On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 02:09:27PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 12:41, donw@examen.com wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 01:35:20PM -0500, Alfredo Valles wrote: > > > > > > I don't think they will do so well with the number of guns you have in the > > > streets, bullets don't distinguish Ph degrees. > > > > PhDs and brains don't go hand-in-hand; part of being smart is knowing > > how to work within whatever cultural limitations you must; in the case > > of firearm-owning Americans, you just need to be smart enough not to not > > get on their bad side. Social engineering at its most useful. > > There are roughly 40M handguns in this country, and quite a number > of states have "right to carry concealed handgun" laws. If the > vast majority of people had such a low level of self-control, we > should see, for example, multiple Columbines[1] on a daily basis. > Since we don't, what conclusion can we draw from this? Well, when you look at the US figures on "firearm-related fatalities" being up in the tens of thousands per year... compared to (for example) Canada with a couple of hundred per year (and tight gun control laws, what a bizarre coincidence)... http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/994015/posts I realize that Canada has about one-tenth the population of USA, but that still gives you per-capita rates that say Americans are somewhere on the order of ten _times_ as likely to blow each other away. Does it take "multiple Columbines on a daily basis" to constitute a problem? Somewhere close to a hundred Americans blow each other away _per_day_ and you want this to lead me to the conclusion that things are okay? -- ,-------------------------------------------------------------------------. > -ScruLoose- | Religion's in the hands of some crazy-ass people. < > Please do not | - Jimmy Buffet < > reply off-list. | < `-------------------------------------------------------------------------'
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