🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Mar10.161419.10152@apgea.army.mil> ahgrabow@apgea.army.mil (Alexander H. Grabowski <ahgrabow>) writes:
>I just heard some very interesting numbers on WBAL's morning show
>with Uncel Al. I think, they perhaps might wake up some people-
>but perhaps I am too optimistic.

Hardly a reliable source of information, it would seem (see below).
That's "fetishists" by the way.


>Facts:
>
>Every year, more US-citizens are killed by guns than during
>the whole, 10-year vietnam war (then: ~53.000).

Fact.  This is incorrect by a wide margin.  The *total* murder rate
for the last 20 years has hovered around the 17,000-22,000 range per 
year.  The percentage of these murders committed with firearms has 
ranged from 58-66%.  This means that the yearly murder rate with guns
is in the 10,000-13,000 range, perhaps a bit more for 1992 (the report
hasn't been issued yet, I don't think), but certainly somewhat shy of 
53,000.

Still a respectable figure, though.  In the 80s, 113,624 people were
murdered by guns in the US.  The worst year in the 80s for murders by
firearms was 1980, BTW.

Source: Department Of Justice, FBI, Uniform Crime Reports for the United
States, 1991, published 1992


>You simply can't brake the laws of logic- more guns out in the streat
>definitely means more killings.

No, you can't "brake" them (well, maybe you can on the "streat"), but
you can apply them with a little more rigor so that they are useful in
a given context.

The question isn't whether or not there are more guns on the street,
which might be debatable (I can't find any clear statistics that
indicate that the number of per capita has risen more than a few
percent over the past decade).  The important question is, "will 
enacting more gun control laws really reduce the number guns on 
the street, and therefore reduce the number of murders?"

Two interesting examples are D.C. and New York, where the gun control
laws are at least approximately as stringent as in the U.K.  Has this
deterred violent crime with guns?  Not significantly.  There is obviously
a deeper social problem which more gun laws might not address at all.  I
do agree that some additional legislation might be in order to rationalize
the current gun procurement process in many states (Virginia particularly
seems to be in chaos), and I'd support any law which would demonstrably
reduce the availability of guns to violent individuals, but I'm not at
all convinced that anyone has a legislative plan for accomplishing this.
Do you?

Logic would dictate that if you could magically make all the guns in
the U.S. disappear, the murder rate would go to zero.  But since this
is clearly impossible, the real problem is in justifying hundreds of
additional cumbersome and costly laws of questionable effectiveness.


>And, yes, I know what is going to come.
>- the right to bear arms (this right refers to the purpose of bearing
>  arms, too: *exclusively* to defend this country)
>- All bad guys will not respect.......
>- All good guys will be helpless......
>- I don't know what I am talking about....
>- One of these days I might be happy if the 'free militia' saves my a**...

Ooops, sorry I didn't fall into your enlightened and open-minded
preconceived categories.  Darn.


>Because it has become a habit for one of the more frequent posters here
>to quote Robert A. Heinlein, let me make a quote from a SF-novel too:
>'Oh, Holy St. Leibovitz, let them dream on!'

What possible relevance could this have to the topic at hand?

<Sorry, no spurious quotations.>
-- 

Dave
lampson@pulse.com