Death by Life

It can’t come as a big surprise that the world is a dangerous and violent place. Wars, civil and against external enemies, rage everywhere, particularly in the Middle East, Central and South Asia. But according to Switzerland’s Graduate Institute, violent death is generated much more by factors other than war and other conflicts… 90% to be more precise.

“The Graduate Institute’s annual survey [sponsored by the Swiss foreign ministry] found an average of 526,000 people a year died violently between 2004 and 2009, and that 90 percent of the armed violence did not involve international conflicts or civil wars…The survey also found that between 42 percent and 60 percent of lethal violence occurs with a firearm, and that civilians hold about three-quarters of the approximately 875 million weapons worldwide.” Huffington Post, July 2^nd.

Many factors influence the choice of weapons. For example, there is a very strong correlation, according to the above survey, between the cost of ammunition and resulting casualties: “A strong correlation between the rise and fall of ammunition prices in Lebanon and the popularity of certain rifle models used by Syrian rebel fighters. For example, Belgian-made FN FAL rifles became ‘useless’ to Syrian fighters when the price of cartridges reached $3. But the most commonly available military rifles, including the Russian-made AK 47s and American-made M16s in Lebanon and Pakistan, command higher prices when ammunition prices tend to be low… The Institute's senior researcher Glenn McDonald said ammunition prices reflect the course of armed conflicts like the one in Syria, and added that the survey overlapped with the first year and a half of the conflict there.” Huffington Post.

For women, the statistics are particularly chilling: “Between 40 percent and 70 percent of female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner, often with a gun. Around 66,000 women are killed violently each year around the world – equivalent to 17 percent of all intentional homicides – usually by a current or former partner.” Huffington Post.

With one gun per 94.3 residents (Wikipedia), the United States is far and away home to the world’s highest per capita private gun ownership in the world. Violence-plagued Yemen is pegged at one gun per 54.8 residents and sits in a distant second place. While gun deaths are falling in the United States, according to a 2012 report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2/3s of all U.S. homicides are by firearm, around 5 per 100,000 residents according to the Guardian UK (slightly lower according to the U.N.).

While murder/homicide rates in third world countries, particularly in areas of insurrection and general instability, are much worse, when compared to the rest of the developed world, America’s murder/homicide-by-firearm rates lead the pack, way ahead of the rest of this global segment: “Even Italy, the G-8 member with the second highest rate of homicides by firearm, comes in far behind the United States. According to United Nations data, a person is 4.5 times more likely to die from gun violence in the United States than Italy… In France and the United Kingdom, the homicide by firearm rate is 0.1 per 100,000 people. That’s one in a million.” ABCNews.com, December 18, 2012.

We have rates that aren’t that far from countries with severe incumbent terrorist cells, but try and get some rationality into our notion of gun ownership, and the exceptionally powerful extremist NRA – which continues to ignore the “well-regulated” words in our Second Amendment (above) – will move heaven and earth (and more than a small degree of campaign contributions) to crush such efforts. We pay for that legal failing, the hubris behind the NRA message, with our flesh and blood.

The big experiment, where a nation with a tradition of gun ownership (Australia) banned such private weapons after a massacre, should be a model for any nation seeking a change: “But one of Howard’s other lasting legacies is Australia’s gun control regime, first passed in 1996 in response to a massacre in Tasmania that left 35 dead. The law banned semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. It also instituted a mandatory buy-back program for newly banned weapons…

“So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cites a study … by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law’s effectiveness.” Washington Post, August 2, 2012.

Sure, there are riots and a military coup that usurped the Morsi regime in Egypt, Taliban executions in Pakistan, suicide bombing in Baghdad and unmitigated chaos in Syria… but looking at ourselves, including our massive manufacture, consumption and export (particularly illegal export to places like Mexico) of small arms intended for civilians, we are a very big part of the problem and not remotely a part of the solution.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I do remember the Biblical admonition that reminds us that we reap what we sow.