Compare Different Policies Around the USA

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So making guns illegal will take them off the street? We should make heroine and meth illegal too.

Americans are understandably determined to ensure that massacres such as the one at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, never happen again. But how?

Some demand ever stricter control of firearms. Many others advocate more effective treatment of mentally ill people. Yet most understand that so-called gun-free zones simply disarm law-abiding victims while leaving criminals with access to illegal guns.

The long-term answer needs to take these and many different viewpoints into consideration. Which policies does experience demonstrate as either effective, or ineffective, in the USA? America urgently needs clarity on what does not work - and what does.

Rape Disappears with Concealed Carry in Colorado University

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How does rendering ME defenseless keep YOU safe?

After Colorado’s 2003 concealed carry law was enacted, the University of Colorado prohibited the right to protect yourself with a firearm, while Colorado State University allowed their students to concealed carry. These different policies had very different effects on crime.

The University of Colorado, under the gun ban they claimed was for safety, experienced a rapid increase in crime, while the latter with concealed carry enjoyed a rapid decrease. Crime at the University of Colorado rose 35 percent since 2004, while the guns at Colorado State slashed crime by 60 percent over the same time frame.

At Colorado State there were 47 reported sexual offenses in 2002, whereas with concealed carry in 2008, there were just 2 - rape had more or less disappeared. They saw a similar drop in crime in virtually every other category after concealed carry became legal. Understanding why they had these very different results will change your life.

Guns Save Women from Assault and Rape

As the police reached the crime scene, the waiting crowd of reporters and photographers was enormous. A rapist had been shot by his intended victim and she'd called the newspapers before calling 911!

All rape in the city stopped completely the moment the story broke. The city had a problem with sexual assault, so the farsighted police chief had given free gun lessons for vulnerable women. The immense publicity given to her gun lessons and the rapist's well-deserved death deterred other rapists for many months. [The story made headlines throughout the US but is written from memory since it doesn't seem to be online.]

There are countless cases where empowering women to defend themselves has saved them from assault and rape. All these links open in a new tab, see:

The countless incidents where a gun saves a woman from rape usually get little if any publicity from the biased media nowadays, but some do get reported. See 1) here, 2) here, 3) here, 4) here, 5) here, 6) here, 7) here, 8) here, 9) here, 10) here and 11) here... all

Experience shows that guns do effectively deter crime. The title of Dr. John Lott's book: More Guns Less Crime sums it up nicely, see the "devastating to gun control advocates" review here.

Thousands of Incidents have Favorable Outcomes

A hundred times more young children drown in swimming accidents than are killed in gun accidents every year

, but you may not know this from the media's biased reporting. More people are killed by hammers than by the rifles that Diane Feinstein and the Obama administration are trying to ban, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Gun owners stop a lot of criminal mayhem - attempted murders, rapes, assaults, robberies - every year, as readily available reports of innumerable incidents

show. Guns inform criminals that you can and will enforce your right to protect yourself

. Policymakers interested in reducing harm should therefore refrain from treating ordinary gun owners as hoodlums.

The real question is: Why do people believe the misleading fiction that more guns in law-abiding hands cause more crime?

Even President Obama has the clarity to chide gun safety advocates to accept the proposition that “almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible

.”

Are America's Increasingly Strict Gun Policies Working?

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Before 1934, any child could order this machine gun by mail order. Number of school shootings prior to 1934: ZERO.

Back in the mid-1960s, in most US states, an adult could walk into a store and buy an AR-15 rifle, no questions asked. Today, firearms are the most heavily regulated consumer product in the United States.

Nowadays, if you want to purchase an AR-15 or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. Permission is denied if the buyer is in one of nine categories of "prohibited persons," including felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and persons who have been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.

Since, half a century ago, "active shooters" were rare, what can account for the continued increase in these shootings? Counter-intuitively, could it be the increasingly stringent gun control regulations, which remove your right to protect yourself, disarm innocent victims, yet leave criminals with illegal access to guns?

Do Governments Want You to Believe rather than Explore Skeptically?

At school, far too many students are taught to believe others, to accept the educational system's point of view. In contrast, scientists learn to approach things with a skeptical mind. You'll change your life with the scientific approach, since being skeptical deters other people from manipulating you. This secret of success will stop you repeating nonsense spouted by politicians who pretend their misleading sophist policies will benefit you.

Governments, like colleges and schools, can't guarantee the safety of their citizens or students, so why deprive responsible citizens of their right to protect themselves and their school-children?

Food for Thought

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one... Distrust and caution are the parents of security."

- Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790, US Statesman, Diplomat and Inventor

Crime at Colorado State University has dropped with concealed gun carry, as well as reports on hundreds of incidents involving guns, can be found in:

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/WP-Tough-Targets.pdf

President Obama statement that gun owners in America are highly responsible is in:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/12/flashback-obama-i-have-expanded-rights-of-gun-owners/

The Wall Street Journal Report on America's increasingly strict gun policies is at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323723104578185271857424036.html

Britain Piers Morgan's vituperative public attack on American Larry Pratt can be explored at:

http://www.reason.com/blog/2012/12/20/piers-morgans-argument-for-gun-control-y

This article was originally published at selfgrowth.com/articles/compare-different-policies-from-around-the-usa-part-6-in-the-right-to-protect-yourself

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net. All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, please share this widely!

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