China Downplays Human Rights Record by Pretending America’s Gun Rights Are an Issue

China has a long and storied history at this point of human rights abuses. Tiananmen Square is still vividly burned into my memory, for example. In that instance, people who were peacefully protesting were slaughtered by their tyrannical nation. Unarmed resistance wasn’t remotely enough to stand up to army troops and tanks.

Things haven’t exactly improved, either. Just ask the Uyghurs, for example. They’ve been herded into camps. Their women have been sterilized by force, then reportedly been used as sex slaves for high-ranking government officials. Then we have the allegations of illegal organ harvesting. It’s genocide by any definition.

China mostly just ignores the allegations, but it’s also useful to deflect from them from time to time, and one of their favorite tactics is to attack the United States’ human rights record. Now, it ain’t perfect, but we do better than most do on that front. The problem is that China seems to want to do it by going after our defense of a human right.

That’s right. They want to go after our lack of gun control.

The United States has, by far, the highest number and rate of mass shootings in the world, and mass shootings are becoming more frequent. According to the report of Giffords Law Center, the United States accounts for just 4 percent of the world’s population but 35 percent of global firearm suicides and 9 percent of global firearm homicides. That is an average of nearly 40,000 annual gun deaths each year, or 100 a day. Gun violence has reached epidemic proportions. There were at least 627 mass shootings in the United States last year. Women, children, African Americans, and other minorities are disproportionately victimized by US gun violence and unduly bear the burden of it. Gun homicides and assaults disproportionately impact historically underserved communities of color. Black Americans are 12 times more likely than white Americans to be killed in a gun homicide. The devastating toll of gun violence especially affects women and girls. More than 6,000 women die from gun violence every year, and women of color are disproportionately impacted.

…

In the light of General comment No. 36 of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to life is the supreme right from which no derogation is permitted, and state parties must not only respect the right to life but also ensure it and exercise due diligence to protect individuals’ lives against deprivations caused by persons or entities whose conduct is not attributable to the state. The US government’s failure to exercise due diligence with respect to preventing and reducing gun violence through the adoption of reasonable and effective domestic measures has limited the ability of Americans to enjoy many fundamental freedoms and guarantees protected by international human rights law. Therefore, it’s not a crisis of gun violence, but a crisis of human rights.

Except that gun rights are human rights.

General comment No. 36 also talks about how the right to life isn’t absolute, but that life shouldn’t be taken arbitrarily. No one is questioning that, but it also notes that taking a life in self-defense. 

This is important because this entire argument hinges on the idea that the lives taken with a firearm first wouldn’t have been taken at all if guns weren’t available–and based on how our non-gun homicide rate is higher than so many other nations, I find that argument hard to accept–and that guns aren’t used many more times in self-defense.

The overall totals of defensive gun uses are up the in air, but most estimates are over one million per year, with many over two million.

These are murders and other atrocities prevented by guns.

Plus, let’s be honest here, absolutely no one in the United States should accept any lecturing on human rights from the people who ran over peaceful protestors with tanks and who are committing genocide of an unwanted ethnic group as they’re talking.