Patrick Elliott wrote:
> "What if they where not available to the criminals either

That's completely unrealistic, tho. It's almost trivial to make a simple 
firearm. Even when you're in a country under martial law being invaded by an 
attacking country, it's not all that hard to get guns.

Now, if you *also* disarmed the police and military, maybe that would happen.

Or, you can look at countries where *everyone* has guns and knows how to use 
them, and see a tremendously low violent crime rate, and consider that maybe 
the guns aren't the biggest problem to address, even if reducing them would 
help.

> We know we could reduce, or remove, the number of guns out there.

Yeah, because that worked *so* well with drugs.  And with alcohol before that.

> We *don't* know if training will do any good. You get a lot of idiots,

Sure. Because only the brightest people go into the military, and people 
accidentally shoot each other every day there.

> We do not know if everyone having one is a good thing, though that was 
> *precisely* the way things where in the old west, and you could, often, 
> only tell the bad guys from the good guys by whether or not the 
> locals/courts decided you belonged on the end of, or rigging, the rope, 
> hardly a prime example of the "good" that every idiot in sight being 
> armed would produce.

Sure. But that was also at a time when the only police force was the general 
population. Disarm them, and watch what the bad guys do.

> And so on. And, the claims that "studies" say you are better off armed 
> take as little, or less, of *any* of the stuff into account that studies 
> saying guns are not a good thing do.

No it doesn't. It's a simple statistic: People with guns got hurt in violent 
crimes less than people without guns.  Admittedly it didn't look at things 
like accidental shootings, but then this was the FBI unified crime 
statistics, not the FBI unified accident statistics.

Saying you can't tell whether it works is like saying you can't tell whether 
changing the speed limit state-wide reduces accidents.

> Pick what can predictably work 

Does it work? How do you know?

> Doesn't imply a real big certainty about all those "other" 
> studies saying its a good thing to have them around imo.

Understand that the reason the guns are around in the USA are for when the 
shit hits the fan. We haven't had a whole lot of revolutions in this 
country, in part because of the second amendment. Before you disarm 
everyone, take into account the effect that has on how corrupt the 
government can get, before you loudly proclaim the benefits of being just as 
disarmed as the general population of, say, China. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
  "How did he die?"   "He got shot in the hand."
     "That was fatal?"
          "He was holding a live grenade at the time."

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