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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just My Opinion who wrote (21989)	5/24/1998 12:38:00 PM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

Wow!!! That is a whole bunch of questions for so early on a Sunday morning. Let's see: 1. I don't know if the gun people financed the study. I do know that you can always find at least one professor, expert witness, attorney, doctor or other expert who will support your position, whatever that position might be. I could immediately pull up a handgun control web site and find an "authority" taking exactly the opposite position. At least the handgun control people have no profit motive, so in a way you could say their information is more objective. This is why it gets so confusing--pretty soon, instead of everyone giving their own opinions about the gun issue, we are all attacking source materials. 2. I was doing research the other day, trying to find out anything at all about killings with knives, and reached a dead end. So I really couldn't provide statistics for other methods of killing people in other countries. Maybe someone else can, however. I BELIEVE America has a very high death rate comparatively by all methods, but cannot prove it. In some of the countries on the list I provided, most of the police are not even armed. This is true for sure in the British Isles countries. So I would assume overall violence rates are much lower. If anyone can provide hard data, it would be very much appreciated. 3. I don't think I am any kind of expert on diagramming sentences, particularly the one about the right to bear arms referred to in the second amendment. I believe the phrase about the militia is very important to its meaning, but as you know there is a huge debate about that. It seems to me that the writers of the constitution were very afraid of assaults on their new country from without, and wanted a populace that could help protect the fledgling republic. Also, even in cities, police departments didn't really come into being until the 1840's. So while an armed public made sense in the late 1700's, it may not now. There is certainly a huge percentage of Americans who believe this is a general permission to carry guns, but I have read that there are no court decisions which actually conclusively interpret the second amendment that way. I wish there was something definitive. Are there any pending cases? "Infringe" according to Webster's means to encroach upon in a way that violates law or the rights of another. I personally feel that an armed populace infringes on my own right to move around safely, and to live in a reasonably healthy society, so again, it can be used in many ways. I was looking at your profile--is there really a drinkers' thread at SI?