9/11 was a terrible thing. Innoncent people died because of some crazy islamic radicals. About 3500 people died. It WAS a terrible thing. And we need to provent terrorism. 15,000 people die each year of murder. That is also a terrible thing. We need to work to stop that from happening to. What I find amazing is that conservatives will rush to protect their right to own their guns, but then when certain liberties are taken away by the patriot act they don't raise an eyebrow. The patriot act takes away a great deal of the liberties that the bill of rights gives us, but oh no, if you deny that all important 2nd ammendment right, even if it saves 15,000 people...
Ok, I know that now someone is going to say... but gun control doesn't work. The assult weapon ban doesn't work. Au contraire mon ami. The death rate in this country has steadily declined since Bill Clinton introduced his legislation. Also:
Gun Laws Get Credit for Homicide Declines
3/24/2003
by Dick Dahl
Total gun deaths in the U.S. have been dropping steadily since 1993, when they peaked at nearly 40,000, to around 28,000 annually 1999 through 2001. Although firearm suicides have remained fairly constant at over 16,000 per year, the decrease in gun homicides has accounted for the bulk of the decline. A variety of explanations have been offered to account for the decline in gun homicides, but recent research has demonstrated that strong gun laws should be considered a leading reason.
An article published by the American Journal of Public Health last December showed that the six states with the highest rates of gun ownership--Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Wyoming--had homicide rates that were three times higher than the four states with the lowest rates of gun ownership--Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The study's lead author, Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, concluded that "guns, on balance, lethally imperil rather than protect Americans." Combined with a 2000 assessment of gun laws around the nation by the Soros Foundation, the data also show that lax gun laws imperil Americans. That's because the Soros scorecard listed each of the six high-homicide states among the bottom third of states with the weakest gun laws, and it listed the four low-homicide states among the top 10 states with the strongest gun laws.
According to Soros, the state with the strongest gun laws is Massachusetts, and according to 2000 data from the Centers for Disease Control, Massachusetts residents enjoy the lowest rates of gun violence in the nation. According to CDC, Massachusetts's overall death rate from guns in 2000 was 2.84 per 100,000 people, well ahead of second-place New Jersey's 4.16 and nearly one fourth of the national average, 10.41.
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which compiles FBI crime data, reports that there were 125 homicides in Massachusetts in 2000 and that 47.5 percent of them were committed with a gun. By contrast, the 2002 FBI data for Louisiana, a state with a population one third smaller than Massachusetts, recorded 560 homicides, 73.7 percent of which were committed with a gun.
"It's no coincidence that we have the toughest gun-safety laws the lowest gun-death rate in the country," said Massachusetts State Senator Cheryl Jacques, a longtime leading force for stronger gun laws in the state. In addition to enjoying the lowest overall firearms death rate in the country, Massachusetts also has the lowest gun-crime rate of any nonrural industrialized state, she said.
Jacques points specifically to a sweeping law that Massachusetts passed in 1998 with the help of a coalition of groups such as Boston-based Stop Handgun Violence, that increased criminal penalties for illegal gun use, toughened licensing procedures for background checks and renewals, tightened screening requirements, and banned assault weapons. In addition, the attorney general's office has begun exercising its consumer-protection powers to regulate handguns.
Within a year of the 1998 law's passage, "we saw a more than 80 percent reduction in unintentional shootings involving individuals age zero to 19," said Jacques' chief of staff Angus McQuilken, "and we saw a more than 20-percent reduction in suicides by firearms without a corresponding increase in suicides by other methods." In addition, gun homicides in Massachusetts have continued to drop.
There's only one problem being the state with the strongest gun laws and low gun death rates. "While Massachusetts has the security of knowing we have the toughest gun laws in the nation, we're surrounded by states that have some of the weakest laws: Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire," Jacques said. "So ultimately, federal protections are very much needed because guns know no borders or boundaries."
While gun-homicide rates have been dropping steadily since the early 1990s, opinions have varied on the reasons for the decline. Typical explanations have focused on an improved economy, the decline of urban crack-cocaine markets, improved policing, tougher sentencing-and tougher gun laws.
"It's largely the laws, but it's the laws combined with education on responsible gun ownership, safe storage, efforts at working with young people and teaching them life skills like conflict resolution, anger management, and things of that nature," said John Shanks, director of law-enforcement relations for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "When you add up all those things and add in the fact that we have a better background-check system, all of these things as a group result in a lower homicide rate."
The degree to which gun laws are responsible for keeping gun-homicide rates down, however, has remained largely unmeasured. And according to Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, it is a question that begs for extensive research. Not that conclusive findings about gun laws' effects don't exist, he said. For instance, Vernick said, evaluations of bans on cheap handguns (often known as "Saturday-night specials") and assault weapons and prohibitions on gun ownership by people who have committed domestic violence have shown them to be effective.
Another area of gun laws that need careful evaluation in Vernick's opinion includes "the broad effort to focus on illegal gun trafficking." That effort includes such specific measures as "one gun a month" purchasing limitations, federal law-enforcement efforts to tighten enforcement of gun-trafficking violations, and the Brady Act's increasing of federal license fees for dealers.
"In the field of evaluating gun laws, you can tick off the well-conducted evaluations on just a few fingers," he said. Among those evaluations, he said, are the recent research by law professors John Donohue and Ian Ayres, which contradicted the research conclusions of economist John Lott that permissive concealed-handgun laws deter crime; and the work of Elizabeth Richardson Vigdor of Duke University and James A. Mercy of CDC, who found that laws prohibiting domestic abusers from having guns are effective.
The general decline in gun homicides and gun violence over the last 10 years is the result of many factors, Vernick said. "But I haven't seen the grand unified theory that plugs all these things in and explains the various contributions to the reduction in homicide. I think knowing which of these things really were reasons for the decline would be tremendously important from a public-policy perspective because we want to know which to replicate and which we should get rid of."
Any efforts to examine how sensible laws might better reduce gun violence will encounter opposition from the gun lobby, of course. In Colorado, where more than 70 percent of the state's residents voted in a 2000 referendum to close a loophole which allows people to buy firearms at gun shows without a background check, the gun lobby is pushing a bill to do away with the loophole closure. "Why is the gun lobby so against the voice of the people?" asked an exasperated Shanks.
As proponents of stronger gun laws point out, the proof is in the numbers. "If the gun lobby's argument that giving everybody guns would make us a safer society were true, America would be the safest place on earth," said Jacques of the Massachusetts Senate. "And it's not."
