Not in China

I remember wincing at the sound of a cane cracking on the back of a  student in an adjoining New Zealand classroom. It was biology class, and I remember Stuart, perched on the stool next to me, whispering, “Yes, we have corporal punishment—but at least we don’t have capital punishment.” I was young, but I’d never thought about it that way before.

I’m older now and sit here shelling peanuts at my kitchen table, laptop nearby. I’m high up in an old Chinese apartment building and there are no bars on my windows, but there are bars on the windows of lower floors. Backpacks, when they’re worn, are often swung around to the front, and people in train stations clutch their bags closely. I wonder about the figures not only for larceny, but also for domestic violence. Sometimes late at night I can hear a fight in one of the nearby buildings—a man shouting and a woman wailing, beseeching him to do something. I’m not even sure that it’s domestic violence because I can’t understand what they’re saying, but inevitably her beseeching turns and simply becomes prolonged screaming. I have never personally witnessed such sounds before. I have, though, witnessed a breathtaking mountain scene that happens to be, a student tells me, where she would go to escape her father’s beatings.

So China’s not perfect. It has both corporal and capital punishment—and it’s not free of school violence.  Just days ago in Henan Province a disturbed 36 year old man allegedly entered a school and tried to attack some children. 

But here’s the thing: The man in China had a kitchen knife, not a gun—certainly not a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle or either a .10 mm Glock or a .9 mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol. The man in China allegedly attacked the Chinese school children within hours of when Adam Lanza made his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in the US. Without assuming that the Sandy Hook tragedy can be accounted for simply by a single factor, legal access to deadly guns, that one factor is precisely the one about which we have some choice and control.

The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world. Although it isn’t top of the list for the number of people killed by guns, it is near the top of the list, following only Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, four countries suffering from very different kinds of problems than those confronting the US (UNODC & Small Arms Survey of 2010, as quoted by Voice Of America 2012-12-18). None of the Western European countries with which the US sometimes compares itself has figures like these—nor do any of them have capital punishment.

But back to China:  Again, according to the VOA, “The United Nations estimates that China's overall homicide rate is less than a quarter of that of the United States. Gun control advocates argue this is because China, which has over a billion more people than the U.S., has only a fraction of the number of the U.S.' guns.”

I can’t pretend that my college- mountain-city is typical in China. I just don’t know enough. It’s certainly not Beijing or Shanghai, that I do know. But I can tell you that I marvel constantly at how safe I feel, bodily safe, walking from early morning until late at night, walking everywhere. The lanes winding through the campus are dimly lit, and yet I never feel alone and never have felt so safe at night. The lanes are full of students at all hours—women walking arm in arm, holding hands, or simply walking alone, men bee-lining their way to the next class or moving along in small noisy groups.  The athletic fields have none of the bright garish lights you find on many such fields elsewhere—they’re simply dark, and students run around the tracks in the dark or sit on the fields, huddled in little groups, talking, laughing, reminiscent of summer camp. Okay, that’s campus, which is also gated with guards patrolling everywhere, but it’s the same way on both the main streets and the back alleys of the city. The open-air stairwells in my apartment have lights that should come on if you stamp your foot—but often don’t. Even in the near dark, I feel relatively safe. People live in the city and they’re out; it’s not just riffraff out late on the streets.

It’s not perfectly safe, of course, and tragedies can strike anywhere. But there is a difference. There are no guns in China—not many, that is.