Originally Posted by jayeff

A feeble response, almost as feeble as switching knives for guns in the stats quoted. That doesn't work because every home has knives along with many other potentially lethal objects and are therefore part of the base stats.

Stats cannot be construed any way. They can be misinterpreted, especially when borderline, and sometimes dressed up to suit the person using them. But when source after source, most with no axe to grind (such as the one I quoted) produces near identical figures, you are into "if it quacks like a duck..." territory.

I couldn't care less if a bunch of bling laden morons shoot each other up and I grew up in a community where owning guns for shooting birds and animals was the norm. My sole beef with the gun lobby is that rather than yield an inch on guns which have nothing whatever to do with sport or self-defense, it cannot use only rational arguments and has to fall back on emotive rhetoric. The worst of the claims they promote, because lots of people, many of them children, die as a result, is that keeping guns at home makes you safer. It doesn't.

Over half the gun-related deaths in the US each year are suicides and the disproportionate number of suicides in homes where there are guns makes it glaringly obvious that far fewer people would kill themselves without such an easy way out to hand.

The next largest group of gun-related deaths is domestic homicides and the next, accidental shootings. Domestic homicides will never go away, nor will accidental death, but easy access to weapons designed to be lethal make both significantly more likely.

You want to keep your toys, fine. But use honest arguments, not ones which end up getting people killed.