The truth about kids and gun deaths (or, Rosy Uber Alles)

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The Truth or as close gets: Frau Rosy tells us that 60,000 children a year are dying from guns. Terrible! The way Rosy paints it, most of these terrible acts transpire when junior finds a loaded gun in daddy's drawer and either shoots himself or someone else. Yet a closer look at the facts indicate that Rosy's numbers are--well--National Socialist (Nazi) propaganda. http://slate.msn.com/code/breakfast/breakfast.asp?Show=5/12/00&idMessage=5298&idBio=168 reveals that 70% of these "children" are actually 17-19 year old street thugs who massacre each other during drug-gang warfare and other crimes. It's even a higher percentage if you include the 16, 15, and 14 year old street thugs. Thousands more die when the gangsters miss and hit innocent bystanders; or as a result of adult (non teen) murderers and other criminals committing their acts.

So how many "children" actaully die in non-criminal actions? According to http://www.cato.org/dailys/05-13-00.html

In 1997, the last year for which data are available, the actual number of children under 15 that died in gun accidents was 142 (about 3 per state). The total number that died from any gun-related cause (including being shot while committing a crime or being shot by a criminal of any age) was 650 or so.

Many more children die each year in accidents involving minivans, bathtubs, bikes, space heaters, hot cooking skillets, swimming pools, playground equipment, choking on candy, etc.

So lock up your guns--both to keep them from the children, and from Oberlieutenant Rosy!

-- sis (sis@home.zzz), May 15, 2000

Answers

Original Message -- Subject: IMPORTANT: Australia and guns

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, a program costing the government more than $500 million dollars. And now the results are in:

Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent;
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (Yes, 44 percent).
In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent.

Figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms (but increased drastically in the past 12 months).

There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.

Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in "safety" has been served after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in "ridding society of guns."

Bet you won't see this data on the evening news or hear your governor or members of the state Assembly disseminating this information.

It's time to state it plainly: Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws only affect the law-abiding citizens.

Take note, Californians and other Americans, before it's too late!


(first they'll come for the guns..then they'll go after the beer and cigarettes again...then the caffiene and sugar.. and fruitcakes...)

-- kritter (kritter@adelphia.net), May 18, 2000.

35,000 gun deaths in USA, about 500 in Australia. Guns don't kill people, people kill people! What a joke. Grow up and face the facts. Guns are made to kill...and kill they do! You like that? What can I say? We live in a sad world, and you and your ilk are the cause. Get an olive branch! Not a sword!

-- delynn colvert (cribwrld@msn.com), November 11, 2002.

And the sad fact also is that he who can only wave an olive branch will be threatened andkilled by the (immoral) criminal who refuses to follow the law.

The highest crime rates are (universally) in those areas with the lowest morals, and the with the highest restrictions on freedom - including the right to bear arms.

Responsibly ("well-trained" comes to mind) bear arms. In defense of yourself, your family, and your freedoms.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (racookpe@earthlink.net), November 12, 2002.


If everyone held an olive branch..I would be very happy. :) Unfortunately..I have learned in life that there are some people who just dont understand compromise, fairness, tolerance, acceptance. And I started learning this in like third grade.

People who do not wish to live by the rules of society, who refuse to play fair or "do the right thing", who feel only their own personal needs and thoughts matter, exist in all realms of life.

It is solely because there are people who will do you or your family harm sinply because they want something from you or dont like you, that we are forced to ever have to consider defending ourselves.

If we were to be without a form of defense..the meek my friend would never inherit the earth. The larger, the stronger, the unreasonable self gratifying bullies would pretty much own us all.

It is only with the ability to defend oneself that the slate is evened out. I am not the perpetrator of these actions..but I wont stand by and have someone cause harm to me either.

Would you truely believe that banning guns would remove them from the hands of those who do not live in harmony with others or choose to not follow the other rules of our society?

You need only look at countries like England to see the results of such actions. In addition to the thugs still having access to guns, the amount of stabbings, strangulations, beating deaths, and other such forms of murder and brutality have risen steadily since. It has changed exactly nothing, but taken the ability of the victims to defend themselves away. Rotten people will continue to exist not matter how much you ask them to take an olive branch. I should be allowed to keep myself and my family safe from them.

-- kritter (k@a.n), November 13, 2002.


It is funny someone should bring up Australia:

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, a program costing the government more than $500 million dollars. And now the results are in:

Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent; Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent; Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (Yes, 44 percent). In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent.

Figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms (but increased drastically in the past 12 months).

There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.

Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in "safety" has been served after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in "ridding society of guns."

I ganked this from another post on here: http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003A9O

In Victoria homicides with firearms are up 300 percent!!! How can this be if they outlawed all those guns?! It is quite plain why crime is up in Australia. The criminals know their victims won't have the means to protect themselves. Their blood is on the hands of those who push to have guns taken away from law-abiding citizens.

-- Sir Mildred Pierce (sirmildredpierce@yahoo.com), January 04, 2003.



"Criminals know their victims won't have the means to protect themselves."

That is correct. Only the law-abiding citizens gave up their guns; the criminals still have theirs. There are some in the United States who want to reverse our 'right to bear arms' but I don't think it will happen. (Especially in Texas!) ;-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), January 04, 2003.


Tut, tut, I thought this was a gentle forum where folks wrote stories, haiku and jabbered about fruitcakes. Now I find that it is rife with gun toting poets who do not appreciate the special difficulties of being a gangstah.

Let's compromise: I propose "Armed Love".

-- (lars@indy.net), January 06, 2003.


LOL, lars....
; )


here's something that i nabbed from a blog the other day

this whittle guy certainly has a way with words!
you can check out his site at www.ejectejecteject.com

~~~~~~~~~

Freedom
by Bill Whittle


When I was a little kid, I asked my dad (who had served in the latter days of WW2 in Europe as a U.S. Army intelligence officer) about images I had seen of really huge numbers of prisoners being marched to their execution, guarded by perhaps five or ten men with rifles. I wanted to know why they didn't just rush the guards? I mean, it's one thing if they were heading to another crappy day at work camp, but these people were being marched off to be killed. I mean, for God's sake, what did they have to lose?

I was six. My dad looked at me. He'd been to the camps, seen some horrible things. When I asked him why they didn't fight back or run for the woods, he said, without any arrogance or pride or jingoism, "I don't know Billy, I can't figure that one out myself." Then there was a long moment. "But I can't imagine Americans just walking off like that, either."

Now before the combined military might of the European Union unites against me with a very harshly worded letter, let me clarify something: When he said he couldn't imagine Americans marching off to their deaths, he meant, obviously, Americans like the ones he knew. Kids who grew up hunting, kids who got a BB gun for their fifth birthday (never Christmas though --- you could shoot your eye out!). Likewise, it's impossible to imagine thousands of Brits (circa 1944) or Norwegians.

Freedom is preserved by free people.

Free people know in their heart that they are free. Back to the idea of an unarmed, culturally rich, bathed in literature and opera, non-simplisme culture like 1940s Germany: I also asked my father what would happen if the Gestapo came for us one night. He said he couldn't stop them from taking us, but he could damn sure take a few of those bastards with them, and I decided right there that I'd do the same thing.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, in Solzhenitsyn's Gulags, in countless other miserable terrifying pits of murder, some people woke up to the idea that resistance is NOT futile.

Addison and David Gulliver have it exactly right. Which is why that old saw, which in my terribly, tragically misspent liberal youth I used to sneer at as the mark of a real idiot - "they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers" - suddenly makes a new kind of sense to me.

That is not the statement of someone who doesn't want to give up a snowmobile or a Beemer. That is a statement that draws a line in the sand for the government, or any other oppressor, to plainly see. You want to take this freedom away from me? COME AND GET IT.

Because gun ownership is the truest form of freedom, and here's why: It says you are your own person, responsible for your own actions. You are not willing to be collectively punished for the misdeeds of others. In fact, those that abuse this freedom by committing crimes are thought of and dealt with much more harshly by gun owners, as a rule, than by Hollywood celebrities, precisely becuase a free person understands the responsibility that comes with freedom.

I truthfully can say I can't remember hearing of a registered gun owner committing a crime against strangers. Not to say that doesn't happen, but look at the behavior of the average NRA member and I'll bet you there are fewer criminals then there are in, say, the Screen Actors Guild.

To Phillipe and other genuinely interested and open-minded Europeans, let me simply refer you to that great unbiased, uncorruptible teacher: History. Ask yourselves why intellectual elites so love totalitarian states where people are unarmed sheep. Look at the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Saddam. If you hate America so much, then ask yourself why no one fucks with Switzerland.

And when contemplating your ever-so-sophisticated foreign policy, ask yourselves what real options you are left with when facing a determined, heartless bastard like Hitler, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan or Attila.

Maybe the time for real evil like that has finally gone. I hope you are right, I really do. I don't want to go fight those bastards; I'd rather barbeque and watch the Gators. I'm sure the Jews in 1930 Germany thought such things could never happen again, not in a place as "civilized" as Germany. I'm sure every bound and beaten musician, surgeon, philosopher and painter being lined up at the side of a ditch thought exactly that.

Try and understand this about Americans like Rachel and me and most of the rest here: We are not going out like that. Get it? We'll put up with handgun murders if we have to, but we are not going down that road. As a general rule, we are quiet, peaceful, decent people with better things to do than referee endless bloodbaths abroad. But it is possible to get our attention. And believe me, you have it now, and I believe the time will come when you will regret calling us cowboys and Nazis and idiots, not when it comes time to fight us, because that day will not come, but rather when you once again need the help of people like Rachel and me and my late father, fighting forces you ignore not from superior sophistication but from sheer moral cowardice.

One last thing, regarding David Gulliver's excellent post:

"The issuing officer was surprised to see that most of his men would not follow an order to disarm the populace by force."

This, to my mind, is the fundamental difference between the Europeans and the U.S.: We trust the people. We fought wars and lost untold husbands and brothers and sons because of this single most basic belief: Trust the people. Trust them with freedom. Trust them to spend their own money. Trust them to do the right thing. Trust them to defend themselves. To the degree that government can help, great - but TRUST THE PEOPLE. Gun control activists don't think they can be trusted, with their guns or their money. They know better. They'll tell us what to do.

Well, as far as the U.S. government trying to disarm America, it won't happen. Not only because the people will resist. Not only because it is in the fabric of the document that limits and legitimizes government. The single main reason why you won't see a police state here, ever, is because American police think it's a crock of shit, too.

Who will do the dirty work? Volunteer citizen soldiers, that's who - and the first guns they'd have to turn in would be their own. We don't have shock troops here, boyo. No Republican Guards, special or otherwise; no Hussars, no Cossacks, no SS; we lack Preatorian guards, elite Napoleonic bodyguard units - any of that poison. Just kids serving their country, making some money for college. You think those people would fire on a crowd of American citizens? Think again.

These trust the people freedoms are so deeply engrained in the fabric of America as to be genetic, I think. I used to worry that we'd bred that out of us, and then along comes Todd Beamer and company on United Flight 93, who, first among us that day, realized he was being marched to his death and decided to do something about it.

We are a nation of immigrants, the descendents of people who had had quite enough of being told what to do by inbred aristocratic idiots and unelected intellectual effete sadists. When Europeans call us idiots, they simply show themselves incapable of recognizing the difference between intelligence, of which we are amply endowed, and intellectualism, that circle-jerk of coffee table discussion and basement politburo planning that we have never had much patience with.

Our grandparents walked on the moon, man! And why is it that of all we produce and all we exult, the only things that seem to have caught on in Europe are McDonald's and Baywatch? That says much more about you than it does about us, and none of it good, I'm afraid.

-- (mebs@watching.six), January 07, 2003.

If you want to see what life will be like if the gun-controllers get their way, watch "Demolition Man". Yes, it is just a movie and we all know how Hollywood is. However, it brings up a very disturbing thought, nonetheless - and that is this: Turning yourselves into sheep won't make the wolves go away. We have lost sight of our origins and are becoming willing to trade freedom for political correctness. The US and Switzerland (our sister republick) have never been invaded. Why? History has drilled the answer into our heads. Prepare for peace, get war. Prepare for war, get peace.

-- Jimmy (james.tech@onetel.net.uk), January 26, 2003.

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