I NEED your help and thoughts - UPDATE

[dave_in_delaware]

I agree. Very well-written. Good job on your response article. I loved it.

[dsglenn]

Very well written article you should really send the story to have it published.

I remember writing an argument paper for one of my college teachers on Gun Control. I made the best grade on that paper but wow did I push some of the teachers buttons. The point is I callenged her thinking and received a good grade on the assignment.

[Parrishco]

I did submit it to be published in the paper - but I just have to wait and see if it is... I'll let you know...

[attackrott]

Great job, two thumbs up. Very clear precise and logical arguments and all backed up by facts. I think your article will get the people with common sense to really consider the truth and facts and not just emotion and theoretical Orwellian views.

[attackrott]

Oh bumber I thought it was already published. How liberal is the paper and the fat cats the control its content?

[beardman2]

awesome article. Hey if they don't print it you could always post it on school bulletin boards. Probably won't last long but its worth a try.

[Parrishco]

Well it is a college paper - but it is in TN which helps a bit. And luckily we have an editor which prints articles he disagrees with and is overall fair is lettng both side speak. I know they will not print it in its entirety but my best friend writes for the town newspaper so Im hoping to modify it to submit it there - if he can pull the right strings. And thats a good idea beardman2 - i never thought about that.

[OutsiderXD]

I couldn't get past the last sentence in the first paragraph. Lost all intrest in what he had to let out of his piehole.
Sorry I am not much help

[Parrishco]

Just thought you guys might want to see the response I received from the author of the original article. He emailed it to me, here it is:

"Hello Drew, I will deal with your points individually below, to make sure that I don't miss anything.


> The original editorial correctly cited a statistic that stated
>in 2003 there were 30,136 gun related deaths. Though when put into
>perspective of the total 2,448,288 deaths in 2003[i], gun related deaths
>(including accidental shootings, legal interventions and suicides) only
>account for a mere 0.01%.

Sorry, but this point is the victim of a logical fallacy built around
grouping unlike things together. You cannot compare gund deaths to, say,
cancer deaths. What this attempts to do is bury the subject under
consideration. You could just as easily say that thefts are no problem because
the overall loss of property in the nation, including losses to hurricanes,
tornadoes, destruction through wear and tear and so forth dwarf the property
value stolen yearly.


>A person is 22.7 times more likely to die of heart disease and 18.5 times
>more likely to die from a malignant neoplasm (cancer), rather than from a
>gun related death - even a self inflicted one like suicide. In fact you're
>twice as likely to die from the flu rather than by a gun.[ii] Of the gun
>deaths that do occur, suicides make up 56.5% according to the Bureau of
>Justice Statistics. In fact, drugs and suicides account for more than 2 out
>of every 3 gun deaths in the United States.[iii]

I´ve already answered the first part of this above. As for suicides, you are
right, and this is a real problem. Suicide attempts with guns are fatal 92%
of the time, almost 10 times more likely to kill than any other form of
suicide. Furthermore, members of households that contain guns are five times
more likely to committ suicide than members of households without guns.
Finally, 68% of all suicides committed by persons 15-24 are effected with a
gun. In short, guns make suicide easier and more lethal, which means that a
person is more likely to attempt suicide if a gun is available, and more
likely to succeed. For this data, see Arthur Kellerman, Journal of Trauma,
August 1998, ohn McIntosh, 1995 Statistical Training Aides, American
Association of Suicidology, Washington, DC, 1998, Wintemute, et. al., "The
Choice of Weapons in Firearm Suicides," American Journal of Public Health, Vol
78, No. 7, July 1988, p. 824, rthur Kellerman, New England Journal of
Medicine, 1993, and Peter Cummings, American Journal of Public Health, 1997. I
believe some of these articles are available through Jstor, others must be
obtained directly from the library.

>Of the 4.8 million violent crimes of rape and sexual assault, robbery, and
>aggravated and simple assault, only 6% of these incidents involved a firearm
>in 2004[iv].

Well then, are we to assume that the 331,630 individuals who were violently
assaulted by gun wielding assailants in 2004 are irrellevant? Once again,
criminologists agree that firearms make it easier to commit crimes, thus
allowing many people who would otherwise be incapable physically or
emotionally to commit crimes.

In reality, only 0.06% of the firearms owned in the United
>States are even used in a crime.[v] In fact, the Bureau of Justice tells us
>that firearm related crime has plummeted since 1993[vi] and nonfatal firearm
>crime rates have declined since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever
>recorded in 2004.[vii]

You are correct. Yet, when opium was declared illegal for non-prescription
use in 1919, in the US, it made no difference that the majority of people who
used opium did so without abusing it. Those who did harmed society badly
enough that it was deemed ill advised to continue to allow this substance to
be sold in the US. Nor does the fact that gun violence has declined in the
past decade make firearm possession unproblematic.

>Furthermore, gun control does not have a positive effect on crime. The U.S.
>government "found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of
>any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent
>outcomes."[viii] In fact, violent crime appears to be encouraged by gun
>control. Most gun control laws in the United States have been written since
>1968, yet the overall murder rate has risen during that time.[ix]

Our current gun laws are woefully inadequate. As such, they do little to deter
crime. I grant that. However, to infer that gun control laws cause crime is
unsupportable. Might I refer you back to your earlier statistics,that violent
crime has fallen in the US over the last decade? Yet, according to your own
statement we have more gun control laws today than ten years ago. These
statistics, in all honesty, likely have more to do with the economy than
anything else, as the changes have not been statistically significant. It is
well established that when the economy improves, crime of all sorts goes down,
and during the 1990s we were enjoying a booming economy.

>Many of the countries with the strictest gun control, Australia and England
>for example, have the highest violent crime rate of any of the top 17
>industrialized countries.[x]

Please refer to these tables.
For England:
http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/to...3=0&sub=0&v=27
Note that these figures are for each 1,000 of people. Multiply by 100 for
comparison to US figures below.

And for the US:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offen...ime/index.html

Our rate of violent crime is almost identical. But, compare the murder rate.

For Britain:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/cru/resfinds/crf36-00.htm
Note that in England and Wales the murder rate is 11.28 per MILLION in the
popluation.

For the US:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offen...me/murder.html
The rate is 5.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. To compare to England and Wales, we
multiply by 10 (because their statistics are per 1 million inhabitants) and
learn that our murder rate is 55 per million--almost five times that of
England and Wales.


Switzerland has extremely lenient gun control
>(more so than the U.S.)[xi], and has the third-lowest homicide rate of the
>top nine major European countries, and the same per capita rate as England
>and Wales.[xii] In Britain, where not even the police are allowed to have
>guns, one in three criminals under the age of 25 possesses or has access to
>a firearm.[xiii]

These statistics are drawn from the Guardin. This may surprise you, but
newspapers in Britain engage in alarmist reporting to sell papers. Let us look
at the British Home Offices official statistics on crime. With a population of
some 58 million Britain suffered these gun crimes.

22,798 gun crimes. Of which, 3,333 involved imitation or toy weapons and
11,825 involved airguns. That leaves some 7,000 or so gun crimes. Of these
Britain suffered a grand total of 78 homicides committed with handguns. I will
attach the relevant chapter from the British Home Office report. You will note
that it does not do to compare the UK and the US in terms of gun crime or
homicides.
In Australia crime has been rising since a sweeping ban on
>private gun ownership. In the first two years after gun-owners were forced
>to surrender 640,381 personal firearms, government statistics show a
>dramatic increase in criminal activity: A 170.1% increase in armed robbery.
>A 144% increase in kidnapping/abduction. A 130.9% increase in assault, and a
>117.6% increase in attempted murder.[xiv]

Regrettable, but until the guns are actually off the street, as they will be
eventually, than not unexpected.

Clearly banning guns is not the
>all in all solution to crime. We should ban guns no more than we should ban
>cars. Though there are reckless people who kill with both, the problem lies
>in the irresponsible use of the tool, not in the tool itself.


Once again, and irrellevant comparison, but it does raise an interesting
point. Throughout the US you must pass an exam to drive a car and failing to
drive responsibly leads to revocation of the license. Not so with guns. There
are limited restrictions on purchase, but none having to do with competence,
and there are no real restrictions on firearm use.
>
>Economics, race and class have little to do with who is affected by gun
>crime.

Wow. This is demonstrably untrue. Gun crime does in fact affect the poor and
minorities far more often than it does the middle class. I wonder how much
time you have spent in poor urban neighborhoods. Not much I imagine.


>Perhaps the best way to prevent gun deaths is to treat depression and mental
>illness (the root cause in many suicides), educated children, and tell them
>not to use or sell illegal drugs, treat drug addiction (the root motivation
>of many gun crimes) and have more police and funds concentrated on enforcing
>drug laws. The gun control lobby, however, says that we should spend
>billions of dollars on gun registration and gun licensing instead of using
>the money to treat the deeper issues that cause the criminals to use a gun
>as their tool to commit crimes. There were criminals and murder before there
>were guns and crime has prevailed throughout history. Empowering and
>encouraging criminals by assuring them that their victims will not be armed
>or be able to fight force with force only provokes crime, not hinder it. The
>responsibility of firearms lies with the owner, not with the government.

I agree that we should attack the root problems, but I would prefer to be
empowered as a citizen by not having to fear violence from a gun carrying
criminal.

>What about those who say "you are far more likely to be hurt with your own
>weapon rather than stop a crime"? The fact is that you are far more likely
>to survive a violent assault if you defend yourself with a gun. In episodes
>where a robbery victim was injured, the injury/defense rates were 6% if the
>victim resisted with a gun, 25% injury rate if the victim did nothing at
>all, 40% if the victim resisted with a knife and if the victim tried to
>non-violently resist they were injured 45% of the time.[xviii]
>
>Guns actually prevent crime. Guns prevent an estimated 2.5 million crimes a
>year, or 6,849 every day.[xix]

This is not true, but is rather drawn from two very flawed studies.. This is a
good example where a few individuals with an agenda and either a lack of
scruples or a lack of analytical skills have made unsupportable assertions.
The statistics you give come from one of two places, a man named Gary Cleck,
or Trent Lott, who got his statistics from an LA Times study. These studies
relied upon a handful of individuals self reporting their supposed use of guns
to protect themselves and extrapolated to cover all of society. Unfortunately,
the data is contradicted by that gathered by the Justice Department from
police departments across the nation, as has been shown by D. McDowell, B.
Wiersama, D. Hemenway, D Azrael and M Miller, among many others. In fact, many
of the instances that were reported as protective acts, were clearly illegal
acts of intimidation upon analysis, when it could be determined that they had
happened at all.

Often the gun is never fired and no blood
>(including the criminal's) is shed. Every day, 550 rapes, 1,100 murders, and
>5,200 other violent crimes are prevented just by showing a gun. In less than
>0.9% of the time is the gun ever actually fired.[xx] 60% of convicted felons
>admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they knew the victim was
>armed. 40% of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes
>when they thought the victim might be armed.[xxi] Washington D.C. has banned
>gun ownership and has a murder rate of 56.9 per 100,000. Across the river in
>Arlington, Virginia, gun ownership is not regulated, and the murder rate is
>a mere 1.6 per 100,000.[xxii] Furthermore, one can see the impact guns have
>on crime by the example of Kennesaw, GA which, in 1982, passed a law
>requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The
>residential burglary rate dropped 89% the following year.[xxiii] 74% of
>felons agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home
>is that they fear being shot during the crime". 57% of those felons polled
>also agreed that "criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim
>than they are about running into the police."[xxiv] As we can see guns do
>have an impact on crime: they stop it.
>
>The facts go on and on, but time and space restrict a fuller argument of
>this topic. Suffice it to say that those who do their homework and find out
>the real facts of gun crime in this country always seem to support citizen's
>constitutional right to legal ownership of firearms. Those who lobby so
>voraciously for gun control all too often have hidden agendas or are simply
>misinformed. Gun control issues traverse just the realm of crime prevention
>and cross over into the guaranteeing, not only our individual protection,
>but also the freedoms of our nation as a whole.
>
>One of the chieftains of 20th century peace, Mahatma Gandhi, said "Among the
>many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act
>depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."[xxv]
>
>Perhaps John Adams, the first vice president and second president of the
>United States, stated it best when he said "Resistance to sudden violence,
>for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my
>property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered
>to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not
>surrender if I would."[xxvi]He also said, "Facts are stubborn things; and
>whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our
>passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."[xxvii]

And note that Adams did not state that he had the right to own a gun. Neither
did Madison, whose second amendment is clearlz aimed at supporting militias,
not individuals.


I´m sorry, but I have run out of time. Good day Mr. Parrish.

Scott Hendrix"

[Majk]

I emailed the tree hugging hypocrite.