Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
His link?
the preponderance of weapons is something that can't be ignored.
-spence
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No, it can't be ignored. But we can't fanatically obsess with it, to the exclusion of other possibilities, either.
One last time. See if you can follow. Check out this link, which lists gun ownership rates and gun murder rates by state...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_vio...tates_by_state
From this link, you can see some things that suggest that your conclusion, that proliferation of guns is the core issue, is false.
Wyoming is ranked #1 in gun ownership at 59.7% of the residents. Spence, do you therefore presume that Wyoming has a problem with gun violence? Really? According to that data, Wyoming had the 9th lowest gun murder rate in the nation.
Flip side, let's look at DC. DC has the lowest gun ownership rate in the country, the absolute lowest, at 3.6%. Spence, based on your logic, gun crime in DC shuold be low, right? In fact, DC has the very highest gun murder rate in the nation. Are you going to tell me that the murders in DC are committed by tourists from Wyoming who come into DC with their guns blazing?
Therefore, while I agree that gun crime cannot occur if guns don't exist, you have to concede that there is not a great correlation between gun ownership and gun crime. The data could not be much more clear on this.
Why can the people of Wyoming own so many guns, yet be so less likely to use them on each other? Family values and religion, the very things that many on your side spend a lot of resources mocking. Your side likes to tell people, especially people who live in places like DC and Chicago, that religion and family values have no place in the modern world.
Stop saying that it's all about guns. Spence, if you owned 50 guns, would you be more likely to murder anybody with them, than you are today? Of course not.
We need to deal with the attitude so many have, that the only thing that matters is the self. The guns are out there, and that is fact. The most effective thing we can do, is restore in our citizenry, a minimal amount of empathy for others.
I'm not a big fan of guns, and I think that requiring the chip on the trigger that verifies the fingerprint of the owner (so that nobody else can fire the gun) is a good idea. But what's scarier to me than guns, is the willingness of so many Americans to do God-awful things to each other.