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Originally Posted by Danzig188
i read once about a country on the african continent who banned guns. they still had a high murder rate--everyone offed each other with machetes.
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And on the other side, there's Great Britain, with strict gun control:Here are some stats:
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm
<<The official figures for gun crime in England and Wales in 2002/03 were announced in January 2004. There were a total of 24,070 firearm offences of which 57% (13,822) involved air weapons, the highest number of offences ever. The largest increase in offences was seen with imitation firearms for which there was an annual increase of 46% to 1815 offences.
The latest gun crime figures from Scotland show a total of 970 offences in which a firearm was alleged to have been used in 2003, a reduction of over 9% from 2002. A large proportion of the offences (43 percent) involved air weapons, and 37 percent were committed with unidentified weapons (the latter figure has increased significantly in recent years since Strathclyde (after 2001) and Lothian and Borders (after 2002) stopped making assumptions about what type of weapon was used even if it had not been identified - it was usually assumed that this was an air weapon for statistical returns and this is still likely to be the case). Handguns were involved in 29 offences, the lowest number since 1990. No handgun was used in any offence which caused injury or death.
In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States - over 80 deaths every day. (Source: Hoyert DL, Arias E, Smith BL, Murphy SL, Kochanek, KD. Deaths: Final Data for 1999. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2001;49 (8).)
Between 1993-1999, gun deaths in the United States have declined 27%. (SOURCE:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm, WISQARS, National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, accessed March, 2002.)
In 1999, 58% of all gun deaths were suicides, and 38% were homicides. (SOURCE: Hoyert DL, Arias E, Smith BL, Murphy SL, Kochanek, KD. Deaths: Final Data for 1999. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2001;49 (8).)
Of all suicides, 57% occurred by firearm (SOURCE:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm, Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, accessed March, 2002.)
In 2000, 75,685 people (27/100,000) suffered non-fatal firearm gunshot injuries. (SOURCE: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports for the United States: Crime in the United States 2000: Uniform Crime Reports. Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Justice; 2001.)>>
To put it in statistical comparison:
<<Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated):
Homicide Suicide Unintentional
USA 4.08 (1999) 6.08 (1999) 0.42 (1999)
Canada 0.54 (1999) 2.65 (1997) 0.15 (1997)
Switzerland 0.50 (1999) 5.78 (1998) -
Scotland 0.12 (1999) 0.27 (1999) -
England/Wales 0.12 (1999/00) 0.22 (1999) 0.01 (1999)
Japan 0.04* (1998) 0.04 (1995) <0.01 (1997)
* Homicide & attempted homicide by handgun>>
Danzig, most of the gun control stuff I've read concerns smart guns, background checks, limits on numbers you can purchase and waiting periods. What's wrong with that? Face it, a gun, specifically a handgun, exists for no other purpose that to kill someone. You don't go hunting with handguns. You don't go hunting with automatics. They exist to kill humans. That's it. The only reason. Shouldn't they be more carefully regulated?
People scream and yell about right to own firearms, and yeah, I'd not support anything banning a person's hunting equipment. But no one on the side of the right to own firearms appears even the slightest bit interested in addressing the fact that 80 people per day die due to firearms in this country, and I'll wager the number of murders due to a criminal shooting someone he doesn't know is not 80 per day. None of you seem interested in doing anything to address the fact that accidental shootings and family assaults far outnumber the lives saved due to someone actually managing to kill an intruder in their homes.
Do I support banning firearms outright? Hell, no. But do I support making them harder to obtain? Sure do. A gun should not be an impulse buy, ever. Yes, criminals will still get them. But right now more law-abiding people are dying due to firearms accidents and attacks of passion of their own making than are preventing crimes in their homes and that's not right.
And Danzig, what makes that woman detestable in her rant about the march is that she is using a fear tactic, rather than providing any kind of intelligent commentary on why these women are wrong. How many of those marchers do you think lost a child, a friend, a spouse in a firearm accident? And here she is, telling them it's going to be their own fault when they get raped. What kind of intelligent discourse is that? What kind of spokesperson for a right to own firearms is that? You really want someone like that speaking for you? Bleah, say I. You can have her.