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I also feel the need to inject some perspective into this discussion about the wide generalizations some of you are making comparing state crime stats to one another. It doesn't make much sense to compare California crime to Florida crime. For one thing, there is huge disparity between population sizes, types, and even regional.
For example, all of California operates under the same strict gun regulations. Yet, there are only a few regions, low-income, dense urban environments, that account for those high stats. I can compare Compton to anyplace, Florida or I can compare Irvine to anyplace, Florida. Which one is going to have the lowest crime rate? If guns solely accounted for the difference, the per capita rate of crime/murder should be the same. It isn't.
Next, many of you argue that possessing firearms prevents crime/murder of innocent people. Well, while that most assuradely occurs, the stats you are reading about are not innocent people or regular joes and janets being accosted and killed. The most frequent murder victim is a young, urban black male. The most common perpetrator: the same. Violence occurs between members of the same race and class, with occasional crossovers.
It will be a rare day, statistically speaking, when any of you rural dwellers need to pull a gun for safety against an threatening criminal--unless you're arguing in a bar or back alley and the situation escalates to violence.
When you make comments like only criminals have guns, yes, true, but they rarely kill anyone else. So you need to look at a complexity of issues, not whether a particular region allows weapons to be carried or not. So when you arm a bunch of people in suburban Texas, I have no doubt that crime goes down in those particular places. But if you start arming californians, you'll get a bunch of gunslingers in rural sacramento, hollywood, and san diego. people in compton and more dense urban centers are already armed and killing one another. Not much is going to decrease in the overall crime averages. That's the consequence of living in a city with 30 million people. There are highly concentrated locii of violence and crime. Arming people in the rest of the state isn't going to dent those averages. There are better ways to reduce violence than arguing arming and training citizens will resolve our culture's preoccupation with violence as a dispute resolution.
So you take Grants Pass as an example. You have 20, 000 people. How many murders this year? I think it's 0, but I haven't looked. Counting from here until last year, I will be able to count them on one hand. And none of them are a result of some regular person being accosted in a back alley. Any murder in that town is likely over meth--and both the victim and the killer would have had access to firearms.
But if gun weilding fixes the problem, why the high crime rate in Portland?
Why the low rate in say, Lake Oswego, but the high rate in the inner city?
I'm just pointing out that you may be using too broad of a brush.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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