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Why does it have to be all or nothing... with all things conservative? Most other countries have a much lower homicide rate than the USA. That is just a fact. Why is that?

Just because Canada,UK,Australia, etc don’t have a murder rate equal to zero does not mean there are not lessons to be learned here. The USA is not even in the same ballpark when homicide rates are compared with other first world nations.

How would taking away my gun stop gun violence and get the U.S. more in line with the rest of the world? My gun is in my home and is used solely for self defensive purposes. To which I add, has never to date been used.

But God forbid, and I pray it never comes, that someone decides to kick in my door at three o'clock in the morning for whatever nefarious purposes, I pray that I still have my gun to defend myself. For you know as well as I that even if the police were just down the street from my home, there would be in fact precious little they could do to protect me and my family.

Two thirds of all 1992 US murders were accomplished with firearms. Handguns were used in about half of all murders. Sharp instruments were used in 17% of murders and blunt instruments in about 6%. Gun control laws are stiffer in Canada, and many claim this accounts for the murder rate being lower in Canada than in the United States. 65% of US homicides were committed with firearms, versus 32% in Canada. However, a large American study indicated that liberalized laws for carrying concealed weapons reduced murder rates in the US by 8.5%. US homicide rates in the year 1900 were an estimated 1 per 100,000 -- at a time when anyone of any age could buy a gun. Statistics-gathering may have been less thorough at that time -- and few people had the money or interest to buy guns. But American gun supply (including handguns) doubled from the 1973-1992 period, during which homicide rates remained unchanged (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 4-Aug-2000, p.A10). Politicians in Massachusetts have cited the State's tough gun control laws as the reason for its low murder rates. However, the adjacent states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have some of the least stringent gun control laws in the US, yet the first two have lower murder rates than Massachusetts and the murder rates in Vermont are comparable to those in Massachusetts. Murder rates in Boston increased 50% in 2004 over the previous year, while murder rates in Los Angeles, Miami, Washington and many other major cites saw murder rates decline.

“Just because Canada,UK,Australia, etc don’t have a murder rate equal to zero does not mean there are not lessons to be learned here. The USA is not even in the same ballpark when homicide rates are compared with other first world nations.”

Great. we’ll send you our innercity population and you civilize them

Why does it have to be all or nothing... with all things conservative? Most other countries have a much lower homicide rate than the USA. That is just a fact. Why is that?

Good question. But the murder rate went north in the USA and not in other nations 20 years before any western nation changed their lax gun laws so it's not that.

Maybe the rise of religious Fundamentalism in the US?