Wake-on-LAN

Indeed. Something like this happens and every flips out over a statistical drop in the bucket. The media in this country has gone totally off the rails.

Because the number of people who have defended themselves against criminals or overthrown their oppressive governments is 0, right?

The point

Your head

It's no different than the anger if there was a list published of who owns gold and how much. It's pointing out that we own something valuable that criminals want because of spite and fear.

You're assuming that Americans don't have a variety of social issues unrelated to guns. We have a high crime rate and WILL have a high crime rate regardless of whether or not we have guns, the fact that most european countries have vastly lower crime rates has no bearing on whether or not guns are a deterrent to crime in America.

Out when I'm at home, in when I'm not.

I don't support his analogy, but I'd point out that legal != responsible, or good, or right.

Less likely to be robbed while the homeowners are present because of danger.

More likely to be robbed when not present because of value.

From what I've seen of that incident it appears that he wasn't trying to kill them, or if he was he was horribly incompetent at it. I've seen references to multiple times where mass murders of schoolchildren were successfully carried out with knives/axes in China.

But it wasn't a gun, so it doesn't matter. Don't you know? Only guns are dangerous.

Oh come on, VLC isn't THAT bad.

Those number are slightly different than the ones I saw before, probably because the year is starting in the middle on those charts. It's nice you didn't have any massacres, I'm sure that's consolation to the higher number of people who died in '98-'02, at least they can know they died alone. I wonder if you have insight to what happened in '02, the numbers I saw indicated that most crime dropped like a rock around then, it looks like that was far more effective than the gun ban in preventing crime.

"Surely, the self-defense argument is voided if there are no guns with which to attack you."
I loled heartily, taking away guns in Britain and Australia caused significant increases in violent crime. Without guns the physically powerful can act with near impunity as they don't fear retaliation.

"And I'd have thought the sacrifice of gun-sports would be a small price to pay for any kind of reduction in the number of school shootings."
It's not just shooting sports, it's self-defense, defense of the nation (against external OR internal threats), and it's freedom. More to the point it's addressing the symptom rather than the disease.

Hows the overall murder rate? My understanding is that it went UP after the gun ban. The latest number I saw are down but it took 6 years. Gun crime dropped immediately, murders stayed high until about 6 years later. I doubt there's causation between a drop 6 years after the ban.

That's not counting non-murder crime either.