $13.4 billion in lost productivity. (Mock et al, 1994) The cost of the improper use of firearms in Canada was estimated at $6.6 billion per year. (Chapdelaine and Maurice, 1996)

A study of firearm deaths in high income countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom (England and Wales), United Kingdom (Northern Ireland), United Kingdom (Scotland), and the United States) was conducted with data from the World Health Organization assembled by the WHO from the official national statistics of each individual country from 2003 (Richardson and Hemenway, 2011). The total population for the United States for 2003 was 290.8 million while the combined population for the other 22 countries was 563.5 million. There were 29,771 firearm deaths in the US and 7,653 firearm deaths in the 22 other countries. Of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the US. In the US the overall firearm death rate was 10.2 per 100,000, the overall firearm homicide rate 4.1 per 100,000, and the overall homicide rate 6.0 per 100,000, with firearm homicide rates highest persons 15 to 24 years of age.

For the US the overall suicide rate was 10.8 per 100,000, and slightly over half of these deaths were firearm suicide (5.8 per 100,000). Firearm suicides rates increased with age. In the other high income countries 2003 the overall firearm death rate was 1.4 per 100,000, the overall firearm homicide rate 0.2 per 100,000, and the overall homicide rate 0.9 per 100,000. Firearm homicide rates were highest in the 25 year old to 34 year old age group. The overal suicide rate was 14.9 per 100,000 with a overall firearm suicide rate of 1.0 per 100,000.

A comparison across countries for an earlier time period is shown below.

Firearms Death Rate (per 100,000, age adjusted) for Selected Countries in one year between 1990 and 1995 (Krug, Powell and Dahlberg, 1998)

 

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The number of firearms injuries remains high in the United States, compared with most of the rest of the world. Firearm suicide rates are strongly impacted by the rate of gun ownership. (Kaplan and Geling, 1998) There is a positive correlation between homicide rates and availability of guns in developed nations. (Hemenway and Miller, 2000) The number of firearms in the hands of private citizens continues to grow each year at a rate far exceeding that of the population as a whole. It might even be said that Americans live in a "gun culture" based upon traditions and behaviors well-entrenched in our society. This is reflected in our constitution, whose second amendment guarantees that "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Though the application of this amendment applied to maintenance of a militia, and not private gun ownership, the second amendment has been consistently interpreted to protect private ownership of many types of guns.

Thus, the laws of our Federal government as well as the states do not as yet severely restrict the manufacture, sale, and use of firearms by ordinary citizens. "Gun control" is a sensitive issue that evokes strong emotions in persons both for and against control. Politicians find it difficult to deal with this issue. There is disagreement as to whether a reduction in access to or numbers of firearms will have a measurable effect upon crime. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed in 1994 in the U.S. established a nationwide requirement that licensed firearms dealers observe a waiting period and initiate a background check for handgun sales (but the law does not apply to secondary markets). So far, this law has not been associated with overall reductions in homicide rate or suicide rate.(Ludwig and Cook, 2000) Perhaps our attitudes--and our tolerances--are reflected in the high visibility of firearms and firearms-inflicted injuries that are portrayed in the media: newspapers, magazines, books, films, and television. (Price et al, 1992) One thing remains certain, despite laws for or against gun control, a lack of care and concern regarding one's fellow human beings, whether in war or through domestic violence, will continue to promote firearms injuries.

Child safety is an important issue. Accidental shooting deaths are most commonly associated with one or more children playing with a gun they found in the home. (Choi, et al, 1994) The person pulling the trigger is a friend, family member, or the victim. (Harruff, 1992) In the period from 1979 to 2000, accidental firearms deaths involving children declined in the U.S., aided by child access prevention laws and felony prosecution of offenders. (Hepburn et al, 2006) A study of nonnatural deaths in a large American city revealed that half of such deaths in persons from 10 to 19 years of age were due to homicide, and firearms were involved in 88% of them. (Heninger and Hanzlick, 2008)

The table below indicates mode of death for firearms injuries in the ten countries with the most reported deaths from firearms for children less than 15 years of age. (CDC, 1997)

Firearms Deaths by Mode of Death for Children <15 Years of Age

Top 10 Countries - Rate per 100,000

 

In one survey, 10% of families admitted to having unlocked and loaded firearms within easy reach of children (Patterson and Smith, 1987). Another study showed that two-thirds of accidental firearms injuries occured in the home, and one-third involved children under 15. 45% were self-inflicted, and 16% occurred when children were playing with guns. (Morrow and Hudson, 1986) A study from 1991-2000 showed that twice as many people died from unintentional firearm injuries in states in the U.S. where firearm owners were more likely to store their firearms loaded. (Miller, et al, 2005)

The issue of "home defense" or protection against intruders or assailants may well be misrepresented. A study of 626 shootings in or around a residence in three U.S. cities revealed that, for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides (Kellermann et al, 1998). Over 50% of all households in the U.S. admit to having firearms (Nelson et al, 1987). In another study, regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home (Dahlberg, Ikeda and Kresnow, 2004). Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner. (Rothman et al, 2005). Individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession (Branas et al, 2009). It would appear that, rather than being used for defense, most of these weapons inflict injuries on the owners and their families.

Hunting accidents with firearms, despite the large gun ownership in the U.S. and numerous game seasons in most states, remain relatively rare and do not appear to be increasing. (Huiras, et al, 1990) In a study of accidental hunting firearm injuries and fatalities from 1961 to 1992 in Germany, there were 257 cases, most involving experienced hunters. 26% of the gunshot wounds were fatal. 23% of cases were self-inflicted and 77% injuries caused by another person. The firearms/ammunition included shotguns (63%) and shotgun slugs (3.5%), rifle bullets (31%), and handgun butllets (2.5%). 22% of pellet accidents produced severe eyeball injuries. 38% of the wounds occurred at a distance of 5 m or less, including all self-inflicted injuries. The most frequent factors responsible for the accident were: improper handling of the firearm (37%), failure to notice the victim (24.1%), covering the victim while swinging on the game (14.8%), ricocheting projectiles (13.6%), inadequate storage of the firearm (11.7%) and mistaking the victim for game (9.3%). (Karger et al, 1996)

Tutorial from http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNSTAT.html

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U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

  

By Adam Liptak

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing. It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."
No more.
"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."
Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

 

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher."
Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe. But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Stern of King's College.
Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are," Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective."
"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries," Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential."
The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.
"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years." French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal policies," Tonry wrote.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.
"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
"These figures," Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate."
Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.
"Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about," he said. "We have a highly politicized criminal justice system."
From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?_r=2

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