[quote...I am not one of the stirrers, who's sole purpose on here is to cause total disruption of the forum.
And what exactly is your purpose here? To try being the court jester who normally illustrates his lack of intellectual ability to add to a conversation, so he inserts pictures of cats in an attempt to amuse himself?
Interesting, NiMA complains that non-Americans express their opinions on this topic. Since he has not objected to you, he must only object to those who don't share his opinion. Another surprise.
No surprise to any normal person. My opinions often differ to NIMA's, but I am not one of the stirrers, who's sole purpose on here is to cause total disruption of the forum.
Can I ask why so many in the USA feel they need to have a gun? Has crime escalated to such a level? Is it so unsafe for 'me/us' as a tourist?
We don't NEED them. We just WANT them.
It doesn't take a PhD in psychology and a lifetime of studying Freud to surmise that perhaps there is some overcompensation going on for a perceived lack of "manhood". Now, oh what could strapping a big, powerful, and mean looking gun with a hard looking shaft oops barrel compensate for?Well I'll be damned!!!!! I never thought of that. I guess if I were the one with the perceived lack of "manhood' I would have thought of it, like you did.
here's an excerpt from today's New York Times editorial, backing up the point our island's mayor made to a community meeting, when he announced that his wife and children were home without a gun, because they were safer that way.
Ask yourself this: Would you wear a seat belt if it were twenty times more likely to choke you than to save you? Would wear blaze orange in the woods if it were twenty times more likely to get you shot at than to save you? Then why would you keep a gun in the house if it's twenty times more likely to cause harm than good?
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[congressional testimony by advocate Sue Trotter] related the story of Sarah McKinley, an 18-year-old Oklahoma woman who shot and killed an intruder on New Years Eve 2011, when she was home alone with her baby. The story was telling, but not in the way she intended, as Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, pointed out. The woman was able to repel the intruder using an ordinary Remington 870 Express 12-gauge shotgun, which would not be banned under the proposed statute. She did not need a military-style weapon with a 30-round magazine.
But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.
The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making women safer, a gun in the home is a particularly strong risk factor for female homicides and the intimidation of women.
In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003.
Further, there was no clear evidence that victims access to a gun reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun at home.
Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk. An analysis by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate partners at a much lower rate. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has used this fact to press the case for universal background checks, to make sure that domestic abusers legally prohibited from having guns cannot get them.
As for the children whose safety Ms. Trotter professes to be so concerned about, guns in the home greatly increase the risk of youth suicides. That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics has long urged parents to remove guns from their homes.
The idea that guns are essential to home defense and womens safety is a myth. It should not be allowed to block the new gun controls that the country so obviously needs.
Let "them" speak for themselves.
There's an illusion about risk, that makes us underestimate risks if we have any degree of control. Control makes it easy to imagine that we are the exception. That's why the passenger feels more endangered by aggressive driving that the driver does. That's why we'll take risks in our own workshop that would be unthinkable in an industrial setting where the employer makes us do it, or in our own kitchen that would be unthinkable in a restaurant. That's why we imagine that it's more likely to be killed by a shark than by a fallen vending machine (you don't control the shark; the vending machines fall because people shake them.) And that's why we imagine that we'll beat the odds if it's us who own the gun.
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