“There is no correlation (sorry, ‘link’) between high gun sales and lowering crime rates. That’s just two unconnected statistics.”

“There IS a correlation (sorry again, ‘link’) between the violence of US society and its high gun sales.”

You are confusing two concepts. There is a positive correlation between high gun sales and lower crime rates and a negative correlation between the violence of US society and gun sales. Corelation does not guarantee causation so we cannot affirm fron this correlation that more guns mean lower crime rates (there are other ways to prove this point) but it is very difficult to substain that higher gun sales produce higher crime rates since the correlation between this two variables is negative.

My ancester James ketcherside lived in scotland, and was a fredom fighter, his entire family was be-headed except him and his brother. they made a homemade raft, and took 9 months of provisions with them, and were blown back by a storm taking them 10 months to arive, and the only thing James had to eat for the last 10 days of the trip was to suck on a soup bone. then when they arived, they inlisted in the melitia, and fought in the revolution. My dad is a norwegian, thus the name Yother. my ancesters always fought for fredom, even died to free african slaves in the cival war.

am I your chap? did the crown give me my freedom?

I am a machinist, have a machine shop, and could make myself a gun, and dont even have to register it, but I couldnt transfer it in any way, and I would love to own a gun, but I get CONVICTED for even THINKING abought it.

My Lord just keeps reminding me of this; 2 corinthians 13:11b live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you. the differance between a muslim and a Christian is that muslims kill for their god, and Christians die for their God.

I think if ya”ll want to keep the government scared to round us up and stick us in concentration camps, then I am all for it.

I dont know the future but Christ does, and if He says He will protect me and my family, then I believe it. besides I’m pretty glad that a mexican with a gun saved me from being killed by a bunch of meth heads that attacked me, and beat me for hours, and knocked me out several times, and I woke to have him sitting on my back, face in the gravel, beating me in the back of the head, they used my unconcous body to ram out all the windows of my car, and sank it in a river. If I would have had a gun they would all be in HELL right now, but instead I prey for them that God will change them into the image of His Son. so I guess Guns arent for me.

Anyone can become as filthy as a demon if they thrust themselves down a REALLY bad path. Jesus’s blood can make the vilest sinner clean.

keeping guns wont stop this US government from destroying us, there doing it right now, but everyone is too scared to stand up to them, you wanna put your guns to good use, gather together, and go to the white house and arrest all the occupants. capture the ritch, take all but a million from them and use it to pay off the debt to china, deport all the muslims, tap our oil, give the elderly a free home on a little piece of land, make corn fuel, stop importing from china, build more factories, plant more food, feed the world, make the press a non profit federally funded unsensored uncoruptable institution, make it a crime for politicians to lie, make it a crime for police to not inforce it,etc… or just keep sitting on your guns, while the goverment robs us all blind. then when the government flees with all our money and leaves us a huge mess, we can use the guns to finnish destroying ourselves, while they sit in their mansions drinking margaritas and laughing at our peril.

if you think you should disregard everything I say because it sounds crazy; remember this is a crazy blinded world full of bowinkles who can never agree abought anything. somehow having a gun seems like the only sane thing to do. Not LOL

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception.

Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed.

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.

People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation… and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act

If you don’t like the right to bear arms that are wrapped within the constitutions, then change the constitution! Ha, good luck!

Get your nasty British ass off this board. You people never change…I’ll box your ears you whiny little mouse.

Scared? Why is it you Americans think we do not want guns? There is a very large section of the population that would like the righ to bear arms again.

No we are not scared, just frustrated! (And sick of woolly minded PC leftie liberals and do-gooders)

@joseph: The nice thing about Americans having guns is we won’t have to use them against a British Invasion for a 3rd time.

Hate to point this out ‘old chap’, the British never invaded America. You WERE the Brits when you gained your freedom from the Crown.

My right as an American citizen to own a gun has nothing to do with statistics. The truth is that American crime rates are lower than our counterparts in Europe (http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kouri/060220), so those liberals who seek to pursue that straw man will find the ground ripped out from under their feet swiftly enough.

But the real argument and point is this: I am a free man, the descendant of Saxons, Picts, the Cherokee, and Romans.

I am not some serf to be disarmed at my lord’s whim. I am not a peasant to be slaughtered by m’lord’s enemies when he is off to war. (In this case, when the police are over-stretched in my high-crime area and can’t respond to my needs in time, something that has occurred twice now.)

In fact, I have no lord. I am an American freeman, not some knee-bending European who grovels at the feet of the modern monarchs of socialism.

And my firearms, not the honeyed promises of fork-tongued politicians, are what make me different from my European counterpart.

“This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”
-Adolph Hitler

I don’t care what laws are passed, what taxes/fees are put in place, what pressure is brought to bear by an armed government or unarmed citizenry…we won’t be giving up our weapons.