OK, let’s count the murders — again

As we grow older, hearing an old, familiar tune can make us wax nostalgic. The other day, I heard this one again:

"Gun control does work in reducing the amount of violent crime. Any look at the statistics comparing our rates of violent crime to those of Western Europe is enough to demonstrate that clearly."

Ah, the joy of repeating ourselves. One more time:

What's the murder rate in America, per capita? Right now it's 0.042 per 1,000, ranking us 24th in the world, behind Colombia (0.617 per thousand -- the missing zero after the decimal point means Colombia's rate is fifteen times ours), South Africa at 0.496, Jamaica at 0.324, Venezuela at 0.316, Russia at 0.201 and Mexico at 0.130, among others.

Your American drug war money proudly at work.

Now take four or five European countries, where "sensible gun control laws" have made it nearly impossible for the typical working-class citizen to own a personal self-defense or military-style firearm for the past century. Let's choose Germany, France, Poland, Russia and the Ukraine.

What's the murder rate for those countries for the past century?

Because they were disarmed by their own governments and thus unable to resist Hitler's Einsatzgruppen, Stalin's NKVD and starvation brigades and the gentle ways of the rest of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army when it comes to "treatment of non-combatants in conquered territories," at least 30 million civilians were murdered in those four countries from 1929 to 1945.

We're excluding the "normal" deaths caused by uniformed soldiers killing each other in times of war, and pretending there were no other murders in those countries from 1910-2010. But even though we've left aside people killed when they were in uniform, that averages out to 300,000 murders of civilians per year for the past century in Germany, France, Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, combined.

Last year, there were 16,204 murders in America, which has a current population of about 312 million, compared to a population of 373 million for Germany, France, Poland, Russia and the Ukraine combined.

In fact, there were a thousand murders reported in France last year alone (Do they batter each other with baguettes?) There were 4,400 in Ukraine, for a per capita rate there of 0.094, more than twice America's rate.

An average of 300,000 murders per year with "admirably strict gun control," versus 16,000 murders per year in a cowboy nation with "ridiculously little gun control." Hm.

What's that? Oh, you don't want to count those? Well, tough. If we're debating the costs versus benefits of having an unarmed populace versus a populace able to defend itself with "all the terrible instruments of the soldier" (Tench Coxe), you must count civilians murdered by their own governments, or by the invading armies of neighboring states, which are precisely the inevitable and deadly forces that an armed populace is designed to guard against.

I know perfectly well these twits don't want to count those murders because they were committed by governments -- usually the victims' own governments. The main reason the founders insisted we retain a populace armed with "every terrible instrument of the solder" is because a well-armed force of "plainclothes" citizens, able to act as a militia, able to take on any standing "regular army" in the streets and in the fields, is "necessary to the security of a free state" ... an explanation the gun-grabbers routinely accuse our side of ignoring!

What's that? It's all ancient history? Nothing like that has happened anywhere for the past 65 years?

How many millions of unarmed Chinamen did Mao Tse-Tung murder in the 1950s? How many millions of unarmed Cambodians did Pol Pot murder in the 1970s, including every schoolteacher, every Cambodian who wore eyeglasses?

See the chart at http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart. (There's a hyphen on either side of the "a".) Please.

Cherry-picking a few peaceful decades in Denmark or Luxembourg because said nations are currently between genocides is not very convincing proof that you're safer, in the long run, if you encourage your own government to bar you from owning any useful military or self-defense weaponry while the guvgoons practice their Kevlar-swaddled "dynamic entry techniques" by day and by night.

Remember, when the ATF attacked the church at Waco -- as the helicopters closed in to hose down the second story bedroom windows from the rear with fully automatic fire, killing nursing mom Jaydean Wendel as her baby watched from the floor -- the first thing the black-clad storm troopers did was to shoot and kill the dog and her puppies in the front-yard pen.

Then they started shooting in through the windows at the women and children. In some cases, they did this while cowering behind parked cars and holding their rifles over their heads, in defiance of their standing orders to withdraw immediately if they met return fire. One government sniper testified he shot whenever he "saw a curtain move." For this they got medals.

Time and again, by a factor of hundreds of thousands, your most likely murderer is the government you trusted to keep you safe.

"The great object is that every man be armed; everyone who is able may have a gun." (Patrick Henry)

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and the nonfiction "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.