TexasCHLforum.com

jimlongley wrote:Remember that Wikipedia is vetted by volunteers, and they may or may not be biased one way or another....

A short time ago, to prove a point, I entered a bogus article on Wikipedia and left it there for several days. I removed it myself after showing the people who felt that Wikipedia is a citeable source.

Wikipedia is a portal, not a source. Use it to get citeable sources, not as a citeable source.

You can't cite it, because it can change drastically before you hit the "post" button (but the history view does show how it looked with every change).

Kevin

Smokewagon wrote:I would also question the 30,000 gun crime deaths per year. Thats like 80 something per day. I don't buy it.

My paraphrase of a Wikipedia article (see the original for cites):

According to the FBI, firearms used to commit 68% of the 14,860 homicides in the U.S. in 2005. That's just over 10,100 gun homicides for that year.

The CDC estimates there were 52,447 violence-related and 23,237 accidental gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, with firearms used in 16,907 suicides in the United States during 2004.

There are approximately 800-900 accidental gun deaths per year. If the suicide figures for 2004 and homicide figures for 2005 were steady, that would mean approximately 28,000 gunshot deaths from all causes: suicide, murder, negligent homicide, justifiable homicide, and accident.

There's also a good reference here, although it doesn't include western Europe (probably because of difference in reporting methods):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence

Don't compare UK to US; compare UK to itself. The gun crime rate (and overall violent crime rate) has gone up in the UK every time they've passed stricter gun control laws.

Murder-by-firearm (and possibly rape) is the only violent crime statistic where the US still leads the UK.

If you want to do some comparison between US and UK (along with Scotland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland), here's some light reading. It's a 304 page .pdf from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cnscj.pdf

There are lots of charts, graphs, and numbers.