Publicola

Join Together Online has a press release stating that the UN small arms agreement has been poorly implemented.

I would submit to them that it was poorly conceived as well.

but on to a brief fisking:

"Small arms, including handguns, rifles and long guns, cause 500,000 deaths a year - taking one life every minute."

Actually my calculator verifies that as being correct - provided there are only 347.222 days each year. It also works out that there is actually only 0.951 deaths a minute, or roughly 1.04 deaths every 64 seconds.

But that does not take into account the source for their numbers, nor the criteria used to qualify a death by a firearm. I doubt that it would serve theri purpose to announce that 20% of those deaths were the result of a person defending his/her life from a criminal, or that 40% of those deaths were the result of a government that decided to kill off part of its population. So without knowing what constituted a death by a firearm for the purposes of this study then the numbers are suspect.


"Rebecca Peters, Director of IANSA [International Action Network on Small Arms] said: 'While governments meet in New York this week, over 7,000 people, mostly civilians, will be killed by small arms. Nearly all those deaths are preventable and will serve no national security purpose. It's time for government and civil society to work together to stop the killing."

Again I question the source of the numbers as well as the methodolgy used to arrive at them. But perhaps Ms. peters would accomplish more if she focused on preventing governments from killing their own people than in trying to help them be safer while killing their own unarmed people.

From my understanding, & please correct me if I'm wrong, the majority of the murders in the 20th century were attributable to governments killing off their own citizens. I would imagine wars would rank next as a cause of death, followed by suicide, criminals & accidents. If we disregard suicides (as firearms are a convenience but are by no means neccessary) & accidental shootings (which I assume are statistically very low) we are left with two types of government action & criminal actions as the cause of the majority of firearms death (I know, listing government & criminals are redundant).

Now what is the UN? An organization comprised of governments. So the organization who wants to disarm civilians is composed of the same type of entities that account for roughly two-thirds (by my unscientific guessing) of the deaths caused by firearms?

Kinda like asking a crack head to guard the cocaine factory isn't it?