From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Tue Jul 07 1998 - 08:37:04 MDT
VirgilT7@aol.com wrote:
>Do the math. Five murders per very hundred thousand would be 50 murder per
>every million which would be 400 murders annually in NYC. I think that it's
>actually lower than that, although I could be wrong.
You think... see, there's that word again. You *think*... you don't care
enough to actually look the figures up. Oddly, the per-capita figures don't
seem to be available on the Net, but here's a URL for the total murder
rate in NYC in recent years:
http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/len/i/one.gif
And the reality: more than a thousand murders a year from 1968-1996 and a
peak of nearly 2300. But what's reality when you can *think* instead?
>So your strategy is to to exchange issue-oriented arguments for psychological
>explanations of why others do not agree with those arguments? It'll certainly
>make for a messy and pointless discussion.
No, our strategy is to continue to explain reality to those who prefer
their ideology to facts. You seem to be amongst them.
>Oh, I've heard that mentioned for some time now. I've also had people point
>to examples in foreign countries where guns aren't so easily available and the
>number of murders is almost mind-boggingly less.
Whoopee-do. Britain had a lower murder rate than America before any
anti-gun laws were passed and still has a lower murder rate. Switzerland
and Israel have widespread availability of military weapons and murder
rates not much higher than Britain (about a quarter of the US rates).
Jamaica and Mexico have extremely restrictive gun laws but murder rates
about twice as high as the US.
So, you were saying?
>Other methods would be to point out that NYC has the toughest gun control laws
>and a declining crime rate that is the envy of American cities.
Or pointing out that *DC* has the toughest gun control laws in the US
*and* the highest murder rate (more than 100 per 100,000 last time I
checked). You were saying, again?
(and, of course, the reduction in murders in NYC has come from increasing
the clearup rate and hence the risk to murderers, not by new restrictions
on guns).
>My point here, since I really do not want to become entangled in a long,
>detailed, gun-control debate, is that the facts simply are NOT clear,
Of course that's only true if you prefer your anti-gun ideology to reality;
amongst independent criminologists the facts are indeed very clear, as you
would have discovered if you'd read the paper I pointed you to yesterday.
Gun control is almost entirely irrelevant to crime rates; there are
countries with strict laws and lots of gun crimes and countries with lax
laws and almost none. Relaxing those laws does reduce the murder rate, just
as increasing the number of cops, but that's still a small change compared
to social factors which can make one area a hundred times as dangerous
as another even though the less dangerous area has almost no gun laws
and the more dangerous area bans them almost entirely (e.g. Vermont and
DC).
But like most anti-gunners, you think and feel, you don't bother to
actually study the subject you're ranting about.
Mark
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