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>To insure we don't become peasants again without a fight! >You see some of us here have not totally surrendered our >personal responsibility. > >You come for me, bring your lunch, we are going to dance for >awhile. ___________________________________________________ We do guns 1) because we can 2) because we wan't to 3)because we can afford them.
But we don't do guns well, or very safely.
For every 100 firearms deaths in the US, almost 51 of them are... suicides! For every 100 firearms deaths in the US, nearly 41 are persons killed by someone they know. For every 100 firearms deaths in the US, only 3 of them are deaths caused by strangers. For every 100 firearms deaths in the US, 1 of them are caused by "legal intervention" (law enforcement or civilians). For every 100 firearms deaths in the US, nearly 2 of them are accidents. We see then that the NRA's favorite bogeymen, the ubiquitouss "criminal," only accounts for fewer than 3 of every 100 firearms deaths in the US, while suicides and "acquaintance murder" accounts for nearly 92 of them!
More than 1500 American teens under the age of 20 commit suicide with firearms every year. **A person, ready to go to bed, turns on the outside lights, lets out the Rottweilers then turns on the burglar alarm, secure in their mind they are somehow "protected" and "safe." But the person most likely to ever beat or perhaps kill them (especially with a firearm), is sleeping in the bed... right *next* to them. True enough, "criminals" do kill people, but it is usually their own race or kind they kill. Very seldom are "strangers" (people unknown to the "criminal), *EVER* harmed by criminals.
Even with all the above being true, as more and more of the formerly 288,000 (in numbers) federally licenced (FFL) gun dealers disappear (now down to under 35,000 nationwide) from the American scene, the cheap guns which were being sold by tens of thousands of so-called "kitchen table" dealers, also have dissappered from the streets of the US, precipitating the ongoing, six-year, double-digit reduction in the kinds of violewnt crimes usually committed with firearms.
But England, a place where previously only landowners (and their hired guns(x*) had guns, has never allowed their citizens to freely own firearms since, making your orginal question germane to Englishmen and others who cannot imagine doing what I can: go down to the local gun dealer, present my bonfides, pony up the cash and in less than an hour, walk out with my legally purchased, "Super-duper, 14 shot, .45 cal shoot-em up" pistol. Essentially, your puzzllement is understandable, in that you can't experience what or why we Americans do (so many things). The real truth is: we do it (or them) merely because we can. *x*Though fewer than 19,000 ppeople die every year from firearms trauma, we Americans, with malice of forethought, recklessly and brutally end the lives of more than 40,000 motorists in the US every year. Why aren't you a little curious about that muderous habit, where people gleefully drink themselves into a stupor, then just as thoughtlessly, just as brutally, murder more than 22,000 of the 40,000 who die on our highways? *x*Remember "The Sheriff of Nottingham" of "Robin Hood" fame? In actually, he was a privateer/enforcer working for the local landowners, hired more to protect the land and landowners than to enforce civil or criminal laws.
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