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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (126730)	10/23/2000 10:31:46 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578452

OT Joe, Here is the link on incarceration I found: fathers.ourfamily.com I know nothing about the source, other than the fact that it is the first relevant thing that came up in my google search. Your kidding....the right wing now is blaming violent crime on feminism? If crime rates are higher in the US, it only stands to reason that the incarceration rate is also higher. Crime is not something like rain that just comes naturally. It is committed by people - criminals, and the US has far more of them than any civilized country. Even after incarcerating 10x as more people than Europe, there are still plenty of them out there committing more crimes, more than any other civilized country. You don't think having guns gives people greater confidence and a sense of power which makes pulling off a crime seem much more possible? I think the question should be: How many more would have to be in jail to make the crime rates in the US as low as other European countries and Japan? From this, using simple arithmetic, you could calculate that for example (just a guess) that the US has 20x the number of violent criminals of Germany, Iceland, Japan. Why do you think putting known criminals in jail would solve the problem? I bet there would be others very ready to take their place. From this, if you wanted to get some reasonable estimate how much the gun ownership matters, you would have to divide the gun crimes by the multiple of the incidence of criminals in the US. Notice I said gun ownership, not gun laws, since the gun laws do nothing about current gun ownership. Gun laws may have effect in 20, 50 or 100 years, or whatever they replacement period for guns is. My opinion is that the people who expect tangible results from the change of the gun laws are deluding themselves. To make a difference in gun related crimes, an outright confiscation of guns combined with replacement of violent US population with less violent population of Japan or Europe in the territory of United States would have to take place. I suppose a case could be made that a greater percentage of the American population has a genetic predispostion to violence because a good number of our founding fathers were outlaws in their own country. But than how do you explain the dramatic drop in crime during the past 10 years? There has not been a dramatic change in the gun laws nor have the violent criminals all been locked up. However this past decade has led to the lowest level of unemployment in 40 years....the least number of welfare recipients in a least 20 years. We have had the longest economic expansion in the history of this country. There is a whole group of people who have legal $$$ for the first time in their lives. Why do you think retail sales have stayed so good for so long, especially among the Walmarts and Targets? There is a lot of pentup demand. We are learning what other counties have known for a while...that life gets better when less people go without. So its not just about the guns, although I am strongly against them. Its about having some of the other things we have talked about on this thread...good schools, a more even distribution of the wealth, better housing, cleaner streets etc. These things create a better life for everyone and make people think twice before taking the risk of losing it.....unlike now, where people commit crimes because they believe they have very little to lose. But there is a strong and vocal segment of our population that does not believe that we are our brother's keeper although, strangely, they are sometimes the most devout among us. They believe its a person's fault that he/she is poor and no level of argument will convince them otherwise. They believe that they are not responsible for anyone but themselves and their families. They believe that someone should starve if they do not have the $$$ to feed themselves. They also believe those people should be kept separate from the rest of us, preferably out of sight. Do you think its this strong and vocal group of people that are the true descendants of those outlaws I mentioned above? Makes you wonder. ted