Mr. Toad! How nice to hear from you
I don’t know if I can reply to everything you said in the time I have available, as I’m sort of entertaining this weekend. But I’ll make a start. In view of time constraints, please forgive my use of a slightly broader brush than I normally use.
It seems I need to repeat what I said to Lazs, which was:
By all means, keep your guns. I'm not trying to take them away from you and neither is your government.
(Look further up this thread to see where I said it) My reasons for posting in this thread are that I am curious to know WHY so many people need to keep guns. Gman made a very good point by saying
Not being racist, but remove all the 13-25 African American males from that chart, and then tell me what you've got?
I believe he is alluding to the fact that the vast majority of handgun deaths are caused by young black males killing other young black males. Given the crime hotspots that I have mentioned myself, and more to the point the ethnic mix that can be found in those areas, and you can see that he’s not far off the mark on that point.
In your second post, Mr. Toad, you presented us with a chart showing homicide trends in the US versus England & Wales. I see that like me, you have found that government data is not generally available until it’s about two years old. I also note that your red line has been continued as a DOTTED red line between roughly 1997 and 2005. This is pure extrapolation, and shows the homicide rate per 100,000 declining from 6 to 1! Mr. Toad, you should have been a politician! If you could make that happen, I’d vote for you. But in the context of this discussion, I think that dotted red line is nothing more than misleading conjecture.
You began to mention suicides when you said that
Now let's talk about suicide. More than half the "gun deaths" in America are suicides. Did you know that?
I’ll come back to this, but must remind you that the Home Office stats which I see you have yet to download are concerned with homicides. The suicides will not feature in those figures, but are a tragedy in their own right. If someone wants to kill themselves, they surely will. Furnishing them with guns just makes it more easy, as your statistics demonstrate. On the subject of suicide, you mention statistics for various countries but omit Sweden, suicide capital of the world. What needs to be remembered is that parts of Sweden and large parts of Finland lie above the Arctic Circle where is almost no daylight at all for weeks at a time during the winter months. For depressed people with seemingly insurmountable problems in their lives, the winter’s gloom is the final straw and pushes many over the edge. Please – no-one make light of this. Suicide is a tragedy.
Mr. Toad presents a plausible argument that Americans like killing eachother – it’s their culture – LOL! OK, laughter aside, why is that? Why is America such a violent society? I have many friends in America, but as far as I know, none is a gun owner.
Both Lazs and Mr. Toad claim that disarming ordinary citizens (such as Lazs himself) would not make a dent in crime. And I agree – because there was no point in their having a gun in the first place, and Lazs's gun ownership has no impact on the national crime figures, despite his self appointed status as community crime fighter. Mr. Toad cites the fact that our own ban on handguns has not worked, and that crime in the US is on the decline. I would just like to talk about New York City for a moment. I have an ex-girlfriend in NYC who I used to visit often – 3-4 times a year, and more when I was working for that American company based in Denver, 1996-97. Mr. Toad is right, and New York City is safer now than it has been since the 1960s. I was there in 1979 and felt intimidated. By 1995 when I next visited, things had changed dramatically. The place was much safer. Why do you think this was? Well, Mayor Giuliani was a cracking mayor – and received a knighthood from the Queen. I was damned impressed by Rudi, and his partner in reducing crime, Police Chief Bratton. Between them they understood the causes of crime. Bratton focussed on cracking down on
Quality of Life crimes – guys urinating in the street in the nearest doorway. Bratton could see that perpetrators of seemingly minor crimes were the same people who went on to commit much more serious crimes later on. The thing that Giuliani did was to see that there were MANY more police on the streets, in the subways and all around the city. Zero tolerance. I spent most of the summer of 1995 in NYC, and I was amazed how often I ran into NYC’s finest – uniformed cops working in pairs. Many a time I emerged from a subway station to see the cops with a suspect in handcuffs. I later learned that Giuliani had boosted police numbers by about 33%. The subway was made safe again. I wish I had $1 for every time I saw a pair of cops on the platform or even inside the trains. I have already said that New York (Manhattan between uptown and South Battery) is arguably safer than London (where Lazs felt as threatened as he might have done at a Church bingo night). I said that in
this thread about two weeks ago.
But the really important thing here is to consider why New York City, former murder capital of the USA, now feels safer than London. And the answer, Mr. Toad, is because law enforcement has been given the necessary mandate to tackle crime, and not because Mrs. Gabriella Rozenburg keeps a loaded .38 revolver at her East 74th Street penthouse apartment.Lazs - it's dinner time here. I'll have to reply later.
