Gaetz Doesn't Get It

Stupid and a Liar!

In Australia "they went and confiscated all the guns. You know who did what Australia did? Venezuela."

        So said Florida Congressman, Trump sycophant, and embarrassment, Matt Gaetz. Gaetz is Florida Representative from Congressional District 1 in the panhandle. He is also either illiterate, ill informed, or simply, like his idol, states as factual things he wishes were true.

        While discussing guns with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro about how to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands. She said, a bit surprisingly, I thought, for Fox, "I’m here in Australia, congressman. They don’t have problems like this," Pirro said Aug. 10 following the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton that killed 31 people. "This is starting to be unfortunately a uniquely American situation. And I am a gun owner. I am a strong Second Amendment person, but some of the wrong people are getting their hands-on guns."

        Gaetz’s genius response was to simply bluster, “"Nobody would suggest that in the United States we would want Australia’s solution. There they went and confiscated all the guns. You know who did what Australia did? Venezuela. And now their people can't fight back when they are having to fight their way out of a socialist dictator." 

       I love it when cowards and bloviating politicians cite “The people” “fighting back” against. (insert favorite tyrant here). There is, perhaps, no better example of how wrong-headed that is than the ill-fated Warsaw Ghetto uprising, where 13,000 heroic Jewish resistance fighters were killed by far better armed German military, whose losses were estimated at a high-end number of about 100 men. Let there be little doubt the same would happen in Venezuela. But I digress. The large pachyderm in the room is the “they confiscated all guns,” canard. No, they didn’t. Congressman Matt Gaetz is, in this instance as in too many others, a liar.

        How do I know? Well, to begin with, as an historian, I know how to do research. As a truthful, fact driven, writer, I do it. Unfortunate; for Matt Gaetz, and fortunately for the truth, there are 2017 statistics which show the fallacy of his statement.

       In fact (remember facts?) the data shows a far less convincing story. Let’s start with base figures and what they mean:  A recent survey lists 230 nations of the world in descending order by the number of handguns per 100 population. It should come as no surprise that, at the top is the United States with a whopping 120.5 guns per 100 persons (yep, more than 1 gun per capita. Scary, huh?). Here are a few representative nations with the “firearms per 100” data:                                      

                                                                                     Deaths per

Nation               Firearms per 100   World ranking    100,000 pop

USA -               120.5                     1                          12.21

Falkland Isl.      62.1                       2                         no stat

Iceland              31.7                       3                         .07

Switzerland      27.6                      19                        3.01

Venezuela        18.5                      35                        49.22!

Australia          14.5                      51                        1.04 

Mexico            12.9                      50                        11.8

Afghanistan    12.5                       63                        14.2

Russia             12.3                       68                no data available

N. Ireland       11.0                       77                          0.8

S. Sudan         9.6                         90                no data available 

So, what are we to make of all this data? I would propose several realistic conclusions:

        First, it seems that there is actually relatively little correlation between gun ownership per capita and gun deaths per capita on a global basis. “But Mike, that’s what the NRA says sometimes, isn’t it?”  Yes, it is. Of course, the missing piece is, “What type of weapon constitutes a “gun,” and who owns it?”  The answer to that is that those Swiss gun owners are extremely well vetted before ownership is authorized, and ammunition in quantities such as we’ve seen in US mass shootings is simply unobtainable by any legal methods.  

        Another point might be to question motivation and societal acceptance of violence. As an example. Icelanders have about ¼ the number of guns per capita that the US does, yet they are 14 times less likely to have gun deaths.

        As for the Matt Gaetz comment which spurred me to do this, clearly, if Venezuela “confiscated all the guns” they did a relatively lousy job, since Venezuela ranks 35 out of 230 nations in guns per capita, but sixth in the world when deaths per capita are tallied. Australia, on the other hand, simply did not “confiscate” guns, any more than did the Obama administration. They did buy back automatic weapons and banned their ownership. Interestingly enough, Australia with slightly fewer guns per capita, than Venezuela, to which Gaetz compared it, has a startlingly lower number of firearm related deaths per 100,000. 

       So, what’s the “takeaway” here? Start with that analogizing markedly divergent countries, as Matt Gaetz does here, is useless. Another takeaway for Gaetz, should he ever see this (he won’t) is that it’s too easy to fact check bullshit statements, so don’t make them. Yet another is that, while there are various factors at play in gun deaths and in their frequency, the psychology of an individual population segment can drive the issue disproportionately to the size of that segment. Mexico is exemplary, with narco-traffickers and profit segments, including law enforcement, highly impactful.  

        Yet here in the USA,  social media have made free access to various sorts of violence and inflammatory speech, the NRA lines the pockets of shameless shills like Matt Gaetz ($2500 in 2018) and most Republican members of Congress ($ 711, 654 in 2018),  and lax laws have allowed for the proliferation of weapons which no one outside the military or  equivalent civil authorities should have. Lax, to almost nonexistent background checks coupled with a “no checks” gun show exemption have made these weapons all too easy to access by the disaffected, marginally insane and full goose bat shit whacko members of our population. 

      Sadly, many still believe that others want to remove all guns from legitimate hunters. That’s also a lie. No responsible individual has ever indicated a desire to stop legitimate sportsman from pursuing their interest reasonably. It probably does mean, however, that a hunter who can’t shoot a deer with a single action weapon shouldn’t be allowed an arsenal of military grade hardware to do it.  

        No, Congressman Gaetz. It isn’t as simple or as one sided as you obviously are.