US ignores how many people it kills abroad: Analyst

Domestic reports of crime and gun violence in the US are “self-involved” as they usually ignore the fact that America is the biggest provider of guns worldwide and has killed millions outside its own borders, an American writer and political commentator says.

According to the Virginia Center for Public Safety, since former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, at least 1.5 million Americans have been killed as a result of gun violence, the Huffington Post reported Wednesday.

This is while only 1.4 million Americans have died since the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775 through December 2014.

In an interview with Press TV on Thursday, Daniel Patrick Welch criticized the limited scope of such studies, saying they fail to see the bigger picture and ignore the number of people the US has killed in its wars.

“When you pick out comparisons and you make statements about how many people die in wars, it is deeply offensive to me, and I think the most of the world, how Americans are constantly so self-involved and self-indulgent and they only talk about it in terms of Americans who died,” he said.

“It is so a glib for people to use these statistics in this way without any kind of  attribution or link to the broader picture which is the world -- the US has killed millions of people in its wars,” he explained.

Welch said that all US wars have been wars of “choice” and “aggression” and it is impossible to delve into these issues without noting the fact that the US is "the greatest purveyor of arms sales in the world. So you can't talk about one without talking about the other."

“The other thing that really bothers me when we talk about crimes and gun statistics and deaths is that it is always about race. Using this one statistic doesn't scratch the surface of what happens in this country: The number of deaths by police shootings of black children; the way the crime statistics and crime reporting are used constantly to demonize black and brown people throughout the United States. And across the world,” the Boston-based analyst said.

These reports are always aimed at demonizing the African-American community and other minorities inside the US and across the world, Welch added.

This is how, he argued, that in Europe and America the victim is demonized while the perpetrators get away with their crimes.

“So when you come up with a single statistic like that, it is useful for this one myopic kind of statement to make it look sensational, but it is really irresponsible I think because it doesn’t scratch the surface of what really the story of violence and crimes in America and around the world is about. It's just like a parlor game for people who use these statistics--kind of a Friday night debate, instead of a matter of life and death, which it is for a lot of our families,” Welch concluded. 

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