See, here's the cute thing about your posts: you didn't provide any references. All you did was just quote some arbitrary article. Therefore, no one is able to go and validate (or invalidate) the claims provided. Furthermore, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you didn't do any fact checking on the garbage that you listed. For instance, the statistic which states "nation’s gun violence epidemic – which kills more than 30,000" is a misrepresentation of the facts; in reality, over half of those incidents are suicides, which means that the gun was the instrument, not the cause. Japan, by the way, has a suicide rate over DOUBLE ours here in the United States (1), however they have very strict gun control laws; if the guns are the problem, shouldn't Japan's suicide rate be much lower than ours? Anyways, the real number of gun-violence related deaths in 2005, for example, was 11,346. (2) In 2009, the FBI estimated that up to 80% of all crime is gang-related (3) (unfortunately, there is a significant reporting issue when it comes to gang-related violence). While there is no data to support it, I don't feel that saying that 50% of gun homicides are gang related is a very big stretch of the imagination. That would leave us with around 6,000 non-suicide/non-gang related gun deaths each year. Not a good number, but certainly not 30,000. Additionally, the stat about 3,000 Texas CCW permit holders committing crime is also a misrepresentation because they count guys like the Ft. Hood shooter in their statistics (he reportedly held a Virginia concealed carry permit). There are 2 problems with this 1) concealed carry permit holders (military or civilian) cannot carry on military installations...they are just another "Gun Free Zone" (read: Criminal Empowerment Zone), so he was already breaking the law and 2) he's a psychopath. The fact that he was a concealed carry permit holder is completely irrelevant in this discussion, because it IN NO WAY enabled him to commit mass murder. There is no magical force field that got turned off by him holding a CCW permit; he broke the law by bringing the gun on base to begin with...he would have done so even if he did not have a permit. Furthermore, what does child pornography have to do with concealed carry permit holders? Does their CCW permit enable them to be sickos and look at kiddie porn? Would keeping concealed carry out of Hawaii in any way lessen the number of perverts in Hawaii? No. Are all CCW holders perfect "law-abiding citizens?" No. But quoting numbers of crimes committed by CCW permit holders than are not gun-related artificially inflates the numbers; kind of like what I said in the other post about anti-2a people lying and spreading misinformation to further their agenda.
By the way, what you just did is called PLAGIARISM in the academic world and will not only earn you a failing grade, but will probably get you expelled from school. I'm not going to sift through the nether-regions of the internet (read: anti-2a propaganda) to refute your points one-by-one. I already DISproved the point that CCW does not reduce crime in an earlier post; and I just did it with two of "your" new points as an example of how flawed your arguments are; unless you're willing to provide links to legitimate sources (e.g., FBI UCR, the DOJ, etc...) to back your statistics, they really don't hold any weight in my opinion.
- Alex
References:
(1)
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/(2)
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/gun-violence/(3)
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/february/ngta_020609