Quote:
Originally Posted by Polar Bear
The gun is designed to shoot things. It is used for nothing else. The automobile is used for...naaahhh...I'm not going to complete saying something that is so patently obvious.
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You are fixated on guns as murder weapons. What do you think people used to kill each other before guns existed? Do you think murder rates were lower before guns were available to the masses?? Tricky question to answer because you need a country that kept murder stats pre gun and post gun.
One such country is England.
Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year.
By contrast, the 1993 homicide rate in New York City was 25.9 per 100,000. The 1992 national homicide rate for the United States was 9.3 per 100,000.
After examining coroners' inquests, Barbara A. Hannawalt, a professor of medieval English history at the University of Minnesota, concluded that most slayings in medieval England started as quarrels among farmers in the field. "They were grubbing for existence," she said. Insults to honor were taken seriously, and violence was the accepted method of settling disputes, since the king's courts were slow, expensive and corrupt.
The knife and the quarterstaff, the heavy wooden stick commonly carried for herding animals and walking on the muddy roads, were the weapons of choice. "Everyone carried a knife, even women," she said, since "if you sat down somewhere to eat, you were expected to bring your own." Given the lack of sanitation at the time, even simple knife wounds could prove deadly.
Historical Study of Homicide and Cities Surprises the Experts - NYTimes.com
I am sure there was a "great uproar" against knifes and quaterstaffs back in the day!