Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.
In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.
And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be.
But here's the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have two Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns – and that doesn't count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.
That means the United States is responsible for over 80 percent of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us?
Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with firmly held beliefs as to "the why" of this problem. And the reason neither can find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact, they're both half right.
The right believes that the Founding Fathers, through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun cannot fire itself – that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Of course, they know they're being intellectually dishonest (if I can use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide to return and wreak some havoc.
But they are half right when they say "Guns don't kill people." I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."
Because we're the only ones in the first world who do this en masse. And you'll hear all stripes of Americans come up with a host of reasons so that they don't have to deal with what's really behind all this murder and mayhem.
They'll say it's the violent movies and video games that are responsible. Last time I checked, the movies and video games in Japan are more violent than ours – and yet usually fewer than 20 people a year are killed there with guns – and in 2006 the number was two!
Others will say it's the number of broken homes that lead to all this killing. I hate to break this to you, but there are almost as many single-parent homes in the U.K. as there are here – and yet, in Great Britain, there are usually fewer than 40 gun murders a year.
People like me will say this is all the result of the U.S. having a history and a culture of men with guns, "cowboys and Indians," "shoot first and ask questions later." And while it is true that the mass genocide of the Native Americans set a pretty ugly model to found a country on, I think it's safe to say we're not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide. Hello, Germany! That's right I'm talking about you and your history, from the Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the British who ruled the world for hundreds of years – and they didn't achieve that through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people, there are only around 200 gun murders a year.
So those countries (and many others) are just like us – except for the fact that more people here believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation.
My liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories, smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes.
But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada's culture is very similar to ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don't grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate.
So – why us?
I posed this question a decade ago in my film Bowling for Columbine, and this week, I have had little to say because I feel I said what I had to say 10 years ago – and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot of good other than to now look like it was actually a crystal ball posing as a movie.
This is what I said then, and it is what I will say again today:
1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.
Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan – but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.
2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, number one in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean).
Those are my thoughts about Aurora and the violent country I am a citizen of. Like I said, I spelled it all out here if you'd like to watch it or share it for free with others. All we're lacking here, my friends, is the courage and the resolve. I'm in if you are.
Follow Michael Moore on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MMFlint
Gun Control has been(and still is) a tool of opression. You can't really control someone who can resist.
Our esteemed and valued author seems to think that we can be manipulated by fear. Yes, Michael we can be made to fear things. Things such as 'evil guns, assault clips, street sweepers, cop killer bullets, the list goes on and on. He builds a case for us being frightened of an object and then goes and tries to frighten us into giving up our civil rights.
I have had thoughts before about gun control and how stupid we Americans can be.
I myself have never actually said the "Star Spangled Banner" because I (even as a child) am ashamed of my country and now that I am older and see more of what is going on it sickens me to know that I have put up with all of this.
Thank you for your inspiring movie and you will be sure to know that you will see my face on the news, in the papers, on the web. You have inspired me to do something about this.
12,791 homicides (41% of total deaths)
16,883 suicides (55% of total deaths)
642 unintentional shootings (2% of total deaths)
360 from legal intervention (1.2% of total deaths)
220 from undetermined intent (.8% of total deaths).
(Numbers obtained from CDC National Center for Health Statistics mortality report online, 2009.)
FACT: Comparison of U.S. gun homicides to other industrialized countries:
In 2004 (the most recent year for which this data has been compiled), handguns murdered:
5 people in New Zealand
37 people in Sweden
56 people in Australia
184 people in Canada
19 people in Japan
73 people in the UK
11,344 people in the United States
I just put the numbers out there. make what you want of them. they speak for themselves.
Black Americans make up just under 13% of the total population, but from 1976-2005, account for over 50% of homicide victims - more than half of the overall deaths from gun violence. Worse, they account for nearly 60% of gun homicide offenders. 94% of black victims are killed by blacks.
Looking closer, the vast majority of homicides are committed by males - men are ten times more likely to commit murder. Hence, it is reasonable to estimate the majority of homicides in the US are committed by a community of individuals which comprise a scant 6% of the population.
Obviously, there is a HUGE problem with black on black homicide that needs to be addressed if you hope to begin to reduce gun deaths in America. The NRA isn't the problem...
Pax et bonum
Yet, the only thing anti-gunners talk about is assault rifles(which are used so rarely in crimes they are a statistical anomaly) and the NRA(the tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners who don't commit crimes.
A handful of kids will kill each other today with hand guns, and all anyone has to say on huffpo is "you don't need an AK to go deer hunting". You guys don't really care about gun control, or deaths. You care about scary looking rifle control.
Revisiting the 300 million guns compared with 15 thousand homicides, applying simple arithmetics, It seems to me that the ratio is about 1 homicide per 20 thousand guns, or to put this another way, >99.95% of pur guns are not being used as homicide weapons. That is a significant majority by most rational standards, and this includes millions of semi-automatic rifles with "high cap" magazines, of course. Additionally, according to USR Carolyn McCarthy (D) NY, "Congress finds and declares that 1) In the United States, the black market is the source of 90 percent of guns used in gun crimes." Source: The gun Trafficing Prevention Act of 2009. I hope that these facts will be digested rationally.
I just created a petition: Ban assault rifles: Make it illegal to purchase assault rifles, because I care deeply about this very important issue.
I'm trying to collect 100 signatures, and I could really use your help.
To read more about what I'm trying to do and to sign my petition, click here:
http://www.change.org/petitions/ban-assault-rifles-make-it-illegal-to-purchase-assault-rifles?share_id=ccWLYgKzcR
It'll just take a minute!
Once you're done, please ask your friends to sign the petition as well. Grassroots movements succeed because people like you are willing to spread the word
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Very easy questions. OUR GOVERNMENT!!
Nothing in the history of Man has ever been as inherently evil as is government.
Sadly he was right (Sagan was a physicist, though, and I know how much Americans love science...). Throw in America's loose gun laws and white-controlled patriarchy, and you've got a lot of impulsive killing going on.
It's even more sad that, whenever there are these incidents with guns, like Aurora, the American populace would rather sweep it under the rug, defend gun use and ignore having honest, sensible and intelligent discourse on guns. Ridiculous.