
In Other News
The Populations of Idaho & Montana have reportedly increaded by 10% almost overnight.
Our piece last week on the US RadioShack franchises who are handing out free guns with satellite TV packages prompted an email from the provider in question, Dish Network. The Dish Network's corporate communications operative, Alisa Meyer, wanted be certain readers understood the company is not itself involved in the promotion …
The statistics are interesting* -
Idaho :
0.33 firearms murders per 100k population
22.7% of murders in the state committed with firearms
5 firearms murders
New York (state) :
4.47 firearms murders per 100k population
61.7% of murders in the state committed with firearms
481 firearms murders
California :
3.7 firearms murders per 100k population
69 of murders in the state committed with firearms
1360 firearms murders
Based on those numbers we can extrapolate pops :
Idaho - 5 FA murders at 0.33 per 100k = 1.5m pop
New York - 481 FA murders at 4.47 per 100k = 10.8m pop
California - 1360 FA murders at 3.7 per 100k = 36.8m pop
Wow, California has a lot of ppl living in it (or my maths is even worse than my teacher said it was). Anyway, it seems that what we can take from this is that giving guns to people that live in the middle of nowhere is about as safe as not giving them guns. However giving guns to people living in poverty/extremely crowded cities is prolly a bad idea.
In other words, why is it such news that they are giving guns to people that can legally own them anyway, and tend not to shoot people that often?
Ok, I'm off to lobby my MP on the giving of free HKs to Scousers... And Google how Idahoans (???) prefer to kill. Seriously - 77% of murders don't use a firearm?!
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*taken from the Graun so they're prolly an order of magnitude out somwhere ^^ And by "interesting" I mean "not all that surprising really"
to keep the legions of cable-pushing sales dweebs from demanding to know why you turned off their overpriced sewer pipe in favor of something you had a little more control over.
these guys stop by my place at least once a week (when I'm home, who knows how many when I'm at work) and it's taken 5 years to get most of them to turn around and stop the spiel when I say "no, not interested". The new ones keep trying to sell me an expensive service I wouldn't utilize enough to be cost effective.
No dish, no cable. Give me a DSL pipe so I can choose what I want to see from whatever source I choose.
grenade because, sometimes subtlety is not effective.
Yeah but the gun sorta helped. It's slightly easier to kill someone with a gun than it would be to kill them with a knife for example.
If you believe the public is responsible enough to own guns that's your choice but don't forget that guns carried in society have only one purpose, to kill or seriously injure someone. Self defence is essentially "shoot them before they shoot/stab/whatever me" so this qualifies for self defence as well. It is arguable whether or not guns for self defence work more often than they make things worse, but that's a whole other argument and getting off topic here.