I don't think this will be in "The Armed Citizen"

[Elfie]

I'd say crime committed with a gun would tend to be more serious.

How so? Criminal breaks into your home brandishing a knife and demands your valuables. Criminal breaks into your home brandishing a gun and demands your valuables. You are a victim each time. You could concievably be killed with either weapon.

It doesnt really matter what weapon a criminal uses. Its the (in this case) act of robbery that is the crime. Use of ANY weapon compounds the crime. To me it doesnt matter if the weapon is a gun, knife, club, chain etc.

I suspect that the mere presence of the person foils the vast majority of crimes.

Some how I doubt the validity of that statement. Since those people were armed, we'll never know for sure will we?

I once "foiled" a burglary of my house by switching a light on and saying "oi", no gun needed.

I suspect you were either very lucky or the criminal was unarmed, heck maybe both.

The Brady campaign make the claim on their website that crime has fallen less in those areas that have allowed easier concealed carry than those that haven't.

The anti gun lobbyists here in the US are known for ignoring facts and telling outright lies. At one point they were claiming an absurd number of people dieing daily from guns. (Something on the order of 24,000 DAILY) At that rate the US population would have been annhilated in just a few years. One woman on a TV talk show was confronted by the Host about that very thing. Amazingly, when confronted with 8,760,000 gun related deaths each year, she stood her ground.

Toad did post some claim from a gun site, but it was more along the lines of "concealed carry areas have less crime", iirc

I've seen figures from the Department of Justice that show crime rates falling (sometimes dramatically) in states that have passed concealed carry laws. Look them up for yourself.

Something I read recently suggested that NO criminologist has ever crossed the fence from advocating less gun control to advocating more gun control. In fact the article said just the opposite is happening. The more criminologists study gun control, the more convinced they are that it does not in fact work. I have not had the time to research that further.

[EN4CER]

Originally posted by Bodhi
gotta love the liberal blame game...

1. the gun
2. NRA
3.  George Bush
4. the gun
5. NRA
6. Dick Cheney
7. conservative pigs
8. NRA
9. Donald Rumsfeld
10. mother

BODHI - My man! You forgot Karl Rove - He's been at the top of the Liberal Blame Game List lately.

P.S. Nice piece of bait Stogey - This ones a grounder though - Mother's at fault - End of Story. Now if I wore those light Lefty slippers (The powder blue ones with the Al Franken smiley face) - Let me guess - It's not her fault - she was traumatized in her early years by her vindictive and narcissistic step father, etc. blah blah blah. You’d hear every excuse under the sun, anything but her own ACCOUNTABILITY.

[Elfie]

Originally posted by Toad
We had to fight a civil war to end slavery and the keeping of slaves wasn't in the Bill of Rights.

We didnt actually fight the Civil War to end slavery. According to Lincoln it was about preserving the Union at all costs. Lincoln himself said, that if he could preserve the Union without freeing any slaves he would, if he could preserve the Union by freeing only some of the slaves he would, if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves he would.

End result of the Civil War, slavery WAS ended and the Union preserved.

[Holden McGroin]

Originally posted by Elfie
We didnt actually fight the Civil War to end slavery. According to Lincoln...

According to the seccesion documents of South Carolina, it was about slavery.

Seccesion occured because they percieved Lincoln as anti slavery, and quoted his house divided speech in the document.  

The Union fought to preserve the union, the confederacy fought to preserve their institution of slavery which they thought could only be continued by rebellion.

[Curval]

Originally posted by Elfie
I honestly won't speak for your country Curval....the Bahamas...is that correct?

No!  Not the Bahamas.  Bermuda.  It's only been mentioned like 20 times in this thread.  

I'm not asking you to speak for my country but just to address the questions I had from your perspective.

[Holden McGroin]

Don't get short with Elfie...

[Nashwan]

How so? Criminal breaks into your home brandishing a knife and demands your valuables. Criminal breaks into your home brandishing a gun and demands your valuables. You are a victim each time. You could concievably be killed with either weapon.

It doesnt really matter what weapon a criminal uses. Its the (in this case) act of robbery that is the crime. Use of ANY weapon compounds the crime. To me it doesnt matter if the weapon is a gun, knife, club, chain etc.

Guns are more dangerous than knives.

Do police swat teams, army special forces squads, etc, prefer to use knives in close combat situations or guns?

Guns are prefered unless there is a requirement for silence.

I can back off somebody with a knife, I cannot back off far enough from a gun.

Some how I doubt the validity of that statement. Since those people were armed, we'll never know for sure will we?

What do you think most criminals are doing? They are looking to steal. The mere presence of someone there will make them run in nearly all cases.

I suspect you were either very lucky or the criminal was unarmed, heck maybe both.

I'm pretty certain he didn't have a gun, it being in the UK.

He tried to force my kitchen window, I walked in to the kitchen, switched the light on, he fled.

If he'd had a gun, perhaps he'd have been tempted to fire through the window, in case I fired through the window at him.

The anti gun lobbyists here in the US are known for ignoring facts and telling outright lies. At one point they were claiming an absurd number of people dieing daily from guns. (Something on the order of 24,000 DAILY) At that rate the US population would have been annhilated in just a few years. One woman on a TV talk show was confronted by the Host about that very thing. Amazingly, when confronted with 8,760,000 gun related deaths each year, she stood her ground.

I doubt a group like the Brady org would have been putting out stupid figures like that.

As to the figures I quoted from them, I've put them out a couple of times, they haven't been challenged yet.

In fact, what struck me about the stuff Toad posted was that they skirted around the issue, but didn't address it directly, when makes me tend to believe Brady's figures are correct.

I've seen figures from the Department of Justice that show crime rates falling (sometimes dramatically) in states that have passed concealed carry laws. Look them up for yourself.

They've also declined dramatically in states that haven't passed CC laws.

New York is often held up as a paragon of crime reduction, I don't think that has much to do with concealed carry.

The number of Homicides in New York city has gone from over 2,200 in 1990 to around 600 now, whereas the US overall has gone from about 23,000 to about 15,000. (The rate in New York has gone from over 30 per 100,000 people to less than 7 per 100,000)

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by Elfie
I've seen figures from the Department of Justice that show crime rates falling (sometimes dramatically) in states that have passed concealed carry laws. Look them up for yourself.

I looked up crime stats in the US. And sure enough there it was plain in my face - crime rates were dropping. HOWEVER.... that same site showed stats on prison populations in the US growing dramatically.

So ummm you guys wanna explain the drop in crime versus the accelerated growth in prison populations?

[SOB]

Originally posted by Pongo
Americans once argued that making slavery illegal worked for Brits but wouldnt work for Americans.
We see here the kinds of arguments that were made.

LOL, I know I must have read this wrong.  Did you just compare slave ownership to gun ownership?

[Toad]

Originally posted by Elfie
We didnt actually fight the Civil War to end slavery.

[/b]

I didn't say that, did I?  

End result of the Civil War, slavery WAS ended and the Union preserved.

That is what I said. Had to fight the war to end it. Most likely wouldn't have ended any other way.

Ever read this analysis on England's end to the slave trade?

When the British outlawed the exportation of Africans to the colonies for sale in 1807, they had had almost 20 years' notice that the Americans intended to ban the importation of Africans in 1808. And it was just about this time that Napoleon, cut off by the British Navy from French colonies in the Caribbean, began looking into the domestic cultivation of the sugar beet.

And there were the rebellions in the West Indies, particularly the Haitian rebellion. The sections of the book that deal with them bring to light an astounding, and forgotten, episode in Western history. Since Haiti alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13 colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. I

t belonged to France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the slaves were intentionally worked to death -- it was cheaper to replace them than to sustain them -- so the market for Africans was very brisk. Uprisings had long been frequent in the West Indies, but at long last rage in Haiti converged with the tactical brilliance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others and the slaves seized the island. This part of the story is familiar. But there is more.

First the British and then the French under Napoleon sent huge forces against the Haitians. The British sent a larger army against Haiti than it had dispatched to fight in the American Revolution. And it buried 60 percent of those soldiers in Haiti. The two greatest powers on earth went up against a population of half-starved, desperate people and were utterly defeated. It is no surprise that these two abysmal wars of empire have fallen out of history.

One cannot read about them without concluding that the Haitian Africans contributed mightily to making the Caribbean slave system untenable. All in all, in 1807 the prospects of the traffic in human beings were not good. It is perhaps coincidental that in adopting the abolitionist stance Britain was able to seize the moral high ground and attempt (together with the United States) to suppress the slave trade among its economic rivals. Certainly this posture was gallant enough to make a great part of the world forget that Britain was for so long pre-eminent among the despoilers of Africa.

[rpm]

OK, this thread has formed a life of it's own and spun uncontrolled into the cosmos. My intent for posting, besides bringing personal accountability and basic gun safety into the forefront, was to point out how blindered and biased all the "Armed Citizen" posts from the NRA faithfull are nothing more than propaganda and those that post them are sheep.

Think for yourselves and realise that guns are a double-edged sword of a subject. This is not good vs. bad or right vs. wrong. It is a much more complex subject and you should not let outsiders (i.e. The NRA) form or state your opinion for you. by Rip-and-pasting your e-mails.

Guns? Yes. Enforcing the laws and making those in error accountable for the awesome power they yield? Abso-freaking-lutely...to the full extent of the law.

Lock your guns, educate your kids. Laziness is no excuse for responsability. That is the point.

[Shuckins]

"...thousands of accidental gun-deaths..."

...another of those hysteria based statements that  have no statistical basis in fact.

Similar to the statement about all the "children" shooting other "children" with guns.  A close study of these "facts" reveals that the great majority of these so-called child victims are young gang-members with long histories of violence, drug use, and other criminal activities.

The American criminal class is cut from a different bolt of cloth than that found in the British isles.  American gangs recruit their members from the very young...and they are trained in violence from the beginning.  Guns and violence are an intrinsic  part of that macho culture.   Pray, how do you suggest we disarm THEM?  

With all the money generated by their drug trafficking, they can by-pass any gun law enacted.  If need be, they'll establish an international black-market to attain them.

Tell ya what...let's all buy tickets and passports for about 10,000 big-city gang-bangers and help them emigrate to the British Isles...and then see what happens to the violent crime statistics there.

[Gunslinger]

Originally posted by rpm
OK, this thread has formed a life of it's own and spun uncontrolled into the cosmos. My intent for posting, besides bringing personal accountability and basic gun safety into the forefront, was to point out how blindered and biased all the "Armed Citizen" posts from the NRA faithfull are nothing more than propaganda and those that post them are sheep.

Think for yourselves and realise that guns are a double-edged sword of a subject. This is not good vs. bad or right vs. wrong. It is a much more complex subject and you should not let outsiders (i.e. The NRA) form or state your opinion for you. by Rip-and-pasting your e-mails.

Guns? Yes. Enforcing the laws and making those in error accountable for the awesome power they yield? Abso-freaking-lutely...to the full extent of the law.

Lock your guns, educate your kids. Laziness is no excuse for responsability. That is the point.

RPM what about the many gun safety classes given by the NRA or at NRA sponsered events each year that help prevent stupid accidents like this one.

I'm not a big fan of the NRA either.  Not because of their propaganda but because I never got my hat when I subscribed to a membership AND I must have gotten a new letter each week asking for more money.

I like the fact that they lobby on my behalf for constitutional rights.....in this aspect they are no different than groups that lobby against infingments on the 1st or 4th amemndments.

[Elfie]

I didn't say that, did I?  

Didn't say you did. Was just pointing out Lincoln's objective for the Civil War.

[rpm]

Guns, I am not oppossed to education. But to put in terms you can understand, what about ejection seat fanatics posting about only the postitive results of an evac vs the negative results? I know this is an unfair eval because the seats have only 1 purpose.

My point was following the rest of the flock does not make you less of a sheep, only a member of the flock.