From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sun Jul 05 1998 - 17:22:22 MDT
In a message dated 98-07-05 18:44:03 EDT, rrandall6@juno.com (Randall R
Randall) wrote:
> >Right... so surely armed private citizens will somehow manage to shoot
> just
> >the criminals and not each other, right?
>
> Exactly. You will probably be surprised to
> learn that this is precisely the truth; as
> compared to police, private citizens are
> less likely to shoot innocents in a firefight
> with criminals.
> No doubt someone else will post the citation.
Here it is:
Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every
year (1,527 to 606).
-- Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.
(Professor Kleck, BTW, was an "anti-gun" social scientist who changed his
views upon uncovering statistics like this.)
And readers of Newsweek learned in 1993 that "only 2% of civilian shootings
involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error
rate' for the police, however, was 11%, more than five times as high."
-- George F. Will, "Are We a Nation of Cowards?," Newsweek (15 November
1993):93
Again, I return to the different contexts of gun ownership in societies that
have developed in a completely disarmed and culturally homogenous fashion and
those that have not. If I lived in a society where no one else was armed and
I could count on almost everyone I encountered having very similar backgrounds
and values to mine, I would feel no compunction about giving up my own
weapons, aside from resenting the loss of the sporting aspect of shooting.
However, where these factors don't obtain, disarming myself seems foolish.
The attitude of people in such other, very different societies seems perfectly
understandable to me, and in the context of the relatively peaceful times in
which we now find ourselves, fairly rational. However, I can't understand the
lack of imagination that seems to lead to a compulsion to export such ideas to
a place with a wholly different social context.
Greg Burch <Gburch1@aol.com>----<burchg@liddellsapp.com>
Attorney ::: Director, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must
be driven into practice with courageous impatience."
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