There are roughly 11,000 gun based murders each year in the US. The US doesn't first have a gun violence problem, it has a black poverty problem mixed with horrible drug laws that drive it all.
The rate of gun homicide for blacks is 15/100k. For Asians it's 1/100k, for whites it's 2/100k. It's almost a 700% greater likelihood that you're going to be murdered by gun if you're black than white. If you fix the black poverty problem, and fix the drug laws, the rate of gun homicides would plunge off a cliff.
And besides, Switzerland is as heavily armed per capita as the US is, and they do not have a rampant gun homicide problem. The reason the US does, is explained by poverty and drug laws.
Also worth noting: the US homicide rate is roughly the lowest it has been in 50 to 60 years. If it continues to fall as it has been, it'll be back to levels not seen since the 19th century. Not to beat a dead horse, but fix the drug laws and America would be exceptionally low on the homicide per capita scale.
http://extranosalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/1homicid...
China has violence, but they don't have much gun violence because 1) guns are often beyond the financial capabilities of their poor, and 2) there aren't very many guns per capita.
In the US it isn't difficult to come up with $150 if you're poor and want a black market gun. The US poverty line for a household of 1 starts at $11,500 (it goes without saying how much higher that is than most incomes in China, so the availability of cash to buy a gun for even someone that's poor is radically higher in the US).
A good example of this in action is Brazil. Their gun homicide rate is twice that of the US. They have some intense poverty and guns, and thus have a very high gun homicide rate (eg compared to China, that just has poverty but limited guns).
Also it's fair to say, to top it off, that the US has a far more violent culture in general than China, that amplifies the problem. I'm not speaking of state sponsored violence mind you.
>Firearms-related crimes posed serious threat to the lives and personal security of citizens in the U.S. Some shootings left astonishing casualties, such as the school shooting in Oakland, the Century 16 theater shooting in Colorado and the school shooting in Connecticut.
Also, please be aware that this is a translation, which explains for the awkward and sometimes grammatically incorrect wording of this article.
The U.S. is an outlier among liberal democracies in its constitutional insistence that access to firearms is a human right. It's also, significantly, an outlier in its rate of firearm-related deaths, with a rate of over 10 per 100,000, similar to Panama and the Philippines and three times higher than the next highest liberal democracy.
Canada, which has roughly the same culture and economy as the United States and shares the same continent, has a firearm death rate only one-fifth of the United States. Australia, which also has a similar culture, has a firearm death rate one-tenth of the United States. The United Kingdom's firearm death rate is one-fortieth that of the United States.
I get that many Americans believe their 2nd Amendment is what restrains the government from tyranny, but the evidence across all the stable liberal democracies manifestly discredits this hypothesis. What keeps a government from tyranny is not the threat of armed revolt but ongoing broad civic engagement in a dense, complex and mutually reinforcing fabric of democratic institutions, traditions, practices and civic values exercised in open, transparent and accountable ways at every level of resolution from the federal government to municipal affairs.
I would go so far as to argue that America's cultural hostility to the idea of government - the deep-seated belief that governments can never be trusted and will only behave (barely) under the constant threat of armed rebellion - is actually a major obstacle keeping the U.S. from becoming more functional and more accountable to its citizens.
It's a failed 18th century idea that is holding America back from joining the rest of the industrialized world's norms of civility, and it helps to explain why the U.S. is an outlier in so many varied measures of life, health and wellbeing.
The US is also an outlier in it's rate of bludgeoning and stabbing, at 1.7/100,000. By contrast, the murder rate (all weapons) in western europe is 1.0/100,000, southern europe is 1.4/100,000, and northern europe is 1.5/100,000.
I suppose bill of rights causes stabbings and beatings also?
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
There is no way people wouldn't defend their families from going to concentration camps if they were armed. History shows that this holds true. The Government is afraid of armed people as it should be. That is a good thing. Not bad.
From a European point of view, the US right to carry/own a weapon is so used and out of control that it affects this basic right to life.
It's a view a good majority of citizen in modern Democracies, excluding the US, would agree wholeheartedly with.
Although I would define it more as "government wilfully endangering the lives of its citizens" rather than "violation of human rights".
Please realize that gun ownership as a constitutional right is an almost exclusively American idea and considered absolutely ludicrous by almost everyone else.
1] Military has too big a delta over civilians; how can I help reduce that delta sanely?
2] Too much of our communications remains plaintext; how do I roll out crypto today?
3] Our economy has non-productive members; how can I help those who want help?
4] People still don't like most other people; how can I detect/counter any biases I might have?
5] People still sexually abuse and torture other humans; how can I help victims, and help deter future violence?
6] Children don't have rights; how can I help children who want to accept adult responsibilities?
7] The US military costs a lot and seems to only make enemies. What can I do to make it act more like Switzerland's army, but without compulsory service? Or to at least be adequately compensated as World Police.
On the parts really stabbing into US communications monitoring, I suspect the reasoning is so the Chinese government can say "Look, it's even worse in the west!" to cover the extent of their own filters and monitoring (which most Chinese people are only vaguely aware of. Most of them take what they're told by the Chinese government as simple fact, and even when they can see the facts from a less biased perspective still refuse to accept it)
On the parts really stabbing into Chinese communications monitoring, I suspect the reasoning is so the US government can say "Look, it's even worse in China!" to cover the extent of their own filters and monitoring (which most American people are only vaguely aware of. Most of them take what they're told by the US government as simple fact, and even when they can see the facts from a less biased perspective still refuse to accept it)
Well.... everyone does that.... it's called marketing/progaganda/etc.
Here in Spain there is no independent press at all. You have the "left" press and the "right" press. Each one talks wonders about their preferred party and throws shit at the others. So you have look into the "left" press to know extensively about the shit from the right party, and vice versa. Similarly, the best perspective about what's wrong with the US is found on non US-friendly press, even if it sounds hypocritical to denounce human rights violations from China.
However, press in the US is likely to be much more independent and self-critical than in China (you WILL find self-critical press in the US but not in China, after all).
spain/poland/russia/uk/germany/france/italy/everywhere...
it's easier to be aware that journalism just works that way - ideologies are commercialized.
The two largest economies in world history spatting over human rights is absolutely world news. If that doesn't qualify, nothing does.
I'm relieved to see that an article about a git command (the second today, on the same command) is #1 on HN right now, while an article reporting on human rights violations in the world's most powerful country is ranked #38.
I see a lot of excellent points that it's a sad joke for China to comment on the US, while ignoring the brutality in their own backyard.
The same holds true for China and North Korea.
A nation that executes thousands of its citizens yearly, while also arranging sham trials and allowing affluent perpetrators to have body doubles serve lengthy prison sentences, should be the last to point fingers at any judiciary, elsewhere.
At least, Middle Eastern states follow Shariah, a religious code (however harsh or barbaric) that dictates the severity of the punishment.
These Chinese wastrels have no such consistency nor do they have the moral rectitude to hold every one, high-born or low-born, to the same rigor of enforcement.
Muslim theocracies often get a bad rap for their macabre laws and punishments.
The Chinese are the true compassion-less brutes. No country comes close to the way in which China "cleanses" its lower classes using a medieval "correctional" apparatus.
So take that state rag and shove it up Wen Jiabao's rear.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Global_distr...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19357107
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00pqhxk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China
We're not talking marginal variances (in which case people reply by saying that the US isn't perfect on x y or z either), we're talking the wholesale lack of.
I can Google "gulf of tonkin" or look up the spraying of black communities with zinc cadmium sulfide by the military in St. Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. I can read all about the bad things our government has done. In China they have to hide everything via censorship. The US is a basketcase right now, compared to the past, but it's approximately a million times more transparent than the Chinese system of government.
But hopefully you realise that none of the above refutes the article in the slightest. You have not addressed a single point in it.
On a scale of measurement of worthiness of a certain quality - any quality - if you fare so many orders in the negative that you barely register on the scale at all, it is generally held that you nary have a claim to call into question the measure of others.
You are not in that league.
You do not get to even raise your hand.
That's the privilege of similarly positioned peers who have earned the right to dispute or criticize owing to their own stellar record in that virtue.
Make sense?
But faults? Mao killed tens of millions through forced famine alone, and he's practically worshiped as a god in China. There are no countries without bad marks on their records, but on the scale of recent bad marks, it's pretty twisted for China to criticize anybody.
I'm not even sure how to respond to that.
The article never made any claims about China having a better human rights record than the US. It simply illustrates the sort of reporting you'd get from a western media source about the US if they weren't so fundamentally biased.
