It's time for another gun threadFollow

Elinda,

He implied that the country would be a safer place without guns. That's an incorrect assumption considering you can't go back in time and keep guns from being invented.

No it isn't.

The U.S. rate for gun deaths in 1994 was 14.24 per 100000 people. Japan had the lowest rate, at .05 per 100000.

Just the first statistic pulled froma simple google search. Keep in mind this is 744 years after their invention. So I think it's safe to surmise, we would be safer without guns.

I went forward further than 2015 and had the interior-mounted version installed.

As an aside, isn't it weird that we're only 6 years away from the "future" from Back to the Future?

Regardless, the numbers speak for themselves. Strict gun law = low gun death. It's a fact.

Huh. 15 posts ago it was 2.45 million. Crazy that it is now 50,000 more! Kleck also mentions that 400,000 violent crimes occur annually because of guns. Thus we can narrow it down to:

"For every 5-6 crimes potentially prevented by guns, one person will be a victim of gun usage." Or, you can go the Japanese route and say "If you don't have guns, you don't have gun crime."

It is interesting to note that in Kleck's study, he says in effect it's tough to know if there are more guns because of violent crimes (ie, people get guns for self-defense because crime is high), or if violent crimes occur more often because of increased gun use (ie, people have more guns and therefore are more likely to be violent). Kleck notes that there is a correlation there (if not causality): violent crimes increase as a result of the availability of guns, but that since more guns are available more crimes can be avoided.

In other words, guns seem to increase both the potential for violent crime and the potential to stop them.

Again leading to my point: fewer guns means less violent crime. If everyone had guns, there would be more violent crimes, although more would be prevented. If there were fewer guns there would be less violent crimes, and fewer violent crimes prevented overall.

Source: Kleck's study.

Edit: I think I misread some of the figures:

Also note that the 2.45 million violent crimes avoided figure is in contention. Figures actually vary from 800,000 (very low) to 2.5 million (very high). Source.

Edited, Apr 7th 2009 1:04pm by LockeColeMA

Edited, Apr 7th 2009 2:49pm by LockeColeMA

How about 8 school kids dead, 13 wounded, and 2 adults wounded as well? With a knife. Want to know where that happened?

Japan. Where guns are illegal.



People kill people. Period. With whatever weapons are handy. You outlaw the guns, and they'll use knifes and clubs. What's amusing is that Japan is proving the slippery slope here and are currently considering strict knife-control legislation...


We push to illegalize the weapons because it's the easy seeming "solution", not because it's the right thing to do. There is no easy solution. The problem is human nature, not the existence of weapons.

Give that kid a gun and he would have killed all 23.

balenic,



Give the teacher a gun and he might not have killed anyone.

Paula,



I'm not going to waste my time describing my relationship with God only to have you insult it. Some things have to be taken on faith, something you know nothing about.