Suicide is Painless (and Apparently Gunless)

This from Reuters:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Over 33,000 people took their lives in Japan last year, topping 30,000 for the tenth consecutive year despite a government campaign to reduce what is one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

A report issued by the National Police Agency on Thursday showed that 33,093 people killed themselves in Japan in 2007 -- the second-largest number on record after 34,427 in 2003 -- mostly because of debt, family problems, depression and other health issues.

There was also a leap in the number of suicides involving toxic hydrogen sulphide gas made from household detergents, a previously obscure method that is spreading rapidly as Internet messages tell victims how to produce the poison at home.

The population of Japan in 2007 was approximately 128 million. The U.S. is about 300 million people; in 2005, the most recent year with compiled number for suicides in the United States is 32,637.

Why am I talking about such grim statistics? Because, IMHO, the biggest success of the so-called "antigun movement," aided and abetted by the U.S. government and the MSM, has been the semantic "tricks" of combining homicide, accidental death and suicide into a single category of "violent deaths."

This has allowed the weasels at Brady to endlessly talk about "violent death" (or "gun violence") in the United States as if such terms represented a single entity. How many times have you heard how much safer the gun-free paradise of Japan is than the U.S.? Japan has a low homicde rate (although there have recently been a number of references that homicides are "buried" by Japanese police into other stats...for example, Yakuza soldiers are never "murdered," "disappear" or even "sleep with the fishes." They go visit relatives in Okinawa). Here's a little tidbit of what I'm talking about from a moonbat website:

In general, then, Japan has crime but it is of a much less violent nature than crime in the U.S. This makes Japan a much safer place to live then in the average American city. A great deal of this difference is related to the strict gun-control laws in japan, unlike the U.S. where special-interest groups promote the idea that people have the "right" to whatever kinds of weapons they want

in whatever quantity. Rights involve responsibilities and the concept of responsibility is more ingrained in the Japanese culture than it is in the U.S. culture. Guns kill people and it is people who are using the guns; the guns do not act by themselves.

Okay, we get it! Let's look at Japan's "violent death" rate...add 33,000 suicides to, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say 100 homicides and maybe 1000 "deaths by misadventure" to come up with 34,100 violent deaths. Now let's bring Japan up to a United States population level...multiplay by 2.3...and you get the equivalent of 78,430, almost 50% larger than the U.S.'s annual violent deaths. Hmmmmm...hell of a paradise when a big afternoon is huffling hydrogen sulphide!