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Monday, January 22, 2007

Guns Kill & People Do Too

Instapundit (writing about gun control vs. mandatory gun ownership) piqued my interest in an old news clipping I had from 2004. I tend to keep old news clippings planning to share with others.
  • Anyway, this clipping stated that 3,588 people were killed by guns from 2001-2003 (3 years) in the state of Pennsylvania.
  • 2,112 of them (or 59%) were due to suicide!
  • 1,476 of them (or 41%) were due to accidents, assaults, etc.
  • I estimate the city of Philadelphia has about 900 gun deaths itself in an average three-year period.
  • That means the rest of the state had fewer than 600 gun / firearm deaths in those three years.
  • Philly has 1.4 million people and the rest of the state has about 11 million.

From these stats, one could conclude society should spend more money on suicide prevention if it wants to reduce the gun death rate. AND the locale is far more relevant to gun death rates than gun laws.

In other words:

  • Guns laws in PA + locale's high crime rate = high gun deaths.
  • Guns laws in PA + locale's low crime rate = lower gun deaths.

And it will be interesting to see the far-left libs like Will Bunch of Dopes twist himself into a pretzel when he supports Michael Nutter's proposal to have car-checks for guns. But But But on the other hand, Will Bunch of Dopes would never support Bush's similar efforts to detect terorrists!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think you are totally right that gun control is all about location, location, location.

To a city-dweller, a gun owner is a criminal who commits violent crimes.

To a rural person, a gun owner is your neighbor, who has a shotgun for hunting on the weekend.

Speaking of gun laws and the Philly metro area, the fact that NJ has much stricter gun laws all over the state than PA does nothing to make Camden safer than Philly. Camden is one of the most dangerous places in the country, guns are plentiful, and the byzantine system that makes it difficult for New Jerseyans to legally acquire guns does nothing to change these facts.