Monday, October 24, 2005

 

I Knew I Always Liked Brazilians

Despite huge pressure from the government, the UN and the Church, the Brazillian people overwhelming rejected gun control in a countrywide referendum this past weekend. This despite the fact that with less than half our population, Brazil has three times our annual gun deaths. Money quote from the BBC story sadly reporting this:

"We didn't lose because Brazilians like guns. We lost because people don't have confidence in the government or the police," said Denis Mizne, of anti-violence group Sou da Paz.
"The 'No' campaign was much more effective. They are talking about a right to have a gun - it is a totally American debate."


A totally American debate and it saved gun rights (and therefore people) in Brazil. They can thank us later.

If you see City of God, you wonder how anyone gets out of puberty unshot there. No wonder they wanted to be able to have a gun for self defense. I have some thoughts on why certain nations are so violent, but they're not complete.

Comments:
I guess it just goes to show that gun control is too late once guns are out of control. I'd be interested to know how many of those gun deaths were innocent victims of crime killing the perpetrators vs. vice versa vs. crimials killing other criminals.

I'm guessing your thoughts will be at variance with those of Michael Moore's!
 
I don't know what the term "out of control" means when you apply it to guns. Do you mean there is too much crime? Also, I don't know of anyone tracking good defensive use of hand guns in Brazil but neither of us reads Portugese anyway. In America John Lott has done some analysis in a book called More Guns, Less Crime. I'll leave it to your imagination where he comes down. The trouble with charting good defensive use of a pistol is that the bulk of good defensive uses will not involve any shots fired but merely the showing to the advancing criminal that the would-be victim is armed, and then the crime never happens and there is nothing to report to police. It's tough to get a chart on those. I'm sure they happen though so the only question is how often? More than 20,000 a year? More than 200,000? More than 2,000,000? Lott says it's the last one. How can we verify?
 
I was thinking of my native land, that has had "gun control" since anyone can remember (of course we don't call it that - we don't call it anything!). I meant that, for example, if Britain were to allow the sale of guns, it would be difficult, twenty years later, to then decide to impose gun control.
I would think Britain would be a counterexample to the Lott thesis, but perhaps i should read the book first!
 
Britain is sui generis I think. The last time Brits routinely went about armed was in the 1700s. Even the police were not armed with guns for most of their history. You guys do commit crimes but you don't murder each other and no one can really explain that. Russians, Brazilians, West Africans murder each other at the drop of a hat.
 
Perhaps we don`t have many gun crimes
in the UK because we don`t allow our population to be armed.
Perhaps so many Brazilians die from guns because they have so many.

Doesn`t seem such a mystery really.
 
It is not at all that simple in the context of other countries. Switzerland, for example, requires that every able bodied male (don't know about females) has a full auto assault rifle in the closet and a side arm (probably a SIG) yet their murder per 1000 rate is about the same as England's (low) Same for Israel where almost every Israeli citizen is armed. Even with guns coming out of their ears, the gun violence there is lower than in most countries and well lower than here. It's not just availability of guns. It's about the 'soul' of the populace or something similar.
 
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