You're poisoning the well by implying that I'd want it to happen to anyone at all.
Of course I don't. It doesn't follow that I have to accept everything that might possibly reduce its rate. If women weren't allowed out without a chaperone, that'd doubtless reduce the rate, too; but that's not the proper response to the problem, and it'd be absurd to think it was. It's not obvious that arming people'd be the proper response either.
There's a lot of things that might be supportable to reduce violent crime of all sorts; but not everything is. It's a long way from being obvious that firearms are the way to go.
You're conflating, too, the number of reported crimes with the number of actual ones. LIke I said: a higher rate of reporting might actually indicate a better environment, inasmuch as that people are more willing to take the effort to go to the police in the first place.
The fact that a study is from Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge tells us nothing about its credibility. It a quick look at the news will show that homicide rates are much, much higher.
With what are we supposed to be comparing NYC and Chicago, by the way? It's hardly surprising that crime rates are higher in cities than elsewhere. It's hardly a mandate for guns.
And there's any number of studies showing that, if you really want to reduce crime, it's going to require all kinds of social intervention in terms of welfare, education, and so on. There's even a public health aspect: there's a very close fit between a drop in the use of leaded petrol and, about 20 years later, a drop in the rate of violent crime. Implication: exposure to lead in the developing brain makes it more likely that the owner of that brain will be violent in later life. And violent crime around the developed world has been falling since about the 70s.
The point is that there's all manner of ways in which you can explain patterns of crime and crime prevention without having to mention guns once. All of which makes your belief in the redemptive power of the pistol look, at best, ill-founded.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Jan 2013, 21:05,
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I liked this
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20536201
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gingerfreak Why? Why not., Mon 14 Jan 2013, 21:14,
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Remind me to never engage you in an argument...
*Doffs cap*
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wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Mon 14 Jan 2013, 21:22,
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