Quote:
Originally Posted by RayinPenn
Why there are too many guns...
I work in the what was just rated the most violent small city. I see, read about and have experienced what guns can do every day. I road that LIRR train that Collin Ferguson shot and killed all those people almost every night home. That night I missed it, caught the train behind it but Myself and 2 other commuters jumped off our stalled train and walked to the Merillon Ave. station. I saw the senseless bloody carnage in all 20 something shot 6 killed. Months later I saw the wounded try to resume a normal life.. Walking with limps and struggling to carry on.
Every year in the U.S., an average of more than 100,000 people are shot
Every day in the U.S., an average of 289 people are shot. Eighty-six of them die: 30 are murdered, 53 kill themselves, two die accidentally, and one is shot in a police intervention, the Brady Campaign reports.
Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 335,609 people died from guns -- more than the population of St. Louis, Mo. (318,069), Pittsburgh (307,484), Cincinnati, Ohio (296,223), Newark, N.J. (277,540), and Orlando, Fla. (243,195) (sources: CDF, U.S. Census; CDC)
One person is killed by a firearm every 17 minutes, 87 people are killed during an average day, and 609 are killed every week. (source: CDC)
Too many guns in too many irresponsible and unbalanced hands. As scary a place as Israel can be they have gun control laws that are stricter and more intelligent then here in the states ..ours clearly are not working...
"One mishandled firearm that you have stumbled across in your entire lifetime is statistically irrelevant."
If a child picked it up and killed himself or another child would it be statistically irrelevant? You sound like Scrooge- would be ok because it would lessen the excess population?
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You appear to have all the Brady anti-gun lobby figures close at hand, but as Dr. Boogie points out, the incidence of shootings you list is .000303% of the population. Clearly, every incident is tragic, but there are much higher figures for many classes of avoidable deaths.
You speak of the LIRR shooting with 20 shot and 6 killed. I point you to the Luby's Restaurant massacre where 50 people were shot and 26 were killed. Would you like to know why the death toll was so high? It was because a highly trained pistol marksman, Suzanna Hupp, had left her handgun in her car and was unable to engage the killer in a gunfight.
In response to the massacre, the Texas Legislature in 1995 passed a shall-issue gun law, which requires that all qualifying applicants be issued a Concealed Handgun License.
The law had been campaigned for by Suzanna Hupp, who was present at the time of the massacre where both of her parents were shot and killed. She later expressed regret about deciding to leave her gun in her car lest she risk possibly running afoul of the state's concealed weapons laws; during the shootings, she reached for her weapon but then remembered that it was "a hundred feet away in my car." She testified across the country in support of concealed handgun laws, and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1996. The law was signed by then-Governor George W. Bush.
HERE'S THE POINT. IF THERE HAD BEEN MORE (LEGAL) GUNS ON THE LIRR CAR THAT NIGHT IT IS LIKELY THAT MANY OF THOSE UNNECESSARY DEATHS AND WOUNDINGS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED.
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