Guns Do Not Kill People Ceiling Fans Do
If you are a liberal, then no matter what field of endeavor you choose to pursue, advocacy for gun control will somehow worm its way into your professional opinions.
That is to say, if you are a gerontologist, then your published papers will contain some nonsense that people would live longer if only there were fewer guns in society.
If you are a psychiatrist, you will eventually publish some nonsense that there would be fewer suicides if we had stricter gun controls. For example, read the following by Andrew Edmund Slaby, M.D., Ph.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University and New York Medical College, a liberal idiot:
American Psychiatric Association, Suicide and Gun Control
Most of us are aware of the grim statistics. Someone dies by suicide in the United States every 17 minutes, for a total each year of more than 30,000. Few of us, however, are aware that 57 percent of those who kill themselves do so with a gun.
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Even when affective illness is diagnosed, the treatment provided is often inadequate. Second, we have done little or nothing to limit access to lethal weapons.
Sherman and her colleagues are to be applauded for providing, in this issue of Psychiatric Services, a model of firearms risk management in populations most vulnerable to self-inflicted death. Although this is not the same as much-needed gun-control legislation, it is a major step forward in giving mental health professionals a plan that can reduce loss of life to suicide. Suicidal individuals who have access to guns are at the greatest risk of impulsive, unpredictable suicide. The effect of gun control was forcibly brought to me recently when a nonphysician colleague asked me to provide psychopharmacologic consultation for a young man whose engagement to be married had been abruptly terminated. He had thought of killing himself the previous week and had gone to a sporting goods store to buy a gun. I asked whether he had purchased one. He looked at me disappointedly and said, "No—in New York State it takes six months to get a license... a lot of good that does!" That man is alive today, getting treatment, and doing better because some members of the community cared enough to legislate to limit access to firearms.
Allow me to rebut this moron, using India as example.
In 1878, the British passed the Indian Arms Act which prohibited the possession of firearms by any Indian unless the British considered that person a "loyal subject" of the British Empire. Europeans (also called white people) were exempt from the prohibition.
Then, 12 years after independence India finally repealed the British Act and enacted their own, the Arms Act of 1959. Sadly, the Indian government trusted their own citizens barely more than the British did, and put so many restrictions that it was impossible for an ordinary law abiding Indian citizen to get a gun license; somewhat similar to the gun control law in my state, New Jersey (1).
In addition, because it is against the law to import guns, those produced domestically are perhaps the shoddiest pieces of crap in the world. Because there are so few guns, there are fewer people who know how to use them. Those of us who saw the videos of the 2008 Mumbai attacks recall seeing how ineffectual the Indian police were against the terrorists (2).
Let us consider the lack of guns in India in the context of what that idiot Andrew Edmund Slaby wrote: that there are probably many people who would have killed themselves if not for India's strict gun control laws.
Now read the following [emphasis mine]:
29 Oct 2008: Ahmedabad - A 26-year-old young woman named Kinjal Shah committed suicide by hanging herself from a ceiling fan. She left a suicide note behind telling her husband of 7 years, Shailesh Shah, "I could not stand the debts you had to face. You can sell my ornaments and pay them off."
9 Feb 2009: New Delhi - Minu Sharma, a 21-year-old Delhi University student hanged herself from a ceiling fan in her home in northwest Delhi after she failed for the second time in her exams.
Merinews India, 29 May 2009, Chitra Singh's daughter commits suicide
Monica Chaudhry, allegedly committed suicide in her house in Bandra West in Mumbai on Friday (May 29). Reportedly, Monica was suffering from depression due to her sour married life.
...
According to reports, the singer had been staying with her daughter for the past one month. On Thursday night, the two chatted till 2:30 am and then went to bed. Next morning when Monica did not respond to constant knocking at the door, her son Armaan used the bathroom window to enter the room only to find his mother hanging from the ceiling fan.
29 Apr 2009: GHAZIABAD - A 15-year-old girl committed suicide by hanging from the ceiling fan.
27 May 2009: NEW DELHI - Santosh Kumar, a BCA student from Bihar, 19, committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling fan at the Safdarjung Hospital.
11 Jun 2009: NEW DELHI - A 22-year-old nursing student at a government medical college in the capital committed suicide in her hostel room. Kaushika was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her room.
1 Jul 2009: NEW DELHI - An 18-year-old girl committed suicide by hanging herself after reportedly failing to secure admission to a college in the second cut-off list released by Delhi University, police said. The victim, identified as Prachi Gaur, hanged herself from the ceiling fan in her first floor house in Kundli area in east Delhi at around 8.30 p.m.
6 Sep 2009: NEW DELHI - A 26-year-old Central Industrial Security Force constable committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling fan in his house in Narela of northwest Delhi, police said.
MidDay News India, 26 Jun 2010, Depressed supermodel commits suicide
The body of model-turned-actor Viveka Babajee (37) was discovered at her Bandra residence yesterday. PSI Sandesh Chakor of the Bandra police station confirmed the incident.
"A neighbour called the police station after smelling a gas leak from Babajee's apartment. The body was found hanging from a fan," he said.
Thaindian News, 14 Jul 2010, Man gets 10-year jail for wife’s dowry death
A court here Wednesday awarded 10 year’s rigorous imprisonment to a man convicted for harassing his wife for dowry, prompting her to commit suicide.
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"Yadwinder and Jagdeep had solemnised their marriage in November 2008 and the latter had committed suicide, by hanging herself from a ceiling fan, in July 2009. This was the second marriage for both of them," said a police official.
Calcutta Telegraph, 12 Jul 2010, Model found hanging at home
A former model was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her Andheri apartment this morning, two weeks after Viveka Babajee killed herself.
Natasha Padbidri’s maid saw the 31-year-old hanging by her dupatta around 11am when she peeped through the keyhole after repeatedly knocking on the door.
I do not have the time to list the tens of thousands of suicides by hanging from ceiling fans but a simple google search will readily convince the reader that this is the method of choice in India for terminating one's life. Certainly it is cheaper than buying a gun: all one needs is a sarong and a fan. Just leave a note saying you are sari.
I know what these liberal idiots want to say, if only we could ban ceiling fans there would be fewer suicides in India. But they would be wrong. Ceiling fans don't kill people just as guns don't kill people.
I would like to end by quoting history's greatest advocate for strict gun control:
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.
History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.
-Adolph Hitler
-Hitler's Table Talks 1941-1944, Edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), pp. 425-426.
Caption for photo: "Non-Violence" (a.k.a. "The Knotted Gun") by Fredrik Reuterswärd. This sculpture was a gift from the Government of Luxembourg to the United Nations.
ENDNOTES
(1): New Jersey passed its gun control law in 1966, which was heralded at the time as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation. It is interesting to note that two years later the murder rate was up 46% and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled [Wiki]. Just a coincidence I suppose.
Anyway, in New Jersey, you can get a gun permit if you try real hard, however, unless you are a law enforcement officer it is extremely difficult to actually own a gun.
(2): At one police station the cops were so outgunned they were afraid to confront the terrorists and switched off the lights and locked the gates. More than a dozen police were killed because they had shoddy pistols or no guns at all or didn't even know how to use them.
There would have been at least a hundred fewer deaths if Indian citizens were armed.
