Safer with guns?

I’ve still got some magazines I kept as I cleaned out Dad’s house. I’ll be reading National Geographic for a while, even though I threw out most of what I found around his house.

The magazine I’m reading now is Mother Jones, the March/April 2013 issue. I’d link to it, but their website doesn’t have ways of searching for and linking to old issues.

What caught my attention was Hits and Myths, this time a list of the top ten myths around guns. I’ve paraphrased them.

1. The government will come for your guns. Heh. The government, between law enforcement and the military, has 4 million guns. Civilians have 310 million.

2. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But states with the highest gun ownership have the highest murder rate.

3. An armed society is a more polite society. But drivers with guns are 44% more likely to flash obscene gestures and are 77% more likely to drive aggressively.

4. A good guy with a gun can take out a bad guy with a gun. And in the last 30 years that has happened … zero times.

5. Guns in the home make it safer. For every time a gun is used in self defense there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 attempts at suicide, and 4 gun related accidents.

6. A person carrying a gun is safer. These people are 10 times more likely to be killed in an argument than stopping a crime. A victim is 4.5 times more likely to be shot if carrying a gun and 4.2 times more likely to be killed.

7. Women are safer when guns are around. Nope, her chances of being killed by an abuser go up 7 times.

8: It’s the violent video games. The Japanese spend more per person on video games. In America there are 88 guns per 100 people, in Japan there are 0.6 guns per 100 people. In 2008 there were 11,030 gun homicides in America. In Japan: 11.

9. More Americans are owning guns. Yeah, more guns are bought, but are held by a shrinking segment of the population.

10. All we need to do is enforce the laws we have. Except the NRA is doing all it can to make those laws unenforceable.