Week 5 - Lawrence Liu (A01)

Lawrence Liu
ASA 2 A01
Week 5

As I read "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence" by Darrell Y. Hamamoto, I realized I tended not to think about the race aspect when it came to stories of murders and crime. I suppose in the past, the idea of Asians being targets of violent crime felt absurd because Asians in America tend to try their best to be model citizens and fit in. The reading delves deeper and labels the Vietnam War as a source and normalizing factor into racial violence and fantasies. The atrocities committed in Vietnam, while condemned, were allowed to go unpunished and unsupervised. This type of negligence combined with an American fetish for guns is the perfect breeding ground for serial/mass acts of violence. America has the highest gun related murders in the world by a wide margin. According to a 2012 homicide statistic of advanced provided by the UNODC, America averages 29.7 homicides per million people. The second highest country is Switzerland at 7.7 and Canada, with similar gun laws and ownership rates, has only 5.1. Such a disparity can only be attributed to deeper underlying social and legal problems in the United States.

Question: Why does Canada have a much lower homicide rate when the two countries share a similar interest in fire arms?



References:

Hamamoto, Y. Darrell. “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence.” Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire, by Carl Boggs, Routledge, 2003, pp. 277-292.

Zarracina, J. (2017, October 2). Homicides by firearm per 1 million people [Digital image]. Retrieved October 22, 2017, from https://cdn.voxcdn.com/thumbor/2SOTsWGm6f4eR9ZeuaAVwHGgfRo=/1200x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9371299/gun_homicides_per_capita.jpg