Liberal Hypocrisy

Shootist

Well-Known Member
Listening to BBC Radio 4 the other day I received the benefit of one of the most glaring examples of the hypocrisy of the liberal mind I think I have ever heard. The program had some intellectual types, an author and some others blathering on.

The author, his book being serialised on the Beeb, “The Death Of America” IIRC he was going on about the death rate of youths in America's inner city ghettos particularly, but he covered the ground from a young boy who accidentally shot himself with his father’s unsecured, loaded, pistol to the appalling gang turf war slaughter in inner cities. It was clear that his solution was the removal of all firearms. They were the cause of all the trouble. He ended up saying “Do you love your second amendment more than you love your kids?”

Then the subject moved on to South Africa. He (I think it was the same man) described a township there where white Boers had gathered to run what was effectively an apartheid town but without black residents, which they viewed as their failure in apartheid that they relied upon black labour. This venture was held in some contempt by the speaker, clearly as apartheid and (white) racism was the major problem in South Africa’s history. (I also found it ironic that he said that white down and outs, druggies, junkies, and losers, made their way to this place to get back on their feet, get some money together before leaving as if this was a failing instead of a chance to go somewhere to get their lives back on track)

Something was bothering me about this. The anti-gun stance was no surprise, but there was something else and I went in search on the net.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._homicide_rate

USA Intentional Homicides per 100,000 of population in 2013
= 3.9 (three point nine) per 100,000 of population, total 12,253. (Population about 319 million)

South Africa Intentional Homicides per 100,000 of population in 2014
= 33 (Thirty three) per 100,000 of population, total 17,805.(Population about 53 million)

Not one word about removing firearms from the South African population. Apparently it's only in America that guns that cause evil.
 
Listening to BBC Radio 4 the other day I received the benefit of one of the most glaring examples of the hypocrisy of the liberal mind I think I have ever heard. The program had some intellectual types, an author and some others blathering on.

The author, his book being serialised on the Beeb, “The Death Of America” IIRC he was going on about the death rate of youths in America's inner city ghettos particularly, but he covered the ground from a young boy who accidentally shot himself with his father’s unsecured, loaded, pistol to the appalling gang turf war slaughter in inner cities. It was clear that his solution was the removal of all firearms. They were the cause of all the trouble. He ended up saying “Do you love your second amendment more than you love your kids?”

Then the subject moved on to South Africa. He (I think it was the same man) described a township there where white Boers had gathered to run what was effectively an apartheid town but without black residents, which they viewed as their failure in apartheid that they relied upon black labour. This venture was held in some contempt by the speaker, clearly as apartheid and (white) racism was the major problem in South Africa’s history. (I also found it ironic that he said that white down and outs, druggies, junkies, and losers, made their way to this place to get back on their feet, get some money together before leaving as if this was a failing instead of a chance to go somewhere to get their lives back on track)

Something was bothering me about this. The anti-gun stance was no surprise, but there was something else and I went in search on the net.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._homicide_rate

USA Intentional Homicides per 100,000 of population in 2013
= 3.9 (three point nine) per 100,000 of population, total 12,253. (Population about 319 million)

South Africa Intentional Homicides per 100,000 of population in 2014
= 33 (Thirty three) per 100,000 of population, total 17,805.(Population about 53 million)

Not one word about removing firearms from the South African population. Apparently it's only in America that guns that cause evil.

I think thats probably because at best South Africa is a Third World country and worse bordering a war zone......

Its like comparing Syria to UAE.

Whilst I agree with your points the Seppo's attitudes to firearms are somewhat looser than ours, particularly when it comes to storage and such like. I find it best to just switch channels if anything gun related comes on regarding the USA.
 
The US homicide rate also never seems to have any proper breakdown of what's actually happening. To quote Brookings, a Washington policy research institution about gun deaths in the US:

"The firearm homicide rate among black men aged 20-29 is about 89 per 100,000.To put that fact in some international perspective, in Honduras—the country with the highest recorded homicide rate—there were 90.4 intentional murders per 100,000 people in 2012. That includes all means, not just firearm homicides."

If you exclude shootings where the perpetrator was black (which is about half of them I think, looking at FBI data), the US homicide rate for the rest of the population also falls significantly.

If you then exclude suicides from the rest of the numbers, you get rid of 70-80% of the remaining gun deaths. It may still be a problem, but it stops looking like a specific problem of homicides caused purely by guns, which is how the liberal media exclusively chooses to portray it. I have heard one talking head say that victims are far more likely to be black, and thus conclude that guns are racist - but this prat failed to mention that the shooter is also black in around 90% of those cases.

If you won't confront the actual facts because your political ideology forbids it, you generally can't solve the problem. Whilst this may be a difficult subject, just ignoring the facts because they don't fit with the media's liberal narrative in favour of going "guns are bad mmmkay" is tiresome at best.
 
The US homicide rate also never seems to have any proper breakdown of what's actually happening. To quote Brookings, a Washington policy research institution about gun deaths in the US:

"The firearm homicide rate among black men aged 20-29 is about 89 per 100,000.To put that fact in some international perspective, in Honduras—the country with the highest recorded homicide rate—there were 90.4 intentional murders per 100,000 people in 2012. That includes all means, not just firearm homicides."

If you exclude shootings where the perpetrator was black (which is about half of them I think, looking at FBI data), the US homicide rate for the rest of the population also falls significantly.

If you then exclude suicides from the rest of the numbers, you get rid of 70-80% of the remaining gun deaths. It may still be a problem, but it stops looking like a specific problem of homicides caused purely by guns, which is how the liberal media exclusively chooses to portray it. I have heard one talking head say that victims are far more likely to be black, and thus conclude that guns are racist - but this prat failed to mention that the shooter is also black in around 90% of those cases.

If you won't confront the actual facts because your political ideology forbids it, you generally can't solve the problem. Whilst this may be a difficult subject, just ignoring the facts because they don't fit with the media's liberal narrative in favour of going "guns are bad mmmkay" is tiresome at best.


Are you really trying to suggest that you can strip out the black deaths because they don't count?
 
I dont see his point as they dont count. I see it as the gang related deaths are usually illegal guns with criminals killing each other. The idea of removing legal firearms will not remove gun crime. The fact of the matter is the high murder rate is a social problem. The black lives matter campaign is a false agenda with all but i believe one of the campaigned against shootings being perfectly legal against armed criminals with a record of violent offences. When young men are gunned down by other young men in Chicago tonight we will not see a media campaign. The statistics and media are being played to support a political agenda. With the Obama administration sending government representatives to the funerals of criminals killed in legal shootings whilst failing to provide the same for police officers killed whilst on duty. This is a case of the left wing jumping on the band wagon. When all the proof shows us that what needs to happen is the fragmentation of these ghettos projects whatever you wish to call them.
 
Are you really trying to suggest that you can strip out the black deaths because they don't count?

No, I thought I was being fairly explicit. I'm saying that there is a very serious problem with homicides perpetrated by black people in the US, and where the victims are also mainly black. It is getting on for an order of magnitude worse than for any other race as far as I can see from the actual government stats. I'm saying that the actual US gun deaths figure cited does not uniformly affect all people - some are very much more likely to shoot and be shot than others. I'm saying that blanket scaremongering based on single numbers is foolish and doesn't reflect the reality on the ground.

Now, those insanely high homicide rates might well be driven by causative factors like alienation, lack of money, educational opportunities, police brutality, lawless poorer neighbourhoods etc. But to properly analyse the issue and come up with sensible policies you'd need to look at the exact issue which is 'who is shooting whom with what' and look for trends - of which there will be many - and potential solutions to address those. You might find, for example, that 80% of the murders in cities were committed with illegal handguns in a handful of poorer districts. You might conclude that additional laws on legal gun availability will do little or nothing to reduce the vast majority of those.

But that would require acknowledging some very obvious difficult issues which the liberal media simply cannot do. They instead choose to portray this as a simple problem purely with legal guns and simply can't get their precious little heads around the idea that it might not be just guns that are driving the issue because to do so means having to confront some very unpleasant truths on the way which they are conditioned to ignore.
 
Spare a thought for the genocide going on in South Africa - makes the US look tame. Whites/ white farmers are being murdered at a rate of something like 100 per 100 000 annually.
 
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The "homicide" numbers are not murders. A great number of those killed with firearms are in self-defense, even criminals killing other criminals who are trying to rob or injure them. In these urban areas, the vast majority of those killed were criminals who had it coming.

Violent crime had actually declined by 75% in the USA until Obama took office. It has increased about 25% nationwide, but that number is skewed by increases in cities like Chicago (2,100 shootings so far this year and 500 fatalities ) and Baltimore ( murders up 63% in 2016 over 2015 ).

Another interesting number is that there have been 25 "mass shootings" in the last decade in the USA, and 25 in the EU, which has much stricter control of firearms. Of the 25 in the USA, 20 were by Muslim terrorists. In the EU, I think it was 23, as of last week.

There are about 2,500,000 crimes stopped by armed civilians. Last week, a Muslim who was killing people at a shopping mall in Minnesota was shot dead by an off-duty policeman, carrying his handgun with a civilian permit. Shortly after the Orlando, Florida massacre, a copy cat tried to shoot up a nightclub in South Carolina. A patron with a concealed weapons permit drew and shot the perp in the thigh, stopping that before anyone else was injured. But the news media walks away from those stories.
 
2/3 of the gun deaths in the US are suicides. Most gun deaths in SA are due to rampant crime. Firearms are available to citizens in both countries.

FWIW - I have lived in both the USA and RSA.
 
The "homicide" numbers are not murders. A great number of those killed with firearms are in self-defense, even criminals killing other criminals who are trying to rob or injure them. In these urban areas, the vast majority of those killed were criminals who had it coming.

Violent crime had actually declined by 75% in the USA until Obama took office. It has increased about 25% nationwide, but that number is skewed by increases in cities like Chicago (2,100 shootings so far this year and 500 fatalities ) and Baltimore ( murders up 63% in 2016 over 2015 ).

Another interesting number is that there have been 25 "mass shootings" in the last decade in the USA, and 25 in the EU, which has much stricter control of firearms. Of the 25 in the USA, 20 were by Muslim terrorists. In the EU, I think it was 23, as of last week.

There are about 2,500,000 crimes stopped by armed civilians. Last week, a Muslim who was killing people at a shopping mall in Minnesota was shot dead by an off-duty policeman, carrying his handgun with a civilian permit. Shortly after the Orlando, Florida massacre, a copy cat tried to shoot up a nightclub in South Carolina. A patron with a concealed weapons permit drew and shot the perp in the thigh, stopping that before anyone else was injured. But the news media walks away from those stories.

Do you have facts to back anything up there as I find it nearly impossible to believe that there have been only 25 Mass shootings in the USA in that time? I am also trying to think of 25 mass shootings in the EU as well.
 
Hmmm... 25 mass shootings. Take a look at the below site, the Mass Shooting Tracker. It's interesting, especially when one recorded incident is a few teenagers riding around in a car shooting at people with a BB gun. Annoying yes, stupid yes, a crime, yes. But a mass shooting. Their bias is showing.

http://www.shootingtracker.com/Main_Page
 
Hmmm... 25 mass shootings. Take a look at the below site, the Mass Shooting Tracker. It's interesting, especially when one recorded incident is a few teenagers riding around in a car shooting at people with a BB gun. Annoying yes, stupid yes, a crime, yes. But a mass shooting. Their bias is showing.

http://www.shootingtracker.com/Main_Page

Thought as much! I find the US attitudes to firearms and its stats use to prove how safe(unsafe) they are amusing at best.
 
ShootingTracker is an anti-liberty website which redefines "mass shooting" to include criminal violence and even pranks and teen hooligans using non-lethal weapons.

I am using the stats from the FBI and Interpol, who define a "mass shooting" as 4 or more people wounded or killed with a firearm by someone they did not know. Naturally, that is going to just mostly be deranged individuals and terrorists.

The other interesting stat from the police is how much violent crime has increased in the UK, Europe, and Australia since their wholesale disarming of the populations in the 1990s.
 
ShootingTracker is an anti-liberty website which redefines "mass shooting" to include criminal violence and even pranks and teen hooligans using non-lethal weapons.

I am using the stats from the FBI and Interpol, who define a "mass shooting" as 4 or more people wounded or killed with a firearm by someone they did not know. Naturally, that is going to just mostly be deranged individuals and terrorists.

The other interesting stat from the police is how much violent crime has increased in the UK, Europe, and Australia since their wholesale disarming of the populations in the 1990s.

please link and prove your stats as to be frank you are talking absolute bullsht claiming there have been only 25 4 person-+ shootings in the USA in the Last decade.
 
Right so so the stats don't show that at all. Let's ignore the dubious source and obvious fact you can manipulate stats to do what ever you want. That's showing roughly 5 per 10m people. With US pop circa 300m clearly way out!!

Are you talking to me or Southern? I just linked you to some stats as requested. As for "dubious source", this is entirely based on and linked to Congressional Research Service and FBI official data. I'm not sure you'll find anything better. From a very quick read it looked like there have been c4.4 mass public shootings a year - which is about 44 over ten years. Not 25, but not far off - it's not thousands or even hundreds. All depends on your definition of mass shootings, of course - which is what the first article I linked to discusses.
 
The difficulty with these statistics is placement and 'reasons' for incidents. What would be very interesting would be if someone could give credible statistics showing shooting incidents but removing the religious dingbats, and gang turf war related shootings, drive by's etc. and get a better picture of what is happening in mainstream American society as regards shooting. It seems to me that if the shooting fairy waved her magic Glock and all guns vanished from America, there would still remain enclaves where violence, hatred, and gang wars would remain and I cannot believe that if guns were so removed that these people would turn into happy hippies doing group hug drive by's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

Gun violence in the United States results in thousands of deaths and injuries annually.[1] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries (23.23 per 100,000 U.S. citizens);[2] 11,208 homicides (3.5 per 100,000);[3] 21,175 suicides;[4] 505 deaths due to accidental/negligent discharge of a firearm; and 281 deaths due to firearms-use with "undetermined intent",[4] included in a total of 33,636 deaths due to "Injury by firearms",[4] or 10.6 deaths per 100,000 people.[4] Of the 2,596,993 total deaths in the US in 2013, 1.3% were related to firearms.[1][5] The ownership and control of guns are among the most widely debated issues in the country.
In 2010, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 67% of all homicides in the U.S. were committed using a firearm.[6] According to the FBI, in 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US, with 6,371 of those attributed to handguns.[7] 61% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. are suicides.[8] In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S.[9] In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm.[10]
Firearms were used to kill 13,286 people in the U.S. in 2015, excluding suicide.[11] Approximately 1.4 million people have been killed using firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011.[11]

In 2010, gun violence cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $516 million in direct hospital costs.[12]
Gun violence is most common in poor urban areas and frequently associated with gang violence, often involving male juveniles or young adult males.[13][14] Although mass shootings have been covered extensively in the media, mass shootings account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths[8] and the frequency of these events steadily declined between 1994 and 2007, rising between 2007 and 2013.[15][16]
Legislation at the federal, state, and local levels has attempted to address gun violence through a variety of methods, including restricting firearms purchases by youths and other "at-risk" populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community-outreach programs. Despite widespread concern about the impacts of gun violence on public health, Congress has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from conducting research that advocates in favor of gun control.[17]

There's more. An interesting read.
 
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