Gunplay: Success Strategem
U.S. - 90 guns for every 100 citizens
No kidding. Don't believe me? Well, we have it on the very best authority; a country, to become healthy, wealthy and wise encourages gun ownership. Yep. According to the Small Arms Survey 2006 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. Didn't say who they were funded by. The U.S. National Rifle Association?
The survey lets us know that over half the eight million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States. No wonder U.S. citizens have in their possession roughly one-third of the known firearms in existence. That's a lot of fire power. It's well know, of course, that violence in the United States is expressed often with the help of firearms.
And countries like Canada that share a border with the United States are leery of the types of lethal automatic firearms that enter Canada. And Canada practises due diligence in attempting, whenever and wherever possible to obstruct and halt entry across the border. But where there is a demand there will always be a way.
Surprisingly, India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal. About 47 million firearms outside law enforcement agencies and in military possession. Placing India at four guns per 100 people. Is India wealthy by western standards? Getting there, but one would have grave doubts whether the ownership of guns plays any part in its growing economic success.
China has been given third-place ranking with 40 million privately-owned guns. Who knew? Who even suspected? China!?! In ranking order, Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico (there's that border influence again) Brazil and Russia brought up the rear. We're talking civilian gun ownership, not a nation's armed forces or policing agents.
Yemen, it would appear, placed second as the most heavily armed citizenry on a per capita basis behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 citizens. Then came Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iran with 30 and Serbia with 38 firearms per 100 citizens. So how does private-citizen gun ownership equate with a country's wealth?
Straggling behind came France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany, each boasting (or not) about 30 guns per 100 people. Many underdeveloped countries, it was pointed out, where scarcity of goods and means leads to endemic violence, had a scarcer incidence of gun ownership. And just as well.
"Weapons ownership may be correlated with rising levels of wealth and that means we need to think about future demand in parts of the world where economic growth is giving people larger disposable incomes", stated Keith Krause, the survey director. Huh? Isn't this a bit arse-backward?
Don't we start with greater disposable income, creating an atmosphere of enablement in gun ownership, not the other way around? Guns as a fetish object of power and control are expressed as a national 'right' by Americans, and in some states of the union the right to bear arms and gun ownership is actually enshrined in legislation.
Some argue that personal ownership of a weapon, like a handgun, a lethal object if there ever was one, is meant specifically to kill people. Others argue that possession of a gun is a deterrent to crime. Since so many individuals own guns and no one is ever certain who has one, the crime level is dampened. That's cute.
How about rampant gun ownership leading to a breakdown in societal mores and expectations? How about gun ownership granting the owner of said gun the wherewithal to explore his every unlawful anti-society and lethal fantasy?
And while it's instructive to learn that of the world arsenal of guns some 650 million are held by civilians, while a mere 225 are in the possession of law enforcement and military forces, it's not reassuring. The balance is rather more than a little askew.
And it's even scarier to learn that only about 12% of civilian weapons are thought to be registered by authorities. Which would mean that there are far more individual civilians owning lethal weapons produced for the purpose of killing other individuals in the possession of society's many misfits and psychopaths than the study's participants could even imagine.
Guns equal brutal force. Brutal force equals wealth? Give us a break.
Labels: Viewpoint
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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