Lex Luthor wrote:
Say you have two societies. In one lots of people are walking around everywhere with guns. In another, almost nobody is carrying guns. Where do you think people will die more on the street? Like I said it is a safety hazard. Adults are just grown-up children, and it's hazardous for them to be walking around with dangerous items. It's bad enough that people drive cars, but at least that is a necessity.
Normally I wouldn't even respond to your posts anymore, but this is untrue. I demonstrated once before in one of these gun control debates that, even if we accept the lowest numbers for crimes prevented by guns, they end up decreasing net murders. That's only considering murders, not other crimes which are stopped by guns.
Moreover, there's been all kinds of statistical analysis done by researchers, and no one has ever been able to show any causal link between more guns and more murders. The best anyone can show is that there are frequently more murders per capita in areas where there are more guns per capita, but that has two problems:
1) Those areas with more guns and more murders per capita, tend to have very few people in the first place, so even if their murders are in the single digits per year it shoots the numbers through the roof on a per capita basis. The same applies to guns.
2) Those areas often tend to include lots of rural areas, where there are going to be more guns for hunting - and for many rural dwellers in this country, hunting provides a major portion of their yearly food. This, combined with the fact that a very few murders looks like a lot in a relative sense, can make it look like there is a correlation when in reality it's a coincidence - the two are unrelated and only appear correlated because of the low base population
3) There is a possibility of reverse causality, especially in the somewhat more populated pockets where this is true: People buy more guns because there is more murder or more crime, not the reverse.
As to adults being gown-up children, this is silly - one could just as easily say children are tiny adults. The fact is, that not only are they different by definition, but that definition exists for a reason. Some adults may act like children, but that is because they
don't want to or won't accept responsibility for their action, where as children are
unable to, at a ratio generlly inversely proportional to their age.
So no, it is not "hazardous" for people to carry guns; what's hazardous is the way some people choose to use them. That's true of many objects, like cars, but guns are just as useful as cars, just in a different way. Guns can provide food, protection, and entertainment instead of transportation, despite attempts by anti-gun fools to handwave away these benefits.
Moreover, more people would die on the street without any guns, because fewer people could defend themselves from crime; the net increase in murders I discussed. Criminals would just turn to other methods to attack people, but now the only people who could defend themselves would be those with a physical advantage over their attacker(s).
Someone remind me that I have Lex on ignore for a reason.
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