Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Family Fun On Christmas

I hung out most of the day at the folks' house.  We turned on the A Christmas Story marathon just before 10 o'clock this morning.  It was just in time to see the Bumpuses hounds burst through the house and eat the Christmas turkey, setting up the dinner at the Chinese restaurant:



Two hours later, when the dogs burst into the house in the next showing of the movie, Mom looked up and said something along the lines of, "The dogs got a second turkey?" After we explained that it was the same scene being replayed, we had a good laugh.

However, it wasn't as much fun when Grandpa decided it was a good time to talk about the ineffectiveness of gun control laws. First, he said that after Australia put in gun control, it didn't stop shootings. Apparently, that doesn't seem to hold up:
 Australia Gun Homicide Rate
Then he followed up by claiming that when he was visiting Honduras, every man and woman carried a gun, and there were very few shootings.  My sister told him she didn't want to live anywhere where everybody carried a gun, while I said I thought they had a large number of shootings.  He told me I didn't know anything because he'd been there and I hadn't.  I googled crime in Honduras and got this:
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Honduras has the highest rate of intentional homicide in the world, with 6,239 intentional homicides, or 82.1 per 100,000 of population in 2010. This is significantly higher than the rate in El Salvador, which at 66.0 per 100,000 in 2010, has the second highest rate of intentional homicide in the world.
After I told him that, he wanted to know how that compared with Detroit.  Honduras was pretty much twice as high. That also occurs when Honduras has many fewer guns than the United States.  When it comes to arguing with Grandpa, facts seem to be liberal things.

2 comments:

  1. Trading liberty for security. . . the calling card of a liberal. Venezuela bans private gun ownership. How's their murder rate going these days? Google that one. The capital is only surpassed by Juarez for murders.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I didn't propose any gun control laws. I am secure enough to go around daily without carrying a gun, but I realize a lot of people are pretty fearful of being the victims of crime and feel more comfortable with a weapon. I have yet to be in a position where a firearm would improve the situation, and I think that is a good thing. I have three guns at home mainly for varmints, but one works well if I ever needed it for home defense. I've considered purchasing an AR-15 on several occasions, but never have. The point of the post, since you seem to have a really hard time understanding, is that if somebody is going to make a political point, they probably ought to get their facts straight, and not have the facts completely invalidate their point.

    ReplyDelete