From the “I just couldn’t pass this up” file comes this little gem via the Huffington Post and Tom Tomorrow:
Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.
Read the whole original article, entitled Bush Nuts 😉
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Quite true, MB. No matter what the drop, it is still but a single data point.
Speaking of single data points, what about that “Washington, DC, crime capital of the nation” one? DC is, of course, the highest ranked state in terms of violent crime rates (one of the few categories where conservatives like to consider DC a state) but nobody bothers to note that the next three most violent states (2005) are South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida — not exactly bastions of liberal weenieism. But then, I suppose three “single data points” are as bad as one.
From 1996 to 2005, SC’s violent crime rate dropped from 996.9 to 761.1, while Florida’s dropped from 1051 to 708 in the same time period. (Tennessee’s, however, has only dropped from 774 to 753.)
The point is that, in general, states that have passed Concealed Carry laws have seen their violent crime rates go down faster than those states that have not. Furthermore, more restrictive countries, such as Canada, Wales, Scotland, England, and Australia, have seen their violent crime rates go up dramatically as they have put in more restrictive gun control laws. As such, Canada’s violent crime rate is 3 times the U.S. rate, and the rate of occupied-home invasions is 5 times the U.S. rate.
Say what you want, but no one f-s with Bernie Goetz anymore! 🙂
And really, that’s the important thing, Squeak
~
Tell us about your great familiarity with those countries, Jack. Tell us how they were great paradises, with a gun over every hearth, and crime free, before strict gun control was put in place and crime shot up. We’re waiting for your history and wisdom.
Your denial of the facts does not make them go away:
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=8073
Who was denying facts? You can’t ever simply answer the question, can you? Is that page in your How to Argue and Win, Even When You’re Wrong manual missing?
I want you, Jack, to tell us how familiar you are with the countries you listed, and how – based that knowledge – we should presume that there are any kind of parallels between the those countries and this, in terms of gun ownership, control, and effects.
See, Jack, I get the idea that you’ve rarely ventured far from your mother’s basement. I could be wrong, but everything I’ve ever seen you say here suggests that you’ve lived your life in a world not much bigger than that.
So now, failing at logic, MB goes to the ad hominem attacks.
How often does the left compare us to European countries, decrying our lack of national health insurance and paid leave for mothers? But when the comparison does not favor your position, you require intimate familiarity of the other countries. Must I have lived in another country to know how their violent crime rates have climbed as they have implemented strict gun control, while our violent crime rates have declined? Must I have lived in Canada to know that the murder rate for White, non-Hispanics victims is as high there as it is in the United States?
BTW, my mom has a home in Nova Scotia, which has the highest crime rate of any of the Canadian provinces. That home is not, however, in Halifax, which has a higher crime rate than Norfolk, where she has another home.
Jack, you criticizing anyone failing at logic is laughable, and that’s being quite generous to you. In citing those countries, you pointed us to places that are – for the purposes of your argument – almost nothing like the US. None of them have nearly the numbers of guns in private possession that the US has, before or after the controls noted by that lunatic author you point to. Not even close. No such failure of parallels exists for oh, say, health issues or parenting support. You type words out, but they don’t add up to anything coherent. Or even interesting.
What you must do, Jack, if you want to be anything more than another speedbump on the Internet, is take your head out of your ass. Or shut the hell up unless you have the first clue as to what you’re talking about. Call it ad hominem, or some other big word from your Rhetoric for Dummies book if you like, – but most folks would say that calling you a blithering idiot is calling it like it is.
So, in short, you have no argument based on facts. In general, states that have implemented Concelaed Carry laws have seen violent crime go down faster than states that have not. Countries that have implemented more restrictive gun control have seen violent crime rise. (The U.N. labeled England, Wales, and Scotland as the most crime-ridden in the industrialized world.) Those are facts.
In the face of those facts, why do you want gun control, anyway?