The central issue boils down to the question: What are the facts? Yet there are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts or about their own lack of knowledge of facts.
Sowell and Daniel Greenfield are easily the most creative intellectuals of our time... What a pleasure both can be read on FreeRepublic...
Thanks for the ping jazusam - here's a link to a Daniel Greenfield piece you'll enjoy:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2980282/posts
I like his style of writing, easy to read and understand and like Dr. Sowell he's right on the mark regarding Obama.
if the hard facts show that gun control laws do not actually control guns, but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher murder rates after law-abiding citizens are disarmed, then gun control laws would be a bad idea, even if there were no Second Amendment and no National Rifle Association.It is estimated that as many as half of all US households, roughly 45 million, have at least one gun. Likewise, statistics on gun murders run in the neighborhood of 5 per 100,000 people, or 50 gun murders per million people. There are about 300 million Americans, which corresponds to roughly 50 x 300 = 15,000 gun murders annually. It would follow, then, that for each annual murder in America there are 45 million divided by 15 thousand, or roughly 3000 gun owners in America.
The obvious conclusion is that people who legally buy guns almost never do so in order to commit murder. It could be that a larger fraction of people who buy fire insurance do so for the purpose of committing insurance fraud.Trying to "reduce gun violence” by reducing the number of legally held guns looks like a fool’s errand.