Gun toting soccer mom shot dead

[JW Frogen]

It is a matter of divinely revealed truth that those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

Perhaps, but if you live in a hiding in a hole you will die never seeing the sun.

 

[Ringel05]

So yeas guns can be used to preserve life as well as take it and the former happens with far greater frequency than the latter.

False. Guns are not used to save lives with a greater frequency than to take them. They are not good at keeping people safe. They are good at making you think you're safe, and they are good for suicide. This is not a random opinion, this is based on evidence of actual use.

"Firearm self-defense is rare compared with gun crimes."
https://www.researchgate.net/public...arm_use_by_US_crime_victims_1987_through_1990

1997 trough 1990, thats pretty funny since most of the states that have adopted "shall issue", open carry and/or concealed carry have done so after 1990.
Per the FBI:

According to the FBI, the states with “shall issue” laws have much lower violent crime rates than the other states, on average: 21% lower total violent crime, 28% lower murder, 43% lower robbery, and 13% lower aggravated assault. Significantly, 13 of the 15 states with the lowest violent crime rates are “shall issue” permit states. The five states with the lowest violent crime rate have all enacted “shall issue” laws.

 

[AllieBaba]

So yeas guns can be used to preserve life as well as take it and the former happens with far greater frequency than the latter.

False. Guns are not used to save lives with a greater frequency than to take them. They are not good at keeping people safe. They are good at making you think you're safe, and they are good for suicide. This is not a random opinion, this is based on evidence of actual use.

"Firearm self-defense is rare compared with gun crimes."
https://www.researchgate.net/public...arm_use_by_US_crime_victims_1987_through_1990

Oh, you're talking about DC, where the murder rate quadrupled after making gun ownership illegal.

Those of us who live in areas with limited police and excessive weaponry leave our doors unlocked and our cars running when we go to the store. Nobody sneaks into our houses at night to steal our kids from their beds...AND we don't have packs of stray dogs running through our towns.

Zero muggings, zero burglaries, zero random rapes.

 

[SmarterThanHick]

1997 trough 1990, thats pretty funny since most of the states that have adopted "shall issue", open carry and/or concealed carry have done so after 1990.
Per the FBI:

According to the FBI, the states with “shall issue” laws have much lower violent crime rates than the other states, on average: 21% lower total violent crime, 28% lower murder, 43% lower robbery, and 13% lower aggravated assault. Significantly, 13 of the 15 states with the lowest violent crime rates are “shall issue” permit states. The five states with the lowest violent crime rate have all enacted “shall issue” laws.

it's great to say that crime is down, but you in no way compared number of gun crimes to number of times guns are used to prevent crimes, as I did. Show the relevant numbers, if you want to argue your point.

Oh, you're talking about DC, where the murder rate quadrupled after making gun ownership illegal.

No. No I'm not. I always find it funny that pro-gun people point to DC as their own "evidence". One tiny area where law abiding citizens can't have guns, but where everyone around that area (and criminals in that area) can. That's just a setup for disaster.

Those of us who live in areas with limited police and excessive weaponry leave our doors unlocked and our cars running when we go to the store. Nobody sneaks into our houses at night to steal our kids from their beds...AND we don't have packs of stray dogs running through our towns.

Zero muggings, zero burglaries, zero random rapes.

zero, eh? sorry, don't believe you.

Fact still remains: if you plot out gun ownership and crime by country, you'll find the US has about 3 times the number of guns per person compared to the next highest country, and our crime rate is HUGE.

So how do you interpret this with the disparity you just presented? Well, get a whole bunch of hicks toting guns so they're constantly scared of each other, and for the most part crime goes down in that local area. The result is a good deal of observation bias. Meanwhile, just outside that area, crime is running rampant because half a million guns each year make it to the black market by being stolen from legal owners.

If you look at countries with many fewer guns, crime is generally much much lower. Suicides are lower. Husbands killing their wives in their house and then committing suicide: much lower.

Again, guns make you THINK you are safe. My town had low crime too, and it had nothing to do with guns.

For a bit of humor: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPuM_XAo2BE]YouTube - 911 Call of Texas Man, Shoots Two Robbers[/ame]
"you dead!"

 

[mskafka]

I think everyone knows what should be done:

Ban all marriages.

 

[Fatality]

Guns kill people.

They don't "save lives."

lol, in true liberal style youre still trying the old tactic of relieving murderers of their crimes, wow!

 

[SmarterThanHick]

Guns kill people.

They don't "save lives."

lol, in true liberal style youre still trying the old tactic of relieving murderers of their crimes, wow!

false

 

[AllieBaba]

Well if the guns are killing people, that pretty much leaves the people out of the equation. So I'd say it's not a false observation at all.

 

[Diuretic]

She shouldn't have put it in the safe locker when she was home and kept it on her there as well. This just proves more than allowing people to carry guns can save more lives, she wasn't killed when it was available.

Guns kill people.

They don't "save lives."

The ultimate in willfull naivity! Show me proof where any weapon has jumped up, pointed itself at someone, pulled it's own trigger and killed someone.
Go to the FBI website and check out the study they completed last year. The FBI (you've heard of them right) disagrees strongly with your premise that "guns don't save lives".
And if you wish move to any country that has a total weapons ban and you will find their murder rates at much higher than ours.

I'd have to disagree with that last statement. It might be true in some places but it's not in others.

 

[Ringel05]

it's great to say that crime is down, but you in no way compared number of gun crimes to number of times guns are used to prevent crimes, as I did. Show the relevant numbers, if you want to argue your point.

Ok moron, since you refuse to do any real research. From the FBI:

March 1, 2009 - Sunday

Fact Sheet: Guns Save Lives


A. Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict

* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2


* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.3


* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.4


* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.5


* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).6 And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."7


* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year.8 Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."


B. Concealed carry laws help reduce crime

* Nationwide: one-half million self-defense uses. Every year, as many as one-half million citizens defend themselves with a firearm away from home.9



* Concealed carry laws are dropping crime rates across the country. A comprehensive national study determined in 1996 that violent crime fell after states made it legal to carry concealed firearms. The results of the study showed:

* States which passed concealed carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3%;10 and


* If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and over 11,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly.11


* Vermont: one of the safest five states in the country. In Vermont, citizens can carry a firearm without getting permission... without paying a fee... or without going through any kind of government-imposed waiting period. And yet for ten years in a row, Vermont has remained one of the top-five, safest states in the union -- having three times received the "Safest State Award."12


* Florida: concealed carry helps slash the murder rates in the state. In the fifteen years following the passage of Florida's concealed carry law in 1987, over 800,000 permits to carry firearms were issued to people in the state.13 FBI reports show that the homicide rate in Florida, which in 1987 was much higher than the national average, fell 52% during that 15-year period -- thus putting the Florida rate below the national average. 14


* Do firearms carry laws result in chaos? No. Consider the case of Florida. A citizen in the Sunshine State is far more likely to be attacked by an alligator than to be assaulted by a concealed carry holder.

1. During the first fifteen years that the Florida law was in effect, alligator attacks outpaced the number of crimes committed by carry holders by a 229 to 155 margin.


2. And even the 155 "crimes" committed by concealed carry permit holders are somewhat misleading as most of these infractions resulted from Floridians who accidentally carried their firearms into restricted areas, such as an airport.15


C. Criminals avoid armed citizens

* Kennesaw, GA. In 1982, this suburb of Atlanta passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89% in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4% drop in Georgia as a whole.16


* Ten years later (1991), the residential burglary rate in Kennesaw was still 72% lower than it had been in 1981, before the law was passed.17


* Nationwide. Statistical comparisons with other countries show that burglars in the United States are far less apt to enter an occupied home than their foreign counterparts who live in countries where fewer civilians own firearms. Consider the following rates showing how often a homeowner is present when a burglar strikes:


* Homeowner occupancy rate in the gun control countries of Great Britain, Canada and Netherlands: 45% (average of the three countries); and,


* Homeowner occupancy rate in the United States: 12.7%.18


Rapes averted when women carry or use firearms for protection

* Orlando, FL. In 1966-67, the media highly publicized a safety course which taught Orlando women how to use guns. The result: Orlando's rape rate dropped 88% in 1967, whereas the rape rate remained constant in the rest of Florida and the nation.19



* Nationwide. In 1979, the Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful.20


Justice Department study:

* 3/5 of felons polled agreed that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun."21


* 74% of felons polled agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime."22


* 57% of felons polled agreed that "criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police."23




1 Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164.
Dr. Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has researched extensively and published several essays on the gun control issue. His book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has become a widely cited source in the gun control debate. In fact, this book earned Dr. Kleck the prestigious American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang award for 1993. This award is given for the book published in the past two to three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to criminology.
Even those who don't like the conclusions Dr. Kleck reaches, cannot argue with his impeccable research and methodology. In "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," Marvin E. Wolfgang writes that, "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator.... I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence." Wolfgang, "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, at 188.
Wolfgang says there is no "contrary evidence." Indeed, there are more than a dozen national polls -- one of which was conducted by The Los Angeles Times -- that have found figures comparable to the Kleck-Gertz study. Even the Clinton Justice Department (through the National Institute of Justice) found there were as many as 1.5 million defensive users of firearms every year. See National Institute of Justice, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," Research in Brief (May 1997).
As for Dr. Kleck, readers of his materials may be interested to know that he is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to any advocacy group on either side of the gun control debate.
2 According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 30,000 deaths per year. See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois.
3Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 173, 185.
4Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 185.
5 Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997); available at http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt on the internet. The finding of 1.5 million yearly self-defense cases did not sit well with the anti-gun bias of the study's authors, who attempted to explain why there could not possibly be one and a half million cases of self-defense every year. Nevertheless, the 1.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies -- nearly a dozen -- are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. See also Kleck and Gertz, supra note 1, pp. 182-183.
6Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.
7George F. Will, "Are We 'a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15 November 1993):93.
8Id. at 164, 185.
9Dr. Gary Kleck, interview with J. Neil Schulman, "Q and A: Guns, crime and self-defense," The Orange County Register (19 September 1993). In the interview with Schulman, Dr. Kleck reports on findings from a national survey which he and Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993 -- a survey which findings were reported in Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime." br>10 One of the authors of the University of Chicago study reported on the study's findings in John R. Lott, Jr., "More Guns, Less Violent Crime," The Wall Street Journal (28 August 1996). See also John R. Lott, Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," University of Chicago (15 August 1996); and Lott, More Guns, Less Crime (1998, 2000).
11Lott and Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns."
12Kathleen O'Leary Morgan, Scott Morgan and Neal Quitno, "Rankings of States in Most Dangerous/Safest State Awards 1994 to 2003," Morgan Quitno Press (2004) at Most Dangerous/Safest State Award 1994-2003. Morgan Quitno Press is an independent private research and publishing company which was founded in 1989. The company specializes in reference books and monthly reports that compare states and cities in several different subject areas. In the first 10 years in which they published their Safest State Award, Vermont has consistently remained one of the top five safest states.
13Memo by Jim Smith, Secretary of State, Florida Department of State, Division of Licensing, Concealed Weapons/Firearms License Statistical Report (October 1, 2002).
14Florida's murder rate was 11.4 per 100,000 in 1987, but only 5.5 in 2002. Compare Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Crime in the United States," Uniform Crime Reports, (1988): 7, 53; and FBI, (2003):19, 79.
15 John R. Lott, Jr., "Right to carry would disprove horror stories," Kansas City Star, (July 12, 2003).
16Gary Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force," Social Problems 35 (February 1988):15.
17Compare Kleck, "Crime Control," at 15, and Chief Dwaine L. Wilson, City of Kennesaw Police Department, "Month to Month Statistics: 1991." (Residential burglary rates from 1981-1991 are based on statistics for the months of March - October.)
18Kleck, Point Blank, at 140.
19Kleck, "Crime Control," at 13.
20U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Rape Victimization in 26 American Cities (1979), p. 31.
21U.S., Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, "The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons," Research Report (July 1985): 27.
22Id.
23Id.

 

[Ringel05]

Guns kill people.

They don't "save lives."

The ultimate in willfull naivity! Show me proof where any weapon has jumped up, pointed itself at someone, pulled it's own trigger and killed someone.
Go to the FBI website and check out the study they completed last year. The FBI (you've heard of them right) disagrees strongly with your premise that "guns don't save lives".
And if you wish move to any country that has a total weapons ban and you will find their murder rates at much higher than ours.

I'd have to disagree with that last statement. It might be true in some places but it's not in others.

Per capita percentages, yes it is true. Part of a study done on a world wide basis. I used to have the info on my old (fried) computer, it's out there in virtualville, I just have to find it again.

 

[Ringel05]

If you look at countries with many fewer guns, crime is generally much much lower. Suicides are lower. Husbands killing their wives in their house and then committing suicide: much lower.

Again, guns make you THINK you are safe. My town had low crime too, and it had nothing to do with guns.

Wrong again, try researching legitimate sites and not just those the Brady Campaign sends you to.
Start doing your own valid research from now on and stop expecting others to do it for you.

Worldwide Data Obliterates Notion that Gun Ownership Correlates with Violence

Harvard Journal Study of Worldwide Data Obliterates Notion that Gun Ownership Correlates with Violence

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Confirms that Reducing Gun Ownership by Law-Abiding Citizens Does Nothing to Reduce Violence Worldwide

By now, any informed American is familiar with Dr. John R. Lott, Jr.'s famous axiom of "More Guns, Less Crime." In other words, American jurisdictions that allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are far safer and more crime-free than jurisdictions that enact stringent "gun control" laws.

Very simply, the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms has helped reduce violent crime in America.

Now, a Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy study shows that this is not just an American phenomenon. According to the study, worldwide gun ownership rates do not correlate with higher murder or suicide rates. In fact, many nations with high gun ownership have significantly lower murder and suicide rates.

In their piece entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence, Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser eviscerate "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths." In so doing, the authors provide fascinating historical insight into astronomical murder rates in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they dispel the myths that widespread gun ownership is somehow unique to the United States or that America suffers from the developed world's highest murder rate.

To the contrary, they establish that Soviet murder rates far exceeded American murder rates, and continue to do so today, despite Russia's extremely stringent gun prohibitions. By 2004, they show, the Russian murder rate was nearly four times higher than the American rate.

More fundamentally, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser demonstrate that other developed nations such as Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark maintain high rates of gun ownership, yet possess murder rates lower than other developed nations in which gun ownership is much more restricted.

For example, handguns are outlawed in Luxembourg, and gun ownership extremely rare, yet its murder rate is nine times greater than in Germany, which has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe. As another example, Hungary's murder rate is nearly three times higher than nearby Austria's, but Austria's gun ownership rate is over eight times higher than Hungary's. "Norway," they note, "has far and away Western Europe's highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate. The Netherlands," in contrast, "has the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe (1.9%) ... yet the Dutch gun murder rate is higher than the Norwegian."

Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser proceed to dispel the mainstream misconception that lower rates of violence in Europe are somehow attributable to gun control laws. Instead, they reveal, "murder in Europe was at an all-time low before the gun controls were introduced." As the authors note, "strict controls did not stem the general trend of ever-growing violent crime throughout the post-WWII industrialized world."

Citing England, for instance, they reveal that "when it had no firearms restrictions [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], England had little violent crime." By the late 1990s, however, "England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban on all handguns and many types of long guns." As a result, "by the year 2000, violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States." In America, on the other hand, "despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s."

Critically, Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser note that "the fall in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world," where 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office suffered violent crime increases during that same period.

Furthermore, the authors highlight the important point that while the American gun murder rate often exceeds that in other nations, the overall per capita murder rate in other nations (including other means such as strangling, stabbing, beating, etc.) is oftentimes much higher than in America.

The reason that gun ownership doesn't correlate with murder rates, the authors show, is that violent crime rates are determined instead by underlying cultural factors. "Ordinary people," they note, "simply do not murder." Rather, "the murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership" in their society.

Therefore, "banning guns cannot alleviate the socio-cultural and economic factors that are the real determinants of violence and crime rates." According to Dr. Kates and Dr. Mauser, "there is no reason for laws prohibiting gun possession by ordinary, law-abiding, responsible adults because such people virtually never commit murder. If one accepts that such adults are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit it, disarming them becomes not just unproductive but counter-productive."

[Posted August 17, 2007 ]

And:

http://www.gunsandcrime.org/

And:

George Mason University's History News Network
http://hnn.us/articles/871.html

 

[garyd]

Your study is hugely flawed sth since a large number of incidences of gun use in self defense aren't ever reported. IN fact your report understates such incidences according to NRA documentation buy at least 75%.

 

[Ringel05]

Your study is hugely flawed since a large number of incidences of gun use in self defense aren't ever reported. IN fact your report understates such incidences according NRA documentation buy about 75%.

Who were you addressing?

 

[garyd]

YOu missed the edit go back and check and you will see I corrected this and addressed STH

 

[Ringel05]

YOu missed the edit go back and check and you will see I corrected this and addressed STH

Ok, I know the estimates you have given and I agree with you. However, for discussions' sake I chose to go with the more provable numbers found in the studies.

 

[garyd]

Not a problem. Wasn't correcting you any how merely telling our resident dingbat that the study he had wasn't worth the paper it was first printed on.

 

[Fatality]

Guns kill people.

They don't "save lives."

lol, in true liberal style youre still trying the old tactic of relieving murderers of their crimes, wow!

false

nope, its true, thats exactly it. you types are relieving murderers of their crimes by blaming an inanimate object.