Right Pundits

YoungDem - I don’t feel like you pick fights. For the most part you are fairly reasonable considering you call yourself ‘youngdem’ (j/k)

I do think that you answer your own questions though. You state that criminals look for easy targets. That’s my point. They generally are going to avoid targets that might hit back (ie: be armed). They also generally go into other neighborhoods. I know that some criminals rob their own neighbors, but usually they go into more well-to-do neighborhoods to burglarize. Generally, they scout out the neighborhood and pick the ’softest’ looking houses to rob. Big dogs in the yard are a good deterrent.

I do agree with you for the most part about the Atlanta airport - that doesn’t seem like a place that is likely to be a place where one would be victimized. HOWEVER, you make the assumption that should something happen there will be armed guards close by to help.

Take LAX for instance, when gunmen came in there blasting away - if someone had been armed , he would have been stopped sooner.

Virginia Tech - they advertised themselves to be a ‘gun free zone’ and all those students and teachers were killed. If someone had had a gun, the gunman would have been stopped sooner.

The examples go on and on. Studies of gun crime have shown that areas in which the average citizen is armed there is much less gun crime. Criminals are just not going to go there to do their criminal deeds.

Of course, we are talking about responsible ppl who are licensed to carry. That makes the assumption they have some semblance of sense. A gun, or knife, or box cutters, or broken glass or a candle stick or anything else can be a deadly weapon in the hands of someone intent on doing harm.

I don’t think businesses should be forced to allow guns on their property - however, ppl do have the right to carry and if a business doesn’t allow it then people who chose to carry a gun should do their business somewhere else.

Beth,
I am sorry but you are digging a deeper hole here. Crime is low in Brittain and they have very restrictive gun laws. Crime is low in Haiwaii and Micky correct me if I am wrong, but they have restrictive gun laws. Those are anecdotes not statistics. I would have to see a study that looks at violent crime rates in areas that changed from no conceal/carry law to one or vice versa. Correct for general increases in crime (use an equation that factors in an increase or decrease in non-violent crime for example) and then analyze whether crime rates changed.

Or, take a survey of convicted criminals and ask them if they considered whether their victim was carrying a weapon when they committed a crime.

Also, your example of Kennesaw Georgia fails because it is an ATL exurb, the surrounding areas of Cobb and Cherokee counties also have very low crime rates but don’t require guns. Same with Switzerland. The problem with these anecdotes is that they are complicated by a lot of other real factors such as poverty rates and anti-crime measures.

Your point about burgleries in well-to-do neighborhoods misses because A) no one is talking about restricting guns in the home and because B) burglaries usually occur when no one is home.

And the LAX and VT examples don’t work well either because they are anecdotal and because one cannot predict what would have happened if there were people around carrying a concealed weapon. In fact, with the LAX example the gunman had to have known that armed guards would not be far off. And at VT, the guy was obviously mentally insane, so it probably did not factor into his decision to go on a killing spree.

Heck, by your logic we should arm teachers at schools to keep the kids safe! Just tell me which school you will be lobbying for this at so I can send my kid elsewhere!

The only example I can think of where a person carrying a concealed weapon was able to obviously prevent the loss of further life was at some megachurch in Colorodo. That killer obviously didn’t take the conceal/carry law into consideration when he went on his rampage, but the problem with my example is that it is anecdotal.

I am not a trained statistician, but I know that for a study on this subject to be interpretable, it must have the right set of conditions and controls. And it must have a large enough sample size (that is another problem with anecdotal examples, they are usually just media-hyped outlyers).

Last point: lets forget conceal and carry laws and just make people put it in a visable holster. That way people can choose to discriminate against those carrying guns. It would be a better crime deterent, right?

Screw the nuances of the law about what is/isnt exempt. All I know is that, as a licensee, my right to carry (discreetly) into any non-secure (no metal-detectors)area should not be infringed. As for secure areas, there should be secure lock-boxes at the entry to same so that I can check my legally-possessed gun. One should be able to notify a reasonable official who would take you aside and facilitate the check in. Before you laugh please realize that there are jurisdictions where this is common accepted practice. As an aside, how come MARTA isnt playing Atlanta’s game “Franklin’s Folly”. In my all-American opinion, there is little worse than people with GUNS telling other people they cant have GUNS.

thepaninthebag.blogspot.com is a projet about guns in Georgia
Check it.