Firearms and Self-Defense
by Duncan Bayne

• Handgun crime up despite ban - BBC
  "A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned. The research, commissioned by the Countryside Alliance's Campaign for Shooting, has concluded that existing laws are targeting legitimate users of firearms rather than criminals."


• Firearm Control - Assessing The Impact
  "The details of the 1997 murder rate also offer another serious rebuke of the government's claim that 'Australia will be a safer place'. For example, despite the forced statewide surrender of 207,220 firearms, not only did Victoria's overall number of murders increase by 18% between 1996 and 1997, but the number of homicides committed with a firearm rose by nearly 300%."


• The ProGuns GUN DEFENSE CLOCK
  "The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well." -- Marvin Wolfgang, the late Director of the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law, University of Pennsylvania


• Guns Effective Defense Against Rape
  "Second, raw data from the 1979-1985 installments of the Justice Department's annual National Crime Victim Survey show that when a woman resists a stranger rape with a gun, the probability of completion was 0.1 percent and of victim injury 0.0 percent, compared to 31 percent and 40 percent, respectively, for all stranger rapes (Kleck, Social Problems, 1990)."


• The Sexism of Gun Control
  "After a series of brutal rapes in Orlando in 1966, hundreds of women began buying handguns each week to protect themselves. ... Although the yearly number of rapes had been increasing before the classes, reaching 36 in 1966, it fell to only four in 1967. Meanwhile the rape rates for the surrounding metropolitan area, Florida, and the entire nation continued to rise. Although a correlation between two events A and B does not necessarily prove a causal relationship, it is quite possible—and in line with highly controlled studies by researchers like John Lott—that all the publicity about women buying guns scared rapists so badly that many of them stopped preying on women for fear of being shot dead in the act."


• Dial 911 And Die
  "Anti-gun lobbyists get away with proposing to completely disarm the citizens only because most citizens just assume the police will protect them. That assumption is false. The police cannot protect everyone -- in fact the police usually have no legal duty to protect anyone."


• Violence, Virtue and Vice
  "Those who prattle on about ending violence of all kinds are apparently so devoid of any real moral sense that they are incapable of distinguishing aggressive violence from defensive violence. If you stop to think about it, that inability puts such "adults" in the same category of intellectual development as that to which small children are usually assigned. These alleged adults, who apparently comprise a significant proportion of the world's population, are literally retarded in an important sense. They seem not to understand that the right not to be aggressed against necessitates the right to defend. Their wishes should be ignored, and their "arguments" should be dismissed summarily. Perhaps the most obvious political issue in which these quasi-humans are involved is that of gun control."
  

Discuss this Article (12 messages)