| ??? 10/01/07 15:05 Modified: 10/01/07 15:18 Read: times |
#145184 - Problems Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Joseph Hebert said:
... killers don't need guns to kill. That, of course, is true. However, a gun does make it a lot easier to kill someone, since you don't need to be in close proximity to your intended victim. The simple, mechanical, and above all remote act of pulling a trigger is far removed from the very real, very close and very physical act of sticking a knife into someone, let alone throttling him until he's dead. ** Joseph Hebert said:
And before I end this post, let me answer one more of these false arguments that have gained such popularity among the terminally naive. How many times do you hear people say something like, "The problem is the availability of guns. They're too easy to get."
e.g., courtesy of Christoph, Overall, countries with stricter gun-control laws have fewer shootings than countries were guns are readily available. 't was me who said that, actually :-). Note that I did not say "The problem is the availability of guns." I merely noted a correlation between (potential) availability and actual use. I agree with you that the problem does not lie with availability, or at least, not with availability alone. What I would contend, though, is that easy access to guns will aggravate any underlying problem that may exist that causes people to murder so readily. Joseph Hebert said:
Yet for all of that ready availability, there was never one incident of a boy taking a gun to school and shooting all of his classmates. It simply didn't happen. Ehm, that may not be quite true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting Rob. ** In order to avoid any misconceptions about my person, I would like to stress that these comments are not based on personal experience! |
