Tuesday, December 27, 2005

people with guns kill people

A young guy goes on a Christmas Day rampage in the upscale Great Falls, Virginia suburbs of DC and kills three people, then himself.

Just another mass killing the the good old USA.

Let's look at a couple of numbers shall we? In 1998, people murdered with handguns numbered 373 Germany, 151 in Canada, 57 Australia, 19 Japan, 54 England and Wales, and 11,789 in the United States. That doesn't include suicides and accidents. And it's interesting because England/Wales have a much higher overall rate of violent crime than the US, but a murder-by-handgun rate about 1/40th that of the US, per capita.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the refrain: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Fact is of course, people with GUNS kill people. The guy in Virginia could have still killed his mother with a knife or his bare hands or a baseball bat or something, but it would've been harder. Harder still to kill the other two people in the second house; those two plus the 20-year-old that hid and lived would have had a much better chance of defending themselves if he had been wielding a knife, not a handgun.

Happy New Year. No doubt somewhere somebody will kill three or four people on that day too, with a handgun.

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