Sadly, I can’t say I know many young women. I guess I used to, back when I was 18-25 myself, but I don’t remember violent crime and gun policies to be the talk of the time.

Yep, little girls can’t be trusted with dangerous, deadly things. That would explain why 16–25 year old BOYS are the ones with the highest automobile accident rate, and the resulting car insurance rates.

And I wonder what the rates of alcohol-related injuries, by gender, are in that age group? When I was in college, I didn’t see any articles in the student paper about sorority girls going to the hospital with alcohol poisoning during sorority parties, or girls getting arrested for booze-soaked brawls in the campus-area bars.

Seems to me that “young women,” with proper training (such as that required to get a drivers license), are a lot more trustworthy in potentially dangerous situations than “young men” the same age.

Way to be the most polite person in the discussion. Just stay away from Bill O’Reilly

Interesting idea about women always being armed. It makes sense on its face, but then, do you know many young women? Most of the 18-25ers I know couldn’t be trusted with a stapler, let alone a glock.

@Larry, I think most people assume the US has the highest crime rate because it has so many people in jail. It is, of course, not true. You can see a list of countries by homocide rate here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate#2000s

Note, however, that while many countries have a higher homicide rate than the US, none of them are in Western Europe.

I am what you’d call a radical empiricist, a term made popular my the philosopher Quine. It means I don’t take any facts as beyond reproach. However, it also means I’m significantly more interested in evidence than opinions

Also a good point about the shift in societal ideology. This may be the key to solving a whole bunch of problems

I’ll try to respond to everything you said. Here goes:
1)predictable does not mean wrong.
2) The fact that other things are involved in more accidents than guns doesn’t mean we should ignore guns. There is no rule that society has to address problems one at a time.
3) Alcohol has medical benefits in small amounts. Tobacco does not, it only kills people. Therefore, yes, it should be illegal or at least strictly controlled. Not all things classed as “drugs” fall into this category.
4) The situation where the unarmed person is mugged or attacked by the armed person is screwy for two reasons. First, the point of gun control is to make it harder for the bad guys to get guns too. Second, from a game theory perspective legalizing concealed weapons increases the chance that you will be shot in the back and robbed rather than mugged. This is a complex argument that I will return to in a later post. If you value logic, I would expect a game theorectical argument to hold substantial weight for you.
5) Don’t be so sanctimonious. Not everyone has time to address all of your comments, and you certainly didn’t address all of the points in the original post. This isn’t my job, or Riley’s – we do it for fun.

@Rick, while you might’ve not quite understood my question, you answered admirably nonetheless, thank you.

@H, I’m afraid manliness was indeed brought up by me.

@everyone: Or rather by two US Americans I found on the internet. It wasn’t from their heated arguments, but from their carefully crafted fan-fiction. As fan-fic writers, their opinions might not carry any more weight than any ordinary US citizen, but their opinions don’t carry any less either, and where there’s two there might be more. I found their fan-fics easy to comprehend, except the points about guns. I didn’t quite realize at the time, but now I do think that it’s just about manliness. I focused on the part where they (more or less) write that it’s alarmingly irresponsible for women to go around unarmed. From there I concluded that they meant that it was alarmingly irresponsible for anyone to go around unarmed. Alas, I seem to have taken it out of contest. Rather, they write that the protagonist’s extraordinarily attractive girlfriend shouldn’t go around unarmed, because even the protagonist can’t protect her -all- the time, right? By the way, the protagonists in these fan-fics are unusually clever with computers, martial arts experts, awesome marksmen, built like a tank, looks like Adonis, have an unmatchable humor and a name that’s the same as the author’s online nickname. (Well, ok, maybe not -that- egregious.) I do apologize for bothering you all with my question, and thank you all profusely for the enlightenment.

@Alphabitch, I’m so very sorry, but I just might have incorrectly inferred that part about tax money. I did it in an attempt to make sense of things, but it now seems to be all wrong, I’m sorry. Also, I should add that I have visited the US twice, for a total of about two weeks. I think that the US is very interesting in many ways. Once in New York, as I was about to change from Greyhound bus to NY subway, I was approached by some unaffiliated person wanting to guide me to wherever I was going. Suspicious, I grabbed all my gear before I muttered “subway”. He quickly started going and disappeared around the corner. As I rounded the corner I found my “guide” next to a police officer, with “guide” in handcuffs. I’m still unsure what to think of that.

@QWERTY, sorry if you felt as if I was purposefully omitting parts of your argument. I didn’t have much response to them and was replying with fairly limited time. But since it bothered you, here ya go:
Alcohol and tobacco were created for entertainment and stress relief, and just have the crappy side effect of killing folks. Guns were created to kill folks, and just have the side effect of being entertaining to shoot.

@alphabitch, good points, I agree that other countries’ respective histories give them a very different perspective on gun rights. Here it is seen as a basic right, which makes attempts at prohibiting them unsuccesful.

With that (and this is for both of you), I’d reply that I don’t suggest we eradicate guns and don’t allow private ownership of them. I don’t support a completely unarmed America. I just don’t think folks should walk the streets strapping heat, and I think there should be stricter regulation and control.