"Jay Stranahan" wrote in message
...
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?

Look, here's the deal - I would rather the lady not be burgled in the first
place - as anyone would. However that's trivial. Consider two options,
either neither the lady nor the burglars has a weapon or on the flip side,
they both do. Who is going to come out the better in a shoot out? The
granny? Certainly not, which is why it would be better that there were no
guns involved.

Of course this is purely academic since America has a firmly established gun
culture - don't forget you're talking to a Brit where the prospect of a some
opportunist burglar entering my house with a handgun is frankly zero. In
America, this is not the case, so give the poor granny an uzi and I wish her
every success.

Gun related deaths in the UK weighed in at 23 compared to over 10,000 in the
US for a similar time period. Granted, a large proportion of that 10,000 may
be gang related, or there may be other driving factors which are not so much
of an issue in the UK. I'm just speculating. However you look at it,
10,000's just staggering - that's Vietnam in five years.

This ethos of gun totting scares me rigid, how on earth can it be defended?
In the US the number of states permitting the concealed carriage of weapons
has risen from nine to 31 since 1986. That's just a step in the wrong
direction. Would you kill a man if he tried to steal your car? Do you value
your pick-up over a man's life? Even if he is a ****?


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.

Certainly doesn't, and that's a shame.

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 wholeheartedly agree, but wouldn't you prefer those guys to not have ready
access to guns to facilitate those violent crimes? Or is it their right to
go about their criminal activities safe in the knowledge that they've a
weapon for self protection? Lunacy!

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.

I'm not desperately urging you guys to throw down your guns, shout
hallelujahs and join the British way of life. I'm just fascinated as to why
you so readily defend your right to shoot someone where really no right
should exist.


Make of it what you like, city boy.


Call me what you like.

Jim Doyle