Check out More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott, a well researched, well
reasoned argument by someone who began his research in order to defend his
personal anti-gun convictions. You won't see references to his work quoted by
any of the gun control crowd.
I'm not saying that gun-owners do not kill people. I'm saying that more often
than not illegal gun-owners/users are the people doing the killings. Attempting
to deny legal and law-abiding gun-owners of their right to own and use guns
because others misuse them, is simply over-reactive and over-kill by those who
don't own them or use them.
Considering the fact that an estimated 100,000,000 American citizens currently
own firearms, where is the evidence of nationwide out-of-control gun violence
or epidemics of nation-wide massacres that anti-gun people predict and use as
grounds for more gun control or for repealing the 2nd amendment? If owning a
weapon meant that it would be misused, and if most owners misused them, anarchy
would be the order of the day.
Drug-related killings are undoubtedly a major concern in the large metropolitan
areas mentioned in the report you cited. Solve the drug and the gangs problems
and then revisit the gun violence issue. You would see a drastic drop in
criminal violence, especially gun violence. But how can you do that when so
many "up-right" citizens are users and the police do not have local gangs under
control?
Every senseless killing is deplorable, grievous, and terribly tragic,
especially so when it involves children. But how much gun violence is directly
attributable to responsible gun owners?
How many of those incidents involving children or young people are copy cat
killings by someone intrigued by the seemingly endless media rehashing of
previous incidents? How many are spawned from hours and hours of playing
violent video games in which killing and mayhem are the objects of the game? Do
repetitive games featuring video mayhem cause people to become inured to the
idea of killing real people? Psychologists say that our subconscious minds do
not readily differentiate between repetitive imagination and real activities.
Does that make real attacks easier to contemplate and execute?
It's interesting that no one caught or cared to respond to my citing the
53,000,000 unborn babies murdered since Roe V. Wade (1973). How does that
compare to gun-related killings in the past 40 years? Why haven't we banned
abortion on demand? No one who has watched a sonogram of an unborn baby
desperately moving in an attempt to avoid the suction tube ripping it apart it
by bit can reasonably retain the notion that it is unaware or that it feels no
pain. Avoidance behavior is a sign of awareness.
On the other hand, how can we charge someone who kills a pregnant mother with
double homicide and still maintain the convenient fiction that when it comes to
abortion a developing baby is not a viable human being until birth and
therefore the pregnant woman has the option either to kill it or allow it to
live? (Are we societally schizophrenic or not?) The highest court in our land
decided that it is a "woman's choice" whether to kill or not kill a living
human being and there was no public outcry? What kind of a society have we
become?
Amazingly, we then wonder why some people decide to kill other people--however
they choose to do it. As I said before, guns are not the problem. People are
the problem. We have created a society where many people have no reverence for
the lives of others. Would banning guns solve this problem? You will never
convince the survivors and relatives of the Jewish people who experienced the
holocaust after the Germans had previously disarmed the Jewish population by
banning guns in Jewish communities. Couldn't happen here? It did in New
Orleans after hurricane Katrina. The police and military confiscated every gun
they could find and left the survivors virtually defenseless in perilous times.
Frankly, I suspect that the recent rash of gun purchases has a great deal to do
with the fact that many people have a deep distrust of our government.
As for gun suicides, I wonder what the figures are for non-gun suicides.
Higher, I suspect. Again. guns are not the problem. Once one has made the
decision, the method usually falls to the most "convenient" means. Suicide is
most often a result of severe depression or despair, another result of living
in a society where reverence for life and others has become a diluted concept.
Sometimes the decision to kill oneself is made in the hopes of something better
beyond this life. At other times it is simply a decision to escape a life
deemed intolerable by ceasing to exist. Of major concern is why are so many
young people committing suicide.
My point is that our society has far graver problems than gun ownership and
that we seem to be getting worse that better. Focusing on gun control simply
diverts attention from other far more serious concerns. (A dysfunctional
congress, a drug epidemic, high unemployment, a disastrous national debt,
creeping socialism, etc., etc.)
On the personal level, we have made immorality and narcissism an acceptable way
of life. To prove that, all one has to do is look at how our entertainment
offerings have degenerated. We have sown the seed of permissiveness and reaped
a harvest of immorality. Our personal systems of checks and balances have
suffered as a result. Where there are no absolutes to guide us, morality
becomes a choice. As the foolish psychologists of a few years ago taught: I'm
OK. You're OK. Just do what makes you happy. You see where that gotten us.
Quite possibly, a majority of our society is not OK; else those who are OK have
abdicated all responsibility for those who are not.
Where live is deemed of little value, and personal desires rule, there is
little resistance to ending one or more if the mood strikes. The method one
uses to do that is immaterial. Murders have been with us since Cain killed
Abel. As I recall, he didn't have access to a gun, but he managed. People
always have and always will.
Hoping for a future return to societal sanity.
Robert
---- Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> You might want to peruse this data
>
<http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6230a1.htm>
> A surprise to me was that (for 2009-2010) suicide by firearms (38,126)
> was much higher than homicide by firearms (22,571). In fact suicide in
> the US kills more people that automobile accidents which (IIRC) is about
> 32,000 annually (which is way down from the more than 50,000 of the late
> 1960s).
>
> Chuck Norcutt
>
> 22,571 firearm homicides and 38,126 firearm suicides
> >
> >> On 14 Dec 2013, at 19:19, Chris Crawford <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> Most violent crime (with or without guns) in the USA takes place in large,
> >> heavily policed cities. Rural areas and small towns that have very few
> >> police officers rarely see murders. Fort Wayne, a city of 250,000 has had
> >> nearly 50 murders this year. There are many counties in Indiana that have
> >> not had a murder in decades.
> >>
Probably most of those residents are gun owners. ;o)
> Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
> Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
> Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
>
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|