The onus should be to prove that guns cause more problems than they solve (complete cost-benefit), since the null hypothesis is difficult.
PALers commit murder at between half and a fifth the rate of non-PALed depending upon how you do the math. Yet virtually all PALers have guns.
If guns were the cause then the opposite would be true, rather than the '99.98% of the PALers don't commit murder' stat. Guns don't cause murder, other things do.
Same in the USA, 400 million firearms in citizen hands, if they were the problem it would be massively obvious.
Based upon some admittedly thin multi-year coroner's report statistics, it appears to me that half the PALers who did commit murder did not use their firearm in the commission of the act, although several subsequently committed suicide with firearm after the murder. Again, if guns were the cause, one would assume that the gun would be used.
Canadians expend about half a billion rounds of ammunition per year (ammunition import statistics). If guns are the cause of homicide, we're missing 99.9999992% of the time.
It's obvious to anyone who isn't trying to twist themselves around a link between firearms and homicide -- because that's the debate that the anti's want to frame the discussion in -- that the cause of homicide is something else.
It took me years of reading and critiquing studies to undo massive media brainwashing on this topic, and I'm still no where in the league of some who do it better than I -- at least one judge comes to mind.
In my early years at this I started reading some anti studies and was convinced/agreed. Then one day I noticed a flaw in their reasoning, and started spotting that same flaw in other anti studies. Then I started spotting a different flaw, repeated. Then I spotted studies that were dependent upon previous studies flawed conclusions for their conclusions. Gads most of the 'studies' are wastes of time.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
– G.K. Chesterton
Of those hundreds of you reading this thread who are PALed, please post if you've committed a murder since you purchased your first legally owned firearm. And if you've committed a murder, please post if the reason you committed murder was because you owned a gun; rather than at the moment of the incident you, for example, hated your victim. And, add if you've committed the murder using your firearm. If you could add how the presence of the firearm, and not other factors/causes, lowered in your opinion the victim(s) right to breath such as your need not to be disrespected or how you took offense at something they said about your mother's shoes or how your 'employer' wanted more money, please add that.
