Guns don’t kill people and you’re not going to like it when I point out who does.
I love it when people blame
It’s even better when someone like
In an column entitled “Our deadly exports: Guns, viagra canada recipe violence and homicides”, cialis Stanford basically says Toronto’s elevated homicide rate in 2005 is our fault.
(To be fair, Gregory isn’t the first one to try to blame the evil United States for Toronto’s problems. Toronto Mayor David Miller himself laid the blame on our doorstep when he said, “The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of
I have a question for Mr. Stanford (and Mayor Miller, for that matter): why do you keep blaming guns (and America), but not the young black men who are the ones committing the shootings?
I’m aware that the above statement is inflammatory.
And, whether you believe it or not, I’m not a racist.
I’m a realist.
And I can do the numbers:
Let’s start with the disingenious assertion that guns cause violent crime.
According to a BBC report there are approximately 200 MILLION guns in the United States.
The FBI estimated that there were around 10,242 murders committed with guns in the year 2000.
Do the math.
That means 0.005121 percent of the guns in the United States were used in a murder that year.
Take a moment to digest that number.
If guns were the (or even a) root cause of homicide, wouldn’t more than .005 percent of them lead to a murder?
Or course they didn’t, because 99.99 percent of guns in America are owned by responsible, law-abiding people.
Now let’s take a look at the numbers that really tell us what’s going on in Toronto (and Milwaukee for that matter):
Staff Inspector Brian Raybould, head of the Toronto police homicide squad and a 36-year veteran of the Toronto police force, was quoted in the Buffalo News saying that 90 percent of his city’s shooting deaths are gang-related and are mostly “young black men shooting young black men.”
According to this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel graphic, 75% of the 122 people killed in Milwaukee in 2005 were black.
Because murders are almost always between members of the same race, I can only assume this means that 3 out of every 4 murders in Milwaukee in 2005 were commited by a black man.
(I have to make an assumption because an internet search turned up not a SINGLE statistic about how many of the killers in Milwaukee in 2005 were black. Note to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: you’re not doing the community a favor by trying to hide the truth about what’s going on in the inner city. If we don’t start by identifying a problem, we have no hope of fixing it.)
I have to say, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that young black men are commiting the majority of murders in Milwaukee given that even African-American columnist
In 2002, even the U.S. Department of Justice stated that blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit a homicide .
Does all this mean that I think blacks are evil or more prone to violence as a race?
Emphatically no.
I believe there are cultural issues inside and outside of the black community that need to be addressed if we are going to end the violence.
But one thing we KNOW will not fix the problem is blaming the guns instead of the people who pull the triggers.
Gun control does NOT stop gun-related violence. Washington D.C. has the most restrictive gun law in the country and it hasn’t made it a safer place to live.
Thanks to Governor Jim Doyle, Wisconsin continues to deny its law-abiding citizens the right to bear arms and yet the homicide rate in Milwaukee still skyrocketed.
Guns don’t cause violence and I’m sick of people whose cause it is to outlaw guns using the existence of violence as their justification.
We will never solve this problem as long as people like Gregory Stanford and the Mayor of Toronto insist on targeting guns and refuse to set their sites on the real issues that trigger violence in the inner cities.
11 comments January 23rd, 2006