SJamieson on 13/1/2003 at 01:46
What are the statistics for children who shoot themselves and or others with
their parent's or a relatives gun, they found by accident?
Or teenagers shot by a classmate who was suffering paranioa/depression/schitzophrenia etc or just liked killing things?
Who should we be protecting with all these guns?
Surely guns should be in the hands of those best placed to use them, i.e. Soldiers and police.
I'm sure you'll find your statistics don't hold water in any country where guns are strictly controlled.
And the very few gun crimes perpetrated don't make much of an impact against the figures for the US.
Fixxxer on 13/1/2003 at 05:06
Statistics for gun accidents can be found (
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvacci.html) here.
As you can see, the only accidental death that is less common in the US is being poisoned by gases or vapors. As for kids who get their parents guns, the parents should have taught them to be responsible respecting the guns and kept them somewhere safe. The answer isn't banning guns from everyone (who obeys the law; criminals obviously don't fall into this category and would keep their guns and get more on the black market anyway...) when only a small number of the 70 million gun owners in the country are irresponsible to the point of such a tragedy occuring.
About other countries: In the first year after their sweeping gun bans, australia saw nationwide increases in violent crime. Why? Criminals didn't have to worry about being resisted by armed citizens anymore. The homicide rate in victoria rose 300%. Armed robbery went up 44% or so nationwide, etc. Isreal, a country that has a very well armed citizenry, has much lower violent crime rates than the US (well, there's all the terrorism, but random acts of violence, muggings, burlary, murder, etc are all low. The terrorism has it's own obvious causes that have nothing to do with the proliferation of small arms among the Israeli population). However, I don't want to incur the further wrath of any other disgruntled DX lovers, so if you want to continue to talk about this subject, feel free to stop by (
http://pub69.ezboard.com/bbrewmastersworldofwhatever) WOW, a forum I frequent. You don't have to register to post, and I think there might already be a gun control thread going. Let's drop the subject in this thread though.
Marecki on 13/1/2003 at 23:09
Great. Now could you please get this out of here and to CommChat?
Fixxxer on 13/1/2003 at 23:53
Quote:
Originally posted by Fixxxer Let's drop the subject in this thread though. Yeah, that's what ^^^^^^ that was for.
