Not Entertainment

[kandrathe]

Won't deny that it's a rising problem. I just don't think that gun-related crime is higher here then in the States, relatively speaking. Problem is the amount is not measured in the same way in our respective countries, so it's hard to figure out how these our figures compare.

True, and true.

The other factor to consider is scale. The US crime rate is the sum of all the bad areas of all the municipalities, and there are just more bad areas in the US, and they are afflicted with more drug addiction, more gangs, more domestic violence, more racial issues, more illegal trafficking, and more poverty.

It would probably be best to choose an area of the US that is comparable to the Netherlands in population size and demographics to compare (80% white, 16 million people, ~$40K GDP per person). Probably some of the northern areas, such as near where I live would be close, although, we may have less population density. In Minnesota in 2009, there were a total of 69 (1/100K) criminal homicides in the state (a 27 year low), and 37 involved firearms. Typically, 1/4 of them are gang related, and 1/2 are related to domestic violence. In the Netherlands (2008), there were (~157) 1.11/100K people. So, the murder rate is pretty close really. I've looked and I can't find the percentage of the Dutch murders committed with firearms for comparison.

Circling back to our prior topic of the NAACP repudiating Tea Parties (and thereby Republicans)... The big push toward gun regulation began as a progressive movement to keep firearms out of the hands of black people, and later American Indians. Now, it's evolved from a progressive movement to keep guns out of the hands of the underprivileged (poor whites, blacks, Hispanics, etc.) The operative word in "Gun Control" is control. Control of the population by the elites who run our government. But, as I've said in other posts... The elitism of progressives is not limited to one particular political party. And, perhaps someday, people will wake up and demand that Teddy Roosevelt's image be scraped off of Mount Rushmore.

Robert Sherrill wrote in The Saturday Night Special, regarding the Gun Control Act of 1968, "The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns to but control blacks, and inasmuch as a majority of Congress did not want to do the former but were ashamed to show that their goal was the latter, the result was that they did neither. Indeed, this law, the first gun-control law passed by Congress in thirty years, was one of the grand jokes of our time."