re the pill for deer no hunting in article apr gnv ifas ufl edu jrm gnv ifas ufl edu writes you might have missed the u s news world report excerpt i posted it is fairly consistant with other such polls finding that approximately of households have at least one firearm ok a near majority actually own firearms but i will still claim that the vast majority never needs to use them or even threaten anyone with them to self defense incidents a year doesn t count with you what do they do right or are they just lucky maybe they re just unlucky if a rapist pulls a woman into an alley in boston chances are almost certain that she won t be counted as one of those self defenders because our local constabulary didn t consider it important that she be allowed to arm herself even though the shotgun she owns at home makes her show up in the gun owner column in either case this means the average threat level in this country is rather low ironic words for somebody who lives in florida the average threat level in florida has been reduced by a liberal ccw policy it s well known that your local thugs like to target tourists precisely because they are less likely to be carrying than your natives come on up to boston or nyc or washington dc and see how much diddlysquat the average threat level in the country means to a resident there i think you have weapons on the brain i never said that these alternative means of self protection involved any hardware why are good neighborhoods good it isn t because every person is armed to the teeth it is because of attitude and cooperation in the good neighborhoods the residents make themselves aware of their neighbors and notice when strangers are lurking around good neighborhoods form groups like crime watch to increase this effect and the relative effectiveness of the police when hostiles are arrested the good neighbors step up and say that s the one officer he was robbing mr jones house sometimes this works sometimes it just lands your good neighbors on the dance card for the next wave of drive bys someone here once told a story about la gangs moving into phoenix i ve misplaced the original text but the story started with one resident calling the cops on a gang member sure enough a few nights later there was a drive by performed at the resident s house except that this time unlike in la the entire street came out and returned fire putting an end to the car s occupants the gang packed up and left of course in la or in a place like florida after the hurricane your first problem is to find an officer to step up to and tell anything in short the alternative to firepower is gangs or at least a benificent manifestation of that social cooperative replace lead with flesh the flesh makes a better conversationalist too and you can invite it over for a block party look nobody is arguing this i have a fire extinguisher at home that doesn t mean i can be careless about tossing my burnt matches on the carpet i live carefully monitor the woodstove get my flue cleaned twice a year and test my smoke alarms annually but if despite all this a fire does start it s too late for any of these things except the extinguisher but legality and legitimacy also matter if a government s charter makes a rule which the government then violates it is violated the basis for its existance enforcement of its will becomes a matter solely of force of arms oliver north the man is positively worshiped in many all american conservative quarters he and big ron set up a secret government and did all sorts of severely illegal deeds the kind of stuff you and i would be doing twenty to life for yet he walks free this bs happens all the time in fact it happens so much that no one really cares anymore legitimacy is a non issue legality is a non issue so long as we get t bones and our mtv who gives a rats ass you seem to be agreeing with your opponent you can t trust your government to protect you from abusers and violators white collar blue collar epauletted or tank shirted ultimately no one has the power to enforce your rights but you unless you ve given up that power no i claimed that no one is interested in the statistical aspects of the argument pure emotion like the abortion issue too many people fit that category that is true some of us like to believe that they are uninterested in the facts behind the case for gun ownership because they ve been conditioned to believe that there aren t any you seem content to underestimate the electorate i m willing to try to raise their consciousness argue away you can t win i think we can hci was founded in what in the mid s they ran a one million strong campaign for two years before reaching this goal my understanding is that they reached it by the stratagem of including wide classes of people other than dues paying members i can t speak authoritatively on this maybe somebody else has details then they started running a two million strong campaign for a while but they let it slip into unannounced obscurity when it became clear that they simply were never going to reach that level of membership in just after the commencement of the dodd hearings the starting point of the modern gun control movement the nra had a mere members by barely after the first murmurs of future registration it had about a million today it has over three million members making it the third largest membership organization in the country next to aarp and aaa and its membership is growing faster than at any previous time historical figures from kukla s gun control pp and as you say many of the people in the middle of this debate are bemused by their t bones and mtv that leaves hard core gun owners against hard core gun banners i know a number of ex hci members who have recently become nra members i ve never heard of a single one who has gone the other way yes i think we can and will win this one firearms related mindless mayhem will be related to the availibility of firearms if they become scarce and and expensive a different psychology will take hold i think they would be used far less to settle trivial complaints i think they would be used far less to hammer nails as well but like you i can t give any citation showing that this utilization is currently significant at more than an anecdotal level if you can i m waiting cdt rocket sw stratus com if you believe that i speak for my company or cdt vos stratus com write today for my special investors packet
