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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (36291)	4/16/2007 9:55:12 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541785

>>Countries that ban guns totally have high use of them. Gun crime in Britain has been going up and up. When you ban them, you just take them away from the honest citizens and leave them with no way to protect themselves. This message is getting though. Thats why you see more and more states changing their gun laws.<< Bill - The statistics I found in a quick search don't seem to bear that out. While the total number of crimes involving guns has increased slightly in England and Wales in recent years, a large percentage of them involved air guns, which are still legal. In Scotland, the story is a bit different: "The latest gun crime figures from Scotland show a total of 970 offences in which a firearm was alleged to have been used in 2003, a reduction of over 9% from 2002. A large proportion of the offences (43 percent) involved air weapons, and 37 percent were committed with unidentified weapons (the latter figure has increased significantly in recent years since Strathclyde (after 2001) and Lothian and Borders (after 2002) stopped making assumptions about what type of weapon was used even if it had not been identified - it was usually assumed that this was an air weapon for statistical returns and this is still likely to be the case). Handguns were involved in 29 offences, the lowest number since 1990. No handgun was used in any offence which caused injury or death." [emphasis mine] From gun-control-network.org These figures show that the majority of spree killings, of the type we have just had at Virginia Tech, are done with legal weapons: gun-control-network.org - Allen