Best Self-Defense Firearm

[beet1e]

Originally posted by Jackal1
You see, Beet, not everyone lives a dull, Ho Hum existence in Pleasantville such as yourself. Most here wouldn`t and couldn`t thrive on such a low pulse rate existence such as this I expect.

I don't know what you're talking about, Jack. I do plenty of travelling. I've already been to three different countries in 2005 (Holland for the Eurocon, France, and Austria, and next week I'll be going to Italy for 2 weeks. Then in October, I'm looking forward to meeting up with Nexx/Swoop et al in Germany. I have no complaints about my life, and enjoy it fully.

How does this compare with the average American? Well most of 'em don't even have passports, and are so busy working those 40 hour weeks for 50 weeks of the year that they don't get a chance to travel. I worked in IL, where a "vacation" was something like 4 days in Green Bay, Wis.

Sure - it would be exciting to be shot at, but I'll settle for the low pulse rate option!

[beet1e]

Originally posted by Martlet
You yourself referred to it as a ban.  Why can't I?

If you could get a gun before the legislation with proper permitting, then that is gun control.  If you can't get a gun for any reason after the legislation that is a gun ban.  Big difference.

I referred to it as a "ban", not a ban - subtle difference, designed to indicate that I do not consider the 1997 legislation to be a transformation from an armed society into an unarmed one.

Furthermore, your entire previous argument revolved around the fact that your gun crime numbers are so low percentages don't count.  Now you claim the same low numbers suggest the ban works.  

No, I said that noting the changes by percentage is misleading, and gives a false impression. In a typical year, there are around 60 gun homicides in Britain. But in some years there have been more, and in some years less. So let's suppose that one year there are 75 gun homicides: What your NRA is fond of doing is telling its readership that Britain's gun homicide has risen by 25%!! Sure, 15 is 25% of 60. But you have to remember that there will always be small fluctuations. Because our actual totals have always been very small, year on year fluctuations expressed as percentages can seem huge to American readers of the NRA website, because they're used to an annual gun homicide tally of 10,000, and not 60 - or 68, as it was in 2003.

How can you claim gun control is working when violent crime involving guns has increased every year since the ban went into affect?

Because as I said before, I believe that gun homicide and therefore the overall number of homicides would skyrocket if guns were made freely available. The very fact that so many criminals resort to carrying replica weapons - despite the fact that the penalties for having them are just as harsh, and associated crimes are still known as "gun crimes" - goes a long way to demonstrate that our criminals are being thwarted in their attempts to acquire real guns. Now, I never said the laws we have are perfect, and in Ripsnort's book, for example, a law has to be 100% effective, or else it should be repealed. But with guns freely available in our society, I firmly believe we would see an annual gun homicide tally of 3000+ after a few years. Right now it's ~60. So the laws are 98% effective. It's not perfect, but it's the best we can do for now.

Just remember the BfC quote - "if more guns made a safer society, America would be the safest society on Earth. It isn't".

[Martlet]

So let's suppose that one year there are 75 gun homicides: What your NRA is fond of doing is telling its readership that Britain's gun homicide has risen by 25%!! Sure, 15 is 25% of 60. But you have to remember that there will always be small fluctuations. Because our actual totals have always been very small, year on year fluctuations expressed as percentages can seem huge to American readers of the NRA website, because they're used to an annual gun homicide tally of 10,000, and not 60 - or 68, as it was in 2003.

Any way you want to portray it, the numbers have gone up.  Not down.  Not stayed the same.  Gone up.

Removing guns as a means of protection or a deterrent has done nothing to lower gun crime or make people safer.  Since the numbers are going up, it appears to be doing the opposite.

Your "beliefs" aren't substantiated by fact.  If you click your heels, maybe you can stop crime all together.

[Shamus]

Colt Officers model in .45 is what I carry, big wallop in a small package, easy to shoot.

btw...I'm not a good enough shot anymore to try and "wing" someone, two to the center of mass if i fear for my life.

shamus

[Angry Samoan]

HO everyone let god sort them

[beet1e]

Originally posted by Martlet
Any way you want to portray it, the numbers have gone up.  Not down.  Not stayed the same.  Gone up.

Let's try this again - I think this is the third time. The number of firearms offences has indeed risen every year since 1997. But what you're still not taking into account is the sheer volume of offences committed by replica weapons. In these cases, the criminals had been unable to acquire real weapons.

Crime in England and Wales 2003/2004

The following is a quote from page 79 of the above Home Office publication.

• There were 68 homicides involving firearms in 2003/04, 12 fewer (15%) than the previous year. Eight percent of all homicides in 2003/04 involved firearms.
• The number of firearm robberies in 2003/04 was 4,030, four percent of all robbery offences in 2003/04, and a reduction of 13 percent from the previous year.[/b]

Your "beliefs" aren't substantiated by fact. If you click your heels, maybe you can stop crime all together.

Refer to the above report from the Home Office. Seems like you wouldn't recognise a fact if one got up and bit you in the arse.

[Iceman24]

44 mag desert eagle they run about $1000-1500 dollars for the base model... will shoot through an engine block on a car, in case you have to stop a car for some reason... you never know I personally have 2, one I take to the range and fire and 1 in a case that was really expensive... I LUV GUNS, COOLEST THING IN THE WORLD UNTIL THEY BUILD A LITESABER, THEN I"LL HAVE A DOUBLE BLADED RED ONE

If you have ever watched lonesome dove, theres a scene where Tommy Lee Jones is handing a pistol to one of the younger cowboys and the cowboy says no I dont need it... Tommy Lee Jones says, better to have it and need it then to need it and not have it...

[Martlet]

Originally posted by beet1e
Let's try this again - I think this is the third time. The number of firearms offences has indeed risen every year since 1997. But what you're still not taking into account is the sheer volume of offences committed by replica weapons. In these cases, the criminals had been unable to acquire real weapons.

Crime in England and Wales 2003/2004

The following is a quote from page 79 of the above Home Office publication. Refer to the above report from the Home Office. Seems like you wouldn't recognise a fact if one got up and bit you in the arse.

Let's cut through your selective copying and take the last line from the very site you hack quote:

Even so, we have seen an unacceptable rise in gun crime over recent years, and are doing everything we can to tackle it.

Here are some more fun facts from the site:

The following statistics are taken from the latest Crime in England and Wales 2003-04 Report.

 There has overall been an increase in the level of gun crime by less than one percent. The number of offences has risen each year since 1997-98, but the 2003-04 rise is the smallest.

The latest figures, which do not include air weapons, are heavily dominated by the use of handguns, either fired or used to threaten in nearly 60 per cent of cases.

Injuries inflicted by handguns also more than doubled, from 317 in 1997/1998 to 648 last year.

The number of firearms homicides has more than doubled since 1998-1999, while non-firearms killings rose by only 21 per cent.

Yep.  Looks like that "ban" is working well.

[Nashwan]

Any way you want to portray it, the numbers have gone up. Not down. Not stayed the same. Gone up.

They haven't.

If you take the most serious firearms offence, murder, the figure in 1995, the last full year before the "ban", the figures for E&W were 70 homicides involving firearms.

The figure for 2003/04 was 68.

That's not a rise, it's a very slight decrease. That's despite a huge rise in illegal immigration and drug dealing.

If you look at robberies with firearms, in 1995 there were 4,206 in E&W, in 2003/04 there were 4,117.

Again, not a rise. (Britain's population has increased as well in the time period, so it's a greater fall per head)

If you look at the proportion of robberies that involve a firearm, it's declined from 6.2% in 1995 to 4.1% in 2003/04

In homicides, 9.4% involved a firearm in 1995, 8.0% in 2003/04

What has really gone up are the number of replicas and air weapons used in "crime", and especially the reporting of such "crimes".

Ten years ago, a kid trespassing on someone's land with an air rifle would have been ignored, now they aqre reported to the police, who react to every such report as if it were a madman on a rampage. As a result, things like that, or children shooting an air rifle at a road sign, are not recorded as "firearms" crimes.

In 1992, there were about 6,000 air weapon crimes recorded. In 2003/04 there were over 14,000.

The other thing that's usually claimed is that "violent crime" has risen in Britain since the mid 90s, but the truth is that much tighter standards for recording minor crimes was introduced at the same time, and that's responsible for the reported increase.

Most countries have an alternative set of crime figures, that's much more comprehensive than the police recorded figures (the police tend to record more serious incidents, minor ones are frequently not reported).

In the US, such figures are recorded by the DoJ in their victimisation surveys, in the UK it's the British Crime Survey. The BCS shows that 1995 was the peak year for violent crime in E&W, with about 4.2 million "violent" incidents. That's fallen every year since, and now stands at about 2.7 million "violent" incidents per year.

(Note I'm not claiming the changes to the firearms laws since the mid 90s have caused this, the truth is the laws in place before that (licencing, registration, safe storage etc) were strict enough to remove legal weapons as a major factor in crime)

[Nashwan]

Injuries inflicted by handguns also more than doubled, from 317 in 1997/1998 to 648 last year.

Injury under the police recording standards includes shock or being hit with the "firearm".

As the report notes:

"It is not always possible to categorise the type of weapon used in an offence. For example, one cannot
always be certain if a crime involved a real firearm. Unless a weapon is either fired or recovered after a
crime, there is no way of knowing if it was real or an imitation (or whether it was loaded or unloaded). The
categorisation of firearms will often depend on descriptions by victims or witnesses."

You can get an idea of how many "handguns" used in crimes are real guns by the number that are fired.

Rifles are fired in about half of the crimes they are used in, shotguns in about 35%, handguns in only 11%

The number of firearms homicides has more than doubled since 1998-1999, while non-firearms killings rose by only 21 per cent.

Um, 19988/1999 was a couple of years after the "ban", so how can a rise from after the "ban" to even more after the "ban" be evidence the "ban" is making things worse?

And the figure in 1998/99 was 49 fatalities with firearms, the figure for 2003/04 was 68, how is that "more than doubled"?

[beet1e]

Originally posted by Martlet
Yep.  Looks like that "ban" is working well.

Yes, it certainly is.

I think you must be Ripsnort in disguise. Seems like you don't believe in laws that are not 100% effective. And the fact is that no law is or ever can be. I never said the British situation is perfect, but it's a whole lot better than if REAL guns were freely available.

Nashwan covered all your other points.

[Jackal1]

Originally posted by beet1e
I don't know what you're talking about, Jack. I do plenty of travelling. I've already been to three different countries in 2005 (Holland for the Eurocon, France, and Austria, and next week I'll be going to Italy for 2 weeks. Then in October, I'm looking forward to meeting up with Nexx/Swoop et al in Germany. I have no complaints about my life, and enjoy it fully.

How does this compare with the average American? Well most of 'em don't even have passports, and are so busy working those 40 hour weeks for 50 weeks of the year that they don't get a chance to travel. I worked in IL, where a "vacation" was something like 4 days in Green Bay, Wis.
 

  Yep, seems you do a lot of traveling to get away from the boredom of where you live.
  The average American doesn`t need a passport for the big part. We have it all right here in our country and don`t have to go on masonary safaris for a l`il break in the hum drum. It`s all right here.
  Now do you have a recomendation pertaining to the subject matter or not?

[Martlet]

Originally posted by beet1e
Yes, it certainly is.

I think you must be Ripsnort in disguise. Seems like you don't believe in laws that are not 100% effective. And the fact is that no law is or ever can be. I never said the British situation is perfect, but it's a whole lot better than if REAL guns were freely available.

Nashwan covered all your other points.

I don't believe in laws that take away an effective means to defend myself and my family, particularly when it has done nothing to affect the problem, except making me more vulnerable, of course.

There were 1,205,576 recorded offences of criminal damage in 2003/04, this represents an increase of nine per cent from the previous year.

# In 2003/04, there were a total of 52,070 recorded sexual offences in England and Wales, this represents an increase of seven per cent from the previous year.

In 2003/04 there were a total of 26,709 recorded offences of indecent assault on a female, this represents an increase of eight per cent from the previous year.

In 2003/04, there were a total of 13,007 recorded offences in the other sexual offences category, this represents an increase of five per cent from the previous year.

In 2003/04 there were a total of 12,354 recorded offences of rape of a female, this represents an increase of eight per cent from the previous year.

There were a total of 955,752 offences of violence against the person recorded by the police in 2003/04.  This represents an increase of 14 per cent from the previous year.

There were a total of 43,850 offences of more serious violence recorded by the police in 2003/04, this represents an increase of 15 per cent from the previous year.

The number of offences in this classification has risen every year since 1995.  There were 19,358 offences recorded in 2003/04, this represents an increase of eight per cent from the previous year.

The total number of other offences against the person in 2003/04 was 911,902, this represents an increase of 14 per cent from the previous year.

There were 1,109,017  recorded violent crimes in 2003/04, an increase of 12 per cent.

[SarinGas]

Vehicle - Sig Saur P229 in .357 Sig. On my person I carry a Glock 31 in .357 sig. Home defence - Ruger Blackhawk .44 magnum and an Ithaca 12 ga. pump shotgun. Various other high powered rifles in .303, .308, .223, 7.62 x 39, 7.62 x 54, .270, .243, and .22-250 calibers. Various other handguns ranging from .25 cal to .50 cal black powder.

They can have my guns when they pry em from my cold dead finga's:aok

[beet1e]

Martlet - None of those crimes could be solved by having a guns for all situation. You seem to think that "more guns" is the panacea to all social ills. It isn't.

Originally posted by Jackal1
Yep, seems you do a lot of traveling to get away from the boredom of where you live.  The average American doesn`t need a passport for the big part. We have it all right here in our country and don`t have to go on masonary safaris for a l`il break in the hum drum. It`s all right here.
  Now do you have a recomendation pertaining to the subject matter or not?

LOL - you don't know where I live. And I was waiting for the Dago-style "we have everything we need right here in the US" mantra. And that's understandable, in a country which has a whole 229 years of history.

I could begin to explain about different cultures, languages, history (more than 300 years) but that would be wasted on someone who has never set foot outside his own country in Cod knows how many decades.  But be joyful - You have everything you want where you live - the three Gs - Gasguzzlers, Guns, and Grits! How could things be any better!