Reply #93: Golly, what a load of "facts"

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Let's see. The quotes from 1789 are irrelevant. Back then there was no standing army and a gun was a muzzle-loading musket that took about thirty seconds to load - useless for street crime. All the DC stuff proves is that guns laws need to be federal to be effective - there's no point in DC prohibiting what Virginia allows because you can WALK from Virginia to DC. Brit Hume seems to have overlooked the fact that the crime rate in the WHOLE COUNTRY has dropped in the last 19 years, not just the crime rate in Kennesaw Georgia - but of course the Kennesaw mandatory firearm ownership law is responsible for that too, right? H.L. Mencken was a crank who also supported the presidency of Warren G. Harding.

The statistic that guns have been used successfully to deter crime "around two million times per year" is a great zonking lie, and every permutation based on it (like "Less than one out of every thousand times people use guns defensively is the attacker killed") is likewise a lie. Where does the two million figure come from? It is simply made up. Nobody records instances of crimes that DID NOT OCCUR. So we simply assume that every time a gun is present and a bank isn't robbed or a person doesn't get mugged, that gun prevented a crime.

All the nonsense about children who get guns from their parents being less prone to crime would evaporate if the figures were adjusted for socioeconomic class. And is anyone surprised that people who get guns illegally are more likely to commit crimes? It doesn't follow that guns should be legal, but that they should be harder to get.

The "middle section" is fact free, and the ideas in it have already been roundly refuted.

The "knife control" stuff is just silly. When we have drive-by knifings or you can point a knife out a window to snipe at someone 100 yards away, talk to me about knife control. All the stuff about Nazi Germany is a cheap smear. It would be just as reasonable to compare "law abiding gun owners" to the Manson Family or the mafia.

John R. Lott's garbage-in-garbage-out "research" has been thoroughly refuted in other fora. All the stuff about Australia fails to take into account that Australia began as a prison colony, which might explain the crime problem there.

So what does that leave? Anything?