I see your point, and sincerely, it is convincing. I just think of the two
alternatives - granted a defenceless lady has no capacity to fend off a
burglar and there is no way the police can prevent him from breaking and
entering - which is a sorry state of affairs. However, were that lady armed
with a 9mm, any sensible burglar would still go to her home taking a pistol
with him. Which is the safer situation for the lady, neither are pleasant,
but I would argue the former.

Okay, look.. I don't want to come off sounding like some chest-beating
right-wing arsehole, but.... look at what you just wrote. Given the choice
between self defense in her own home and placing herself at the mercy of a young
male intruder, the woman in question should throw herself on the mercy of the
intruder for *fear* that *he* might be armed.

I'm sorry, but that's loathesome. Is this what you would choose for your own
wife or mother?

And since I'm in a state of high dudgeon at the moment, here's a link on violent
crime for the year in question from -- no, not some NRA think tank, but The
Economist:

http://www.economist.com/displayStor...tory_ID=513031

Britain doesn't come off too well.

Here's another link from the Bureau of Justice. More Americans kill themselves
with firearms than use them to commit any sort of crime. (Nothing to be proud
of, for Christ's sake, but revealing).

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/guncrime.htm

And at any rate, this is all so much ****ing in the wind. The primary causes of
crime are demographic and economic: The more jobless young men you have running
around, the bigger the spike in crime. Demographers have been pointing this out
for a long time, but they don't seem to make much of a dent in the whole
crime/punishment/gun debate. I'm convinced culture also plays a part, as fuzzy
and un-quantifiable as that may sound. I live in rural northern California,
where we have no shortage of mean/stupid druggies/alcoholics/just plain crazies,
and where the percentage of people on some kind of state support is in the
double digits, and where pot and meth are to be easily manufactured and
purchased, and where absolutely every house has *several* longarms in it...

.....and yet out of 150,000-odd people, we had something like 380 violent crimes
in 2001, including two murders (neither of which were gun-related). Which was
damned alarming, because most years it's zero. I know that doesn't fit your
prejudices -- about firearms in general, or about my people, or about the
society we live in -- but there it is.

Make of it what you like, city boy.