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A comment on The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47. Parent comment

Re:The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 by pc86 on Friday December 21, 2012 @01:47PM (#4953923)
Unless you exclude suicide, in which case you see as more and more millions of guns are produced every year, murder (and even homicide overall, which includes self defense and accidental homicide) rates are at their lowest point since any time between 1998 and 2004 depending on which specific metric you look at.

It is intellectually dishonest to include suicide when talking about "gun deaths."

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Re:The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 by edyang on Friday December 21, 2012 @02:15PM (#4954046)
Furthermore, the suicide rate in “gun-free” Japan, at Number 7 on the global list of national suicide rates with 23.8 per 100,000, dwarfing the comparable rate of 11.8 in the heavily-armed United States, which comes in at Number 41.
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Re:The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 by pc86 on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:51PM (#4954693)
This is an interesting statistic. What is the source, the WHO?
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Re:The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 by jQueryIsAwesome on Friday December 21, 2012 @02:15PM (#4954043)
Why is intellectually dishonest? Is your view that the 100% of gunshot suicides would have been successfully committed anyway through other mediums? Or they lives don't count because they don't value/want them?
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Re:The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 by pc86 on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:48PM (#4954680)
100%? Of course not. The vast majority? I'm willing to bet, yes.

The reason I think it's intellectually dishonest has nothing to do with suicide itself. When someone behind a keyboard or behind a news desk talks about gun-related deaths or gun violence, the image is of armed robberies, execution-style murder, and more recently the crazy white kid with the assault rifle. If you live in certain parts of the US you might think of gang violence.

It does not evoke a mental image of the divorced alcoholic ending his life with a revolver, or the undiagnosed depressed college student with his dad's handgun. These are two thirds of gun-related deaths, and they're cheapened when pundits and members of Congress use them to try and score political points.

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