An American man from New York City travelled to the country of Chile on vacation. Chile is Latin America. He saw a mural painted on the side of a building and got closer to take a picture. What he didn't realize was he was in bad neighborhood; it wasn't safe for him to be there. Santiago police at the time were watching the building for illegal activity. Police believe Garvin had just finished dinner downtown before he was killed. "They told us my son was innocently walking down the street, paused for a moment, and took a snapshot of a building in a drug-infested area," Garvin's father told the New York Post. "Immediately following that, three gentlemen came across the street, grabbed my son and stole his phone, and shot him three times, and he died on the scene." Garvin, 38 years old, was African American, lean and tall, with a big and muscular body build, so it may have been that the criminal group assumed he was part of another gang and perceived him as a threat. Eric Garvin Jr. reportedly moved to Staten Island from Maryland to attend law school. He worked for the New York City Council and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. Some of Garvin's work under former Mayor Bill de Blasio includes combatting gun violence throughout the city. (source: 38-Year-Old Shot, Killed After Taking Picture During Vacation In Chile Santiago, Chile, travelnoire.com, Parker Diakite, Jan 27, 2023 ) It's ironic that a man who comes from an American city, plagued with gun crime, goes to another country on vacation, not knowing any better, and is a shot dead there. from the article: Over the last year, Chilean officials have grappled with the uptick in gun violence. A report from the organization InSight Crime shows homicides in Chile grew by more than 32 percent in 2022 from the previous year. 2022 marked one of the country’s deadliest ever years. When Garvin Jr. traveled to Chile, the State Department listed the Latin American country as "Level 2: Exercise increased caution in Chile due to civil unrest." The travel advisory does not describe the growing gun violence problem at the time of this report. "Chile has been experiencing growing violent crime for several years, so this is not new," says man's father, Garvin Sr. "The fact that the U.S. State Department has been silent on violence in Chile is gross negligence." He adds, "Our recommendation also includes highlighting Yungay and other neighborhoods as dangerous." So the father is saying someone should have warned them about the gun violence in Chile. Chile requires all civilians to register firearms and undergo background checks. It has been illegal for civilians to own semiautomatic guns. The registration only authorizes its bearer or holder to maintain the firearm in the place declared, either his residence, his place of employment, or the place that he intends to protect. In Chile the law authorizes the person to have a firearm and to keep it in a fixed place. Only in some special cases, in which the person has been shown to be in danger, can a person carry a firearm on his person. (source: M1911.ORG, Volume 12, Issue 1, Winter 2017, International Focus: Gun Laws in Chile, Harwood Loomis, Ivan Marinkovic) "Chile has one of the strictest sets of regulations in the world," said Ennio Mangiola, the president of the Chilean Gun Shop Owners Association. The murder of a police officer last week on the outskirts of Santiago, has revived the debate about gun ownership in Chile. Chile's president, the progressive Gabriel Boric, announced during a public address on June 1 that he would seek a total ban on firearm ownership by civilians. (source: Poorly armed Chile joins world anti-gun debate, laprensalatina.com, Patricia Nieto Mariño, June 16, 2022) It sounds like Chile has some very strict gun control laws that American gun control proponents would salivate at. Explainer: Gun Laws in Latin America's Largest Economies | AS/COA (as-coa.org) Question: Should we listen to gun control proponents? Because even after all the extensive laws and regulations Chile has put in place, their gun violence problem still hasn't ended. And they keep wanting to pass more and more gun laws in Chile, trying to deal with the problem.
The reason why the U.S. looks like an aberration in the statistics is because, in many respects, the U.S. is much like a First World country coexisting side by side with a Third World country. In other words, if you were to mix a First World and Third World country together, through simple arithmetic addition or averaging, in the statistics, it would look similar to the U.S. Chile is actually one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. (only the small country of Uruguay has a higher per capita GDP, and they are 88% white and only have a population of 3.4 million people, which is smaller than Chile's capital city) GDP per capita Chile 16,265 GDP per capita Brazil 7,507 GDP per capita Mexico 10,045 GDP per capita Argentina 10,636 population of Santiago metropolitan region, Chile's capital city 6.8 million
taking a look at overall homicide rates (per 100,000 of population) U.S. 7.8 Chile 3.6 And consider this: Blacks in the U.S. are more than 2.5 times more likely to be shot dead than Whites https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroo...in-us-more-than-3-times-as-high-as-in-whites/ Majority of blacks who are shot are killed by other blacks, in higher crime areas. About 50.5% of murder victims in the U.S. are white and 44.5% are black. Which stands out because only 13.6% of the population is black. It is possible to calculate that the U.S. homicide rate would be 4.3 if blacks (as victims) were not included. (Kind of a useless figure but can give us some very rough figure of how the U.S. might compare to Chile which is only 4.7% black) Sorry, real logic does require us to look at some statistics and do some calculations. It's not always simple.
