Those of us Slate fans who don't live in the US and who enjoy the complexities of US politics know that there is one topic in which logic, experience and history take flight and there is really no point in arguing - your obsessive love of guns and death.

You send your children to school each day never knowing if someone acquaintance of theirs, with whom they had a trivial playground argument the preceding day, will not be waiting for them at school with an item from of daddy's lavish gun collection to end the argument with the finality of death.

You fill your houses with guns to 'protect' yourselves and ignore the figures that prove beyond all reasonable doubt that keeping a gun in your house means you are more likely to be shot and killed in the event of a break-in, most probably with your own weapon.

You make no connection between the death rates in your own cities, the death rates in a war zone like Iraq and the massive profits being made by the sellers of weapons to both war zones. You berate countries like Mexico for their violent lawlessness where drug gangs fight it out on the streets for control with the police and ignore the fact that 95% of the guns used by drug gangs in Mexico (where it is pretty nigh impossible to buy a gun legally) are imported illegally from your own country, and that Mexico if nothing else is therefore suffering from infection by your disease. I could go on, but why bother?

As it says in the Bible which you so fervently claim to believe in but so rigorously avoid living by, there are none so blind as those who will not see......

What's true in Mexico is true in Canada. Illegal, unregistered US guns are all over the streets of Toronto these days. 10 years ago it was a pretty peaceful city, now it's a gripped with fear of gang shootouts.

Hey, you have the option of never coming to our cesspool of a country, asshole! Stay the hell home, we've got enough of your kind here already. And those "statistics" you so sagely cite are falsified by the Violence Policy Center, The Brady Campaign and other disarmament groups. And Mexico's problems have to do with government corruption and drug smuggling, not with the so-called flood of US guns across the border. I've never seen a US city in which the army had to be called out to deal with gangs because the police were either too inept or too well paid by the gangs to do anything about it. Those people use autos last time I checked and automatic weapons are hard to get even in our "Gun Culture", so in short: your figures are shit. You had one good idea in your ignorant screed though, why bother going on?

Speaking as an American, I don't mind if violent Canadians are disarmed.

Thank you.

I seldom bother to get involved in this "debate" with my fellow countrymen (I was born in Iowa) . Our love of firearms of all sorts is and has always been mystifying to me.

As a society, we have decided that any number of gun related deaths is a price we are willing to pay for the privilage of virtually unrestricted firearm ownership. Any restrictive laws are a feeble sop to say we are concerned about careful ownership.

I think it stems in part from the nature of the birth of our nation, or at least how most citizens percieve it. We fought a bloody war and sacrificed lives for independence. We wrote the constitution, but had to add the bill of rights to get it passed; the bill of rights essentially trying to protect the citizenry from tyranny. We now say, and have said through the years, that our military is protecting our freedoms, rather than our lives; when it seems in many cases, particularly in this day and age the military is doing the reverse; our freedoms are not really in peril from any foreign threat. I believe that Americans simply value freedom more in the freedom-security scale than many other industrialized nations. If you disagree then fine, you're within your rights to complain, fight for the balance to be shifted, etc. If you live in a foreign country, then I don't understand why you would even complain.

Oh, and I couldn't just let this one go:

Vanno:

As a society, we have decided that any number of gun related deaths is a price we are willing to pay for the privilage of virtually unrestricted firearm ownership.

Virtually unrestricted? Give me a break. Maybe if you're coming from the position that the most dangerous thing you have a right to own is a butter knife.

Copito:

Those of us Slate fans who don't live in the US and who enjoy the complexities of US politics know that there is one topic in which logic, experience and history take flight and there is really no point in arguing - your obsessive love of guns and death.

Welcome to the Dark Side. We have cookies.

Copito:

You fill your houses with guns to 'protect' yourselves and ignore the figures that prove beyond all reasonable doubt that keeping a gun in your house means you are more likely to be shot and killed in the event of a break-in, most probably with your own weapon.

That's a classic misuse of statistics - the figures prove no such thing. They show a correlation, which does not show causation at all.

People who wear seatbelts on commercial airline flights are many times more likely to die in an air accident than poeople who never wear seatbelts on commercial airline flights. Does that mean wearing your seat belt on an airliner will increase your odds of dying in a crash? No, it means the vast majority of people who never wear seat belts on commercial airline flights don't ever go on commercial airline flights and so are at no risk of dying on one. Neither wearing seat belts nor the higher risk of accident causes the other; both are results of a third factor, flying on a commercial flight.

Likewise, people who belong to street gangs and/or engage in activities like hard drug dealing or armed robbery are at an extremely high risk of being shot and killed as a result of their avocation, and they also almost always own guns. The gun ownership isn't what makes them die; rather, gun ownership and high risk of murder are both results of another causative agent, engaging in violent crime. People who own guns and are not criminals have almost no higher risk of being murdered than people who don't own guns and are not criminals, and possibly a lower chance. But you never hear that because the worthless invalid analysis appears to support your agenda, an agenda that happens to be shared by most of the news media.

Don't feel too bad, most studdents here aren't ever taught proper logic and reasoning either.

Copito:

You send your children to school each day never knowing if someone acquaintance of theirs, with whom they had a trivial playground argument the preceding day, will not be waiting for them at school with an item from of daddy's lavish gun collection to end the argument with the finality of death.

Those cases are tragic and get a lot of headlines, but the number is extremely small compared to, say, the number of children murdered and abused by their guardians or their guardians' partners. Locking everyone accused of child abuse up for life with no trial would prevent orders of magnitude more deaths of children than gun control, but we don't do that, because in our country as in Europe and Canada we don't ditch basic civil liberties even if doing so might save lives.

Copito:

You make no connection between the death rates in your own cities, the death rates in a war zone like Iraq and the massive profits being made by the sellers of weapons to both war zones.

The death rates in our cities have much more to do with automobiles, cheeseburgers, cigarettes, and illegal drugs than guns. Likewise your cities, wherever you may live. If you remove violent criminals who put themselves at risk and suicides who would likely just use other means (as they do in much larger numbers in gun-free Japan - which, by the way, has more violent deaths in proportion to the population than the US), the effect of gun ownership on our life expectancy is negligible. The same cannot be said about Iraq.

Copito:

You berate countries like Mexico for their violent lawlessness where drug gangs fight it out on the streets for control with the police and ignore the fact that 95% of the guns used by drug gangs in Mexico (where it is pretty nigh impossible to buy a gun legally) are imported illegally from your own country

Mexico, like the US, has billions of dollars in illegal drugs, illegal to manifacture everwhere in the western hemisphere, moving across its borders every year. Do you seriously imagine that criminal cartels that can acquire and smuggle 300,000 kg of cocaine and even more crystal meth would be unable to acquire and smuggle in a few thousand handguns as well - or that, for example, the government of China would decline to serve that market when it happily supplies much worse people with much deadlier hardware already?

yup, virtually unrestrained. Read the rest of my post.

ANYBODY who wants a piece in this country can get one. The laws that exist are not adequate to the task. And I am sure that you are aware of that.

.My position is that the deaths due to guns are acceptable to our society. Just as thousands of deaths due to automobiles are a price we are willing to pay to own cars.

You have a right to own guns and cars, just be aware of the cost.

>ANYBODY who wants a piece in this country can get one. The laws that exist are not adequate to the task. And I am sure that you are aware of that.

Where do you live? Go to California, NY, NJ, et cetera and try to buy a firearm, legally. If you can jump through all their hoops, are willing to provide the bureaucracy with every last bit of personal information they want, then you MAY be allowed to buy a firearm. But, don't count on it.

The thought that ANYBODY who wants "a piece" can legally get one is preposterous. If you are claiming that ANYBODY who wants "a piece" and is willing to commit a crime can get one, then you are admitting that laws restricting possession of firearms DO NOT WORK. Thanks for admitting that.