“The shooting of two government officials during a meeting Wednesday comes amid a rise in gun-related crimes in China, which has maintained a stringent, decades long ban on owning firearms,” wsj.com reports (and not for the first time). Wait. Does China’s soaring “gun violence” mean that anti-gunners who point to The People’s Republic as an example of the joys of civilian disarmament are wrong? Well . . .
It’s important to realize that the people running The People’s Republic aren’t big fans of a free and independent press. Any information on Chinese “gun violence” comes through a fascist filter, which usually means total censorship. (Reporters Without Borders gives China’s press the worst ranking on their five-point scale.) So any report of Chinese firearms-related crime should be viewed as tip of the iceberg stuff.
That said, here’s the Wall Street Journal’s all-too-credulous but still revealing take on the topic:
Gun violence and the use of firearms to commit crimes are unusual in China, where rules effectively ban all private ownership and police exercise wide authority to question and detain suspects. Violent crimes tend to be committed with knives or explosives available for mining and road construction.
Government statistics show the number of violations of controls on firearms and ammunition rising by more than 50% in one year, to 81,668 cases in 2015. The national police ministry said in August that overall gun-related crimes are continuing to rise, especially internet sales of guns, “seriously affecting public safety and stability and the people’s sense of security.”
You gotta love any organization that wrings its hands about “the people’s sense of security” rather than their actual security. Organizations like…all of America’s gun control advocacy groups. Orgs that would like nothing more than to see The Land of The Free become a gun-free people’s paradise — despite the fact that there is and can never be any such thing. Even under a brutal totalitarian regime.
Despite restrictions and public attitudes, handguns, rifles and other firearms still circulate in China. Primary sources include smuggling, theft and lax controls at arsenals and factories producing them for export or law enforcement. Others originate from small-scale workshops forging guns and homemade devices.
Last year, a Beijing judge was fatally shot by attackers armed with a homemade gun. A villager in the southern county of Dongyuan used a homemade shotgun to kill three people last summer in what was believed to be a property dispute.
A man from Hong Kong, a partly autonomous Chinese territory, was caught late in the year smuggling two dozen guns and thousands of ammunition rounds over the border by Shenzhen customs officials.
The Ministry of Public Security routinely announces crackdowns and sweeps urging citizens to turn in guns and call in tips for generous rewards. Hunan province last year began offering rewards as high as 100,000 yuan ($14,400) for tips pertaining to gun violations.
Homemade guns? You mean you can’t stop the signal? That’s exactly what it means: gun control is a fool’s errand. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either seriously deluded, a totalitarian-in-disguise, or both.
Nice looking ammo there. Some alcohol and a wire brush ought to do it. Carry on comrades.
Maybe that’s what they meant when they said violent crimes tend to be committed with knives or explosives.
Ya, Chinese version of a Tetanus shot.
It was probably stock left over from WWII that was buried in a can somewhere.
I just read about the shooting yesterday. I was stunned, considering the near total civilian gun ban and the degree of, ah, control that the government has.
And we’re going to straight out ban guns here? Ramada, I don;’t think so.
Nope, we’ll continue down the CA/MA/NY, etc. path that keeps making the circle smaller and smaller while making the penalties greater and more severe. I believe that a vast majority of the regular folks will give in to prevent their lives from being ruining by arrest and jail.
The remaining regular folks who don’t go along? 3%.
I’ll be the glass half full guy here. I can’t speak for MA or CA, but here in NY, orders to register “assault weapons” and the threats of increasingly severe penalties for failing to do so have been a dismal failure. No one cares, not even most of the police. Upstate is awash in firearms that are now prohibited. No one turned them in, and even the most generous estimate of compliance with the law puts it at about 5%. Your 3% estimation? 95% didn’t ‘give in’ here. The gun control ship has sailed. It’s a lot easier to pass laws than to enforce them with might. The state simply has no way of knowing who has what.
WAIT! Wait. Wait a minute. You mean that even in CHINA, criminals do crime?!?!
Yes. Even the private sector/not chicom thug variety.
Even in China where they convict you of the crime, take you outside, make you kneel down, and then put a rifle to the back of your head and blow your brains out. Even there.
You mean swift and terminal retribution doesn’t dissuade folks from crime? Governments shouldn’t do death penalties. Only potential victims should have that right.
We’re a figurative five minutes away from any jackwagon with a smartphone being able to download a design app, input some design dependent parameters, and swipe a credit card. A 3D printer will then fabricate the firearm fitting the technical performance measures, and a drone will drop it off on your front porch by lunchtime.
About a cup of coffee after that, virtually anybody will be able to run that entire process out of their garage on their own with no special training. And antis are still jibber-jabbering about gun control and common sense measures to keep guns out of so and so’s hands? Oh that’s rich! You’d have as much success repealing the Law of Gravity.
I know someone who recently acquired a plastic 3-D printer. It would be exceedingly easy to print all the necessary plastic components for a firearm … at least within the size limitations of the printer. My understanding is that metal 3-D printers are not far behind.
While such 3-D printers are quite fantastic, I have to question the initial and long-term strength of the objects that they produce. Consider the plastic 3-D printer for example. With how much strength does each new layer of melted plastic adhere to the previous layer? Will the final product be anywhere near as strong/durable as the same product produces from current non-3-D processes? I have the same question about metal 3-D printing as well.
The strength of the gun is irrelevant. It is either used as a means to acquire a more substantial fire arm or mean to be a one shot device that can then be easily destroyed to get rid of the evidence.
Then don’t use a 3D printer, use a CNC mill and make it out of metal or don’t have a CNC mill, hire a Pakistani tribesman to build one for you out of an old truck axle.
“… or don’t have a CNC mill, hire a Pakistani tribesman to build one for you out of an old truck axle.”
dph wins the Intertubez today!
The biggest issue with 3D printed plastic pistols (or rifles), is of course the need to contain the pressure of the fired round. This is the most frequent source of failure in the plastic guns-split firing chambers. So long as your concern is not about defeating a metal detector, however, inserting a metal rod, or even the barrel of an old pistol or part of a rifle barrel in the right caliber, resolves the weakness issue and should result in a very reliable and re-usable weapon. IMO. YMMV. Don’t tell BATFE you’ve got the thing!
Obviously Chinese “gun violence” statistics don’t include unarmed political dissenters who are transported to the countryside by the police and summarily executed…
Nah, they quit doing that. Now they transport them to prison hospitals where their organs are harvested for transplantation. Executions are saved for corrupt political officials and drug smugglers. China performs more organ transplants per year than the rest of the world combined. Many victims are Falon Gong members, imprisoned without charge, then summarily executed in an operating room.
It’s better than that, Mark.
When sentenced to death, a ‘technician’ takes a sample of blood from you.
They run a type-cross-match on the sample, and when a match is made, you are then executed and your organs are harvested for transplant.
A part of you re-paying your debt to their society, I suppose…
The historical irony of that photo is delicious, seeing as it’s a Chiang Kai-shek Mauser being seized as an accessory to the killing of communists 67 years later.
That looks more like a stock photo to go with the article instead of the gun used.
Caption for the photograph. “Okay, let’s see if you can get it this time. This little piggie went to the market…
81000gun “crimes” isn’t a lot in a huge country with 1.5billion people. Mayhap the #’s are far higher. Any diverted firearms one of those Hawk/Pardner Pumps many of us have or had? You can’t stop the signal…
Having lived in China I can say that gun related violence is much more prevalent than what is mentioned here. One of the major sources of illegal weapons in China comes from the police giving them to the mafia. Also homemade pistols sell for around $100-$150 if you buy it from the manufacturer and upwards of $1500 if you buy it on the black market in a major city.
Having talked to my father-in-law (who is Chinese and has never been outside of China) about the crime rate there he thinks it would not be lower than the US, it’s just that mist of it does not get widely reported.
China is THE key argument for the necessity of guns on civilian hands: Red China killed about seventy million of its own people. Half of these were starved to death by Mao during an Ukraine-like Chinese Holodomor from 1958 to 1962. As with Stalin, Mao’s troops scoured the houses of starving and unarmed peasants for every morsel of grain they could lay their hands on. Totalitarian minds hate civilian gun ownership for a reason: it’s much harder to exterminate an armed population than an unarmed one. Ensure that every decent person you know has a gun. Check out “The Black Book of Communism” for more.
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” ― George Orwell
Clearly lax gun laws in Indiana and Michigan are to blame.
Explosives… Black powder fireworks are everywhere.
“lax controls at arsenals and factories producing them for export”
Bribery and in Asia of all places! Who ever heard of such a thing!
On the real, “The People’s Republic” owns/controls/is the largest single weapons proliferator on the planet (Norinco) and would in no way want any of those weapons in the hands of its citizens. Child soldiers in Africa OK. But for Mr. Zhao who lives in a Bejing suburb . . . no AKM for you.
There is a Chinese manufacturing concept there known as a ‘Ghost Shift’, where after hours, the manufacturing production line resumes operations. The owners of the plant are sometimes in on it, for a cut of the profits.
That is where items like those counterfeit flash memory cards you see on eBay come from…
If guns are up in China, it probably means the Party “Princes” aren’t paying their protection/enforcement dues to the Triads.
Let’s do some numbers, here.
1,382,824,938.000 Chinese (as of 2016)
81,668.000 deaths by gunfire (worst case supposition)
0.000059
325,333,945 US (as of 2016
30,000 deaths by gunfire (including suicides)
0.000092
The US managed “Nearly the same rate” of gun deaths, with 23% of the population. Would you imagine people in the US would rather have 0.000092 death rage, or 0.000059? Or do gun owners simply dismiss the difference as, “The cost the population must bear in order for me to feel safe!” ?
Again, you are not permitted to speculate that millions of unreported DGUs would prove that having a gun makes anyone safer. Speculation is not data*.
* “Data” from China are suspect, China being a closed society. Therefore, nothing published by the Chinese government can be trusted. Thus making any evaluation of “data” useless. There is nothing to be learned from such, so there is no point in highlighting Chinese gun regulation, except to prove some nebulous myth that gun control does not, cannot, under any circumstance improve the safety of any segment of society, anywhere. To which the only remaining solution (imperfect though it will be) is to make use of firearms so costly as to render them moot.
Those Chinese numbers don’t count those executed by the State, either.
Tragically true.
More costly than what the chinese .gov makes missusing a gun or owning one?
How draconian do you want the government to be? Public beheadings for owning a gun?
As a troll you’re becoming more and more irrelevent. You used to be a halfway decent troll. What’s happened to you? You need to quit phoning it in and up your game.
Or just admit your side lost and be a good sport and fade away.
It all means gun owners are quite happy to have a greater gun violence rate than China because the higher US cost in lives is reasonable, rational, justifiable as a means of making gun owners feel safer, when they actually are not.
Cool story, bro.
But you misunderstand. I wasn’t debating you. Just grading your trollness. You’re not doing as well as you once were.
Peaked?
Several things going on, actually. Got a posting as a volunteer face in the crowd at gun sense demonstrations, along with a subsidized gig organizing and coordinating several indigenous groups supporting good gun legislation. All that, amidst work for Bernie. Keeps a fellow busy. And a neighborhood legal group taps me from time to time to do research on local gun regulations, past and present legal cases, and keeping up on gun technology and pro-gun vocabulary and themes.
If it seems I have peaked it is because writing here is almost exclusively reactive to what the gun lover lobby posts. Perhaps I “peaked” because you lot have “peaked”.
Dude. You truly embody “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. It’s your life and resources to waste. Have at it.
““Data” from China are suspect, China being a closed society. Therefore, nothing published by the Chinese government can be trusted. Thus making any evaluation of “data” useless.”
In other words your entire argument quibbling over how the draconian measures of a repressive regime like Communist China would change firearm death rates by a few hundred thousandTHS is useless since its a certainty that the Chinese are under reporting the problem.
Let’s be honest- one of those “top sources” is really corrupt police and military selling their guns to gangsters on the side. The Chinese just won’t admit any gubmint official in their perfect communist utopia is a bad person.
Chinese guns. Shoot somebody and an hour later you want to shoot somebody again.
On a scale of 0 to Ralph I give that a 3.
So when do we get the announcement that a “steel river” of illegal guns from the U.S. is to blame?
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