10,000 people died in drunk driving accidents each year.
11,000+ die from firearms

Do you think that statistic is too small of a size? Do you want more people to die from firearms for it to be ok? How many more school shootings until it's ok to use them as examples of why we need significant change?

It's 680 fatalities and 15,000 non-fatal injuries.

------> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... death_rate

Continue to disregard obvious statistics.

We ban toys all the time for killing a single child.

10,000 people died in drunk driving accidents each year.
11,000+ die from firearms

Do you think that statistic is too small of a size? Do you want more people to die from firearms for it to be ok? How many more school shootings until it's ok to use them as examples of why we need significant change?

Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:

If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.

The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain:

[P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)

It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.

“I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf about the tops of them...The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass...straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind. I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees...he said at last to his mother, ‘Well, why don’t you take away the trees, and then it wouldn’t wind."

When you say "cirtain types of guns simply don't belong in the hands of the civilian population", are you aware that the very reason we have the right to bear arms is to fight our own government, in the event we the people deem it to be necessary? Simple logic would dictate that we need to be armed with paramilitary weapons, not "safe and sane" popguns with limited capacity and single-shot firing.

Before guns, we killed each other with swords and arrows.

People killing each other is as old as our species and will be a part of us until we are extinct.

Taking one weapon type away will do jack and shit, and jack left town (yes, a Bruce Campbell fan am I). We can however slow down murder rates by screening gun owners for mental illnesses and locking up violent criminals. I do think you should have to take a gun safety class and a mental evaluation to buy a firearm, after all you have to do almost as much to drive a car. Why not to own and operate a potentially dangerous tool like a gun?

That said, the organizations doing the mental screenings would need to be third parties without any agendas otherwise they would just declare everyone insane for nitpicky little things and keep everyone away from guns that way.

So more people on prison is the answer? We already have a massive problem with incarceration and you want more? How about we try something else.

I was also for a Universal Healthcare Amendment. It's hard to get any shit done in this Congress without cheating.

Yeah Falcon, I said violent criminals, since they are more likely to use guns. Now we already do that for the most part, but I think mental health progress is the best answer. Getting some of the stigma off of it, screening potential gun owners for certain types of mental health issues, teaching people how to recognize potential warning signs for people who are close to becoming unhinged, etc.

And regarding too many people in prison... we need to legalize marijuana across the country and then legalize prostitution across the country, and then we would get 50% of the prison population out of our prisons when they are in prison for stupid shit in the first place that should already be legal.

Oh, and you have to take a safety course to drive a car, I don't understand why we don't have to pass a safety course to buy a gun. My grandpa made my mother take a safety class before she could go shooting with him when she was a kid and I had to do the same when I was a kid.

It's common sense really.

Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :

"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."

you compare drunk driving to gun violence, yet I don't see you clamoring for prohibition (or maybe you are)

There are more speeding accidents that kill by far, so why not remove that along with the drunk driving problem by eliminating private transportation. Spend more money building better government sponsored transportation so everyone can have a nice safe journey home