Posted on 05/10/2013 6:51:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 31,672 people died by guns in 2010 (the most recent year for which U.S. figures are available), a staggering number that is orders of magnitude higher than that of comparable Western democracies. What can we do about it? National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre believes he knows: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If LaPierre means professionally trained police and military who routinely practice shooting at ranges, this observation would at least be partially true. If he means armed private citizens with little to no training, he could not be more wrong.
Consider a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” Pistol owners' fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense. I harbored this belief for the 20 years I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum with hollow-point bullets designed to shred the body of anyone who dared to break into my home, but when I learned about these statistics, I got rid of the gun.
More insights can be found in a 2013 book from Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, edited by Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick.....
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
In most places, police academies devote just a week or two to firearms training. I've had far more formal training than the average police officer, and far more range time.
The best solution is to make certain that all citizens are properly trained in the safe use of firearms.
Ditto.
I have to wonder if they really know better themselves. After all, these medicos know you don’t have to vaccinate every single person in a community in order to bring an epidemic to an end. (Quick! How many of you have smallpox vaccinations?)
Probably not the answer the grabbers want... but if taxes have to subsidize anything why not this. Shooting lessons free to anyone who is not a crook or a nut.
Don’t be dissin’ black rednecks, or any color of rednecks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c66P1mCVGio
Rednecks built America!
It’s unfortunate that they suffered such a rate of craziness. I have a hunch, it would be probably difficult to prove, but what I think is a spiritually educated hunch, that the problems with such populations may not be all genetic. It may be spiritual too, and I don’t mean all of their free will i.e. if they just read the bible all the demons would go away, it’s not always that simple in spiritual warfare. All manner of dark spirits probably followed the African slaves kidnapped from Africa, and guess where they mostly went.
The other day, in the news, the news reader stated that “government scientists at NOAA .....”. That’s all that I needed to hear .... “government scientists” is an oxymoron!
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