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Ha, I'm getting quite a chuckle watching you hold your own against the flamethrowers. You debate well, and although I disagree with many of your positions, I think you are doing a fine job and am enjoying this thread. Besides, as a native Texan(Houston), I too appreciate and loved the cool temperate weather of Oregon and Pennsylvania. One can always put on layers, but how can one escape the heat? As to the Highland Park shootout, sounds like you must have encountered one of Barry Switzer's Dallas Cowboys!

Well if you are familiar with S. Dallas south of Fair Park(beyond the actual areas next to the Park itself), then you have an idea of S. Atlanta, but on a much larger scale. Liquor stores and a very few homegrown 7-11 type business, neighborhoods of abandoned houses and weedfields with scattered clothing. Though certainly not uniformly so, there are many large pockets of violent poverty. However the spillover rate of crime is much more than you would see from S. Dallas to N. Dallas, due to geographic/demographic differences.

AnAmericanMother raises a really good point about relative risks. Are you familiar with the work of John Lott? He's a researcher who has found(and his work was peer-reviewed) that 98% of the time simply brandishing a weapon was enough to repel an attack, without shots being fired. On average a gun is used in self-defense 7000 times per day in America.

And those stats in the mainstream media that say anywhere from a child a day to 15 per day are shot by guns? All invariably trace back to the research work of an Emory University professor, who has not subjected his findings to peer review, and who refuses to even reveal his methodology. In reality those are urban myths. Lott attempted to reconstruct the figures, and the only way to do so is to include persons up to 25 years of age, and almost all those involve shooting related to gangs and/or commission of a crime. Which is one reason why the reaction to anti-gun statements is often quite caustic here, because we are used to and expect anti-gun advocates to lie, throughout myths, and then call us Nazi's when we point out the holes in those arguments.

Believe it or not, you will find anti-gun proponents sprinkled throughout the spectrum of conservatives, even here on FR. However it does seem to skew female, and also diminish with the level of threats personally encountered. Your story seems to be a bit of an exception, having been attacked yet still anti-gun. Do you think it might be related to anger/upset with your father, and perhaps an increase association of that violence with guns?

I had a girlfriend whose father was physically abusive, and for many years she was very anti-gun(though conservative in most other areas, excepting abortion until a few years ago). However after she had an ex-husband stalk her, she gradually changed her opinions on guns, even after having taken self-defense courses and other forms of protection. FWIW.

Thanks for the answers on the British public. I just wonder, do they fathom that left unchecked, it is only a matter of time before these dictators such as Hussein and Khadafi will have WMD, and plan to use them? It just strikes me as a form of denial, similar to the denial of Hitler's ultimate goals in the late 30's, an attempt to hit the snooze button. The threat comes not from the size of these countries, but the concentration of such destruction in ever smaller and increasing portable weapons. Such weapons are becoming easier to deliver to any city in Europe or the world by mercenaries, which would make tracing and assigning accountability much more difficult. So if one is much less likely to be conclusively fingered as the source, isn't the risk much less? Especially considering that one's enemies(Europeans) would refrain from counteracting without solid proof?