TrueValueMetrics ... Impact Accounting for the 21st Century

Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Though I have chosen to live my life in the United States of America, there are some aspects of the country that upset me. One of these is the attitude of many Americans towards guns amd the country's high level of violence.

I have lived in the USA since the mid-1960s. Less than a year into my US residence my wife and I were living in Texas and one of my wife's friends shot and killed her husband. He was coming home after working late, and she shot him thinking that he was an intruder. Truly, a deadly accident.

I know a little bit about guns. I went to a boarding school in England that had the best record of the time in shooting competitions including at Bisley, the top competition in the UK. I participated with the school team as a 'spotter' even though my shooting prowess left much to be desired. Nevertheless, a decade or so after leaving school, I participated with my wife in a 'skeet' shooting competition in which she and I were the only ones that had perfect records! Gun loving Americans in the group hit hardly any! The love of guns by Americans is crazy ... stupid and dangerous.

I am also an advocate for 'peace'. From time to time, it is right and proper for a nation to stand up and engage in war. I was born in January 1945 early in WWII. There has never been much question in my mind that Great Britain should engage in war against the forces of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich.

Since the Second World War, however, there have been far too many times when the militaries of powerful nations and especially the United States have been used to address international issues rather than diplomacy. Mostly, I am in favor of diplomacy and negotiation around a table rather than violent confrontation on the battlefield ... but I like to have the option of overwhelming military power in the event it is required.

Growing up in the UK, I learned something about good policing. British police officers do not routinely carry guns, yet the country remains orderly. In contrast in the United States, the police carry guns and the country is seriously disorderly. In the case that the British police are faced with an armed miscreant, they are able to call on a very well trained special team of police officers who are both exceptionally well armed, but also highly skilled to resolve the situation. Most of these specialists have been in the British special forces prior to their work with the police. Mostly, members of these specialist teams can be deployed and at the crime scene within just 20 minutes ... mostly much less!

The British legal policy with respect to guns and crime is also very smart. In the event that a crime is prosecuted in the British courts and there is a guilty determination, the punishment for a crime with a gun involved will be many times more severe than when there is no gun involved. The effect of this is that criminal gang leaders work to ensure that none of their partners in crime are armed ... they are not carrying guns ... during any crime situation.

The police record in the USA and the crime record in the USA suggest that something in the USA is terribly wrong ... and has been for a very long time.

Worse ... it would appear that the trend has been in the wrong direction for maybe as much as the last 40+ years!

The 'NOTES' below are thought provoking. They support my point of view very well!
Peter Burgess

STREET CRIME & SUITE CRIME NOTES

* Do NOT “Defund the Police.” Instead, FUND the police and reform bad practices (choke holds, don’t shoot misdemeanants running away). According to a 2021 analysis of police budgets in the nation’s fifty largest cities by Bloomberg CityLab, law enforcement spending as a share of general expenditures rose slightly, from 13.6 percent in 2020 to 13.7 percent in 2021, even as many cities cut spending in other areas as a result of the COVID pandemic.

* Despite stereotypes, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for Trump in 2020. The Third Way compared murder rates in Trump and Biden states and found that they were 40 percent higher in red than blue states. Red states on average had lower education levels, higher rates of poverty, worse health care, and less economic opportunity.

* Gun-related deaths cost the U.S. $280 billion a year. The greatest cause of death of children under sixteen is not cars or drugs but guns.

–Former Chief Justice Warren Burger: “There is absolutely no reason why a civilian on the street should be carrying a loaded weapon.”

–Governor Abbott said, after 21 children were killed at the Uvalde massacre: “It could have been worse.”

–If a “good guy with a gun” is the answer to “a bad guy with a gun,” how come 400 armed cops couldn’t stop one person killing so many children in Uvalde, Texas?

–If laws can’t stop criminals with guns, why did the two 18 year-old murderers—in Buffalo and Uvalde—wait until exactly their eighteenth birthdays to buy their AR-15s?

* Glenn Beck claims America has more gun violence today because of “Wokeness,” “CRT,” and bathroom access for transgender individuals . More American schoolchildren have been killed by guns than by learning about gay people.

* Politico-Morning Consult poll: Requiring background checks on all gun sales: 88 percent strongly or somewhat support. Creating a national database with info about each gun sale: 75 percent support. Banning assault-style weapons: 67 percent support

* The NRA says that more guns will make us safer. We now have more than one gun per American—do we feel safer? Criminologist Emma Fridel found that mass shootings are 53 percent higher in states with more gun ownership.

* CDC estimated 45,000 gun-related deaths in 2020, a surge of 35 percent from prior year, an historical increase.

* The issue with guns is not the much-disputed Second Amendment but rather the public health of millions of Americans per decade.

HOME

BRIEFS

L020-ISSUES-ALPHA

L020-ISSUES-CHRONO

L0200-PDA-2022-NavList

Last txt00023335

Next txt00023337

SITE COUNT