From: moore@tc.fluke.COM (Matt Moore)
Subject: Re: Travelling armed 
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Distribution: seattle
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 18:17:11 GMT

In article <1992Jul22.190322.21485@eskimo.celestial.com> alpinist@eskimo.celestial.com (David Butler) writes:

>     This argument doesn't work.  The MAJORITY of murders in this country
>are commited by people known to the victim in a fit of rage.  Not by "Bad
>Guys" who would have owned guns illegally.  If guns were taken away from
>the "Good Guys" (ie Normal Population) then the guy in the above example
>wouldn't have had one in a dangerous drunken rage.

 I can't let this one go by. The idea that most murders are committed by
otherwise normal people in a once in a lifetime fit of rage is simply not
true. In fact, murderers are highly atypical, abberant individuals whose
life histories almost always contain long records of substance abuse,
reckless and cruel behavior of all types, and violence against family and
neighbors. I can quote statistics at length to make this point, and I will
if anyone asks. A good place to start is with "Restricting Handguns, the
Liberal Skeptics Speak Out" by Don Kates, Jr., which is in the King Co.
libraries.

 Briefly, the average murderer in the US has several violent felonies on
his record before the murder. The average American adult doesn't have even
one violent felony on his record.  The most common scenario for "domestic"
homicide in America is an individual who uses threats and actual violence
to get what he wants from friends and relatives, a person close to him who
will neither submit nor flee, and a judicial system that allows the
resulting series of violent acts to continue until someone dies.

 The best predictor of violent behavior in the future is violent behavior
in the past.  If somehow we really could disarm everyone in America who
has a violent felony record, then the rate of violence *with guns* would
fall drastically. I believe that the rate of violence with other weapons
would rise to compensate, however. And it is also not true that violence
with guns is somehow intrinsicly more awful than violence with other
weapons. Ask anyone who has experienced both.

>     I do happen to support individual rights to own a gun.  But I also
>realize that the Murder rate (gun violence rate) would go down if guns
>were illegal.  If only "Bad Guys" had guns that would be a heck of a lot
>less people being shot on a daily basis.

 Here again, conflating the "Murder rate" and the "gun violence rate" is
strange. Do murder victims really care what weapon did them in? I submit
that what we really care about is the *violence rate*, which is determined
by social factors far more than by availability of hardware.  The best way
to reduce violence in American would be to remove individuals with proven
violent personalities from society. When we do not do this, either for
humanitarian reasons or because prisons seem to cost too much, we pay a
predictable price in higher rates of violence. Some will argue that this
social price is worth paying, others will argue that it is not. Gun
availability is simply irrelevant in this social decision.

						Matt Moore
						John Fluke Mfg. Co.
						my opinions are just that
Newsgroups: seattle.general