English Script Request

It might be hard to believe given the recent mass shooting in Newtown Connecticut, but the truth is, gun violence is a myth. By that, I don't mean that it's a conspiracy or that it never happens. Rather, I mean the way that gun control supporters portray gun violence is simply not true. Often, people who advocate gun control talk about thirty thousand americans dying every year from gun-related violence. This number is about as close to a blatant lie as you can get while still technically telling the truth. It is true that every year about thirty thousand americans will die after being shot with a gun. But what the gun control advocates won't tell you is that about twenty thousand of those gun deaths are voluntary. That's right. Two-thirds of gun deaths in The United States are suicides, not homocides. Now, we can argue back and forth over whether a person who wants to end his life should or should not have the right to do so, but everyone has to admit that a person freely choosing to shoot himself is a situation so fundamentally different from an innocent person being murdered, that it is at best misleading to include the two in the same statistic. Although, to be fair, not all gun control advocates hide this fact. In fact, some of them actually admit that two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, and they say that this is yet another reason why we should have gun control. Well, would the US suicide rate be lower if there were less guns in society? Probably not. If you compare the United States and Canada, you'll see that both countries have about the same suicide rate, yet Canada only has about a third the number of guns as the United States. And perhaps more importantly, canadians tend to have hunting rifles and shotguns..which are more difficult to commit suicide with...whereas americans tend to have more handguns. Yet, despite all these differences, the countries still have about the same suicide rate. And both Canada and the United States, with all of their guns, have way fewer suicides than Japan, where virtually all guns are illegal. So it's just not reasonable to think that the availability of firearms has any corrolation to the suicide rate. So if we subtract suicides, this leaves us with about ten thousand gun deaths every year. But even that number is still a little too high. Every year about a thousand of those deaths are either accidental, where someone mistakenly shoots somebody, or justifiable, where somebody shoots somebody in self defense. In terms of accidents, you are far more likely to die from a car crash, from fallling down, from eating or drinking poison, from drowning, from being burned alive, or from suffocating, than you are from an accidental gunshot. And of course, justifiable homocides are justified, so they shouldn't be included in the statistic. So now we're at about nine thousand gun murders every year. But even that number is too high if you really want to be fair. According to the F.B.I., as much as eighty percent of murders are gang related. In fact, most of them are gang members killing other gang members. And virtually all of these murders are commited with firearms that were obtained illegally. Thus, placing additional restrictions on access to guns by law-abiding citizens will have little, if any effect on a gang member's ability to get a gun. So finally, the actual number of...for lack of a better word...normal gun murders that occur each year in the United States is around eighteen hundred. Eighteen hundred, in a country of three hundred and fifteen million people with three hundred twenty million guns. Eighteen hundred people are murdered every year..not thirty thousand. So, if you live in the United States, and you're going along with your life in a normal, non-suicidal, non-gang-affiliated way...while it is absolutely possible that you can be shot and killed with a gun...the probability of that happening is literally almost zero. Thanks for watching.