Which harms more:

Illegal drugs caused 989 deaths in FL in 2007

There were 2328 gun crimes in FL in 2007

But guess which one we are "at war with".

This isn't a gun board, but I'll humor you.

Gun crimes do not equal gun deaths. Big distinction.

True and gun crimes are crimes of violence for which the only equivilent with drugs is death.

Nationally ALL drug deaths - legal and illegal combined are about equal to gun deaths. So by definition illegal drug deaths are signifcantly less than firearms deaths.

But you're comparing apples to oranges. Just because a better comparison doesn't exist doesn't indicate that an inaccurate comparison is a good substitute.

How am I comparing apples and oranges? If drug OD deaths are enough to invoke a "war on drugs" motivation, why then do we celebrate the fantasy illusions of gun ownership?

"Gun Crimes" contains no indicator as to whether another crime was commited with the USE a gun, if those guns were legally obtained in the first place, or if the improper storage and carrying of a legal gun is the root cause of X amount of those crimes.

"Drug deaths," however, is a relatively clear-cut term relating to deaths caused by prescription and non-prescription drugs, based on the amount in the victim's blood.

How many gun-crime DEATHS are there per annum in the State of Florida, as the result of gun abuse (i.e., NOT self-defense)?

There is your apples-to-apples. You can't just simplify the numbers and compare on different criteria when they don't line up with the point you're trying to make.

How a gun was obtained doesn't matter. Legal Gun ownership contributes more than 37% of all guns that are used in crimes - 37% are ones that are stolen outright. Then there are the legally owned gun that are used for illegal purposes.

As for gun deaths in FL I couldn't find data specific to fl. The only data that the CDC has is aggregated on a national level, but its the #2 or #3 source of premature death. AHEAD of "illegal drugs".

Schedule I drugs are illegal.

Firearms are not.

No one, but you, "celebrate[s] the fantasy illusions of gun ownership."

Face it, in order to further your agenda, you'd compare firearms to Mickey Mouse. As it is, your so-called "arguments" are about as realistic as a walking, talking and dancing rodent...

Unfortunately for you, not very many people seem to share your loathing of constitutionally protected rights...

Tautological reasoning about what is and is not "legal" isn't useful in determining whether policy is good policy or consistent with core prinicples. The whole point is that despite doing less harm, Schedule 1 drugs are not only illegal but we are "waging a war against" them because of the harm they cause, yet for handguns and guns more generally - which cause MORE HARM to society than Schedule 1 drugs, folks like you engage in utopian fantasies that have no factual basis.

yeah that's good policy making

The amount of actual death caused by drugs is a relatively miniscule amount of the overall social, physical, psychological, moral and economic pathology caused by drug abuse and drug addiction. If ODs were the only thing bad about drug abuse, then drug abuse wouldn't really be all that bad.

As a secondary point, how many shootings were instigated by drugs and alcohol?

As with prohibition, most of that pathology is caused by the prohibition and its consequences, not the drugs themselves.

Heroin addicts in particular are quite mellow and non-violent if what they are getting is clean heroin. Only meth and coke/crack have violent behaviour problems - and then nothing compared to alcohol.

OTOH, guns are inherently associated with violence, their whole purpose for being built is violence.

degsme:

As with prohibition, most of that pathology is caused by the prohibition and its consequences, not the drugs themselves.

Yet addiction to drugs is known to cause crimes due the money required to feed said addiction. So to claim the two are mutually exclusive is also faulty.

Price is still primarily a consequence of prohibition. You have to disambiguate the two to intertwine the two crimes.

Only in theory, since no relevant data exists to prove your claim.

I am against drug prohibition, but am not about to ignore the reality of drug-motivated gun-crime. They are not separable for the basis of economic comparison.

There is data - from two distinct examples:

• Alcohol prohibition - after repeal, the price of alcohol went down as quality went up
• Marijuana - used to be primarily imported and the price sky-rocketed for the first decade after the border crackdown. But within a decade of Zero Tolerance, the quality of domesitically grown MJ was higher and 10x more potent, and price had dropped dramatically

In fact Zero Tolerance is touted by libertarian economists as one of the few trade tarriffs that actually worked.

So if the crimes are being driven by prohibition, then they very much are seperable as the basis for economic comparison