>>>>When you get to the bottom of the issue, if a person is going to murder another, any weapon will do. Take away the guns and they'll used knives, baseball bats, ropes, ice picks, axes or whatever they want to commit the crime. Or they may make their own crude gun and use it.
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>>>Except that it's a lot harder to kill with all those other weapons (and most people would have no idea how to build their own gun). With any other weapon, you have to get up close and personal, so you can't take out a lot of people in a short time the way you can with a gun.
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>>>Tamar
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>>Yes it is harder, but the bad guys will always find a gun somewhere. So, the killing continues. It's not the guns. It's the minds of mankind that do the damage. Minds that are shaped by their parents and in some cases minds that are re-shaped by their religious leaders.
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>Sorry, I just don't buy that there are a lot of people on the streets who are just looking for opportunities to kill other people at random. There are some crazy people who believe it's their mission to kill people, but the reason we can name a lot of these (Manson, for example) is that they're rare.
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>There are people who are willing to kill in the commission of other crimes, and they're probably the most dangerous people out there. But again, this isn't a large group.
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>Most murders involve a murderer and victim who know each other. The page below says that no more than half of murders involve strangers. (14% are known to be strangers. For 35%, the relationship is undetermined.)
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>http://ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/relationship.htm
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>Tamar

What do you call First Degree premediated murders? These have been decided up in advance and not because somebody was mad and just happened to have a gun.