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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (17487)	7/26/1998 8:12:00 PM
From: Rick Slemmer	Respond to of 20981

Just got back from a weekend of surfing in Mexico; hope you all had a relaxing interlude. I wondered how long it would be before gun control hit this thread. Curiously, no one mentions Phoenix, Arizona's open-carry laws or Vermont when the issue of how the presence or absence of guns is an influence on crime and violence. There happen to be a few such studies on the Web, one of which is citilink.com and part of which I will quote here: Vermont has long had the least restrictive firearms-carry laws. Citizens there can carry guns either openly or concealed without any permit. Perhaps in part because of its liberal gun policies, Vermont has among the lowest violent crime numbers in the country. In 1980, when murders and robberies in the U.S. had soared to 10 and 251 per 100,000 people, respectively, Vermont's murder rate was 22% of the national average and its robbery rate was 15%. In 1996, Vermont's crime rates were among the lowest in the country: 25% of the national murder rate, 8% of the national robbery rate. Furthermore, gun control simply cannot work in the States. I challenge anyone to refute these statements: 1. Guns cannot be uninvented. They're here to stay. 2. Criminals prefer "soft" targets to difficult ones. Unarmed targets qualify as "soft," as I'm sure many European visitors to Florida learned to their dismay a few years ago. Seemed unarmed tourists were being killed or carjacked with some regularity on their way out of the airport in their telltale rental cars. 2. Criminals will not willingly give up their guns if a total ban or restrictive ownership is declared. They are, after all, criminals, and as such, their obedience to laws is annoyingly inconsistent. 3. The public knows that criminals will not give up their guns, so there is no incentive for the lawful citizen to give up his. After all, he wants to protect his family (remember the children?) from harm. 4. The only way to enforce any gun ban is a nationwide house-to-house search, the efficacy of which is very doubtful. How many places in YOUR house can you hide a gun? No amount of anti-gun legislation will disarm the criminal element. Better we concentrate our efforts on mandatory prison sentences for assault with a gun and punish the people who use them in the commission of a crime. Murder and attempted murder should carry the death penalty or mandatory life sentence without parole. "Getting away with murder" used to be a fairly rare occurrence; now we have murderers set free and walking the streets after they are said to have paid their debt to society; in some cases, less than five years. By the way, President Clinton is a laughingstock and the source of much amusement in Mexico. They thought they had a lock on corrupt leaders until he showed up. RS