re gun control was re we re mad as hell at the tv news in article c tshu ew magpie linknet com manes magpie linknet com steve manes writes frank crary fcrary ucsu colorado edu wrote that s all very well and good but i was refering to all homocides not just ones involving handguns what is this fixation on death by shooting as if it were somehow worse than death by stabbing what relevance are all homicides in this debate what do you think gun control advocates are saying that if we get rid of all handguns we will live in a homicide free world the relevance is that if you ve got x homicides and reduce the number of gun homicides in that group but x doesn t decrease by a significant amount have you made an improvement and is that improvement worth what you ve paid the issue is guns not baseball bats even a simpleton knows that he stands a better chance of surviving an attack with a baseball bat certainly of outrunning a bat wielding assailant if a baseball bat is a tenth as likely to kill a victim as a gun is that any comfort to that tenth as for knives see my earlier post i d much rather face a knife than a gun thanks i ve faced a knife and i was damn annoyed i didn t have a gun all the statistics in the world didn t change the fact that he was interested in cutting me fortunately the best defense against a knife isn t another knife anyone trained in unarmed self defense won t have much of a problem disarming a knife assailant untrained in knife assault which probably means of knife assailants anyone trained in self defense unarmed self defense isn t for everyone what s more it requires substantially more training to be safe and effective than a firearm it requires physical proximity and thus a greater threat to the victim which is a primary problem with stun guns you have to actually touch your assailant unless you re very good a large stronger assailant can simply ignore your blows long enough to incapacitate you david veal univ of tenn div of cont education info services group pa utkvm utk edu
