Originally Posted By: jack maloney


The "gun laws = lower homicide rates" proposition was unsupportable from the start - but its author defended it tenaciously until his lame, late-in-the-game "ha ha I was just kidding" line.


Unsupportable? Jack, glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor. EVERY country in the world, with a society relatively similar to our own--that would be, once more: Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, all of Western Europe--has a murder rate far below our own. In fact, our murder rate is at least 3 times higher than in all those countries, and as much as 7 times higher than in some of them. That would be a 100% correlation between those countries (the SAME ONES you tout for superior universal health care) and the United States when it comes to murder rate. Much stricter gun laws . . . it'd only be about a 95% correlation, because a couple of them (Switzerland and Finland) do have relatively liberal gun laws along with a low murder rate. But the vast majority of them certainly do have stricter gun laws than we do.

Of course I'm more than willing to concede the SPECIFIC "social, economic and cultural factors" that differentiate the United States from those other countries--which is precisely why I do not apply the "general proposition" that stricter gun laws would reduce our murder rate to their level. You, however, seem far too willing to gloss over those specific factors, all the while advocating a NONSPECIFIC universal health care scheme for this country. You've told us you don't like Hillarycare or Obamacare, yet you've refused to tell us what UHC for the United States SHOULD look like--which makes Hillary and Obama look more honest than you are, because they're willing to subject SPECIFIC plans to the slings and arrows of review and criticism. Pretty hard to evaluate the worth of the poke, without knowing the specific nature of the pig within.

And one additional factor I did not mention, which also obviously has an impact on life expectancy in this country vs other countries: If we're murdering people at a rate 3 to 7 times higher than the countries against which we're being compared on the issue of life expectancy, then obviously our higher murder rate would have a negative impact, and is therefore one of those specific social/cultural factors one would have to consider when making any LEGITIMATE comparison.