Guns Don't Kill People...

GO GREEN GET RICH
Guns Don’t Kill People,
Discordant Wealth Kills People…
Now that we have a handle on the concept of risk assessment
and mitigation, let us apply it on a greater scale and ask
ourselves: what risks does our civilization face? One risk with
significant consequences is the problem of gun violence in the
United States and around the globe. An outsider unfamiliar with
the debate might think that a peaceful, stable, and economically
prosperous nation such as the US would have sensible laws that
prevent weapons from reaching the hands of violent or unstable
citizens.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (2012) there
were 12,664 homicides in the United States in 2011, two-thirds
of which were committed with some type of firearm. That figure
does not include other violent crimes perpetrated with guns,
the many people who were wounded or crippled by gunshots
within the period, accidental deaths or suicides. Actually, the
suicide rate is nearly double that of the homicide rate: 6.3 versus
3.6 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the US has the highest rate
of gun ownership in the civilized world. It is true that guns can
prevent crimes, but it is also true that guns are frequently used
to commit crimes.
If you were to look at the business of Smith and Wesson,
Colt, or Kimber, you might note an upward trajectory in the domestic
sales of firearms, despite so many high-profile shootings
that have called into question the sanity of American gun laws.
It can be argued that the jump in sales is precisely due to those
shootings, tied to the fear that the US government will finally
step forward and put some restrictions on gun sales. Many now
believe that the government will even come to take their guns,
stop the sale of ammunition, or put other restrictions on the
ownership or use of guns. Look at the irrational hoarding of
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ammo that followed the election of President Obama. The empty
shelves of the gun stores should tell you all you need to know
about how real and how deeply felt are those fears. The lack of
legislative action and administrative power should also tell you
how irrational they are.
The majority of firearms produced by gun manufacturers
are bought, sold, and distributed among the US population.
Why would a stable country such as ours be so obsessed with
gun ownership?
To understand our gun culture one must go all the way back
to colonial times. The frontier held grave dangers from wild
beasts, hostile natives, and oppressive governments. If you sent
a man to venture into the Carolina swamps or backwoods in the
18 th century without a gun for protection, you could not reasonably
expect that he would return. While some local tribes
such as the Catawba or Yamacraw became friendly allies, others
remained quite hostile. Deadly battles were commonplace in
our history. If these dangers were not enough to prompt almostuniversal
gun ownership, the oppression of the European governments
demanded it.
We have already discussed the failing of the British control
of its colonies, but the French and the Spanish were no
better. The colonists did not gain their independence by the
benevolence of their monarchs. They won it with violent uprisings—with
blood and guns. This situation did not improve
much as the frontier moved west. The dangers of the wilderness
changed but did not dissipate. We found new tribes to
fight, and new wars to wage. The need for a man to own a gun
changed little. It is now an ingrained part of our culture, a right
protected by constitutional authority, and celebrated and mythologized
by Hollywood.
The prevalence of gun ownership in America presents us
with a risk factor to consider: what is the probability that a gun
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owner will one day shoot someone and what might be the effect
of that?
It can be rationally argued that crime in general—violent
crime in particular and gun-related crime specifically—is directly
related to poverty, unemployment, and desperation. While it
has been often debated, it has never been proved…until lately.
In 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime supported
a study which concluded that, while violence can be connected
to gangs and organized crime,
“The largest shares of homicides occur
in countries with low levels of human
development, and countries with high levels
of income inequality suer homicide rates
almost four times higher than more equal
societies”.
One of the original studies on this topic, conducted by Ichiro
Kawachi of Harvard, found that income inequality accounted
for 74 percent of the variance in murder rates and about half
of the aggravated assaults (Kawachi, 1999). These results were
surprisingly unambiguous. Even more surprising was that poverty
alone explains the results, and other factors such as unemployment,
alcohol consumption, and educational attainment
were only weakly associated with or had no connection to violent
crime at all. Kawachi’s findings have been confirmed by James
Fearon of Stanford University, in a World Bank-sponsored
study which confirmed these results on income inequality. It
was found that on a worldwide basis, homicide rates are inextricably
linked to the unequal distribution of resources (Fearon,
2010). Dr. Fearon even looked specifically at countries plagued
by drug wars and civil wars and found these to be only weakly
correlated. The driving factors behind homicide and other
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violent crimes were still found to be income inequality and a
lack of economic growth.
In other words, while many things might affect the rates
of homicide and, in particular, gun violence, nothing drives it
more than income inequality. Poverty itself does not produce
more violence as people do not fight over what others also do
not have. Drug wars increase violence but that is a result of a
few people acquiring great wealth and power because of the
drug trade. Other factors may enter the equation but nothing
drives violence quite like the deprivation of the many for the
enrichment of the few. Add in the prevalence of gun ownership
and a tradition or culture of violence and you have a toxic brew.
The data and analyses bear out this rationale: gun violence is
tied to unsustainable wealth and equity disparity.
I believe that as we establish a more sustainable path of sharing
and distributing wealth, violence in general will subside.
Hopefully the Green X Platform will be a step in that direction.
Global Warming Statistics
Now, let us imagine that the organization we are examining
is the planet Earth itself. What risks does the planet face? While
there are a number of possible cosmological events, such as a
stray comet or a gamma burst, our ability to mitigate those risks
is minimal. We do not know if those dangers are coming, but
we do know that our world faces a danger of accelerating global
warming in the coming decades.
The question becomes how to apply solutions to stop man’s
destruction of the environment, to mitigate the damage caused
hence far and to prevent Earth’s environment from declining
further due to unsustainable practices.
By now, you have read and heard plenty about global warming.
In a 2013 analysis of peer-reviewed scientific publications,
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