I think you might want to check your statistics. The highest murder and gun-violence rates actually occur in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama - places that not only have very liberal gun laws, but also have deth penalty statutes.
Forgive me if I was misleading. What I meant were the cities of these states. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. (which I left out). These cities combined make up for six percent of the population, but they account for twenty percent of U.S. homicides, and these cities have the strictest gun control laws in the country. And I'm sure everyone will say that the laws are a result of the crime and not the other way around, but according to the NCPA...
Murder rates in the District of Columbia and Chicago actually went up after each jurisdiction passed restrictive gun control laws.
For some reason Patriot posted a list of people (some of them under 18) who were killed or wounded while housebreaking. None of them had rape or murder convictions. Everyone else stopped posting to the thread.
Like I said before Dim, anyone with a previous rape or murder conviction would most likely be imprisoned, so it would be a rarity to find such an example. It doesn't make any sense to say that someone is only dangerous if they've previously committed a violent crime. I gave example upon example of people defending their lives and homes from intruders, whether or not they were previously convicted of anything is irrelevant.
I consider that a conclusive resolution to the gun control debate.
Silly Dim.
I guess you haven't heard, Patriot. The US Supreme Court decided that the unborn technically are not human beings and do not have legal protection extended to them.
Hence state-sponsored murder. I don't agree with that classification, sorry.
I don't think this is true - by 1/2 way through the second trimester an embryo has a functioning CNS and spends most of it's time dreaming. I don't think it's moral to kill them except under extraordinary circumstances.
Mid 1st trimester abortions terminate a rapidly dividing cluster of cells with no functioning CNS to speak of.
I guess if you were a religious person then you could claim that the soul entered into a person at the moment of conception (the churches belief). This makes almost all forms of contraception a technical means of abortion. It also makes God a prolific abortionist, since the majority of fertilized eggs fail to implant on the uterine wall and are expelled during menses.
There are many areas of grey, and it's pretty hard to determine when life begins and when the soul becomes existant. But I believe that in week six of the pregnancy (once the primitive heart begins to function) that abortion technichally becomes murder.