A few interesting facts about gun control, violence, history & irony

Before reading this, look in the "links" section on the right side of the blog and click on the link titled "Should we have more gun control? No matter your opinion, please read".

On assault weapons: did you know that rifles account for LESS than 1% of firearm-involved homicides in the U.S.? In 2013, rifles accounted for LESS than 290 deaths, according to the FBI's "Expanded Homicide Data Table 8". According to the same article, that year, shotguns were used to kill LESS than 310. Added up, long guns killed only 600 people that year. And this is EVERYTHING that counts as a rifle (from low powered plinking rifles and single shots to high powered hunting rifles and semi-automatic "military style" rifles) or shotgun (from single shot to semi-automatic) in statistics, so the deaths involving "assault weapons" are probably even lower Also you want to restrict those while not mentioning cutting instruments and blunt objects, which account for 1,940 and 428 deaths respectively (then again, they're work tools). Altogether, firearm-related homicides accounted for a GRAND TOTAL of 8,454 people that year. Divide that by 290,000,000 and about 0.00002915172% of the population was, in homicide, killed with a firearm that year.
Do you know what an assault weapon even is? And how gun control advocates plan any exceptions to restrictions, such as rimfire (which are quite weak) rifles and rifles with either non-detachable (such as the M1 Garand or most variants of the SKS) magazines or low-capacity single stack magazines (such as the Merkel S1, Benelli R1, and the semi-auto Browning BAR)?

How effective really is it to restrict things that statistically, produce such a low body count compared to even everyday tools? And I am not even talking about improvised/homemade weapons such as the STEN or Luty submachine gun which are quite simple and not all that hard to make yet a bit effective, more so than simpler designs such as homemade single-shot shotguns.
I'm not even sure if people would even address loophole weapons.

And remember pump action rifles that use centerfire ammunition and are fed by detachable magazines.

I'd also like to note that, believe or not, 2 of the largest civilian-on-civilian massacres (with the exception of the 2011 Norway attacks, which was a terror attack because of political motivation and the Uiryeong massacre, which was carried out by a bad police officer who has stolen military weapons) take place under interesting circumstances. One is the Bath school disaster, where Andrew Kehoe killed 45 people WITH EXPLOSIVES, and the Tsuyama massacre, which had 30 people killed and happened in JAPAN. The killer had 3 weapons; an axe, Katana, and last but not least, a Remington M11 shotgun (which was actually a variation of the Browning Auto-5). The gun he had probably isn't something that comes to most people's minds when they think of "assault weapon", as that it has a traditional look to it, and had a little 3 or 5 round tubular magazine, so you literally had to load in one round at a time and, with a round in the chamber, get 6 rounds at best. Yet the killer managed to kill 30 people, more than what Adam Lanza managed to kill with his Bushmaster AR-15 copy or his Glock 20 pistol. What's wrong with the picture?

(Note; you can find better video's on your own. For some reason, Blogger's YouTube video feature doesn't always work all that well in terms of finding videos.)

While I know there is currently not all that much gun crime in the United Kingdom, the supply of firearms is rather ridiculous. I recommend watching "Gun Control is a Myth UK" and looking in the description for links to mostly mainstream sources to show the supply of rather effective weapons in the hands of criminals (thank goodness that not many people are killed). In Germany, according to Gunpolicy.org, there are like 20 million illegal firearms in Germany but the same case; they are rarely used. A similar situation is in Japan where the Yakuza have live firearms but do not use them all that much (plus the 30 Howa Type 64 battle rifles that were lost by the JSDF Oita Prefecture garrison in January 2007). This probably is becuase of not only their culture (which would probably be classified as "Lawful" in the 9 alignments, which basically means that they often follow certain rules and care about honor. I won't explain the system myself but, if you want to, you can read the "THE 9 CHARACTER ALIGNMENTS" article by SCRIPTMONK!!!, but it is not required to do so), but also, strict laws against illegally discharging a firearm, which I have little problem with (those preying on weak innocents deserve to be punished anyway).

A little critique to weapon laws in other countries; weapon laws actually vary greatly in Europe, from countries such as Switzerland, the Czech republic, Austria, France or Serbia having not all that strict weapon laws and/or high legal firearm ownership rate to countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Cyprus or Spain, all of which have comparatively stricter weapon laws, and nonsense such as "may-issue" permits/licenses ("may issue" means that the firearms authority people make the last decision as to rather or not you'll get your license/permit. "Shall-issue" means that if you meet the requirements you will get your license). Yet the former countries I described don't seem to have substantially higher homicide or violence rates than the latter countries from what I'm aware of.
I'd also like to note that there are a LOT of cases where militaries, law enforcement and government agencies in that matter have lost weapons that are often restricted to almost banned for private civilian use and ownership. For militaries, read a couple of articles called "More than 300 guns lost or stolen from Army bases over just five years", "Norwegian army admits losing 1,200 rifles", and a video called "Home Office and Police Gun Losses - How Many do they Lose?". So it won't be surprising if those types of weapons end up in the hands of criminals, militants, black market dealers and so on.

Another interesting story is New Zealand vs Australia, where the former has mostly lighter (I say "Mostly" because I'm not so sure if law enforcement would visit the homes of gun owners all that much in Australia plus the legality of antique weapons in Australia) firearms laws than the latter plus more firearms per capita, yet again, actually has lower homicide and violence rates.
Not to mention how countries in Central and South America often have stricter weapon laws than Europe or some parts of Asia and yet look at their crime and violence rates.
Hmmm.