
Originally Posted by
cwolff
You might be right about murder rate. I'm trying to find stats and it looks like murder doesn't correlate to gun ownership by country. Certainly we reign supreme in gun violence but not too bad in overall violence.
Not just murder, gun access isn't correlated with violent crime rates either. Cross-country comparisons aren't super helpful, it's better to do cross-state and best to do post-ban. What gun access is well correlated with is suicide rate, though, and Americans are slightly more likely to commit suicide than be murdered.
This is an incredible thing if you think about it: there are 7 billion people in the world, and all of them put together are less likely to kill you than you alone are. Or: you're 7,000,000,000 times the threat to your life that a random stranger is. And you want to give yourself a gun? For the express purpose of self-defense, no less? Speaking generically, of course.

Originally Posted by
Ravenwood
I feel for your loss, I truly do but weapons arent to blame here.
As an empirical person (and a Republican, METHAIS) I have a hard time with blame. It's one of Ker_Thwap's squishy things, I leave those alone. Correlation is my game, and reducing access to guns has a measurable and statistically significant impact on American suicide rates.
I want to stress the first thing I said: "as an empirical person". You don't have to be an empirical person, but you are allowed to be and it doesn't even require that much training. Doing the data collection is monotonous, doing the analysis requires math (though not as much as you might think), but just getting into the frame of mind is pretty easy. I can't give you any reasoning why empiricism works, that's a contradiction in terms. But I do recommend it.

Originally Posted by
Wrathbringer
I don't think people are going to be up in arms until they've had time to try and use the "coverage" they bought and are unable to do so.
I have seen no loss of coverage with my new plan, and it has been very slightly cheaper so far. My medical status is unusual, but still, just throwing that out there.
Hasta pronto, porque la vida no termina aqui...
America, stop pushing. I know what I'm doing.