Gun homicide in Japan.
11 people died from fiream-related homicide in 2008 in the whole of Japan . It was a national scandal that the number was so high. There were 12,000 in the US in the same year.
That's the cost of the US form of gun ownership, pure and simple.
NB I'm fully in favour of people owning guns, just for it to be done sensibly
A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths
In part by forbidding almost all forms of firearm ownership, Japan has as few as two gun-related homicides a year.
And yet the US gun lobby said after the batman shooting that deaths from shooting sprees could be minimised if more people were to carry guns. This shows up the gun lobby as being at times both insensitive and so obsessed with defending their position, they fail to see the lack of logic in their own arguments. Essentially the gun lobby in the USA is defending the indefensible. It’s not that there are more crazies in the USA than there are in Europe and Japan it’s that the crazies live in a culture where the acquisition of multiple firearms and rounds of ammunition is a constitutionally enshrined right.
I agree. The moral argument is so much harder to defend when you have people’s deaths directly attached to it. Current US approach to the war on drugs = 50,000 Mexicans and counting. Current US implementation of the right to bear arms = 12,000 Americans a year. We have examples where the death rates are near zero percent for both in countries with different approaches. Difficult for the US to continue to be the arbiter of moral authority in the world.