Morons of the Internet: Rense.com

This is the segment where I scour my favorite forums around the internet and find some particularly interesting articles about current affairs told in the words of my favorite human beings.

In this edition we have the inclusion of a popular chain mail 'lesson' set up to educate the people of America why they should keep their sacred guns. I say educate, really it's slanted bullshit, but unfortunately this is genuinely the logic used by gun fanatics in America.
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http://rense.com/general81/ligun.htm
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1. What the fuck has starvation got to do with gun control? It's already clear that the message of this history lesson is 'people died in a country where gun laws were in place so obviously those two events are always connected'. Since when can a lack of food be solved by giving people guns? Not unless you want the murder rate to shoot up anyway. Secondly the Soviets tried to ban firearms in 1920 because of a revolution, which is quite a big wake up call in reality, but what you fail to mention is that in rural areas guns were still plentiful due to peasants needing hunting rifles to survive; ergo your point about banning guns is incorrect. Furthermore the Soviets did distribute weapons to Russians in Nazi controlled areas, and that had precisely zero effect on these dissidents being murdered. It's interesting to note that some of these dissidents were officers in the army. If men that have special training in firearms couldn't survive the slaughter then how could a random civilian with no experience?

2. It's physically impossible for Turkey to have established gun controls in 1911 considering that it didn't even exist. In 1911 modern day Turkey was part of the Ottoman Empire, which is a simple historical fact, and one that not knowing shows a clear lack of knowledge in these so called 'history lessons'. A little research would have been nice, especially when that research would have been imperative to your whole argument's legitimacy. Secondly the Armenians who were rounded up on death marches were predominantly women and children. Yeah I'm sure giving them guns would certainly have worked against a highly trained army, and not at all just exacerbated the situation.

3. 'Hundreds of thousands'. Oh what a fantastic amount of research you've done; it's almost like that vague statistic isn't even remotely close to being true. I also like that the statistics used so far are from countries at a time of global warfare. I don't believe America is currently in a global war, so you still haven't proved why America should be allowed to have ownership of personal firearms in a modern age. Even so I'm quite confident that the Jewish persecution would still have happened even if the Jews had firearms considering how they were treated at the time. It's just this absurd logic that Hitler oppressed his population solely because they had no right to own firearms, where as any respected historian will tell you that Hitler persecuted many people for a variety of reason.

Spotted a pattern yet? All three of these examples are not only irrelevant to the modern age, but also based on vague periods of history. Not only are these points totally hypothetical, but also irrelevant considering that the difference between an armed population and one that isn't cannot be applied to these examples, yet alone a modern America. But don't worry, in case you were in any doubt the website comes up with more ancient examples to prove their point.

4. Isn't it strange that there's such a large gap between when gun restrictions were brought into China and when their supposed impact was. It's almost like the two events are completely unconnected. Actually this example is quite ironic considering that Chairman Mao, who was in power at the time of these atrocities, actually began his campaign by arming rural peasants. So actually all this history lesson does when put into context is prove that allowing the general public to carry firearms leads to negative effects. When you look at it that way this example actually becomes the most logical piece of evidence in the entire article.

5. Guatemala still has one of the world's highest homicide rates to this day at 82%, but that's due to the poor restrictions of firearms thanks to illegal arms trading. All you've done here is highlighted another country that suffered, and still is, thanks to the poor restrictions of firearms.

6. Guess what, 5,000 of those murdered by Idi Amin in Uganda were trained soldiers. Seems they couldn't prevent the massacre, so how could the general public, many of whom were in poverty? If 2-3 million people really did die then that would make living in 1979 Uganda, which had a population of 12.18 million, more dangerous than fighting at the battle of the Somme. Somehow I find that hard to believe.

7. Actually the Cambodian genocides were primarily caused by Pol Pot claiming he was moving people out of the cities for their own wellbeing. I'm not sure how guns would have helped the population there. Also worth mentioning that the gun laws were in place for a number of years before the Khmer Rouge took power, so how these two events can be related is inconclusive, as are all your other examples.

No examples from the 21st century? Okay well I've got one for you. How about the 15,000 Americans that die every year because of relaxed gun laws? Explain that one with your historical case studies. I think it's pretty damn disrespectful to start shitting on the graves of millions of innocent civilians claiming that 'it would have been fine for you if you were allowed to own a firearm'. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to help the families of those affected sleep at night, including the families of those involved in the high school massacres over the recent years. So thanks for the lack of any causative evidence, it's a shame you decided to continue with the bullshit.

Oh what a surprise, the official statistics provided by the Australian government state that this is all bollocks (http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html). Look at that nice steady decrease in homicides over the last few years. Gun crime has gone down from 24% to 11% since the law was introduced, as have the assaults, as have the armed robberies. Admittedly the statistics do show that gun crime increased for a few years following the ban, but using these statistics to try and prove that gun laws don't work without looking at them from a longitudinal perspective is a poor use of statistics to say the least. However I do suspect that the reason you didn't use more up to date figures is because it proves the inverse.

Hmm, I wonder if you have the same view on the citizens of Vietnam. I do accept that you might feel like a subject without a boomstick to protect yourself with, but with them it's statistically proven that there will be less of your fellow 'citizens'. America has one of the highest gun crime rates in the developed world; I just wished you'd bother considering that before writing this slander.

Wow, it turns out we're now onto rewriting history. I do believe the reason Japan didn't invade the US in 1941 was because that would have been effectively suicidal from a tactical perspective. The whole purpose of the attack on Pearl Harbor was to cripple the American navy by surprise, and that doesn't work if you send a whole invasion force. Why Japan attacked the Americans was to halt the American progress towards the Dutch East Indies, and so a full scale invasion was in no way due to America's lack of gun policy. I find your hypothesis rather hard to believe considering that you haven't even put the remark in quotation marks, and have provided zero sources to back it up. I also find it unlikely that a Harvard educated admiral would use the primitive language of internet chainmail, but I think we've learnt by now that none of your arguments stand up to even basic logic.

As a reader we cannot seriously consider this propaganda as a reliable article, and so instead we need to consider whether regulating an industry primarily designed to kill people is really a negative thing. The statistics show us that gun control has dramatic effects on the native population, so why are there still arguments like this that claim the more widespread distribution of killing instruments somehow decreases the homicide rate. The logic of that argument is just absurd, and all this for a false notion of so called 'freedom'. This from a country where the legal drinking age is 21, and the nation that came up with the NSA. The gun crime rate in America is not a statistical anomaly, it's only proof that gun supporters have had their heads shoved up their own asses for too long.