Howard's gun legacy - 200 lives saved a year

Nah! I got one just begging for a buy back. Derringer with one barrel that shoots around corners, but I can never remember which one. Loading seems kind of dangerous, too, if you don't do it exactly right.

Freedom haters never deserve kudos for abolishing freedom, even when they make bogus claims that taking away freedom somehow saves lives.

Strangely I don't feel any less free than I did in 1995. But maybe owning a gun would change that. Can't imagine what it's like to drive in your neighbourhood wondering which nutjob has a gun and if you can pull yours out quicker than he can.

Of course you probably can't imagine what it's like to live in a neighbourhood with deadly spiders, snakes and jellyfish. Of course none of them has ever tried to carjack me (ok, once a spider did)

you left out the crocs!

Totally agree with you, hinge.
And I'll grudgingly admit that it took considerable courage on his part, considering the opposition he faced at the time.
(As for the rest of his legacy.... agh!)

Refreshing.

Before the buyback, Australia used to have a multiple shooting every year or two.

''In the 13 years since (the buyback), there have been none.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.
I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''

For those of you who don't live in Australia & might be interested, this was the event which led to the gun buyback ... :



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_%28Australia%29

I can't quite see how these figures add up....
660,000 guns at $800,000 each = 52.8 trillion dollars ? .. But let's take off the 1%tax levy we all paid, say $500 million = 52.3 trillion ? ...
If so, what was this $52.3 trillion benefit ?
Also suicides down 74 % ... so does this mean 74% of suicides were committed
with semi-automatic rifles/pump action shot guns ?
Perhaps someone can set me straight ..... or is it just spin doctoring ?
The fact is that the law abiding folk who handed in the now illegal firearms
still have have other firearms which comply with the law.
I wonder how many criminals handed their cache in ?

Suicides commited with firearms are down 74%

There are four basic reasons for the second ammendment in the United States.

Every one of the founding fathers is on record to the effect that private
ownership of firearms, the 2'nd ammendment, is there as a final bulwark against
the possibility of government going out of control. That is the most major
reason for it.

At the time of the revolution and for years afterwards, there were private
armies, private ownership of cannons and warships. . . The term "letters of
marque, and reprisal" which you read in the constitution indicates the notion of
the government issuing a sort of a hunting license to the owner of a private
warship to take English or other foreign national ships on the high seas, i.e.
to either capture or sink them. The idea of you or me owning a Vepr or FAL rifle
with a 30-round magazine is not likely to have bothered any of those people.

The problem with drug-dealers owning AKs is a drug problem and not a gun
problem. Fix the drug-problem, i.e. get rid of the insane war on drugs and pass
a rational set of drug laws, and both problems will simply go away. A rational
set of drug laws would:

1. Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no
more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
2. Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances
would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot
up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e.
take every dime out of that business for criminals.
3. Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and other Jeckyl/Hyde
formulas.
4. Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.

Do all of that, and the drug problem, the gun problem, and 70% of all urban
crime will vanish within two years.

But I digress. The 2'nd ammendment is there as a final bulwark against our own
government going out of control. It is also there as a bulwark against any
foreign invasion which our own military might not be able to stop.

Admiral Yamamoto, when asked by the Japanese general staff about the possibility
of invading the American homeland, replied that there were fifty million
lunatics in this country who owned military style weaponry, and that there would
be "a rifle behind every blade of grass". This apparently bothered him a great
deal more than the 200,000 or so guys in uniform prior to the war.

A third obvious reason for private ownership of firearms is to protect yourself
and your family from criminals and wild animals.

And there's a fourth reason for the 2'nd ammendment, which is to provide the
people with food during bad economic times. When you listen to people from New
York and from Texas talk about the depression of the 30's, you hear two totally
different stories. The people in New York will tell you about people starving
and eating garbage, and running around naked. The Texans (and others from more
rural areas and places in which laws and customs had remained closer to those
which the founding fathers envisioned) will tell you that while money was
scarce, they always had 22 and 30 calibre ammunition, and that they always had
something to eat, even if it was just some jackrabbit.

Eating is habit forming. In any sort of a down economic situation, that fourth rationale
for the second amendment quickly becomes the most important.

One other thing somebody might mention would be the 60,000 or so people killed by snakes in India every year. That simply cannot happen in a nation whose people are armed. The 2'nd amendment is an idea whose time has come all over the world, and not just in the US.

Trying to imagine all the suffering of those people poisoning themselves when they could have simply shot themselves through the head without any pain...

The freedom to have guns does not result in such a situation.

That's because they don't.





It's just spin doctoring. The freedom haters spew bogus statistics now and again to try to pretend that taking away freedom saves lives.

Don't ya just hate this sort of mindless jargon?
"Freedom haters".

Yeah, it is hilarious. I'm sure when Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin chatted about freedom they thought it began and ended with having the ability to put holes in other people regardless of your mental state.

Hardly mindless. The gun ban movement is like al-Qa'ida -- trying to create a world with no freedom.

"Regardless of your mental state"??

The Framers were more than capable of supporting multiple freedoms, and that does not in any way diminish the importance of any one freedom.