The quality of the newer bulbs is not sufficient to switch on their own. The lifecycle cost does not justify their use in most places (they don't last as long as advertised, ever, and when energy is cheap, it makes no sense...)

I've personally gone back through my place with incans and replaced all the dead CCFL bulbs I've bought, such as in the basement. The incans last much longer on average I've found, even the stupidly cheap $0.25 ones. My power bill is no different (not enough to notice) and I've got a fairly high use (due to having kids who don't know how to turn off a light, yet *grumble*).

How do household burglaries, assault, and other violent crime rates track against those firearm restrictions?

I'd bet they've gone up, if demographic information from other firearm restrictions are to be of any guide.

Sorry, I'll accept a higher likelihood of being shot if I've got the ability to shoot back, along with the decreased likelihood that violent crime will be perpetrated against me in the first place.

Your rationale justifies fire bombing urban ghettos more so than it justifies banning guns, if you're going to look at actual correlative causation instead of just pure statistics, by the way.

It's slim to nil, once you eliminate the criminal element.

And for the deaths that do occur from lawful use of firearms in self defense, they're usually from the demographic which is more likely to cause criminal firearm deaths.

If you've got people coming into your house to take you and your family away, do you think a couple guns in the bedstand leading to a shootout with the jackboots might be preferable to dying of starvation in a deathcamp?

Or maybe they'd like to be able to help rescue their fellow ideologues before they themselves are brought to the camps. You forget that German disarmament occurred long before the Jews and other undesirables were collected. They didn't have the option, they could only keep their heads down.

Some people would like that option. And you can be assured that collection of undesirables would be much less likely to be the 'right thing to do' when the soldiers doing the collecting are concerned about getting shot while doing so.

What percentage of the UK population is stepped in ghetto thug culture?

Because that correlates pretty tightly in the US with gun grime rates.

Correlation is not causation. Germany has (and always has) a much different culture than the US. Germans are known (over here) for their stoicism. This may have something to do with the lack of firearm fatalities - you may be surprised to find out that other culture-related crime statistics are also likely different.

What is absolutely hilarious is the dissonance on this topic. They fear something, don't understand something - so they want to ban it. It's a typical knee-jerk response (for pretty much anyone, for any agenda, but it's particularly bad in this case).

How can a person, with a straight face, say "prohibition will work" in one case (banning guns, or any variation thereof), while at the same time getting on the soapbox about pot legalization (or similar) is laughable.

Look, we've tried that. Prohibition has failed. And then it failed again, and again, and again: Prohibition, War on Drugs, etc. Arguably, the illegality of prostitution and long-standing abortion illegality are also related to increased crime rates, violence, and organized crime.

Prohibition not only directly causes crime by making previously peaceful, legal things illegal but creates a black market, which further increases violence and organized crime.

If you want to stop gun related crime, stop making everything illegal. Don't make gun-free zones. Don't ban peaceable citizens from owning things they can use for their own self-reliance which are easily acquired by the criminal element through black markets. Start addressing the socioeconomic situations in urban ghettos which are the vast majority of firearm related crime. Do things to get people off welfare, get people jobs, and get their lives drug-free.

And what of that number once you adjust it for suicides?

You're left with a number lower than the number of people who drown in a bathtub every year. This makes your statement really kind of silly-stupid:

"Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby."

While we're at it, we might as well make it illegal to sleep on your back and to not wear untied shoes.

Firearms are just a scrapegoat for a political agenda which wants to ignore the real social issues surrounding violent crime.They're cultural and largely relate to the misconceived War on Drugs.

MoveOn.org. It's not 2003 anymore.

In case you haven't been paying attention, there has been more death and killing in Afghanistan during Obama than Bush Jr by a factor of 3. Gitmo is not only still open but it's expanded its efforts, and there are many more privately run detainment facilities now.

I'd appreciate it, for the sake of an honest argument, if you wouldn't castigate your opponents falsely and negatively simply because you disagree. Should we compare gay rights activists to Nazis as well? Should we say they just want to rape little boys? You're doing the same thing. (The NRA response has never been "more nuts with guns", either. In case I didn't make that clear.)

You know what's also got a perfect relationship with these mass shooters? Democrat voter registration (where appropriate), left leaning political views, and psychotropic medication for mental illness. Maybe we should be talking about paying more attention to signs of sociopathic tendencies and treating those people accordingly instead of demonizing roughly half the US population?

Something you should probably consider is youth exodus, for both maps.

The best and brightest tend to leave home at a young age and never come back. They go to where the opportunity is, which, if you have an advanced degree or a specialist degree, is not anywhere near your home state (more often than not, if it's got a low population density).

Also, other data/studies I've read contradict this map. For instance, CA has one of the lowest IQs in the country. Observe:

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/05/state-iq-estimates-2009.html

(This information can be found elsewhere 'officially' but this is quick/easy to digest.)

Note that CA is the 4th lowest, DC is the lowest, etc. with the more staunchly conservative states right up there with Massachusetts and Vermont (SD, ND). This is composed from official US education data. (I'll note that military brats, who have tumultuous upbringings by anyone's standard (and stereotype), score notably higher than eg. NY, Hawaii, RI, CA, etc. as well. And yes, this data suggests the South is not likely to rise again...)

There are plenty of stupid liberals out there, plenty. They'd be stupid conservatives if it wasn't for their drug abuse, welfare recipience, and extra-marital children.

Strong social safety nets (or any other social program, really) are not practical or cost effective unless you're dealing with a largely urban environment. So that's where they have the most success, and where they're most often tried.

Of no significant coincidence, I'm sure, urban environments have more people, which tends to result in a higher amount of diversity of need and thus, a stronger likelihood that a random enterprise may succeed.

In smaller locales (outside the general interest realm of massive and monopolistic corporations), business owners tend to be highly involved in the community, fostering growth in the community (largely out of self interest).

I live in the US and I don't see the division you're speaking of. It's more like:

* entitlement and statist culture votes left: yuppies, inner-city citizens, welfare recipients, Marxist idealists, etc.
* self-reliant and culturally conservative culture votes 'right': business owners, contractors, people who depend on strong economic growth for livelihood

IE, it's not a racial thing. (Of course, there's a looooot of back and forth. Eg. a small family farmer voting for a Democrat (eg. left) because of farm subsidies but also voting for a Republican for another seat for moral/ethical issues. There are quite a few single-issue voters in the US.)

Populist states - NA, CA, NJ, etc. - at the top of the redistribution curve, and due to their income have less to lose by increased taxes. The threshold between "what I make" and "just getting by" is significantly larger, not only as a percentage of income but also absolute dollars.

I've noticed there seems to be a fairly significant association between "people who do the actual market production and keep things moving" and conservative voting habits (eg. engineers, business owners, laborers, and other male-dominated fields) and "people who do high-level/service work and 'liberal' voting habits. The more abstracted from the everyman's existential needs, the more likely they are to vote with a leftist policy.

When you're making 30k, a 1% tax increase means you need to make household budget cuts, because that tax increase 'trickles up', to abuse a term used by economists. That 1% tax increase may cost a chunk of your income, but you'll also have to contend with the increased prices of goods and services which results from the increased costs of doing business, which is caused by needing to increase pay of their employees and increased material costs, all caused by people needing more money to cost justify a specific job.

If I'm making $100k a year, I'm probably not even going to notice a 1% tax increase.

Another part of it is ideological affinity. To many people in Western states, it doesn't matter how poor they are. Sure, they want to have more money, but there is a certain pride in eg. the Western US states about being able to say, "I did it my way, pulled myself up by my bootstraps". Ironically, my experience is that it's notably more difficult to actually make a go of a business in these states due to population density, and possibly due to a higher sense of cultural self-reliance and minimalism which naturally leads to less consumption of amenities.

I would be interested in seeing a county wealth heatmap like this, after adjusted for total cost of living (including state and local taxes). I'm in South Dakota, where we have no state (income) tax, sales tax is 4%, and municipal taxes aren't more than another 2%, IIRC. $40k here goes a lot further than $100k does in eg. the SF Bay area or downstate NY. On 40k, you can comfortably (with spending discretion!) start a family, buy a house with a yard in a nice neighborhood, have paid-off used-in-good-condition vehicles, have money for vacations and/or activities, and not live paycheck to paycheck. That's with a single income, I might add.

Some of us still drive those cars.

The people who were too dangerous in those cars were too dangerous then, too. They got in a lot of accidents. Now, they get in a lot more accidents at higher speeds, with more totaled vehicles.