Vrede too wrote:That's your choice, JTA, but understand that having a gun unquestionably places you and your family at greater risk, not reduces it.
A "greater risk" of what? I don't deny accidents happen, and having a gun in the home does pose a risk of someone being hurt or killed if responsible measures are not taken; but because someone buys a firearm doesn't mean that person has created a serious risk scenario in his/her home. There are many, many more responsible gun owners than there are irresponsible gun owners.
JTA wrote:... That being said I still don't think any idiot ought to be able to conceal carry without taking a CWP course....
I think you meant something different. Conceal carry does require taking a CWP course, one that any idiot can pass. My opinion is that all possession should require stringent adherence to training and regulation standards,
I think JTA meant what he said; not what you would like him to think. I don't know about S.C. or where you live in N.C., but the course I took was rather stringent.
and that some weaponry should be banned.
I believe if you'll read backwards, somewhere you'll find I agreed with that.
We do it for cars and drivers and auto death rates have steadily declined because of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong . . oh wait, you already did tried, when I said that gun deaths are at an all time high; I think this chart is a bit more accurate than your 5 year old chart:
Medical ailments, such as cancer and heart attacks, kill considerably more people each year than either guns or automobiles, according to the CDC. But
firearms and motor vehicles are among the leading non-medical causes of mortality in the United States. They kill more people than falls do each year, and considerably more people than alcohol.
The steady decline in motor vehicle deaths over the past 65 years can be attributed to a combination of improved technology and smarter regulation. The federal government mandated the presence of seat belts in the 1960s. The '70s brought anti-lock brakes. The '80s brought an increased focus on drunk driving and mandatory seat belt use. Airbags came along in the '90s. More recent years have seen mandates on electronic stability systems, increased penalties for distracted driving and forthcoming requirements for rear-view cameras.
The result has been safer cars, safer roads, better drivers and a decades-long decline in motor vehicle fatalities, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
By contrast, the history of American gun control regulation has been more erratic. Restrictions passed in earlier eras, such as the assault weapons ban, have been undone recently. During the George W. Bush administration, Congress passed laws that prohibited law enforcement from publicizing data showing where criminals obtained their guns and granted gun-makers immunity from some civil lawsuits.
Technological advances, like smart-gun technology that prevents people other than the owner from firing a gun, have been
stymied by opposition from the National Rifle Association and from many gun owners. Modest
regulatory changes, including
universal background checks, enjoy
overwhelming support from gun owners and the American public. But those, too, have been thwarted under pressure from gun-rights advocates and the NRA.
( I stated once before that I have no dealings with, nor do I support the NRA)
The result?
A gun mortality rate that's slightly higher than where it stood 50 years ago. Particularly vexing is that there may be ways to improve gun safety and reduce firearm deaths -- particularly suicides -- that haven't even been thought of yet. But innovations in gun safety are hard to come by, in large part because of Congress's longstanding ban on many types of federal gun research.
Firearms kill roughly 30,000 people a year. But Wintemute estimates that there are only a dozen full-time gun violence researchers in the United States. “There’s so many things we’d like to do,” Hemenway told the Trace earlier this year. “Just pick a topic, and we’d like to know more about it, from things like open carry to gun training to gun storage to gun theft to straw purchasers.” But he explicitly tells his students not to join the field because of the severe difficulties that researchers face in obtaining funding and publishing their results.
Gun deaths and vehicle deaths are in many ways two different problems. Gun deaths are typically intentional --
people deliberately kill either themselves or someone else. Motor vehicle deaths, by contrast, are usually accidental.
Still, we've been able to make driving much safer thanks to a combination of smart regulation technological innovation. We could potentially do the same with guns.
Bottom line: There's smart people and there's dumb people. Smart people own hand-guns for protection from criminals and dumb people. Smart people know how to handle weapons and treat them with respect. Dumb people know how to handle weapons as well, but feel they need a whole arsenal to play with, or use them to maim or kill people who "piss them off".