For some years now we’ve been told words are violence. It’s a jarring assertion for Americans brought up on the axiom that sticks and stone may break their bones, but words can never hurt them. So, sticks, stones and words can break our bones? Our parents and relatives were lying to us? The center cannot hold. The trans “movement” goes a bit beyond that assertion with the certainty that the unexpressed thoughts of Normal Americans are a “trans genocide,” but that was a topic for another article.
The Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) left has always been the nearly exclusive manipulator of language. When one of their perfect, non-falsifiable policies fails, that failure was not a result of their own venal stupidity, but a failure of “messaging.” If only they had perfected the right turn of a phrase, or the invention of a new term, they would have been able to fool Deplorables into willingly accepting their own destruction. Where Normal Americans are content to consult the dictionary despite its recent turn to the woke, D/s/cs just make things up.
The recent attack on a Christmas market in Germany is a case in point:
Author” src=”https://images.americanthinker.com/ir/ircvimelvchjmhbws6lb_640.jpg” />
Graphic: X Screenshot
It wasn’t a Saudi Arabian Muslim who drove a car into the crowded market, no. It was that darned car that drove itself killing five and injuring scores. And of course, the motivation for the car running down all those Germans may never be known, but it certainly had nothing to do with Islam, no sir!
In America another linguistic scourge is “gun violence.” It’s a selective scourge to be sure. When a comic-opera villain named Luigi Mangione assassinated a health care CEO, there was no instant call for “common sense gun control,” which translates as “take guns away from people who will never harm anyone.” Instead the comically named, uni-browish killer was lauded as a Robin Hoodish, hunky luv muffin. But when yet another deranged teenaged girl attacked a Christian school, the messaging immediately demanded the banning of “assault weapons,” though she—maybe “he”—used only a handgun.
Still, if D/s/cs are to be believed America is rife with “gun violence,” inanimate objects animating themselves and injuring and killing Americans in huge numbers. Allied with this sort of violence is the messaging that America is uniquely violent, unlike the rest of the world’s nations where lions lay down with lambs. The invaluable Bill Whittle put that notion to rest with a classic video that revealed America, despite having more guns per capita than anywhere in the world, is only number 111 in homicides per capita. If statistics from America’s most violent, D/s/c-ruled cities are omitted, America would rank at around 211. Whittle’s statistics were derived about a decade ago, but things haven’t changed much, if at all, since despite the FBI’s manipulation of statistics to benefit D/s/cs.
With that in mind, let’s examine the possibly less politicized statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report from 2015-2019. These stats represent the weapons used to kill Americans:
Author” src=”https://images.americanthinker.com/so/so2gqbe0zhk6lastph3l_640.jpg” />
Graphic: FBI UCR 2019. Public Domain
Notice that in 2019, firearms of all types were used in 10,258 instances. Of that figure 6,368 were handguns and only 364 were rifles. Only 200 shotguns were used, for a total of 564 long guns of all types. The FBI didn’t break them down further, but we know only a tiny portion of that 364 figure were “assault weapons.”
What’s really interesting, however, is there were 1,476 instances of knife or cutting instrument violence, 397 instances of blunt object violence, 600 instances of “hand, fist and feet violence,” and poison, explosive, fire, narcotics, drowning, strangulation and asphyxiation violence for a total of 356 and a shocking total of 840 “other weapons or weapons not stated violence.”
Considering “hand, fist and feet violence,” accounts for far more homicide than murders committed by “assault weapons,” shouldn’t we be advocating “common sense murder weapon control” by means of hand, fist and feet bans, or at least registration, storage mandates and the red flag laws necessary to control such dangerous weapons?
These statistics were also derived before our borders were thrown wide open, though that probably made no difference. D/s/cs assure us illegal immigrants never commit crimes and are far more law-abiding than legitimate American citizens. Well, apart from the murderers, rapists, drug dealers, child traffickers, cartels, murderous gang members and terrorists that is.
The FBI has also been inventing “ghost gun” statistics in an attempt to convince us this new linguistic scourge is, well, scourgish (If D/s/cs can make up words, so can I). These aren’t all used in murders, but apparently criminals who go to the trouble of manufacturing these guns just leave them lying about crime scenes. But even those made-up statistics pale in significance to the real, historic scourge of “hand, fist and feet violence.” Why aren’t we hearing impassioned pleas to ban those far more commonly used and deadly weapons?
How about some common sense D/s/c linguistic control?
On a different subject, if you are not already a subscriber, you may not know that we’ve implemented something new: A weekly newsletter with unique content from our editors for subscribers only. These essays alone are worth the cost of the subscription.
Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
