Hermit wrote:Seth wrote:As you know, the most accurate number of actual defensive gun uses available is that provided by the FBI itself, after studying case records where the use of a firearm by a victim was documented and investigated, and the FBI uses this hard data to estimate that at least 80,000 people per year lawfully use firearms defensively to protect themselves.
That's ten times the number of people being protected by firearms every year than you cite as being murdered by handguns.
Therefore, the benefit of individuals being armed outweighs the danger of their being murdered by a handgun by ten to one at a minimum, and if the research by Lott and many others is correct, which there is no reason to believe isn't the case even in the face of the allegations made by your pet Harvard hoplophobes who didn't actually replicate the study and find it in error, that number is more like 312 to one.
Setting aside for the moment all the other considerations that make your diatribes so much bilge, that fact alone completely destroys your argument.
You're describing the conditions in the USA. They don't apply to civilised countries. Insularity for the win.
To pick an example of a civilised country where your argument does not apply at all, Australia, the per capita incidence of violent crime is much lower than in the US, and so is the need to defend oneself from armed criminals.
Wrong. The need to defend oneself from criminals, armed or otherwise, is 100 percent and absolute for each and every individual who is victimized by a criminal. The statistical chances of any particular individual being victimized is utterly and completely irrelevant to the need to be armed if and when one is victimized. Every victim needs to be armed, period.
And because it is utterly impossible to predict when, which, where or how many individuals will be victimized, or in what manner and with what severity it is therefore reasonable and prudent to allow every law-abiding person to be armed for self-defense. This is particularly true because merely being armed for self defense poses at best a miniscule threat to non-criminals, and because the right of the individual to effective self-defense in the face of an attack that might be deadly far outweighs the vacuous and paranoid fears of cowards who live in petrified fear of their fellow good citizens who would disarm their neighbors, thereby leaving them helpless in the face of an attack.
The right to individual self defense is not allocated by statistical analysis of crime trends, it's an absolute, unalienable individual right enjoyed in full by each and every individual at every moment in time that they exist.
There are too few of them about, in part because it is so difficult for them to acquire rifles, shotguns and sidearms.
Non sequitur. Criminals don't eschew crime because they don't have guns. Not even in Australia:
AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN
April 13, 2009
It is a common fantasy that gun bans make society safer. In 2002 -- five years after enacting its gun ban -- the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime. In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.
Even Australia's Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:
In 2006, assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
Moreover, Australia and the United States -- where no gun-ban exists -- both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:
Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America's rate dropped 31.7 percent.
During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.
Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.
While this doesn't prove that more guns would impact crime rates, it does prove that gun control is a flawed policy. Furthermore, this highlights the most important point: gun banners promote failed policy regardless of the consequences to the people who must live with them, says the Examiner.
Source: Howard Nemerov, "Australia experiencing more violent crime despite gun ban," Free Republic, April 9, 2009. (emphasis added)
Because of that, we don't feel the need to skulk around with concealed pistols in case we go to, say, a cinema, and have to take a pre-emptive shot at someone who objects to us texting our daughter while an advertisement for an upcoming show is being screened.
I'll bet the 12 people killed and 58 injured in the Aurora, CO movie theater wish somebody like me had been "skulking around with concealed pistols" when the nutcase opened fire.
And suppose that the guy who you're referring to had really cracked and started shooting everyone else rather than firing one shot? Do you suppose someone "skulking around with concealed pistols" might have been useful in putting a stop to the shooting...kind of like the armed school resource officer who put an end to a school shooting in 80 seconds did...as opposed to the two hours that the killers had to run free and kill people at Columbine because there was nobody but them in the school with a firearm?
The thing is, anyone you encounter, any time of the day or night, anywhere you go, could be armed. You'll never know unless and until they pull the gun out to use it. That's why they call them "concealed weapons." What should be of concern to any sane person is that if someone does so with the intent to harm others unlawfully, that there is someone there who is likewise armed who is able and willing to put a stop to the killing.
Gee, what a concept.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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