Well here we go again.

[skeet]

Another college campus shooting. Good grief...I think these people do this stuff just for the thrill of being important for those few minutes. Almost makes me question the utility of firearms. Not really but how do we answer the critics??:confused:

[Valigator]

You will always have to answer the critics in these horrible crimes. But you have to answer with stats, real life numbers and all the other crap that goes with crime. I am in the process of that now. Let no one or any anti gun group ever ever get us against the wall with our weapons. If they want to stop the crime let them stop it from another angle, the dispair, the criminals the system lets loose on our streets every day to commit more and more heinous acts against the average man everyday. If the system is going to leave us to fend for ourselves then they have to take the good with the bad. I dont know why this freak did what he did, but I do know I am not going to stand there and be a target if I can help it. And neither should anyone else...

[gd357]

Tell them that IF some of those students had been carrying concealed weapons, it would have been a VERY different story. We are past the point of discussion - it should be legal for CCW holders to carry on campus. JMHO

gd

[Rocky Raab]

Yeah, it's a good thing Illinois and NIU have such strict gun control laws, or an innocent psychopath might have gotten hurt.

:rolleyes:

[GoodOlBoy]

Yea and we get to have frm Pres Clinton on campus today campaigning for his wife. Yipeeee.

Many campuses including the one I work at have started putting up some pretty decent campus alerting systems to warn faculty/staff/students of an impending emergency. The problem still boiling down to (in my opinion) that licensed Concealed Carry holders STILL cannot carry on campus. The general campus reaction is "No we can't allow that that would let guns come on our campus and there are no guns on campus now."

Maybe someday they will wake up, but I am afraid it will be too late.

GoodOlBoy

[denton]

Why do you suppose these incidents happen at schools, churches, and hospitals, rather than shooting ranges, gun stores, and police offices?

You don't need a large percentage of the population to be armed. If, on average, 1% of the people are carrying, the probability of having at least 1 firearm in a group of 100 people is 73%. If 2% carry, then the probability is 87%.

[LoneWolf]

denton, break down those numbers. I can't make the math add up?

[Rapier]

The unintended consequences of safety by exclusion. When you exclude firearms for safety sake, the lawabiding become the victims of the criminal who is and always will be armed.
Ed

[gd357]

Lonewolf,

It's the Bell Curve/6 sigma thing... Statistics. To simplify, if 1% of the population is armed, there will still be rooms of 100 people where no one has a gun. And there will also be rooms where there are 10 guns. So there may be a 1% average, but that will vary between groups within the population in question. Hope that's clearer.;)

gd

[BILLY D.]

While I was in college I once read of a dissertation by an Italian nobelman named Cesare Beccaria.

In it he said, " The laws that forbid the carrying of "arms" disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. "

Further; Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailant. Does "gun free school zone" ring a bell here?

They also serve to encourage rather then prevent homicides, for the unarmed may be attacked with greater confidence by an armed man. DUH! Ya think.

The man who wrote this was a Criminoligist and a Penal Reformer and it was written in 1764. Many of his theories on Criminology are still used to this day in the school system.

This gentleman had it figured out 244 years ago. Why are we still struggleing with the concept. After all, we have found that anyone born before 1940 is not capable of tying their own shoes and is dumber than a box of rocks. The "greatest minds on the planet" have all been bestowed on us since then.

By the way Mr. Beccaria's works are still available. A sidenote, he was against the Death Penalty and any form of torture.

Best wishes, Bill

[jplonghunter]

skeet

How do we answer the critics?

64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one today.

jplonghunter

[skeet]

That I know all the ready cliche' type aswers as well as you do. People do NOT listen to those type of comments any more than we listen to our critics inane statements. There has got to be some way to get the point across with some real meat in the statement.
I also know of the dissertations by Beccaria. People no longer look at the facts of situations. They just see the situation. The media makes BIG money on it(and we worry about Big Oil). I honestly feel that the media makes or enhances the chances of some of these things happening. Some of them know they will have their 15 minutes of fame so they do these idiotic things just for the media attention. How to make the media stop making a circus of the whole ordeal?? Seems like a GOOD first step. Oh I feel Beccaria was wrong about the death penalty but you do have to understand...he may have been a bit more civilised than I. In my ideal of penalties...If someone strangles someone...they should die in the same manner as their victim. But as I said...I may not be as civilised as some in the world. Put some fear into their minds..Not that wimpy lethal injsection Bullsh##. And get it over with inside of 90 days as it used to be!!

GOOD GRIEF...rant over I guess:confused:

[cwa1104sab]

Originally posted by denton
Why do you suppose these incidents happen at schools, churches, and hospitals, rather than shooting ranges, gun stores, and police offices?

I like to point this out a lot. Just ask the question and leave it out there whenever something like this happens.

Really, why does it happen in these places. The answer is so simple that anyone within earshot knows the answer.....

Because everyone in these places is armed

[denton]

The gory math...

If 99% of the population is not armed, then the probability of any one person randomly selected from the population being not armed is .99. If you draw a random sample of 2, the probability that both are not armed is .99^2. If you draw a random sample of 3, the probability that all 3 are not armed is .99^3.

So the probability of everyone in a random group of 100 being not armed is .99^100.

1 minus that number is the probability of having at least 1 gun in the group of 100.