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Originally Posted by Tchocky
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Originally Posted by SUBMAN1
Next - cars accidently kill what? 40,000 people in the US in a given year. That is a huge number comparitevly. I think that is a much bigger target than the couple people that were accidently shot due to stupidity. +1 for Darwin. Based on your idea, we should ban cars way before we go after guns.
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That's a ridiculous extrapolation. Cars and guns are not analogous. Many countries in the world function quite well without widespread gun ownership, you can't say the same for cars. The factual evidence for costs/benefits of removing guns are at best ambigous, whereas for cars the effects are self-evident.
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So I am trying to understand how you live in a country that is built on the very ownership of the very thing you despise? We wouldn't be America today if we followed your advice. We would be New England or something, surpressed, and taxed to the hilt till we were all poor. Do you realize what you are saying?
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Many countries have been born out of violence, I don't see how that affects this issue. Yes, the US came into being through armed conflict. That was a very long time ago. My home country was established after a War Of Independence, much more recently than the US, and we've got no complaints with gun controls.
I don't understand your argument, but I'll try it out. What about smallpox? It was a major factor in the decline of the Native American, yet the US helped eradicate it?
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Originally Posted by ASW
If the population of the US is ~360 million, using your figures, Tchocky, that would imply that 14,443 people were killed by guns in 2005 in the US. The leading cause of death in the US in 2005 was tobacco usage, which resaulted in cancer [435,000].
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Uh-huh. What are you getting at? |
Yep - i see you don't understand. If you read above, we should save an estimated 30 to 50 people a year from accidental shootings. If that is going to be used as an argument, then cars is a 'MUCH' bigger target. You live in Europe, so to me in the US, a gun is a tool - just like a car. It can be used for everything from hunting to defense. So to me - they are along the same exact lines and analogous in the lines that were drawn.
For America to remain strong, we must continue to follow past traditions. Maybe that doesn't bode well for Europe, since it is a dying section of the world with a negative birth rate (a direct indicator of how your population thinks of its future), but I would like to keep my country strong. This is just one more that people are trying to errode away.
-S