A
Annie39
Guest
Hi LS
You write: From my point of view, it’s not a situation that will be resolved with anecdotal evidence at all.
Me: Will you at least acknowledge that my anecdotal evidence beats your “Nigerian scammers and Marijuana” non non sequiturs?
Regarding the man who massacred those people in Port Arthur; it seems that he was mentally unstable. A member of my family is unstable and is periodically suicidal. There is no way this person would ever have access to our guns. We have a gun safe that this person won’t get near let alone be told the combination. I believe that if a person has ever been suicidal or homicidal, that fact should go on his/her record for life and the person should not be allowed to own a gun also guns in the homes the person visits should be locked away.
You write: Police always advise after every crime report, not to play hero in these situations. Normally, the gun is being used to intimidate and subdue a victim… not to kill them and life is more important than goods
Me: Hero? I wonder how they would define the seasoned citizen who confronted a man breaking into her home. If your mom was home alone one day and someone broke in what would you have her do? Should she just hope that the person is after only her goods? A policeman of my acquaintance was the first responding officer to a home invasion robbery. The victim was an older lady with gray hair. She was laying face down lifeless. She looked for all the world like his mom from the back. This officer was granted leave for a few days to come to grips with this. I’m thinking that he wished that lady had a gun.
I find it interesting that the Australians are counting on their thugs to ONLY intimidate and subdue the victims of their society.
Here are some statistics regarding the gun issue in the USA:
Mass shootings aren’t the problem. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,” says the report. “Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” Compare that with the 335,000 gun deaths between 2000 and 2010 alone.
Gun suicide is a bigger killer than gun homicide. From 2000 to 2010, “firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearm-related violence in the United States,” says the report. Firearm sales are often a warning: Two studies found that “a small but significant fraction of gun suicides are committed within days to weeks after the purchase of a handgun, and both also indicate that gun purchasers have an elevated risk of suicide for many years after the purchase of the gun.”
Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report. The three million figure is probably high, “based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys.” But a much lower estimate of 108,000 also seems fishy, “because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” Furthermore, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Annie
You write: From my point of view, it’s not a situation that will be resolved with anecdotal evidence at all.
Me: Will you at least acknowledge that my anecdotal evidence beats your “Nigerian scammers and Marijuana” non non sequiturs?
Regarding the man who massacred those people in Port Arthur; it seems that he was mentally unstable. A member of my family is unstable and is periodically suicidal. There is no way this person would ever have access to our guns. We have a gun safe that this person won’t get near let alone be told the combination. I believe that if a person has ever been suicidal or homicidal, that fact should go on his/her record for life and the person should not be allowed to own a gun also guns in the homes the person visits should be locked away.
You write: Police always advise after every crime report, not to play hero in these situations. Normally, the gun is being used to intimidate and subdue a victim… not to kill them and life is more important than goods
Me: Hero? I wonder how they would define the seasoned citizen who confronted a man breaking into her home. If your mom was home alone one day and someone broke in what would you have her do? Should she just hope that the person is after only her goods? A policeman of my acquaintance was the first responding officer to a home invasion robbery. The victim was an older lady with gray hair. She was laying face down lifeless. She looked for all the world like his mom from the back. This officer was granted leave for a few days to come to grips with this. I’m thinking that he wished that lady had a gun.
I find it interesting that the Australians are counting on their thugs to ONLY intimidate and subdue the victims of their society.
Here are some statistics regarding the gun issue in the USA:
Mass shootings aren’t the problem. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,” says the report. “Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” Compare that with the 335,000 gun deaths between 2000 and 2010 alone.
Gun suicide is a bigger killer than gun homicide. From 2000 to 2010, “firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearm-related violence in the United States,” says the report. Firearm sales are often a warning: Two studies found that “a small but significant fraction of gun suicides are committed within days to weeks after the purchase of a handgun, and both also indicate that gun purchasers have an elevated risk of suicide for many years after the purchase of the gun.”
Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report. The three million figure is probably high, “based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys.” But a much lower estimate of 108,000 also seems fishy, “because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” Furthermore, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Annie
