Gotta agree. Guns are simply another tool to people in rural areas. I know of someone whose ranch actually falls under the jurisdiction of the Ute reservation. Well, his house is at the tippy most end of it, and last time he had to call the police, it took the Ute tribal cops 2 hours to show up. By that time the problem had been peacefully settled. My acquaintance shoot his rife over the top of the head of an individual who had driven 45 minutes down a very bad dirt road just to see the sights at 3:00 am and became inspired to attempt to break into one of the rancher's barns. The "sight see-er" got uninspired real quick and took off down the dirt road never to be seen again - at least not at that rancher's place.

Oh, the local 3 page paper put the incident on the front page.;)

You aren't kidding! The funny thing is you went back and edited that post. What was it, a typo that you found? :D

That should be a major consideration in the debate, right?
I hate to cite "reality" - but it does have some discernable characteristics...

But it does put a damper on the "debate", no?

Well, like I said: it should.

True dat...

Who knows. :rolleyes:

I think I'm going to start going to sleep after taking a sleeping pill*. The recreational value of staying awake can't be denied, though.

* -- edit: okay, maybe 1 1/2 sleeping pills.

Glatt is unfortunately (and ignorantly, alas, also) subscribing to the discredited theory of "the evil gun," that certain types of firearm are inherently more wicked than others. The ignorant and neurotic ravers against human self-defense use this as an entering wedge to help get the rest of us as helpless as they are. Anyone accepting this theory has been pwned like a big dog!

Disclosure time: in my callow youth, that was me.

This "theory of the evil gun" is exploded by the fact that the same compactness and concealability, and not least their lesser weight, that make pistols suited to committing felonies with, and with a maximum of discretion at least until the shooting starts, are the very same properties that facilitate active defense against committing pistol-armed felonies, by the fundamentally simple expedient of blowing holes in the felon. Which isn't remotely part of his plans for the day.

Crooks can't gag down being shot to death. If this is a universal prospect, they perforce stop being crooks, either under their own volition or because they are too dead to do anything other than cool down to ambient. Either outcome dramatically reduces crime and attendant wastage.

You can shoot a crook with a rifle, too. However, bearing a rifle around with you means you have to carry it in your hand which means you haven't got both hands on your work. A pistol, you simply wear. It's emergency equipment for a specific kind of emergency. Wearing it makes it available in even the most pressing and immediate kind of emergency.

So do ordinary people walk around in the US wearing a pistol?

I'm not particularly extraordinary, and I've done that. Not often, but I've done that.

In the State of Vermont, anyone able to possess a gun can carry it concealed without a government permit of any kind. The one rule Vermont has about this practice is that thou shalt not do it in furtherance of any criminal activity. This is a tremendous improvement over the assumption that CCW is itself a crime, as is the attitude in Washington DC, New York City, and the State of Illinois.

And we know all about thousands of Vermonters killed in shootouts every month, don't we? :D

Very ordinary jewelers carry concealed pistols in their shops, as do pawnbrokers. Even pizza delivery men who'd previously been robbed in nasty neighborhoods -- petty theft can sometimes stoop to new depths of pettiness. This has saved innocent lives, and owing to the modest hitting power of pistol cartridges, doesn't necessarily take the perpetrators'. A rifle bullet is more likely to kill.

rifles are designed to kill things

Ignoring him for a moment, the answer is no.

However, he, for once, raises decent points. For certain people in certain circumstances, its a wonderful idea.

And Vermonters have a certain... mindset that helps prevent violence. I have never met a vermonter who was anything but chill, mellow, and cool.

A stone axe will do a good job of that too.

PeTA will tell you it's immoral to kill animals. Those people never took enough biology to know that all life springs from death, from dissolution. Even plants kill insects: the caffeine in a coffee bean, the cocaine in the coca leaf, and the capsicum in a chile pepper: all these compounds mess bugs up something fierce, generally by hitting them with a dose of something that wrecks their nervous systems. The dosages of these insecticides are too small to do more than stimulate the systems of large mammals like us.

You live, and not starve to death, because you kill stuff and eat it. Plant or animal, to fuel your life, it dies and is disincorporated.

That mindset is hardly unique to Vermont. It's generally prevalent in every State containing about Vermont's population: the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon -- all kinds of places whose murder rate is about 2 per 100K persons/year, a rate closely comparable to England's, in places far more generally heavily armed. Other crime is similarly infrequent. The general rule is that counties that are not entirely swallowed up by cities have low rates of murder and other crime, with murders as an example in the range of 2-3/100K/year.

OK then, by that philosophy, people who live in cities are either 'more criminal' than people who don't, or that cities are more populated and therefor crime must be higher.

Where are you getting your stats from UG? I'd like to know what the ratio is for urban areas.