John Calvin wrote:
>
> >First of all, Psychology tell us that few criminals have an interest in
> >killing others without a cause. The cause could be money. If the victim is
> >unarmed, killing is not necessary, threatening with a weapon usually is
> >enough.
As I've stated before, this is not the case here in the US. Criminals here
prefer to shoot you and any other witnesses to prevent you from testifying
against them. They put a higher value on your stuff than on your life, which is
why we have kids killing other kids for a pair of Nike sneakers. Its also been
conclusively shown that you have a 30% greater chance of surviving an armed
encounter if you are armed with a gun than if not.
> >In Germany we have a very low rate of Murder, with 381 cases of
> >murder. There were a total of 12.448 cases of weapons usage only as a
> >threat. So you could say that we have a very, very low rate of crimes with
> >actual wepaons usage. The crime rate in the US is quite different: 1998 ther
> >were 14088 cases of murder.
>
> I may be having a bad math morning, however considering the differing sizes of the populations the numbers don't appear to be that dramatically different.
>
> Germany 1999 est. population 82,087,361
> US 1999 est. Population 272,639,608
> (the above from the CIA WorldFact Book)
>
> Given the substantially larger population in the U.S. the Substantially Larger number of murders appears to be roughly on par with the murder rate in Germany.
Actually, Germany does have a much lower incidence. However, I notice he only
said murder. What about manslaughter and other forms of illegal homicide? Also,
what are the property crime rates? I notice you left those out, as well as other
violent crime, including non-gun violent crime, like rape, assault,
manslaughter, negligent homicide, etc. What are the rates of burglary, robbery,
larceny and car theft?
As I've repeatedly said, comparing the US average murder rate to a european
average is meaningless because the gun laws vary so widely from state to state,
and those states with the most gun control have the highest rates. If you
divided US states up between those with strict gun control, and those with
liberal gun laws, then do your comparison, you will find that the controlling
states are the greatest contributors to the overall US crime rate.
Claiming that only states with big cities have high crime is incorrect, as there
are plenty of big cities with liberal gun laws in states with liberal gun laws
that have low crime rates. Another thing you can do is look at counties of
similar size and area, that are part of the metro area of a big city, but are in
different states with different gun laws. You can compare Rockingham County, in
New Hapmshire and Middlesex County in Massachusetts, for example, or counties in
Virginia and Maryland that surround Washington DC, or counties in Missouri and
Kansas surrounding Kansas City...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:59 MDT