Space Forum / Shuttle / April 2007

Yah - those _sound_ impressive don't they?  The you look at the
details and note that the majority of the gun deaths occur among
minorities.  It's easy to lie with statistics - and in this case it's
politically incorrect to tell the truth with them.

D.

Clearly rationality won't change some people's mind, but perhaps it
can help others reading this thread.  Doing a few days worth of real
research instead of reading "sound-bites" unveils some incovenient
truths.

The U.S. homicide rate is narcotics-driven, not gun-driven.  The VAST
majority of those killed teens are 15-19 years old and involved in the
narcotics trade (gang members--thus the racial component).  These
people are already banned from owning guns, and Jacob points out very
well how utterly ineffective such bans are.  

Innocent children are much more likely to die in a swimming pool or
hot tub than from a gun.  Time to ban those.  (I mean, if it saved
only ONE life, wouldn't it be worth it?)  Oops, maybe Jason (or other
gun controllers) like to tub or swim now and then and don't want to
lose that right because of the irresponsible actions of others.

Of the other homicides, accidents, and suicides by firearm, the
majority involve alcohol.  Perhaps it's time for a new alcohol
ban--except gun controllers like a drink now and don't want to lose
that right because of the irresponsible actions of others.

Adjusted for race, the U.S. homicide rate is lower than most
industrialized countries.  (Note that Jason kept referring to
"firearm" deaths, not "homicides."  Nice way to spin the data.) Yes,
we kill each other more with guns instead of beatings, knifes, etc.
The suicide rate in Japan, for example, is vastly higher than ours.
They use buildings, instead of guns.  Let's lower them all to 2
stories.

Speaking of other countries, isn't it interesting how many of those
kind and gentle foreign nations with strict gun laws provide us with
our own guns?  Cho used an Austrian Glock and a German Walther to
murder those kids.  Barettas come from Italy, HK and Sig from Germany,
CZ from Czech, Taurus from Brazil, Llama from Spain, and Para-Ordnance
from our gun-hating Canadian neighbors.  I guess it's okay to pump the
world markets full of guns as long as you ban your own people from
using them.

Jason, hate it as much as you want, but we live in a country full of
guns--over a quarter billion of them.  The overwhelmingly vast
majority of them are used productively, and banning the law-abiding
from carrying them does nothing to stop the criminal.  Twenty years
ago, Britain's violent crime rate was a tiny fraction of the U.S.'s
Still, they completely banned handgun ownership in Februrary 1998--and
immediately their violent crime rate skyrocketed.  Today, it's HIGHER
than ours (even gun crimes!), something utterly inconceivable two
decades ago.

Want to get rid of our guns?  Okay, delete the Fourth and Fifth
Amendments of the Constitution and permit warrantless searches of our
all homes (like most of the countries Jacob named.)  Sound good?  

Of course, 92% of violent crime in America does not involve a firearm,
and over 2 million crimes a year are *prevented* by law-abiding
citizens using guns (over 3x the number of crimes committed with
them). We beat, strangle, and stab each other to death by the
thousands.  Banning guns would effectively disarm the innocent, have
no impact on the guilty (who are already in violation of the law), and
allow our homes to be violated regularly by unwarranted searches.
Hey, sign me up!

Gun control is largely driven by ignorance of the facts or by Faith.
To many, it's a matter of morality: a nation with fewer guns is a
"better" one, never mind the resulting body count.

************************
Btw, I used to be much closer to Jacob's viewpoint than "George's."
But that changed once I started getting my research data from reading
the Unified Crime Reports, the National Crime Victimization Surveys,
and other raw sources, domestic and international...not from the
out-of-context blurbs on political sites.

"ExTraj" <ExTraj@home.net> wrote in message But

Fortunately - at least here in the UK so few people have guns legally - and
fewer still illegaly the chances of that happening are close to 0 anyway. In
this town (city) of 200,000 there has been a total of 4 firearm incidents
where someone was actually shot (not by the police) in the last 10 years.
Don't know about the first two, but the latter two definately knew their
killers/drug related.

I would be interested in a comparison with the 'safest' town/city of
comparable size in the US - a country in which laws vary by state - but guns
are always available - over the counter.

SC

Yes, police is of no avail, let's just take the gun and kill
before being killed.

With split-second reflexes, you will take your gun and kill the
other that has already a gun and pointing to you...

As in any country, here in France we had in the last year
several cases of mentally ill people killing and murdering.

But they could get only knives to do their deeds and the
number of dead people was very low. They could NOT buy a
machine gun or other weapons in the next store.

There is no question that sometimes it is helpful to have a gun on
your side.  Overall, though, you've got to look at the odds.  To put a
serious dent in high school and university shootings, you'd probably
need to arm about 10% of the students.  That's about 2 million
additional guns.  And these are among the most dangerous kinds of guns
for accidents, since they must be kept with their ammunition (one of
the best gun safety measures is keeping ammo separate from guns, but
that would prevent the intended use here.)  Plus, in this case, they
are possessed by young males (most likely) who might conceivably not
be the most responsible of gun owners.  So while it may well help
against mass murderers, you'd lose a lot more to accidents than you'd
save in mass murder victims.

Again, perfectly true.  But also true is that if enough people are
armed to protect me from mass murderers, then I'm more likely to die
in a gun accident than I would have been from the mass murderer.

  Lou Scheffer