Posted on 04/29/2007 7:45:42 AM PDT by rellimpank
It seemed like a curious question to pose to a presidential candidate. But given current events, it wasn't totally irrelevant.
During last week's debate among Democratic candidates for president, NBC News anchor Brian Williams asked for a show of hands:
How many had ever kept a gun in their home?
After the massacre of 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech University by a deranged gunman, it seemed like a timely - albeit "loaded" - question for the men and woman vying to become the country's next chief executive.
Five of the eight - former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware - raised their hands. Front-runners Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards did not.
(Excerpt) Read more at jsonline.com ...
-ping-
LOL! I doubt that.
The only way they DON'T have guns in their houses is if they have men (not women) somewhere around the OUTSIDE of their houses carrying automatic weapons.
They'd be total fools not to, and they're not total fools about their personal safety.
It creates a hostile work environment for an intruder, but so what!
Kucinich has a gun? Must be a .22 short.
--that would make a good tagline--
BB gun!
Kucinich was counting the squirt gun a neighbor kid gave him when he was 6.
http://www.nraila.org//Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=119
"22 Times Less Safe?
Anti-Gun Lobby’s Favorite
Spin Re-Attacks Guns In The Home
Is a firearm in your home “22 times more likely” to be used to kill or injure a family member than to be used for protection? Or “43 times more likely?” How about “18 times more likely?” Anti-gun groups and politicians say it is, citing research by Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D.
Dr. Kellermann’s dubious conclusions provide anti-gunners propaganda they use to try to frighten Americans into voluntarily disposing of their guns—in essence, to do to themselves what the anti-gunners have been unable to do to them by legislative, regulatory, or judicial means.
Kellermann admits to the political goal of his work, saying “People should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.” (”Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home,” New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 1993.) Anti-gun groups have seized upon his most recent attempt in this regard, a “study” from which the bogus “22 times more likely” risk-benefit ratio is derived. (”Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home,” Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care, Aug. 1998.) The study suffers numerous flaws common to previous Kellermann efforts, including the fact that it is a very small-scale survey of sample jurisdictions (ONE COUNTY) that are not representative of the country or even of one another.
Most significant, though, Kellermann severely understates defensive uses of guns, by counting only those in which criminals are killed or injured. Dr. Edgar A. Suter, writing in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, explains the error in the context of an earlier Kellermann study, which compared family member deaths to killings of criminals: “The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected—not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1% to 0.2% of defensive gun usage involves the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000.” (”Guns in the Medical Literature—A Failure of Peer Review,” March 1994, p. 134.)
Similarly, criminologist Gary Kleck notes, “More commonly, guns are merely pointed at another person, or perhaps referred to or displayed, and this sufficient to accomplish the ends of the user.” (Targeting Guns, Aldine de Gruyter, 1997, p. 162.) Kleck’s 1995 landmark survey of defensive gun uses found guns used for protection as many as 2.5 million times annually, a number much smaller, obviously, than the number of criminals killed or wounded. (”Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.)
Kellermann’s “22 times more likely” study suffers yet another flaw: only 14.2% of criminal gun-related homicides and assaults he surveyed involved guns kept in the homes where the crimes occurred. With a similar sloppiness in his “43 times more likely” study, suicides (never shown to correlate to gun ownership) accounted for the overwhelming majority of gun-related family member deaths he pretended to compare to defensive gun uses.
Posted: 12/11/2001 12:00:00 AM"
I’m not sure if the fact that Obama, Clinton and Edwards rejected personal gun ownership makes them better candidates.
they may not personally own them, but I’ll betcha their bodyguards can produce enough firepower in seconds to make anyones head spin..
Not mine.
You know as well as I do John Edwards has guns in the house. He just won’t admit it and lose his liberal street creds.
He is a little squirt, come to think of it.
I will bet that not only does John Edwards have a gun in the house, it is probably an $80,000 Ivo Fabbri 12-gauge with an engraved ornamental exhibition walnut stock.
BTTT
John Edwards’ wife is afraid of people with guns. Just ask her neighbor.
Help me out with this one. My head hurts.
Cap Gun! (with wet caps)
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