Gunman Assassinates U.S. Congresswoman

[Felch]

Why are you guys all hung up on firearm homicide rate? Is it better to have your skull caved in with a baseball bat than it is to be shot? Of course we have a higher firearm homicide rate than countries where guns are harder to get. India has a highly publicized problem with women being burned to death with kerosene. America has people getting shot. Personally I'd rather be shot than burned to death.

Comparing overall homicide rates still has America coming in as a much deadlier country than most developed countries. Just one more indication of American exceptionalism.

[Asher]

Why are you guys all hung up on firearm homicide rate? Is it better to have your skull caved in with a baseball bat than it is to be shot?

Yes. Of course.

Comparing overall homicide rates still has America coming in as a much deadlier country than most developed countries. Just one more indication of American exceptionalism.

Guns are far, far more deadly than most other weapons. It follows that with such easy availability of such deadly weapons of opportunity, your homicide rate will be higher while other countries just have assault/attempted murder in those cases.

And yes, the US has other reasons for its high murder rate as well. Guns are just part of the problem, not the whole of it.

[Asher]

The war on drugs probably contributes as well. The creation of a black market with gangs controlling and fighting for territory...

[Felch]

I bring up the baseball bat because I know two people involved in murders using baseball bats. One is my college roommate's little brother who thought he could hit a guy on the head with a bat and not kill him. Kevin is in prison now. Stephone Wiggins was killed with a novelty baseball bat a few years ago.

I don't know anybody who has been killed with a gun. Flat out. I know people who've been shot and beaten (drug robberies), but they survived. Baseball bats are no joke.

[Asher]

You have to recognize that baseball bats are FAR less deadly than guns when used as weapons...

[Felch]

They are less deadly. I know that. It's why armies use guns instead of bats. But that doesn't mean that Kevin didn't kill anybody, and it doesn't bring Stephone back to life. Dead is dead, murder is murder, and it doesn't matter if you beat them, shoot them, burn them or whatever, it's all the same.

[Elok]

Baseball bats don't kill people. Lack of access to health care to treat baseball bat-inflicted injuries kills people.

[N35t0r]

Why are you guys all hung up on firearm homicide rate?

Because we are using it as an example of why gun control should be enacted?

While deadly injuries with other kinds of weapon are also possible, non-firearm injuries are, generally, less deadly. Thus, gun control laws would result in less people killed.

[MOBIUS]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/...dents-day.html

Every last one of those is a bona-fide right-wing nutjob.

This appears to be an exclusively right-wing disease*...

























By European standards, the US is so extreme that virtually anyone who IDs themselves as both Republican and religious are right-wing nutjobs IMO...

[MOBIUS]

The war on drugs probably contributes as well. The creation of a black market with gangs controlling and fighting for territory...

Yeah, the mind boggles at how impressively ****ed up the US is - the war on drugs is another stain on right-wingers...

[Felch]

Every last one of those is a bona-fide right-wing nutjob.

This appears to be an exclusively right-wing disease*...

No, kidding. People who oppose Obama are largely right-wing. Wow. What other insights will the Man from Wales bring us?

There are 300,000,000 people in the United State. About a third are right wing. Out of those 100,000,000 a few dozen are bat **** crazy. Big deal.

[Heraclitus]

I find it fascinating how the media immediately tried to pin his political alignment as right wing and even blamed it on a "climate of fear/hate" despite his favourite authors being guys like Saul Alinsky and Marx. And this isn't just Liberal media bias, the tardificent excuse for a news network called Fox news floated even crazy theories of Anti-Semitism and talk of her being the first Jewish woman to rise to a position of that level in the US (dead wrong btw), despite the fact that its seems likely that he was Jewish. His mom was Jewish after all and some friends even claim she might have attended the same synagogue as Gabrielle Giffords (Mein Kampf seems even more out of place after hearing of this, however to be fair there have been people like Bobby Fisher who might make sense of this in their heads)!

Contrast this to the coverage of the guy who went on a shooting spree yelling "Allah akhbar!" at Fort Hood.

[Hauldren Collider]

It's all a vast right wing conspiracy, Hera.

[Asher]

I enjoy how the president of Fox News finally told all of his talking heads to shut the **** up, or at least tone it down.

[giblets]

I find it fascinating how the media immediately tried to pin his political alignment as right wing

I don't. He attacked a Democrat. It's typically the right wingers who will hate a Democrat the most. It's not hard to see why someone might suspect that such an assassin is right wing.