Friday, October 06, 2017

Illegal guns? in the Philippines, we have them..

Despite the strict "gun laws" in the Philippines, nearly every middle class person has a gun or two hidden in in hs house for protection.

Let me explain why.

there re a lot of guns around, period.

linkpdf

Security forces and licensed security agencies combined possess only 1.8 million guns compared with the 3.59 million guns (legal and illegal) in civilian hands.
some of these are in the hands of "militants" or druggie types, but some are in the private armies of politicians. But a lot are simply for self protection.
My point? This was, of course, after Marcos made gun possession difficult, and confiscated all private guns in the 1980's.

Uh, that didn't seem to work very well. (and those delusional to think Gun confiscation would work in the USA, well, think again).

the connection rarely mentioned: Crime.
Ordinary folks have guns for protection, because they know that the gangsters and criminals have guns.

And a lot of the gangster types are running the place. follow the money.

So in our area, we have lots of political murders. It's about power and money (including who can skim city and development money, and take bribes, especially bribes related to the drug trade).

I live in Luzon. Now we are not in a war zone, although the local communist NPA were active here until a few years ago. But murders? Well, our family lost a nephew as a bystander during a political hit years back. And there were other incidents...

 A 2010 GMA article relates killings going back  to 1980, and includes this snippet about the church trying to get these guys to stop killing each other:


Bishop Sofronio Bancud was, however, disappointed with the non-participation of several mayoral candidates, especially those involved in 2007 cases of electoral violence.

yup. And it mentions our town:

The Gapan City local government unit has declared its city hall a “no-firearms zone," after a brother of the outgoing city mayor barged into the local Comelec office and bodily harmed a Comelec official over a voters’ registration issue last October.

more stuff here on election violence:

2015 article in Business Mirror

From May 2013 to October this year, 21 politically motivated executions have been carried out by guns-for-hire, or the now popular “riding-in-tandem killers,” causing the death of 14 individuals and serious wounding of seven others.
The victims are all local politicians ranging from city and town councilors to barangay officials and plain local government employees.
2015 article in the Sun reports that some blame the governor for at least 15 shootings.


here is a recent example where the cops nailed a local "gun for hire" gang.

here is a 2016 raid in our area that found a lot of illegal weapons.

political murders make the headlines, but what has actually started to worry me is that random crime has increased. Several local people, especially the elderly, have been killed in home invasion robberies:

here are two. LINK LINK2 but I can thing of others.

and no, I don't travel outside alone: We had a "kidnap gang" here, and still have snatch and grab robberies on the street.

have these increased? I have no idea: but the level of violence in robberies has.

so excuse me when I read about Duterte's drug wars murders, as if every murder in the Philippines is now his fault.

Are murders worse under Duterte, or did the murder streak start before his election in May 2016, and his election was because folks were tired of what was going on?

world atlas data notes the increase in murder rate has increased from 2003 to 2014.

and Rappler has an article on the crime problem, written in 2016 before the election of Duterte.

It has statistics on both the increase in crime, and also the drop in convictions percentages.

Crime solution efficiency, or the percentage of solved crimes out of reported crimes, was only 37% and 28% in 2012 and 2013, respectively, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority.

what is not noted: Since you won't get justice anyway, a lot of crimes go unreported. Why bother to report a crime when you know you won't get justice, and even if you do, you might be shot by the perpetrator or one of his friends?

One wonders how many of the murders  by rogue cops or ex NPA members, who become "Dirty Harry" and dispense justice to known criminals, either on their own or for families who don't trust the court system.

We never did get justice for our nephew: we could have gotten private justice for a few hundred USDollars, but we declined the offer. (Note: the mayor behind the hit died in his bed ten years later and had a huge Catholic funeral).

The MSM of the world seems upset about the "drug war"murders, but hey, they didn't start with Duterte: it only started getting in the news when the NWO got upset that an outsider won, and a lot of local politician are pretending to be worried about all those poor people killed by Duterte, when in reality the local politicians are worried they will be "outed" for corruption. example LINK

Are shooting more common now than in the past?

Probably.

but to put crime into perspective, check out this 2011 article in the local webnews site.


  • ex vice mayor held for illegal gun possession: Check.

  • Ex city councilor arrested for pushing illegal drugs. Check.

  • people who were arrested for pushing counterfeit money arrested and found to have a gun and drugs. Check.

  • Pregnant woman killed when someone sprayed her house with bullets. One of those living with her was a known drug dealer. Check.

  • Businessman shoots home appliances in his girlfriend's house after she breaks up with him. Check.


In other words, lots of gun crime here. And a lot of it related to the drug trade. And a lot of it was going on before Duterte, but didn't seem to upset the SJW of the world.

as for the drug trade: We were in danger of becoming another "Failed state" run by drug cartels, similar to Mexico, where 23000 were reported murdered in 2016 (not counting, of course, the bodies that haven't been found yet).

 again, the Rappler article notes:

Back in 2012, The United Nations World Drug Report said the Philippines has the highest rate of shabu use in East Asia.
It’s mostly ethnic Chinese syndicates that organize and finance the trafficking of shabu in the Philippines, according to the US State department report on international drugs in 2012.
Because of its geographic location, the Philippines has become a major hub for the drug in Southeast Asia. This has contributed to more incidents of Filipinos getting arrested in other countries for transporting or selling shabu.
Shabu is usually brought into the country from Japan, China, and Korea but it is also grown domestically in “meth labs.”
The drug problem was recognized even by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines when it released a pastoral letter last July 2015 focusing on drug addiction in the country.
Entitled “Addiction, freedom, and disciples,” the letter pointed out how shabu or the “poor man’s cocaine” has become “daringly ubiquitous, oftentimes peddled openly in parks, bars, and street corners.”
This was what was going on when Duterte took over.

So the bishops are upset about his aggressive stance against criminal, and say pray about it...

but as for me, I'm thinking that maybe I should get a gun and learn to use it....

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