A few 2 minute reactions to your stats:
1) Suicide is bullshit.
While gun-related suicides were reduced by Canada's gun control legislation of 1978, the overall suicide rate did not go down at all: the gun-related suicides were replaced 100% by an increase in other types of suicide -- mostly jumping off bridges.
"The authors describe suicide rates in Toronto and Ontario and methods used for suicide in Toronto for 5 years before and after enactment of Canadian gun control legislation in 1978. They also present data from San Diego, Calif., where state laws attempt to limit access to guns by certain psychiatric patients. Both sets of data indicate that gun control legislation may have led to decreased use of guns by suicidal men, but the difference was apparently offset by an increase in suicide by leaping.
So strike every single one of those about suicide. If someone wants to kill themselves, they'll find some way to do it. Unless you want to say killing yourself by slitting your wrist with a knife or jumping off a birdge is somehow better than with a gun.
2) "Every day, 15 children, aged 19 and under, are killed with guns.
National Center for Health Statistics"
Since when are 18 and 19 year olds children? Someone is doctoring some numbers there.
18 and 19 year olds are ADULTS. How many of these children are little gangbangers that were committing a crime to earn their death? The young adults who shot up Columbine were children too, and I for one am glad they are no longer part of this world.
3) Throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Let's consider the homicide rate in the USA to be 50,000 per year (actually it is 21,597(FBI 1995 UCR),of which, firearms were used in 70%, but 50,000 is a nice round number). According to the BATF, there are approximately 50,000,000 handguns in the US. As a percentage of handguns owned to handguns used to commit murder, the figure is .001% (yes, that's 1/1000 of 1 percent). I ask of you, when less than 1 percent of handguns are misused, is there really a gun problem, or a criminal problem.
Or, let's just consider violent crime in general. According to the 1995 FBI Uniform Crime Report, there were slightly less than 1.8 million violent crimes in the US in 1995. Of this number, 30% involved the use of a firearm (any firearm, not just handguns). Thirty percent of 1.8 million is 540,000 instances where a firearm was used. Again, let's do the math. The BATF estimates that there are 200,000,000 firearms of all kinds in the US, but to illustrate my point more clearly, I will just use the figure for handguns instead of the figure for all kinds of firearms. The figure for handgun use in violent crime will be overstated by a factor of 4, but the percentage misused is so small anyway, that it does not really matter for the purpose of debate. The percentage misused is .01% (yes, that really is 1/100 of 1 percent). remember also, that the true figure is 4 times smaller than that. When less than 1% of firearms are used for criminal purposes, there is no "gun problem"
Furthermore, when you think of the fact that compared to 540,000 incidents where a firearm was used to 2 MILLION incidents of lives saved / crimes prevented by having a firearm (see article), you see that you are doing more damage by removing guns than having them.
4) Accidents???
Accidental gun deaths among children have declined by over 50 % in 25 years, even though the population (and the gun stock) has continued to increase.
Kopel, Guns: Who Should Have Them?, at 311 and National Safety Council, Accident Facts: 1998 Edition, at 18.
Accidental Death Rates for Children (ages 0-14)
Motor Vehicle 3,059
Drowning 1,060
Fires, burns 833
Mechanical Suffocation 459
Ingestion of Food or Object 213
Firearms 181
Figures are for 1995. National Safety Council, Accident Facts: 1998 Edition, at 10, 11, 18.
By your logic, we should ban fire instead of firearms, it kills 4 times as many children in a year.
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