3 Cops Killed In Baton Rouge

There are about 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States. Nearly 60% of those are suicides. About 3% are accidental deaths, and the remaining 34% are homicides or intentional shootings. People shot by police are included in this number.

According to FBI statistics, nearly four in ten homicides are classified as being committed for unknown reasons, while arguments are the top cause of known homicides. In Chicago, which nearly always tops the homicide lists, approximately 80% of homicides are recorded as being gang related. The same is true of Baltimore, which is currently leading in 2016.

Would national gun control solve the problem of gang violence when such measures have clearly failed in Chicago and Baltimore? I will suggest that they aren’t even intended to, as proposed gun laws always target a segment of the population that is the most law abiding.

Approximately one-half of the households in the United States have at least one gun. In fact, the number of guns roughly equals the number of people in the country. Given these facts, it is only common sense that the U.S. would have more gun murders than countries that ban guns. After all, Florida has more swimming pool deaths than Michigan, and more people die on expressways in New Jersey than in South Dakota.

Unlike swimming pools, however, guns can be used for self defense and, although the media generally buries such stories, guns are often used to prevent deaths. Since these deaths don’t occur, there are no statistics for them, but there are plenty of people alive today who wouldn’t be alive if only the bad guys had guns.

Suicide is often used as another reason to ban guns, the argument being that the presence of a gun makes suicides more likely on a momentary impulse. However, given that statistics are so often used by gun banners when they work in their favor, here’s one you won’t hear.

Japan has very few guns and very few gun-related deaths, a fact that is often cited by the gun banners. However, Japan’s suicide rate is more than twice that of the United States. Suicide rates in the United States are roughly the same as in Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland and Iceland, and well below that of France and Greenland. The only logical conclusion is that suicide rates have little or nothing to do with the availability of guns. Guns just happen to be the suicide method of choice in the United States, whereas the Japanese prefer to jump in front of a train or swallow poison.

Although the rate of mass shootings has jumped considerably during the Obama administration, they are still relatively rare. We hear about them every day in the United States because the media won’t shut up about them, and every mass shooting remains in the news until the next one comes along.

 

If Black Lives Matter were the Klan or a militia group, the feds would have rounded up everyone involved with the group and charged them with RICO violations. Under the Obama Administration, however, all black and Muslim groups are a protected class. BLM leaders are regular visitors in the White House. It makes me wonder if Obama isn't personally directing their activities.

From the news report that @Gary Ridenour just posted:

"A Grandview High School classmate tells KCTV5 that Long converted to Islam three years ago."

 

According to the shooter’s YouTube account, he was a former member of the Nation of Islam, having converted to Islam about three years ago. He complained about “crackers” and made references to Alton Sterling, the black man who was killed by police in Baton Rouge on July 5th.

He makes references to a book that he supposedly wrote about black liberation ideology. “I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers,” he said.

He spoke disparagingly about protests, calling protesting “emotional” and “for the women.”

In one of his more recent videos, he said, “I thought my own thoughts. I made my own decisions. I’m the one who’s got to listen to the judgement. That’s it. And my heart is pure. If anything happens with me, because I’m an alpha male, I stand up, I stand firm, I stand for mine, until the end. Yeah, I also was a Nation of Islam member. Don’t affiliate me with it. Don’t affiliate me with anything.”

 

From the media reports alone, you'd never know. Listening to the radio news, they commented several times that the shooter was a former Marine, that he was from Kansas City, and that he was a part of a separatist, anti-government group. They never mentioned that he was black, that he had converted to Islam three years before, or that the anti-government group was the Nation of Islam, yet these facts were surely more pertinent to the event than that he was a former Marine or that he was from Kansas City. Had he been white, or if the anti-government separatist group had been the American Nazi Party, the Klan, or a milia group, we'd hear nothing else for days on end. Think of it. A white kid shot a bunch of people in a church. Because his victims were black and they were able to find a picture of him with a Confederate flag, the Confederate flag was banned from just about everything, Confederate memorials and monuments were removed, and the graves of Confederate dead were even dug up from some cemeteries, and that's all we heard about for months.

 

No, but then I wouldn't have been threatened by him. He was shooting at police, who were armed, and he was doing it from a distance. Do you think a law against guns would have prevented it?

Had someone in the black church in Charleston been armed, and knew how to use his weapon, one bullet could have stopped that kid. If the kid had reason to suspect that anyone in the church would be armed, he probably wouldn't have even gone there. The same is true of several of the mass shootings that we've heard of lately.

Of course, a concealed weapon isn't going to keep you safe from all possibility of harm but it does give you a chance, which is more than the gun banners want anyone to have.