Map: Gun deaths since Newtown

[jigsy]

Feb 1, 2013 13:06:03 GMT -5 susieq said:

Feb 1, 2013 12:32:45 GMT -5 mbcdefg said:

I'm not talking about totally banning guns, because obviously that's never going to happen. I'm talking about tightening restrictions even further.

And this goes back to my comment about not being raised around guns, but honestly, I don't see the "need" for a gun. Personal preference, sure. I wouldn't feel any safer if I had a gun in my house for protection.

Also if you dont have time to defend yourself with a gun what makes you
think you will have time to grab a phone, dial 911 and tell the
dispatcher where you are before the bad guys get to you. 

I imagine it'd take a lot less time to grab my phone from on top of my nightstand and dial 911, than it would take for me to get a gun out of a locked safe and load it and get into position to fire it, no?

Nope I can get a shot off from an unloaded gun in less than 15 seconds. 
You cannot dial 911 and tell them where you are in that amount of
time.  Much less waiting valuable minutes for the police to come while
your family is being assaulted, raped, murdered...

Feeling safe with a gun in your house is a matter of training and practice.  No one is saying that you have to have one.  I just know that my odds of surviving an attack are much greater with one.  I know the laws and how to safely operate the firearms that are at my disposal. 

And I do realize you specifically did not say to ban them.  Another poster made the comment that we would be better off w/out them.  Most mass gun deaths though occur where gun use / ownership is restricted and not where guns are permitted.   So why are we going to put more bans on guns when statistics have proven it does not work.

The often-cited number that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year in the United States is just wrong. (http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPAM_Cook_Ludwig_Hemenway_2007.pdf) A survey of criminals who had been shot in a Washington, DC jail indicated that, far from being injured by their victims, they had almost all been shot by another criminal. When combined with other evidence, that defensive gun use is quite rare: “to believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.”

Further, when someone is involved in a fire-arm related incident, they will often cite that it was in a defensive manner, when in fact they were actually using the gun as a means for intimidation (See George Zimmerman) (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/) 

[awkwardpenguin]

Feb 1, 2013 13:11:36 GMT -5 hamster said:

FWIW, here's a good (but long) article on gun control.

larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

Thanks for sharing.  This was a very thought provoking article.

[Deleted]

Feb 1, 2013 11:03:06 GMT -5 susieq said:

Feb 1, 2013 10:04:17 GMT -5 mbcdefg said:

What countries are you referring to?

And when you say "all of the meat that we eat," do you mean "we" as in you and your family (which is what I'm guessing you mean), or "we" collectively as a society? And is hunting your meat your own personal preference, or is it done out of necessity because otherwise you couldn't afford it?

You can start with Britain vs the US Where guns are banned
Assault 2.8% vs the US 1.2%
Rape 0.9% vs the US 0.4%
Gun Deaths 14
Total crime victims 26.4% vs the US 21.1%

Australia where guns are banned
Assault 2.4%
Rape 1%
Gun Deaths 59
Total crime victims 30.1% vs the US 21.1%

While the # of gun deaths is a lot lower it does NOT take into account the population size.  The US death by guns INCLUDES suicides. 

All the meat that my family eats is hunted.  Society could suffer as a whole if this way of providing is taken away.  We place our survival completely on cow feed lots, transportation systems and distribution systems. 

Guns are banned in neither Great Britain or Australia.

So, did you make up those statistics also?