Diet, lifestyle are far more dangerous than a loaded firearm.
Published in The Orlando Sentinel on June 24, 1999.
Your risk of being murdered is one in 16,666. For most Americans, it is much less than that. The majority of American homicides involve one low-life killing another low-life.
Thus, if you stay out of the drug business, which most Americans do, and if you don't hang out with low-lifes or foolishly wander into bad
neighborhoods, your chances of becoming a homicide victim are very small.
In short, the danger of firearms is greatly exaggerated by politicians and press alike. In 1997, for example, 15,551 Americans were killed by firearms, compared with 28,400 who died in their homes as a result of accidents, only 1,000 of which involved firearms. Total deaths from
firearms accidents were 1,500. Compare that with the 43,200 killed in vehicle accidents, the 14,900 who died in falls, the 8,600 who were killed by accidental poisoning, the 4,000 who drowned, the 3,700 who died in fires, and the 3,300 who died from the ingestion of food or some other object.
Eating poses more than twice the risk of a gun in causing an accidental death.
In 1997, whereas homicides with a gun took 15,551 lives and 1,500 died from firearms accidents, 88,000 died from pneumonia and flu, 91,000 from accidents (I've subtracted the 1,500 firearms accidents), 110,000 from lung diseases, 159,000 from strokes, 537,000 from cancer and 725,000 from heart disease.
Deaths related to firearms - including murder, accidents and suicides - amount to a hair more than 1 percent of the annual deaths in the United States. Yet both politicians and press distort and exaggerate the danger of firearms to the point of hysteria.
If this two-headed, demagogic monster would devote half of the energy to cancer and heart disease that it devotes to firearms, far more lives might be saved. Your diet and lifestyle are far more dangerous than a loaded firearm in terms of the likelihood of your being done in.
I wanted to put firearms deaths into perspective so that you can realize that you are being subjected to a deliberate propaganda campaign.
If the politicians and the press were really interested in crime, then they would face the race factor in crime, but they both are scared to address it. The race factor, simply stated, is a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by blacks. That is not to say that race causes the crime; I'm merely pointing out that a disproportionate amount of the
violent crime is being committed by blacks.
An analysis of the homicides in Chicago in 1991 performed by the Chicago Police Department shows that there were 927 homicides. Of the offenders arrested, 702 were black; three were black Hispanic; 128 were white Hispanic; and only 51 were white. Only 38 of the victims were white. Clearly, Chicago's homicide problem that year was not uniformly distributed but localized among blacks and Hispanics. Few, by the way, invovled drugs.
To back up what I stated about low-lifes, 61 percent of victims and 77 percent of the offenders had prior criminal offenses on their records.
So, don't worry too much about being murdered, but be careful in that supermarket, restaurant and your own kitchen. As for a keeping a firearm in the home, it's safer than a car in the driveway or a swimming pool in the back yard.
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... enough said.
Mike
This has been edited for brevity.