I don’t agree with you in 100%, but you covered some good points regarding this topic…

I also meant “liberal” gun laws in the classic sense of “Laissez-faire” liberal.

Concealed Carrier

And as for gun laws “stopping” anybody…that’s the point–they don’t. DC had the most stringent gun laws in the country, and it still had some of the worst gun violence of any city. Even if we succeeded in banning guns in the US entirely, how hard would it be to get one in Mexico?

That old cliché, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” is really true.

“If they don’t know who’s packin’, they’re more likely to avoid the kind of public spree that you’re so worried about.”

I’m not so sure about that. I imagine Utah must have some pretty liberal gun laws, but that didn’t seem to stop Sulejmen Talovic.

By the way, it’s not that I’m “so worried” about these things, it’s just a slow day at work…

Perhaps not precisely what you were looking for, as the individual was an off-duty policeman, but for all intents and purposes, being off-duty made him a “civilian”..

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/13/national/main2466711.shtml

Realize also that in those states that have CC laws, permittees must pass training classes on how to shoot. That might result in fewer “innocent bystander” incidents than you envision. Even so, police have had such things happen as well.

Research has shown that criminals are deterred not by the severity of punishment, but by the certainty of punishment; that is, I won’t rob you if I know I’ll be caught and imprisoned. If criminals are uncertain that their acts will go unchallenged, i.e., if the certainty of their crime is not assured, they’ll be less likely to commit it. If they don’t know who’s packin’, they’re more likely to avoid the kind of public spree that you’re so worried about.

There will always be loonies. There will always be loonies who are capable of acquiring the means to kill. Depriving law-abiding citizens of the ability to counter such loonies is making them less safe, not more.

I actually used to be a gun-control advocate. I didn’t like them, saw no reason to have one, and thought getting rid of them was a good idea…until I realized that doing so just made the law-abiding citizen an easier target for the criminal.

The link is here. Apparently that inlcudes suicides, so if we just include deaths from homicide and accidents the number is about 35 a day.

Sergey, point taken, we don’t have to pick Japan, I was just quoting from the link I got.

But if we accept that the US has a more violent culture in general, how much sense does it make to allow people to walk around with concealed weapons? How do we know that only “the good guys” will do that? I doubt that homicidal (and suicidal) lunatics be deterred from shooting sprees after thinking that there may be someone packing on campus.

Yet it seems to me very likely that we would see many more cases of arguments escalating to gunfights, outweighing any deterrent benefit.

Apparently 48 states already have some form of concealed carry laws. These types of sprees seem to happen all too often, yet I dont recall any that have been stopped by a civilian. Anyone have any links?

Also I was wondering: Let’s say that someone does avail themselves of the CC law and intervenes with their gun to stop one of these incidents. In the process, they also kill a bystander. Can anyone point me to sources which tell how the legal system would handle that? Would they be facing a manslaughter charge?

That’d be about as easy as getting rid of guns and autos….

A little tricky, there, aren’t we, with statistics? Did you mean to confuse us all with this one:

“Suicide 16,869”

Do you seriously believe that those suicides would be alive today if guns weren’t around? Wouldn’t they have found something else, like a car, pills, jumping off a bridge, slitting the wrist, etc.?

And how about the 732 from “legal intervention,” as in criminals being shot? The actual “homicide” rate is around 12,000…still awful at 33 per day, but a lot of that is criminal on criminal, you know, gang stuff…

All of this is still less than the 145 per day killed in automobiles (almost as many as in 10 years of Vietnam, by the way…) and you’re not seriously suggesting banning automobiles, are you?