Toonpack

I have made nothing up. P.S. I don't own a gun.

If it's not deemed murder, it's not murder then is it, simple really. You're as likely to die in an accident at work in the US as you are to get murdered (by whatever means). If you took all the guns out of America, how many of the murders that are committed do you think that would stop ?? 100%, 50% 25% Personally I think the US would STILL have an inordinately skewed murder rate, that's the real root cause problem.

Utter bollocks, I have no issue with reasonable legislation but it's way too fucking late. Where do I state I do not care about the lives of children ?? What makes someone kill by whatever means ??

4 times in total, yes, if you discount the non-firearm related murders it's about 3 times the murder rate of the UK attributable to guns as the murder weapon. Takes a "special" kind of person to kill I reckon. In simple terms, given the US has 5+ times the population I would expect that the numbers of people with the propensity, or lack of moral judgement, to be able to kill would be 5 times as much as here ergo a murder rate would (all things being equal) be 5 times what it is here, but it's not it's less than that. The fact that there are so many people prepared to kill is the problem, not their method of murder. The gun argument is just noise around that. In some utopian society, if you took all the guns out of the US would every one of those murders that happened with a gun, not happen by another means, some of them probably yes, but even if it was half of them you'd still have a murder rate approaching something like 3 times what it is here.

Simply saying that by having guns definitively means massive murder rates is equally as silly. Look at Switzerland, loads of guns, bugger all murder rate. My friends and aquaintences, who are gun owners, use theirs to do pest control on their multi tens of acre farms (could be hundreds of acrestbh, have never been but have seen pics) and to go "shopping" for meat in season. One of my mates lives 100+ miles from the nearest mainstream store waaaay up north and way out in the sticks, hunt and eat meat it's been that way his whole life. Should he lose his right to have guns ??? Some of my Texan colleagues carry, erm because their Texan and that's what they do, no-one I know there has ever used theirs "in anger".

Four times as high I believe, of which 33% don't involve guns. It's what makes someone a murderer that is the problem not the murder weapon. Knife, gun or baseball bat the victim is just as dead. I will read that, haven't yet btw.

Oh there's a problem, but it's peculiar to the US, in that almost anyone irrespective of background/record can buy a gun at Wallmart. Restricting it now would be worthless, there's so many guns out there, the only folks who would perhaps give up their guns are the folks who aren't the problem. If they were starting from say, where we are, that'd be a different matter. That said given the scale of the ownership, the effect of guns is somewhat restrained tbh. It's more dangerous to get regularly pissed or get pregnant, or god forbid, do gymnastics

In the US it covers - Murder, Rape, Robbery and Aggravated Assault UK figure excludes murder and sexual offences. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/13/violent-sexual-crime-statistics-england-wales-2013 Geezus it's even worse than I thought

It's way too late, the genie is out of the bottle.

Name calling, oh well that's novel. Refute the stats

Just to stir the pot We'd better ban booze, killed 2/3rds as many people in the UK (per UK Gov) as guns kill folks in the USA, given the US population is 5 times what ours is, that would mean booze is way more dangerous than guns. BTW Fish, your previous stats table is wrong, all violent death in the US is 4.7/100,000 of population (as per the FBI) so guns can't kill 10.2/100000 (and 33% of US violent deaths do not involve firearms) (Switzerland's violent death rate is 0.7/100,000 your table says guns kill 3.84/100,000) And from http://irbplayerwelfare.com/pdfs/CI_Risk_Assessment_EN.pdf (I was looking for sports safety stuff) Motorbikes in the UK killed 190/100,000 of those who used them in 2005 If you work in Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Austria, France, Greece, Italy, Spain or Portugal you are more likely to get killed at work than you are to be shot by a gun in the USA. In fact twice or three times as likely in Spain and Portugal (8.9/100,000) !!!! In fact if you consider owning a gun as "participation" there's tons more stuff more dangerous, Gymnastics being really, really nasty (twice as dangerous than gun ownership) as is being a UK pedestrian, about the same as US gun deaths. Bizarrely you are also 13 times more likely to suffer death or a catastrophic injury playing Rugby in Fiji than in the UK, UK cocks are more dangerous than US guns, four times as many women die in pregnancy 12/100,000 than folks get gunned down in the USA. (well they did in 2005) Oh and the UK had 700,000-ish more violent crimes than the whole of the US last year 1.9mill v 1.2 mill, There's more of it but it doesn't involve guns much so that's OK. There are more non firearm murders in the US than there are total murders in the UK, if you're going to murder your going to find a way.

No, not at all, I stumbled across it reading another article and thought I'd post it here as I knew it'd get some of you wetting the bed. Seems to have done it's job

Tragic, fucking poor bowler an all, he must be in bits.

Hmmm

Do you advocate randomly laying poison around the environment ?? P.S. Poison and dogs don't mix.

Who gives a fuck

So some say, and the so some say not.

If you say so Shouldn't you be away trying to become an MP or some such.

Rubbish. I happen to believe in God, I also believe God and evolution are not mutually exclusive. Anyway this discussion as about UKIP and the impending doom of western civilisation.

Why is that relevant ?

All of them?, they maybe had a token social conscious to their won, but subjugated all others to their own ends ?? Additionally all successful empires have eventually fallen, either to a more powerful empire or sometimes a more powerful and less civilised group and then simply imploded. It'll happen again it's the natural turn of things.

All social animals cooperate, cooperation in itself has little to do with it. Mankind has developed (in some places) a social conscience, it's not particularly "normal" though in the everyday natural world.

In some places they do

Chez is correct, it's got nothing to do with do with "modern" empires or thirst for power/glory/wealth or anything of the like, since time immemorial it's simply the natural order of things. Look out of your window, everything you see is trying to survive at the expense of something else, mankind is different in that it has tried to, or aspires to, help the "weaker" members of it's society, it's laudable but at the same time wholly unnatural.

It would be natural.