What was surprising to me in reading articles and statistics on gun-control was that over half the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 1997 were suicides.

>>>>It's swords for them! People get all twisted up over guns here, why I don't know. It ain't the gun that's the problem. It's the person holding it. I've been carrying one for thirty years and it's never killed anyone, nor has it shot anyone, even though it has been shot at six times.
>>>
>>>Of course it's the person behind the gun, but on the other hand, suppose in an imaginary U.S. nobody but police officers and the military had been allowed to have a gun, say starting 100 years ago. Do you think the homicide rate attributable to folks with guns would be up, down, or unchanged today? My guess is down. The problem is nobody wants to tackle the problem head on. The attitude is, since we've always had guns, we should continue to have them.
>>>
>>
>>We can guess in any direction, can't we?
>>
>>>I'd have thought that the last thing, as a police officer, that you'd want, is citizens running around with guns. How do you tell which one of them is going to be the problem later on?
>>
>>I guess that shows what you know. I'd rather have honest, law abiding people carrying guns for self protection. It has been shown that when a criminal gets killed after attacking someone who defends themself, crime drops. I don't feel threatened by the average gun toting civilian any more than I do by fighter jets flying overhead carrying armament that could light up my entire city.
>>
>>The way you tell which one is going to be a problem, is they usually pull the gun and point it at you (except if they do that, they aren't law abiding, honest citizens). Those people are the ones who will have guns regardless of the law. They are also the ones that make it necessary for people to be able to defend themselves. As has been said, "an armed society is a polite society."
>
>In an article I was reading about Yoshi Hattori (the Japanese kid who was shot and killed because he went to the wrong house and knocked on the door) I found this statement (I don't know where the statistic came from, but I have no trouble believing it):
>
>"Statistics demonstrate, however, that any individual with a gun in the home for the purpose of self-defense is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. This was the case recently, when a man, thinking a robber hid in a closet in his house, shot his child."
>
>How do you weed out the stupid in a country that only passes the Brady law by a very narrow margin after strong opposition.