> The real problem with this Lott/Landes drivel
>is that it does not make a proper comparison.
>How about comparing the US (or the states in
>the US with concealed gun laws) with the rest
>of the world? Guess who has a whole lot more
>deaths from guns, and I mean a whole lot more!
er, how would your suggestion be a proper comparison? I can't make out how it accounts for different sociopolitical structures, different ideals of socialisation, different national histories....
In my first job, I briefly had a colleague my age who'd been a teenager in Hungary in '56. It was a society with very few deaths by firearm. Very peaceful, in its way. You could at any moment be hauled off by the secret police and never be seen again, but not many people shot one another, it's true. Personal killings had to be done in old-fashion ways: stabbing, slicing, clubbing, strangling, poisoning, drowning, etc.
Then the Hungarians tried to break free of the Soviet hegemon. My erstwhile colleage spoke bitterly of having to try to overcome tanks and infantry with rocks and a precious few molotov coctails. He seemed to feel, rightly or not, that a more general availability of even small-caliber firearms might have allowed them to make the game not worth the candle, as in Yugoslavia. But, of course, they didn't have them because they'd all been confiscated in the name of civil order. A similar thing happened in Praha in '68, I believe.
Weapon-free societies are very good for the ruling class, but perhaps not so good for the rest of us. Instead of advocating confiscation of weapons, perhaps leftists should be focusing on the socioeconomic disparities that give rise to weapons use?
Margaret