Sometimes stupid loses

"John A." wrote in message
...
On Fri, 8 Apr 2011 16:20:02 -0400, "Neil Harrington"
wrote:

John A. wrote:
On Fri, 8 Apr 2011 03:50:02 -0700 (PDT), Whisky-dave
wrote:

On Apr 7, 5:34 pm, "Neil Harrington" wrote:
tony cooper wrote:


Sane gun users shouldn't mind going through a reasonable process.

No disagreement about that, but we surely disagree about what is
reasonable. The Suffolk County laws as described appear designed
mostly to harass law-abiding citizens who choose to own guns than
to prevent any sort of crime.



In today's paper, two more incidents of gunshots. An estranged
husband shot his wife and a killing outside of a club.

Unfortunately the far more numerous occasions when guns prevent
crimes do not generally appear "in today's paper." Mostly they do
only when the intended victim has to shoot someone to protect
himself, and this is a very small minority of cases.

How can you get data on this as these incidents aren't recorded well
no more recorded
than the fisherman's tail of one that got away.

One has to wonder how many of these incidents are actually cases of
some nut visiting what they think is a "scary" neighborhood and
frightening off some innocent bystander who was walking their way.

Or cats rattling the trash cans prompting someone to poke call out "I
have a gun!" and frighten the cat away.

The Kleck surveys were carefully designed to eliminate any "bump in the
night" or similar incidents where there was no clear actual threat from
one
or more human beings. Events involving defense against animals (including
large, wild, dangerous ones) were excluded. Kleck is a professor at
Florida
State's school of criminology, remember. He knows what he's doing.

His conclusions were basically confirmed by the independent studies of
Prof.
John R. Lott Jr. of Chicago University, who later wrote the book, "More
Guns, Less Crime."

That position by the way has been echoed by another writer on the subject,
David Kopel, former assistant attorney general for Colorado and former
assistant district attorney for New York City, who has said, "Guns don't
cause crime. Guns prevent crime."

Changes in gun laws over the last several years have supported this. Many
states now permit concealed carry that formerly did not, and it has been
reported that in every such state violent crime rates have gone down since
they passed CCW laws.

As I understand it violent crime has been on a downward trend
nationwide.

Yes, evidently because we've been putting more criminals away, which some on
the left seem to feel we shouldn't be doing. It's true that at least some of
our crime rates have gone down while our prison population has gone up.

That states which added concealed carry also saw the same
drop would not be surprising, and would not necessarily mean the carry
laws contributed much if at all. Got any cites for figures showing
they saw consistent drops that were beyond the normal variation?

Not at hand I don't, no. I believe the decline in violent crime in those
states preceded the nationwide decrease, but I'm not sure of this.

There are individual cases I can point to. Here are a few:

"Faced with a dramatic increase in forcible rape, Orlando, Florida, police
instituted in 1986 a well publicized program in which 6,000 civilian women
received firearms defense training. In 1986, Orlando was the only city of
100,000 population in the United States to report a decrease in violent
crime. Rape dropped by 90 percent, while aggravated assault and burglary
dropped by 25 and 24 percent respectively.

"In Highland Park, Michigan, armed robberies dropped from a total of eighty
in a four-month period to zero in the succeeding four months, after police
there instituted a highly publicized firearms training program for retail
merchants. In Detroit such a program was carried on by a grocers'
association over the opposition of the police chief. The program received
extensive publicity, first through the chief's denunciations of it, and
subsequently when seven robbers were shot by grocers. Grocery robberies in
Detroit dropped 90 percent. In 1971, publicity for a firearms training
program for New Orleans pharmacists was credited by police and federal
narcotics agents with causing pharmacy robberies to drop from three per week
to three in six months there."

http://www.saf.org/journal/other/silverkates.pdf