just random stories, pics, and opinionated articles of mine

[FriendlyFace]

I'm not saying it's the same thing, I'm saying that just because lack of regulation of something may cause less crime as a result of the business surrounding it doesn't mean it's right. And I called you bloodthirsty because of your desire to attempt to take another human being's life (and in doing so risk your own), not because you think you should be able to own a gun. I completely respect your right to throw away your own life in defense of your stuff. I just don't think it's very smart. You've clearly never been robbed at gunpoint if you think it's a good idea to attack someone who's shoving a gun in your face.

[DeletePlease]

Are you aware that in general firearms that are acquired illegally started out by being sold legally (inside the US) to the wrong people? If guns were banned, there is no doubt that criminals would have a much harder time getting their hands on them. Not really. That's like saying crack would be harder to obtain if it was banned but... The problem is that those guns were sold to the wrong people in the first place. nor did I feel physically threatened as I know that a burglar isn't at all likely to hurt you unless you fuck with them That must be a really nice city to live in. Stop comparing guns to drugs. Why? It's a valid point. Both are very highly sought after commodities that have proven to be a huge boon on the black market. Guns would have to be bought by street criminals? Do they have to buy them? Perhaps it would be harder for them to buy them if they couldn't obtain them from any gun-show parking lot where there is no trace of the sale. Living in a city where daylight executions on busy streets aren't a surprise and gang wars are a seasonal thing, I have to disagree. Gun and drugs are very easy to come buy. Especially in cities where gangs are a problem. You can't buy crack, sherm, etc in shops, but nearly every single kid knows how and where to get it. It's very easily smuggled in through ports and across the continent. There's absolutely no reason why banning guns altogether, or even just assault rifles, would change that. If anything, it'd cause a huge boon in the black market. There's a certain degree of regulation that's sensible, but that doesn't mean banning certain types of guns (which is sfgssgfssfas-worthy, all things considered). The shops need to be regulated. Jon Stewart did a segment on this a little while back that covered the utter failings of the current "safety net" behind weapons sales and enforcement. I'd post a video but I can't find it. That needs to be fixed, drug prohibition needs to end (Portugal has proven that the decriminalization of ALL drugs for personal use works), and America needs to do MUCH more in regards to mental health. Those three areas of concern need to be addressed before even thinking of banning guns.

[FriendlyFace]

That must be a really nice city to live in. So in your town the burglars are all murderers? I'm from Baltimore, friend. Yeah it's a nice city to live in, but I can guarantee you it's a lot more dangerous than pretty much anywhere in Canada. You're lucky if your gang wars are seasonal. In a dangerous place you learn not to fuck with the guy with the gun, because if you do you get shot. He's got no reason to shoot you otherwise, and I know that from experience. This is a case where acting on your fear by trying to "defend yourself" (attacking someone who's just going for an honest robbery) will actually get you killed. I'll say again, I don't have a problem with you thinking it's a good idea, I just think it's a very silly risk to take. And by the way, crack is harder to obtain because it's banned. Especially the good stuff. You're honestly telling me that it wouldn't be easier (and cheaper) if you could just buy it in a store? Or grow coca plants in your front yard, extract some nice, pure cocaine and make big piles of crack in your oven (a waste of good coke if you ask me, but you get it)? I know the problem is that the guns are sold to the wrong people, that's the point I was trying to make. If the guns aren't sold to any people, then they aren't being sold to the wrong people, and therefore the black market suffers. While I know this, as I said before I don't support a gun ban. Just heavy regulation.

[Universal Mind]

I'm not saying it's the same thing, I'm saying that just because lack of regulation of something may cause less crime as a result of the business surrounding it doesn't mean it's right. And I called you bloodthirsty because of your desire to attempt to take another human being's life (and in doing so risk your own), not because you think you should be able to own a gun. I completely respect your right to throw away your own life in defense of your stuff. I just don't think it's very smart. You've clearly never been robbed at gunpoint if you think it's a good idea to attack someone who's shoving a gun in your face. It's a good idea to shoot somebody who has broken into your house, if you can do it. If a person breaks into your house, that person is likely to shoot you if he sees you. If there are any females in the house, he very well might be there to rape them. Also, the point isn't all about shooting the intruder. It is also about making the intruder afraid to break into your house in the first place. Like I said, neighborhoods in my area do not have a problem with burglary because there are more guns than people out here. Criminals are terrified of robbing this area. In the art district of Jackson, people in large numbers put themselves out there as anti-gun and get their asses robbed blind. They sometimes get raped, and they sometimes get killed. People are afraid to walk the streets at night. Doesn't that tell you something? My brother was help up at gun point in Belhaven. I don't think he should have pulled a Clint Eastwood move in that situation, but I do wish he had been living in a neighborhood where thugs are scared to rob people. If Belhaven were a neighborhood known for having gun lovers for residents, it would be a much safer neighborhood. Guns would have to be bought by street criminals? Do they have to buy them? Perhaps it would be harder for them to buy them if they couldn't obtain them from any gun-show parking lot where there is no trace of the sale. They would be buying them like crazy. Making something harder is not necessarily enough to make it not happen. It's not hard any way. Guns are bought on the streets all the time now even though guns are legal. Do you think that making guns illegal will make them suddenly stop being brought to the streets? It hasn't worked with drugs. Why would it work with guns? Why would good people go to jail? It's unlikely anyone would ever come to your door demanding your gun, and if they did and you fought the people using your gun it would automatically turn you into a bad person. They would go to jail for possessing illegal items. People don't deserve to go to jail for having guns to protect themselves. Do you know any good people who have gone to jail for drug possession? It's a major injustice. Jail should be for victimizers only.

[DeletePlease]

This is a case where acting on your fear by trying to "defend yourself" (attacking someone who's just going for an honest robbery) will actually get you killed. I'll say again, I don't have a problem with you thinking it's a good idea, I just think it's a very silly risk to take. I don't own a gun, nor do I ever want one in my home. But to say that you don't have to worry about someone who's "just going for an honest robbery" is beyond ridiculous. Violent home invasions are a thing. Man wounded in violent home invasion : Vancouver & B.C. : Video New Westminster man in hospital after violent home invasion 4 suspects charged in violent Oshawa home invasion | Globalnews.ca Police hunt for three suspects after violent home invasion in Windsor | CTV Kitchener News Justin Derek Rao sentenced to 12 years forgang-rape-of-woman-during-b-c-home-invasion/ These aren't isolated incidents, they happen frequently. I doubt that girl was gang raped in front of her family because she "took a silly risk [by attacking the burglars]." Sure, it's usually best to simply comply when someone breaks into your home, chances are they'll leave you alone. But usually ≠ always. If someone decides to keep a firearm in their home to protect themselves from violent home invasions, it's not just a "silly risk to take." Being physically/sexually attacked by intruders is a very valid concern many people share. And by the way, crack is harder to obtain because it's banned. Especially the good stuff. You're honestly telling me that it wouldn't be easier (and cheaper) if you could just buy it in a store? Or grow coca plants in your front yard, extract some nice, pure cocaine and make big piles of crack in your oven (a waste of good coke if you ask me, but you get it)? If crack was decriminalized, addicts would receive the medical attention they need instead of simply being locked in a prison (where drugs are even more readily available). Portugal can attest to that - hard drug use dropped dramatically ever since they decriminalized all substances for personal use. That coupled with proper drug education (as opposed to what we have now in North America - blatant lies and exaggerations), would lead to less social stigma being attached to people with drug addictions, far better treatment programs, less experimentation with hard drugs, etc. Decriminalization of crack would also cut the price a fair bit (drug prices are set based on demand for the substance and the risk factor of their sale) - the lowered profit margin would mean less incentive to go into that trade. So when you factor all of that in, crack sales would definitely dry up a fair bit. As for the "crack is harder is harder to obtain because it's banned" part... Study Says It’s Easier For Teens To Buy Marijuana Than Beer | NORML Blog, Marijuana Law Reform That study mentions marijuana, but the same can be said of crack, sherm, meth, etc. I know the problem is that the guns are sold to the wrong people, that's the point I was trying to make. If the guns aren't sold to any people, then they aren't being sold to the wrong people, and therefore the black market suffers. Except that's not how the black market works... You can't stop guns from being sold to everyone. There are millions upon millions of guns available world-wide, and many would simply be shipped to America if you were to somehow eliminate all US-owned firearms (which is impossible considering the number that are currently in circulation). That doesn't weaken the black market in any way whatsoever; it just intensifies competitiveness in that trade - inevitably bolstering the underground market.

[FriendlyFace]

That study only applies to teenagers. For anyone else, crack would be much easier to get if you could buy it in a store. And by the way, I'm not for drug prohibition. I hate dealing with the people that I do in order to get my drugs. I would much prefer that they were easier to buy. Which, if they were in a store, they would be. I don't think that's an arguable point (unless you are, as you said, a teenager, although I personally never had any problems buying booze as a teen). Anyway, I think I'm done here. I was only sharing how I've stayed alive through multiple home invasions and armed robberies. I will continue to do what has kept me safe. As I've said many times, I don't care how you handle the situation. I don't understand why my indifference to your actions incites so much aggression from you people.

[Universal Mind]

Aggressive? We were just disagreeing with you and telling you why. This is a discussion forum. In your post, you said that you had no trouble getting booze although it was illegal for you to buy it. You also said that you buy illegal drugs now. The bans did not stop you. Although getting the other drugs is harder for you, you still get them. That is case in point of the fact that making something harder to get is not the same as making you not get it. They are two different things. That is how guns on the streets will work if guns are made illegal. People who want to buy and sell guns on the streets are going to continue to do so even if you throw them some bumps in the road. With that being the case, I deserve a shot at defending myself and adding to their fear of robbing and raping people.

[FriendlyFace]

Believe me, I would smoke a lot more weed if it were cheaply and easily bought in a store or grown in my garden. I'd keep other drug use at a minimum for my health, but I'd be smoking probably a quarter ounce of hash a day. Obviously prohibition doesn't keep me from buying drugs, but it does limit their availability and jack up the prices, thus making them harder to get. In response to your post below, you roll the dice anytime you get into a fight with a deadly weapon. When you start disagreeing with someone's experience because of your own beliefs, I think that's a bit aggressive. Seriously, do you think I'm lying to you about what's worked for me? Some of you seem to think that if I had introduced violence to the situation, there would have been a better outcome. I know for a fact that if I had done anything differently I would have been killed at least twice already. I've stayed alive all these years. You can't disagree with that. I'll say for the last time, you do what you want. Good day.

[Universal Mind]

I didn't say you did anything wrong. I just think you would have been safer if you were living in a known gun lover neighborhood and that killing the scum bag would have made you, your roommates (if you had any), and your property safer... if you killed him. I think you deserved at least the chance to do that. If you had females in the house, they were in danger of being raped for all you knew at the time. Also, some rapists are gay. I don't want to roll those dice. If you do, I understand.

[melanieb]

I've posted a couple articles here. It's not required reading but they do make good points in the discussion. I would appreciate it if [you, collectively] read them. I liked reading this story. It helps convey the messages I have been trying to express. Spoiler for Do Guns Make Us Safer?: Taken from: Do guns make us safer? - CNN.com **Editor's note: David Frum is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a CNN contributor. He is the author of seven books, including a new novel, "Patriots." Washington (CNN) -- Do guns make us safer? It's an article of faith among many gun owners that yes they do. Last week, I presented in this space some evidence of the dangers of gun ownership: the elevated risks of accident and suicide in households that own guns. I pointed to a paradox: More Americans support gun rights, even as fewer Americans own guns. I explained this paradox with data that suggested many Americans hold false ideas about the prevalence of crime -- and wrongly look to gun ownership for self-defense. Over the following seven days, I heard from many angry gun-rights supporters. They argued that gun ownership is necessary for self-protection. They narrated stories of how their guns had saved them or their loved ones in armed confrontations. And of course that must sometimes be true. The question is: How often is it true? And how do the benefits of widespread gun ownership compare with the measurable harms in higher rates of accident, suicide and crime? Government figures from the National Survey of Criminal Victimization suggest 100,000 uses a year of guns in self-defense against crime, the vast majority of these uses being the display of weapons to deter or dissuade. There are some problems with these government numbers, beginning with the fact that they are based on data from the early 1990s, when crime rates were much higher than they are today. The number of criminal attempts has declined 30% to 40% since then, and one would expect the number of occasions for self-defense to decline correspondingly. For gun advocates, however, the main problem with the government estimate is that it is not nearly high enough to support their case that private gun ownership is the best way to stop crime. Many of them prefer another statistic, this from a study published in 1995 arguing that Americans use guns in self-defense some 2.5 million times a year, or once every 13 seconds. A Google search finds more than 1 million citations of this study posted online. You can read the study here. The trouble is that this claim of 2.5 million defensive gun uses is manifestly flawed and misleading. Let's review the ways: 1) Even if you think the 2.5 million statistic was correct at the time it was computed, it must be obsolete today, for the same reason that the victimization survey data is obsolete. The 1995 study that generated the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses was based upon data collected when crime rates were vastly higher than they are today. Some of the data was collected in 1981, near the very peak of the post-Vietnam War crime wave. It's just incredible on its face that defensive gun use would remain fixed at one level even as criminal attempts tumbled by one-third to one-half. 2) When we hear the phrase "defensive gun use," we're inclined to imagine a gun owner producing a weapon to defend himself or herself against bodily threat. Not so fast. The authors of the 1995 study aggregated 13 prior polls of gun users, most of which did not define what was meant by "use." As the authors of the 1995 aggregation study themselves ruefully acknowledged: "The lack of such detail raises the possibility that the guns were not actually 'used' in any meaningful way. Instead, (respondents) might be remembering occasions on which they merely carried a gun for protection 'just in case' or investigated a suspicious noise in their backyard, only to find nothing." In other words, even if the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses had been correct at some point back in the early 1990s or early 1980s, the vast majority of those "uses" may be householders picking up a shotgun before checking out the noises in the garage made by raccoons rooting through the trash. 3) The figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses is supposed to represent the number of such uses per year. Yet none of the studies aggregated in the 1995 paper measured annual use. Most asked some version of the question, "Have you ever?" Two asked instead, "Have you within the past five years?" The authors of the 1995 study took those latter two surveys, multiplied the rate in the survey by the number of U.S. households, then divided by five to produce an annual figure. But people's memories of fixed periods of time are highly unreliable. It's not very likely that many respondents thought, "Today it's August 1990. I do remember scaring off a prowler in June 1984. But that was more than five years ago, so the answer to the question is 'No.' Not within the past five years." More likely they thought, "I'll never forget the night I warned off a prowler with my shotgun. That was scary. Man, I'm glad I had my gun ready. When was that anyway? Three years ago? Four? I don't remember exactly, but the answer to the question is 'Yes.' " 4) Meanwhile, over in the world of hard numbers, the FBI counted an average of 213 justified firearm homicides per year over the period 2005-2010. If the figure of 2.5 million defensive gun uses were any way close to accurate, it would imply that brandishing a gun in self-defense led to a fatality only 0.00852% of the time. That seems almost miraculously low. 5) Underneath all these statistical problems is a larger conceptual problem. When we hear "defensive gun use," we're invited to think of a law-abiding citizen confronting a criminal aggressor. Yet crime does not always present itself so neatly. The vast majority of homicides take place between intimates, not strangers. Assaults, too, are often an acquaintance crime. When guns are produced by two parties to a confrontation, one party may deter the other. Yet it may be seriously misleading to designate one of these persons as a "criminal" and the other as a "law-abiding citizen." Perhaps when we hear "defensive gun use," we should not imagine a householder confronting a prowler. Perhaps we should think of two acquaintances, both with some criminal history, getting into a drunken fight, both producing guns, one ending up dead or wounded, the other ending up as a "DGU" statistic -- but both of them entangled in a scenario that would have produced only injuries if neither had carried a gun. Avlon: Is it still too soon to talk gun control? To be clear: I'm not disputing that guns sometimes save lives. They must. I'm certainly not disputing that the Constitution secures the right of individual gun ownership. It does. I'm questioning the claim that widespread gun ownership makes America a safer place. The research supporting that claim is pretty weak -- and is contradicted above all by the plain fact that most other advanced countries have many fewer guns and also many fewer crimes and criminals. Should you own a gun? In some few cases, the answer to that question of wisdom is probably yes. But most of the time, gun owners are frightening themselves irrationally. They have conjured in their own imaginations a much more terrifying environment than genuinely exists -- and they are living a fantasy about the security their guns will bestow. And to the extent that they are right -- to the extent that the American environment is indeed more dangerous than the Australian or Canadian or German or French environment -- the dangers gun owners face are traceable to the prevalence of the very guns from which they so tragically mistakenly expect to gain safety. Follow @CNNOpinion on Twitter. Join us at Facebook/CNNOpinion. Another good article that cites sources Spoiler for The Self-Defense Self-Delusion: Taken from: The Self-Defense Self-Delusion About FAIR- What’s FAIR? The Self-Defense Self-Delusion Owning guns doesn't actually help stop gun violence By Steve Rendall In the gun lobby’s arsenal of propaganda, the claim that guns make people safer may be the most potent. After all, while gun advocates make grandiose—and historically inaccurate (Consortium News, 12/21/12)—claims about the Second Amendment being designed to enable armed citizens to resist government tyranny, no sane person believes individuals armed with handguns and rifles would stand a chance against a trillion-dollar 21st century military backed by vast surveillance systems. But protecting one’s family, home or person? That seems sensible enough. If guns make us safer, as they say, then having a gun for self-defense isn’t an irrational choice. The premise is regularly featured in news reports. This Week host George Stephanopoulos (ABC, 1/20/13) offered no challenge when former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum claimed, “There are more people who protect themselves and stop violence ...happen[ing] to them with the ownership of a gun than [there are] people who commit crimes with a gun.” Fox News, of course, where gun ownership is practically a sacrament, has featured a virtual rhumba line of pro-gun guests touting the virtues of safety by gun. Hannity’s January 18 show might as well have been renamed the NRA Hour, featuring first NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre stating that the vast majority of the American public “deeply believes in the Second Amendment, deeply believes they have a right to protect themselves”—followed by former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, director of the NRA’s National School Shield Project, who told gun-toting host Sean Hannity that the solution to school shootings was “to have the armed, trained presence there to really protect the children.” It’s not just conservatives and Fox pundits who embrace the self-defense argument. Discussing gun regulations on CBS’s Face the Nation (12/16/12), anchor Bob Schieffer endorsed the view that protection was a legitimate rationale for gun ownership: “By now, the pros and cons of the gun issue are well known.... Of course, there are legitimate reasons for both pleasure and protection to own guns.” On January 9, CNN’s Anderson Cooper presented a segment that gave more or less equal weight to arguments for and against the notion that guns make us safer, concluding that it’s hard to say for sure: The one true thing that we know about the gun debate here at home, that neither side has a monopoly on the truth, or even the facts, because the facts can be so hard to establish. One side has studies linking gun ownership with violent death. But correlation is not causation. The other side has research showing when people are allowed to carry concealed weapons, violent crimes slow down. Yet newer studies cast doubt on that conclusion. Studying the problem is hard, said Cooper, “with a shortage of facts but a surplus of victims and anguish and loss, the debate so far has evolved into passionately stated and exclusively competing articles of faith.” But is it really hard to study the effects of guns on public health and safety? And is the debate merely between competing articles of faith? Perhaps more to the point, does the evidence support Schieffer’s and the others’ claims that guns are a rational choice for self-defense? The pro-gun crowd sure wants you to think so, promoting studies over the years claiming guns are used defensively thousands of times per day and that broader gun ownership makes communities safer, and repeating anecdotes in which guns are reported to have thwarted crimes. A favorite study of these advocates is 1995’s “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun” (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall/95), by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which found that guns were used defensively about 2.5 million times annually in the U.S.—or almost 7,000 times a day. Researcher John Lott conducted another study favored by gun advocates, published in his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime, which claimed that increasing numbers of concealed carry permits in a given area are associated with decreasing crime rates. Both studies have been convincingly challenged in the scientific community. In a 2004 meta-study of gun research, the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science found that Lott’s claims were not supported by his data. And when Lott misrepresented the report (New York Post, 12/29/04), the NAS published a letter (Deltoid, 1/26/05) listing his distor-tions. Shooting Down the More Guns Less Crime Hypothesis (11/02), a paper pub-lished by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found crime actually increased in states and locales where concealed carry laws had been adopted. The Harvard School of Public Health’s David Hemenway took on Kleck in Survey Research and Self Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1997), demonstrating that because of the nature of the data, Kleck’s self-reported phone survey finding 2.5 million defensive uses of guns per year was wildly exaggerated. For example, Kleck says guns were used to defend against 845,000 burglaries in 1992, a year in which the National Crime Victimization Survey says there were fewer than 6 million burglaries. Hemenway put together facts from the well-regarded NCVS—that someone was known to be home in just 22 percent of burglaries (1.3 million), and that fewer than half of U.S. households have firearms—and pointed out that Kleck “asks us to believe that burglary victims in gun-owning households use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time.” Hemenway noted that respondents may also have a distorted view of “self-defense”—e.g., mistakenly thinking they are legally defending themselves when they draw a gun during a minor altercation. As the Harvard researcher and his co-authors in another study pointed out (Injury Prevention, 12/00): “Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense. Most self-reported self-defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society.” A National Crime Victimization Survey report, controlling for many of the methodological problems in Kleck, supported Hemenway, finding 65,000 defensive gun uses per year (NCVS Report, 1997). Current NCVS estimates are in the 100,000 range. To assess the benefits and costs of pervasive gun ownership—there are currently 300 million firearms in the U.S., and roughly 80 million gun owners (CNSNews.com, 2/4/13)—it’s useful to compare the self-defense numbers to the gun crime numbers. The National Institute of Justice reported that in 2005, “11,346 persons were killed by firearm violence and 477,040 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm.” Or, to put it in starker terms, the FBI’s Crime in the United States report for 1998 found that for every instance that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 50 people lost their lives in handgun homicides. With a gun murder rate about 20 times the average of other industrialized countries (Washington Post, 12/14/12), it’s hard to argue with Hemenway’s conclusion (Harvard Injury Control Research Center, “Homicide”): “Where there are more guns, there is more homicide.” A New England Journal of Medicine study (10/7/93) in 1993 concluded that a gun in the home raised the chances someone in a family will be killed by nearly three times, with the danger to women—who are more likely to be killed by a spouse, intimate or relative—even greater. A 1997 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine (4/14/97) reinforces that danger, finding that the homicide risk for women increased 3.4 times in a home with one or more guns. Taken together with the heightened risk of suicide and accidental deaths posed by guns in the home, these numbers demolish the argument that guns enhance family protection. Much of the research on guns and public health dates back to the 1990s, it should be noted, because of the near total ban that Congress imposed on public funding for studies of guns and public health in 1996, singling out the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). “Scientific inquiry in this field has been systematically starved, and as a result almost no one does it,” University of California–Davis professor Garen Winte-mute told Huffington Post (1/10/13). The ban was driven by the NRA, whose anti-inquiry view is shared by gun researcher Lott; when conservative talkshow host Mark Levin (WABC, 1/16/13) asked Lott whether he wanted “the Centers for Disease Control to be delving into studying the gun issue,” Lott responded, “No, no, I don’t.” In addition to underplaying the statistical case that guns are a destructive force in society, the media have largely ignored experts who can explain the practical reasons why guns are not necessarily a rational choice for self-defense. An exception was 20/20’s report, “If I Only Had a Gun” (ABC, 4/10/09), which explored the issue with firearms experts. 20/20 took a group of college students of varying familiarity with guns, and provided them with professional training exceeding the level required by most states for concealed carry permits. Then the producers recorded the students reacting to simulations in which an aggressive, active gunman entered a classroom. In every simulation, the student failed to stop the aggressor and was badly or fatally wounded; in one instance, the student narrowly missed shooting a victim of the assault. According to the weapons experts 20/20 consulted, only professionals who drill continuously in live shooter situations can hope to succeed in such chaotic situations. Firearms instructor Glen Dorney told host Diane Sawyer, “Even police officers, through extensive training, if you don’t continue with your training, ongoing training, it’s a perishable skill. You’ll lose it.” When Sawyer asked him, “How long before you’re going to lose it, even at your level of training?” Dorney answered, “If you go for a month to two months without training, you lose it.” A Time feature (1/16/13) that looked at how unpredictably even well-trained police respond to crisis situations came to similar conclusions. The debate over the wisdom of wholesale arming of citizens for the purpose of self-defense is not a debate between two sides arguing “articles of faith,” and there is no shortage of facts. The verdict has been in for years: Guns, as they are bought and sold and regulated in U.S. society, do far more harm than good. And if we had a media culture where public health actually mattered in discussions of guns, the argument that they are helpful for protection or self-defense would be relegated to the margins.

[Universal Mind]

Those articles miss the boat for the most part, but one does address a supposed increase in gun violence as a result of concealed-carry permits. The reality's I know go counter to that claim, so I am extremely skeptical. Also, what other factors changed? Did rapes go down? Did the killing of scum go up? Did robberies go down? Do people feel safer in their homes? I explained the Belhaven vs. Barnett Bend situation in the Jackson area. Here is another situation that hasn't been explained away. Gun Ownership Mandatory In Kennesaw, Georgia --- Crime Rate Plummets Remember that it's not all about each person being safer with a gun in a vacuum. It's about a gun owning population making people not want to screw with the population in the first place. I am talking about robbery and violence that never happen in the first place because of deterrent. On top of that, no matter what the success rate is for people with guns, every innocent person deserves the chance to defend himself, even if his odds are 1 to 1 trillion. He still deserves the chance if he wants to use it. I know what to do with a gun, and I am not typical Joe gun fail man. I deserve my chance no matter how bad the next person sucks with a gun. My father caught a burglar with a gun a long time ago, and the piece of shit was put in a cage where he belonged. Some people can do that, and our right to try should not be taken away. The piece of shit is going to have a gun, so it is completely unfair to try to take away mine.

[Descensus]

I'm only passively following this thread, but I was shown a study done by two criminologists on banning guns and reducing murder and suicide rates a while back. Seems reasonable, so I figured I'd put it here. http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/...useronline.pdf

[Universal Mind]

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/...useronline.pdf I can't get copy and paste to work right with that for some reason, so I will just announce that the conclusion starts on the second to last page.

[Universal Mind]

I don't agree with Ann Coulter on everything, but she hits some nails on their heads here. This is good stuff.