Guns advocacy OT! 566

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:48:39 -0600, Liam Slider

Yes, he did cover whether easy access to guns was the reason for gun crime. The bank scene was intended to illustrate just how easy the access is in some places. It is certainly the case that there is no nationwide registration requirement, and only minimal background checks are required. Most states have no licensing of gun owners.

Be that as it may, he then went to Canada and discovered that Canadians also have easy access to guns but much lower gun crime. He also looked at video games and music as reasons for our crime problem.

I saw the movie. If you didn't, you can watch the clip for yourself at:

The bank did have such an offer. He didn't claim the bank did anything wrong, they did all the proper checks. It may have been staged, it was a movie after all, but it wasn't untrue. He did not just make it up.

I agree that Moore's a sloppy film-maker and he often goes way over the top. He's a polemecist, that's what he does. I just thought it amusing that you seemed to agree with him about gun control.

I watched Pat Buchanan on "The McLaughlin Group" yesterday and found myself agreeing with him. That's amusing too. A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that.

His data are from the FBI, and I checked a few samples to make sure he didn't pull a fast one. I didn't read the whole article, I was only looking for data in a nice format, so I have no comment on that.

Lets see...New England has the lowest homicide rate in the US on a per capita basis. New England is pretty "blue" these days.

Louisiana had the highest rate state-wide in 2003, followed by Maryland, Missisppi, and Nevada. Three red states and one blue. New York State is not even in the top ten. New York obviously has more homicides than Nevada, but fewer per person.

Chicago is much higher than New York City, which isn't even in the top 10 cities by per-capita rate (in fact it is in the bottom 10, which kind of blows away population density as the only determinant). Why do you pick on New York so?

You are correct that "blue cities" populate most of the the top 10 big cities, but they also populate most of them bottom 10. That's because there simply aren't many big cities that voted "red".

Sure, that could be, but Europe has high population density too so there must be other factors.

Really? Toronto and Montreal are big cities with metro areas of over a million people. I doubt they are any more spread out than Phoenix or Denver. They just don't have very many big cities is all, since there are only 35 million Canadians.

But forget Canada, what about London? Berlin? Moscow...oops, Russia has a really high homicide rate, higher than the US. Of course, their economy sucks, so maybe there is yet another factor. So far we have culture, population density, and the economic situation. There's probably lots more.

My only point here is that treating this as a political issue, "evil blue states" vs "goodly red states", or vice versa, leads you to bark up a lot of wrong trees. Making buttumptions in an effort to explain away the numbers is also a good way to mislead yourself.

The causes and prevention of crime are not well-understood and just applying "commonn sense" seems to not work very well. Politicising the issue the way we in the US have done actively inhibits finding real solutions IMO.

-- - Bob Hauck - A proud member of the reality-based community.