More shootings.

[popeyespappy]

Even with that data, I like how you conveniently ignored and left out the stats about murders by handguns...

Which is: 6,220.

Work me out the percentage difference between that and knives for me would ya?

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Hellooooo cherry picking.

I think he was banking that we wouldn't actually bother reading it.

I answered the thing about handguns when Min brought it up. The bill that Fienstein is going to bring up in the senate next week will attempt to ban assault rifles not handguns. Assault rifles are only used in a small fraction of America's shooting deaths each year. The number of deaths by assault rifles has been on a steady downward trend for years despite millions of new ones becoming available since the end of the last ban. Last year the number of deaths attributed to assault rifles was something less than 323. More than 5 times that many people were killed with edged weapons during the same period. I'm not sure how much less because the FBI numbers don't differentiate between assault rifles and other rifles, but I know all of deaths caused by rifles were not via assault rifle because the stats in California and Chicago do report that data, and all the deaths attributed to rifles in those places were not via assault rifles.

The point of all this is the legislation that will be introduced in the senate next year doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of producing any kind of significant reduction in the number of murders in the US. That’s even if it passes which is unlikely because in case you can’t tell there is a lot of opposition to gun control legislation in this country. Much of that opposition among the population in general comes from people that don’t want to see restrictions on what we can own but wouldn’t mind seeing improvements in the system for performing background checks and mental health reporting. It would be better to expend our energies on legislation that requires mental health and social services professionals to report suspect individuals into a system that actually keeps up with them. Those are the kinds of changes that have a better chance of becoming law and could actually make a difference.