Posted on 01/03/2004 9:55:32 AM PST by jimkress
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:38:15 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
People fear guns. Yet, while guns make it easier for bad things to happen, they also make it easier for people to protect themselves.
With the avalanche of horrific news stories about guns over the years, it's no wonder people find it hard to believe that, according to surveys (one I conducted for 2002 for my book, "The Bias Against Guns," and three earlier academic surveys by different researchers published in such journals as the Journal of Criminal Justice) there are about two million defensive gun uses (search) each year; guns are used defensively four times more frequently than they are to commit crimes.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Nice shot!
Every year, Treasury puts out a report on the top 10 guns used in crime, and each report serves as the basis for dozens of news stories. But why not also provide a report--at least once--on the top 10 guns used defensively? Similarly, numerous government reports estimate the cost of injuries from guns, but none measures the number of injuries prevented when guns are used defensively.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack
R.J. Rummel made the following comment in a speech given to the ABA National Security Conference on "The Rule of Law in United States Foreign Policy and the New World Order. Washington, D.C., October 10-11, 1991:
Today, we can extend the idea of peace through democracy to cover freedom from government genocide and mass murder. But to do so requires overcoming incredible mass ignorance even about the megamurders for which authoritarian and totalitarian governments have been responsible. Of course, everyone knows about the Nazi genocide.
Elsewhere on his website,Freedom Virtually Ends Genocide And Mass Murder he states:
By shooting, drowning, burying alive, stabbing, torture, beating, suffocation, starvation, exposure, poison, crushing, and other countless ways that lives can be wiped out, governments have killed unarmed and helpless The Revolutionary Second Amendmentpeople. Intentionally. With forethought. This is murder. It is democide.
...democide is a government's murder of people for whatever reason; genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language.
Part of this reluctance to call a government or its ruler a murderer comes from the fact that to do so is a new and strange thought. Democide is a black hole in our textbooks, college teaching, and social science research. Few people know the extent to which governments murder people.
Note that at the workers' level, this was not an act of massacre by the uneducated, undisciplined masses, ordinary folk easily misled and aroused. As with the Holocaust, when Nazi killing squads were often led and composed of Ph.Ds and other professionals, the claims of the powerful and authoritative easily swayed the well educated to murder. In the Great Genocide, Hutu lawyers, teachers, professors, medical doctors, journalists, and other professionals, made their contribution to the methodical annihilation of the Tutsi or defiant Hutu.
What connects all these cases of democide is this: as a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal wishes, or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted.
Fear may be justifiable if you are looking into the barrel of a weapon that is being held by someone with malevolent intentions.
Will not do much good if he/she is pointing and you are only carrying! ;~)
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