So, that explains about 20%. Did Australia crack down on the tools used in the other 80%? Did banning guns somehow also reduce the prevalence of golf clubs and cricket bats? Or did crime maybe go down for some other reason. Be honest!

Riiight. Nope, no bias in that study at all. Refer to my link above about the murder rate of states vs. gun ownership.

And I am completely sure that there is no bias in that study that you linked... none at all.

Guns are used about 800,000 times per year in America to prevent crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, explain to me why the gun usage, as a percentage of homicide rate, did not actually drop significantly? Could it be that the HONEST people were the ones that gave up their guns while the criminals kept theirs?

Also, is mass shooting the ONLY way to measure success? What if you went back in time, prevented the gun laws from passing, and found that 20 more people died per year in mass shootings, while an extra 100 or so were killed individually? Is it somehow worse when people die as a group but not so bad when they die one-by-one?

Yup, the gun laws are responsible for EVERYTHING. It must have NOTHING to do with the population density, the criminal justice system, the social system, the economy, the government, or the family structure. Gun laws dictate everything.

Say, Japan has almost not guns, but a much higher suicide rate. According to your logic, this is proof that fewer guns cause suicide, right?

The Riemann Hypothesis has not been proven either, but everybody assumes that it's true.

I actually wanted to run the numbers for this myself, but I could not find a database of number of murders by zip code. If you can get this, and get the average income per zip code, it should not be TOO hard to make some decent conjectures. Maybe add data on population density per zip code, and you should get some REAL eye-opening results. If anybody knows where to get this, I would appreciate it, and publicly admit that your google-fu was stronger than mine.

With that being said, would you feel more nervous about being a victim of violent crime in a low-income neighborhood, or an area with mansions and Ferraris?

pools don't shoot out of your neighbours property and hit you in the face. BULLETS CAN. and no you can not prevent yourself from being accidentally shot by somebody else. What will you do? shoot them first?

Let me paraphrase...

pools don't shoot out of your neighbours property and hit you in the face. CARS CAN. and no you can not prevent yourself from being accidentally run over by somebody else. What will you do? run them over first?

Car accidents kill LOTS of people (about 20,000 each year in the US), and many people are NOT the ones who did anything wrong. Using the same logic, should we ban cars? If not, why not? Both kill about as many people per year. One is protected by the Constitution, one is not.

Seriously? They are NOT the same, but common sense should STILL apply -- keep them away from children -- this ain't rocket science. Sort of like you should practice common sense before hitting the "submit" button.

Hmmm. What else does Detroit also have? Yes, the have guns. So does Dallas, but Dallas is much safer. Detroit has major economic problems, which Texas does not suffer from so much.

It is not the guns, it is the poverty. Why not attack the root cause instead of just the tools used?

If you take guns away from Detroit, you still have more criminals, just without guns. Take away poverty and provide jobs and you don't just reduce crime, but you also make the general population much happier, as they could then afford luxuries like food.

And if a child falls in a pool, the child is still dead. Accidents are preventable. Accidental drownings do not mean that we ban pools -- it means that parents must be careful. Why should this be suddenly different for guns, except for the fact that you are looking for excuses to ban guns, not pools.

Since when does "disarm everybody" work that well on crime?

Austalia had a great "gun-ban" and their homicide rate DID go down (it wend down MORE here is the USA during the same period, but why bother with facts). Let's look at one of the consequences:

http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTool...

Choose Homicide, 1995 and Homicide, 2012. The number of gun homicides, by percentage, looks almost EXACTLY the same. Firearm usage in murder dropped from 18.38% to17.5% Wow. WHAT A SLAM DUNK! There might be a LOT of reasons for the decrease in homicide rate, but apparently less than 1% can be attributed to banning guns. Wow, that makes a difference, huh?

I know, Australia is also cracking down on knife crime too, and cops can hassle a person for carrying a Leatherman -- nice freedom over there guys.

With gar marriage, while some may disagree with it, at least there are no victims. With abortions, there ARE victims.

With guns, each year, only one out of every 30,000 guns claims a victim ( about 8,000 gun homicides per year, 270,000,000 guns in the USA).

Hmmm.... where on the planet exactly does increasing the numbers of people carrying weapons make for a safer society?

Here is a challenge for you: Go to this page (Gun violence in the United States by state):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Copy and paste the entire table into your spreadsheet of choice. Next, delete all columns except for the state name, gun ownership, and homicides per 100,000. Make an "X-Y" scatter plot. Looks pretty random, right?

Next, make a linear trend line for the data. CONGRATULATIONS! The trend is more guns -=> less murder. Washington DC really skews the data. Remove that row. Wow, the trend still exists! Less pronounced, but it still exists.

You have just PROVEN that having a higher gun ownership rate is correlated to less murder, using raw data from an unbiased source.

Wow. DC already HAS, by far, the highest murder rate of ANY state (yes, DC is not a state, whatever). I don't see how this could possibly make things any worse.

Simple. It is called a "wife." The "wife" program is not just an entertainment application, but rather an OS upgrade that limits what I can do. ;-)

My wife loves the convenience of instant coffee. I wanted to stick with a regular drip maker, but she did not like the mess involved in cleaning it up nor how long it took to make a pot. I don't like the expense and the waste of K-Cups, but the wife always wins in these sort of disagreements.

I must admit that the new Keurig makers are nicer than the old ones as they seem to have changed the pumping mechanism. That was always a weak spot with the old ones, especially if you had non-optimal water. Well water could kill an old K-cup machine in just a hundred cups or so.

We moved so no more well water, but I hope that this maker lasts a lot longer. We were also bitten by the DRM. We have some old "genuine K-Cup" pods laying around without the new ink, and they don't work -- at least until I get the time to dig up a very sharp craft knife to do the plastic surgery.