“We had an interesting discussion about why fewer students are coming to, particularly from Japan, to study in the United States, and one of the responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents here is that they’re actually scared. They think they’re not safe in the United States and so they don’t come.” – John Kerry in Kerry: Foreign students ‘scared’ of guns in U.S. [via cnn.com]

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63 COMMENTS

  1. No, the problem isn’t gun ownership, the problem is anti-gun members of the media portraying a United States that doesn’t exist. Gallup has even done studies recently about perceived crime versus actual crime and, thanks to the wonderful media wanting to make money off of tragedy, the perception is the crime rates are about twice what they actually are.

  2. Or perhaps it’s because these parents don’t want to drop $50k a year for their children to be surrounded by unmotivated, listless students who view college more as a long sleep-away camp than an institution of higher learning.

    I don’t think it’s the guns at any rate, John.

    Then again I wouldn’t put it past our mighty State Dept. to spread fear and loathing abroad. Times Square is apparently on the verge of becoming the OK Corral after all.

    • Dennis Prager refers to the majority of US universities as “Leftist seminaries”. That’s the correct terminology.

      The only difference (besides the ideologies) between a Christian seminary and our Leftist seminary universities is that the Christian seminary freely admits that they want to mold the students mind with Cristian beliefs. In contrast the leftist universities denies that their primary objective is to create socialists.

  3. Or, um, you know, the shrinking youth population in Japan and South Korea. Or our hostile immigration system. Or the fact that John Kerry is full of shit, because despite our immigration system, shrinking populations and all the mean, bad old guns 2012 was a record year for foreign students in US colleges.

    • Not all foreign students apply for a work visa, let along get them, after school. I didn’t the first time around, and returned to Europe. It took 2 degrees and meeting my wife. I’d say 90% of my foreign friends also left the States after graduation.

      FWIW, YMMV, etc etc.

  5. Maybe the Japanese are a little less likely to study here, as in many respects we’ve become a Lysenkoist backwater in the hard sciences.

    The whole “don’t confuse me with facts” isn’t limited to the anti-gunners, y’know. A country in which a Senator reads #ucking Genesis on the floor of the Senate as a refutation to climate change will not be all that attractive to a student of the sciences, f’rinstance.

    The rest of the world didn’t swallow the products of Exxon-Mobile’s answer to the Tobacco Institute.

    Or the whole stem cell thing, or that the cool physics is in Switzerland and Norway.

    Or that much learning is tied to research, which is in turn tied to federal money. This dried up under Bush due to a sh!tty policy on science, and stayed dry because there’s no spare money any more.

    We’re no longer at the forefront on a great many things, and that saddens me.

    Still, a lot of foreign students come here because we’re still a pretty nice, safe and welcoming place in which to be.

    And we’ll be back at the forefront when the money grows back, because that’s where we belong.

    • Well you had me going with you for a minute with the Lysenkoism but then you went off on the anti-Christian crusade. Lysenkoism properly describes the climate changes hoaxers led by the reincarnated T. D. Lysenko Al Gore.

      I guess since the “science is settled” you missed this article in the Economist, a real news magazine that is hardly “in the pay of Exxon-Mobile.”

      http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

      The Lysenkoists have been using an old form of the greenhouse equation that was developed in the 1920s before we had modern computational methods. The equation’s boundry conditions are set as”infinitely thick” which cause heat to be trapped more less permantly in the atmosphere. A former NASA scientist Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center, has taken another look at the equation using modern computational techniques and has found that there are finite limits to greenhouse warming. Since the atmosphere does not really have an inftinitely thick boundry excess heat is re-radiated into space setting a limit on greenhouse warming. Now if you consider the fact that the Earth didn’t turn into Venus when atmospheric CO2 levels were an order of magnitude greater that what exists today Miskolczi might be on to something.

      http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm

      Anti-Science indeed.

    • Did it ever occur to you that exxon-mobil is not the only one likely to benefit from marginalizing cheaper energy tech and sources? What are those things called that control power companies in most states? Oh, the PUC, public utility corporation. Governments lose power when people aren’t reliant on centrally controlled electricity/fuel.

    • The man who presently holds Albert’s Einsteins chair takes the opinion that the global climate fearmongers have not come close to proving their case. Take it up with him.

    • “And we’ll be back at the forefront when the money grows back, because that’s where we belong.”

      So what, money grows on trees now? It’s obvious that economics, along with science, is not your forte either. Money doesn’t just grow for the sake of it, particularly if it is the government a) printing notes with little recourse, and b) taking revenue from wealth producing individuals in order to redistribute it to other aspects of society, regardless of reasoning.

      Also, for the record, the U.S. as a nation still leads all others in the number of Scientific Nobel Laureates winners. Not bad for such a “Lysenkoist backwater” nation.

  6. Remember all those after school specials about not trying to please others at the expense of not being yourself? Apparently that’s a bunch of hooey. We’ll never make UN prom queen if we don’t start getting hip to state power and disarmed serfdom.

    • Also, is it just me or is he holding that shotty rather oddly with his left hand? I was always taught to cradle it, not grab it in a death grip.

      • Since it would be very tough to see the front bead with his thumb in the way, I can only conjecture that the front bead fell off and Kerry being the wile combat veteran is improvising by using his thumb as a site.

    • I’ve noticed that also. We’ve got plenty of “foreign students” at the K-12 level. They just aren’t paying for their education and their parents don’t have social security numbers. Our country is playing stupid games, and winning stupid prizes. Still, at least we are doing much better than our southern neighbor.

      • Yep, public school employee here. At one of our elemtary schools the teachers estimate that at least half the kids are illegals. It’s right across the street from a section 8 apartment complex. Where do you think most of these kids go to when the last bell rings? Right across the street to the Government apartments. Gang activity is constant there also.

        I have no problem with legal immigrents. Those that do it right are welcome by me. My real problem is with the pols that won’t do anything real about the problem.

  8. Could say the same thing about Japan, right?

    I mean, who wants to be molested or felt up on the train? Way I hear it that’s Japans national past time. That and looking at cartoon porn.

  9. In Japan and Korea, U. S. police procedurals air multiple times every night of the week. As a result, there are many people that view the US through the lens of the CSI franchise.

    • I never knew how powerful our TV was until I hung out with some foreign students. Of course we took them to the range weekly and were no strangers to guns. One guy stated that budweiser beers are the best because the commercial says it is the king of beers. He really believed it! I can imagine what everyone thinks of csi.

  10. My wife went to Grad school in Boston and almost all of the foreign students felt this way about America before they came here. The perception that America is the “Wild West” with gunplay everywhere seems to be particularly prevalent among Asian students.

  11. My wife is from Japan, and she actually was scared to come over here and scared of guns especially because she heard about the Japanese person who was shot dead during Halloween. However, now that she’s here, she’s not scared any more. I keep guns in the house and she knows that we don’t own them for the purpose of going out and murdering people. She also knows that the four safety rules will prevent accidental deaths. Education about guns has trumped the media hype about their dangers.

    • My wife is from Europe. She said to get married I had to give up my guns when we returned to the states because they are dangerous. I said it looks like we aren’t getting married then. She changed her mind a while later. Now she wants to learn how to shoot.

  13. We have a lot of students that hail from the Middle East and Latin American. Places that are far more violent than the US. As usual Kerry if FOS.

    • There was a Chinese national in my graduating class who was a devout Communist, believed Mao was one of the greatest men to ever live, and claimed the Chinese gov’t was completely transparent and didn’t limit Google searches, etc. And best of all–you can’t even make this up–he is now employed with, of all places, the Federal Reserve.

  14. The point of view that a lot of people I know have (from my European perspective) is that the USA is a dangerous country to live in. For me the main reason is that our media (in my country the most watched tv channel is on public fund) tend to picture it that way which is pretty convenient for them to say see our country is great we have criminality but hey it’s worst anywere in the world including the US with all their mass shooting and their insane gun laws. Trying to have a discution about the fact that the us is a wonderfull country, not so terrible as they think, is pretty hard to have with some people. And making them understand that the right to carry a gun is a good thing is impossible (even with some other gun owners..).

    I’m really looking forward to moving to the USA..

  15. Give me a break. Here in Honolulu we have three ranges that exist solely for tourists from Japan to shoot all the guns outlawed in their own country. Business is booming…

  16. I don’t remember where, but some Japanese exchange student was shot by a slightly unhinged homeowner on Halloween years ago. Maybe California? Nipponese media sources puffed the piece up much like our MSM handled Trayvonosauras Rex.

  17. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting webubwicans.

    (I stole that line because it funny as hell a fits the illustration perfectly.)

  20. Cool! Let the rest of the world believe in the persistence of the wild west mind set. Might convince them that we continue to be a world power to be respected and feared. “Damn! If they fight each other at the drop of a hat, imagine how vicious they would be with a bunch of foreigners. Better not piss them off.” Hey, any advantage we can maintain as we continue to evolve into the worlds biggest paper tiger.

  21. They’re scared of the US because of our guns?!?!

    They have Godzilla and Mothara over there for God’s sake. My kids will never be killed by a giant dinosaur or moth here in America. I don’t want them going to Japan.

  22. I can’t think of anything that’s happened in the last 24 hours besides “gun violence” that they should be scared of… Nope, perfectly safe here in the U.S.these days if we could just get rid of those guns. Oh wait…

  23. Kerry is full of chikusho! When they reach the U.S., many Japanese tourists, students, etc. go on a “gun tour”; ranges that offer all the way up to fully automatic weapons instruction (in Japanese) and shooting. These ranges make bank on Japanese tourists.

    The reason Japanese student exchange is down is due to the really low birth rate in Japan. Japan now pays families to have children . . . . and the Japanese government heavily subsidizes full ride scholarships for colleges, trade schools, etc.

  25. I happen to be a Asian college student (from India) and i dream of studying or settling in the USA solely for guns. I’m only scared by a gun when its loaded(round in the chamber) , safety off and in the hands of a stupid person or an antisocial . Firearms interest and fascinate me because they are interesting simple little wonders of mechanical engineering and metallurgy that have greatly affected our civilization and because they were invented to protect civilization not destroy it .

  26. Boo-hoo, do little babies want to be coddled and told they’re special when they get here. C’mon Kerry, I know you’re struggling to remain relevant, but sheesh!

  27. ” They think they’re not safe in the United States . . .”

    No surprise; they have seen pictures of Kerry and Obama holding guns.

  28. I’ve seen and lived a different side of this situation. I worked at a Japanese company, and the Engineers I worked with all owned guns, and loved going to the range. They invited me to go with them several times, they were a great group of people.

    So this is just more antigun rhetoric, B.S.!

  29. Then keep your a$$ in your own danm country…how about we focus on educating our own children first?

  30. The range I go to in suburban NY has Japanese tourists in there all the time firing the .22 rifles they have for rent. Maybe what they’re really scared of is out of control gangs in places like Chicago.

  31. And we should care because..?

    If foreign students don’t like our national traditions and rights, they’re welcome to stay in their pathetic little polite tyrannies.

    Funny, this nation was founded to distance ourselves from the oppressive government traditions of Europe, and now we have American officials bemoaning how our freedoms are offending foreign subjects. Another day, another example of what a pathetic nation we’ve allowed ourselves to become.

  32. Foreign students are afraid to come here? Good. Let them stay home. We have enough of our own morons to educate. We don’t need idiots from abroad.

  33. I don’t know who Kerry reminds me of at this point in history; Goebbels and Quisling both come to mind,,,
    BTW
    Kerry appears as if he had a Depends Failure

  35. Look at the stats. A Japanese person is about 4x more likely to kill themselves than an American person is to be killed by someone else.

  36. Why in the world would foreign students want an education here in the first place Mr. Kerry? The US ranking in education is ranked 9th out of 34 industrialized nations for education. Are the only ones in our colleges the ones that can’t make it in their own country? If you listen to the Teachers/Professors Unions this can be fixed if we give them more money but aren’t we are the highest paid educators in the world now?

  37. Somebody needs to plaster two faced John on a big ‘ole bill board for the world to see.

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