Originally posted by Wlfgng
cpxxx it was for beetle
besides, they still are NOT the SAFEST places..
amen
Hehe Wolfgang. I've joined this thread late, but a couple of observations - already noted by some. Big though the US may be, it is not the biggest country on the planet and is not representative of the rest of the world. It has only 5% of the world's population, and its land area as a proportion of the earth's surface is minute. Looking at the map on the first post, it is clear that the original argument pertains to the US, and to no other country. So the "argument", if I may call it that, is skewed by incomplete data from the start.
As for "guns not killing people, only people kill people", it's a hollow argument when one looks at crime patterns in countries where there are far fewer privately owned guns. Lazs is right and the gun crime amongst poor black areas is much, much higher than in middle class white suburbia. Just look at Chicago! Many (about 20) years ago, I saw a British TV documentary about the Cook County Hospital, a hospital to which you can go even without medical insurance, and few poor blacks have got Blue Cross/Blue Shield as I had, along with probably most Americans reading this. In 1980 I lived in Chicago - correction: I lived in the middle class white suburb of Mount Prospect, and I could relate to what was said in the documentary. And one of the startling facts presented was that the most common form of complication amongst pregnant women was not excessive water retention or an ectopic condition. It was gunshot wounds.
It's simple. For gun crime to be possible, there has to be a gun. So the more guns, the more gun crime. Socially deprived areas of ethnic minorities are not strictly an American phoenomenon. We have them here in Britain. But what we don't have is the guns to go with it. Figuratively speaking, we have the powder keg but fewer sparks. And we don't have thousands and thousands of people killed by guns each year. The annual tally is something between 50 and 75. If we had no guns at all, this figure would be zero.
That would leave "sharp objects"! But because of their cumbersome nature, a gun is the preferred weapon of choice for someone who wants to do someone else in. Besides. The TOTAL number of murders in Britain each year is around 700-800 - far less than just the
gun related homicides in America.
If we were to allow the proliferation of privately owned guns here, then like America we would have thousands of gun homicides. (And most would be in socially deprived areas/ethnic minorities. Suburbs and the rural areas would be largely unaffected) But we haven't, and so we don't.
Got to rush - Mum is expecting us for Easter, so...
Toodle-Pip with an egg on it!