Interesting post SL

I know you said you didn’t want to compare rates, but the numbers you quote are meaningless unless you do. A little bit of digging found that the Canadian figure is 27.5 per 100000 people. The figure you quote puts the British number at 16.6 per 100000, quite a bit smaller than the Canadian figure. I found another statisitic for Britain at close to twice that (18500 in 06/07), so who knows? Maybe the real value is somewhere in the middle.

Anyways, it appears the Brits have stricter gun control and a slightly lower gun crime rate than we do in Canada. The point of gun control laws is to allow the police to prosecute criminals and keep them behind bars longer for having a gun. Normal people carrying guns will not deter criminals from crime, it will simply increase the amount of people who can shoot a gun. And who knows where that bullet will go.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to conclude, if anything. It’s kind of McMillan-esque: a couple of interesting data points put together in close proximity and vague enough so we can draw our own conclusions? :)

There’s always a few of us out here that need to be drawn a picture.

What? A leftist against gun control?
What’s next? A rightist against tax breaks for oil companies?

The point of gun control is to assuage fear on the part of people who can’t come to terms with others owning and carrying firearms. We have a few decades worth of a “couple of data points” showing that whether people (other than habitual criminals) carry does nothing to significantly increase violent crime and suggesting that to the extent there is an effect on violent crime, it is tp decrease rates. People restrain themselves more in an armed environment than an unarmed one.

Canuckguy
What’s next? A rightist against tax breaks for oil companies?

That would be me. And I’m a proud tool of big oil.

IrC
The point of gun control is to assuage fear on the part of people who can’t come to terms with others owning and carrying firearms.

It also allows liberal politicians to appear as if they’re doing something without accomplishing anything. The corner stone of all political policy. It’s more important to look good then to actually be good.

Just being facetious Balbul as you may have gathered.
I like to think I hold an sensible mixture of several political persusions. I take my stands based on facts and common sense regardless of what the Left, Right oe Center think. Each has their stereotypes with their sterotypical stances and axes to grind.

Sometimes I am dead wrong. IE: When a political aid to the Liberal Prime Minister of the day, a short time before the invasion of Iraq referred to Bush as a moron, I said off with her rude head. Man, she was so right.

“Left” and “Right” as political descriptors are becoming more irrelevant each time they are used. It is not “the left” that favours gun control, it is the authoritarian-left who, like all authoritarians, are control freaks.

When discussing a completely separate discussion this this afternoon regarding individual rights I was told that my “inner-rightie” was being let loose more and more these days - in my opinion people simply do not know what the words mean anymore and only use them as arguments when they run out of talking points.

And which quadrant of the political compass would you place that “classical liberalism”?

Toward the “individualist” end of the individualism-collectivism axis, and the “rationalist” end of the rational-irrational axis. See: http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm