Reply #251: Since you appear to have good intentions, allow me to clear up some misinformation.

[LeftyMom]

1. Pit bulls do not have locking jaws. No dog does. There's nothing abnormal about their jaws in any way.

2. Pit bulls do not have an unusual potential to cause damage. They're medium-sized dogs. There are any number of dog breeds that are bigger and stronger. They're just much less common.

3. There's no credible evidence that pit bulls kill more people than other dogs, however such evidence would still suggest nothing unless it could be proved that they were disproportionately dangerous in proportion to their numbers. Otherwise high numbers could just suggest that they are very common, which is observably true. To prove that they were disproportionately dangerous, you'd have to compile accurate statistics of bite incidents that meet your criteria (death, serious injury, ER visits, whatever) and then match them accurately to the breed of the dog involved.

Since many dog bite incidents involve dogs whose breeds are not known to the victim or reporting party, and since untrained people are generally terrible at identifying dogs by breed (as I stated elsewhere on the thread, many people think my family's boxers are pit bulls) doing so is nigh impossible. THEN you would have to get accurate information on total dog population broken down by breed, and you'd have to compare the per capita incidents for each breed. So if you found ten million pit bulls and fifteen reported incidents, but two incidents for 100,000 akitas, the statistics would show that akitas were more likely to cause incidents than pit bulls. None of the current surveys have made any attempt to adjust for the ubiquity of the breed, so in those surveys pits would appear to be more dangerous than akitas in my example, due to laughably bad study design.