911 tells young mother, "do what you have to do to protect your baby"

[iverglas]

88. have you come up with anything to back that up yet?

In the vast majority of cases where a gun is used in a criminal manner, any number of other tools would still accomplish the same task.

How would you go about killing (or injuring) a bystander from a significant distance with, oh, a knife? or a baseball bat? or your fist?

How would you go about killing (or injuring) a child in its bed, from outside the building, with some other "tool"?

How would you go about killing (or injuring) anyone from a significant distance with a rock, even?

How likely is it that you would set out to commit a robbery or a drug rip-off armed with a blunt object? You might indeed; but you are far more likely to do that if you have a firearm; just admit it, okay?

How likely is it that you would kill your spouse or partner with the plan of killing yourself directly afterward, if the tools at your disposal were a bottle of sleeping pills, a pillow, a brick and a high bridge?

How likely is it that you would go to your place of employment or your school or a public place with the intention of killing as many people as possible if you had only a baseball bat in your arsenal?

How about you or someone go take a look at a sample of the thousands of firearm homicides that take place in the US annually and offer up some significant number where you can at least credibly assert that the homicide would have been committed absent a firearm?

How about you do the same for some robberies? -- and be sure to include homicides in the course of robbery (which skew the robbery stats for the US to an extent that does not apply in comparable societies with much less widespread access to firearms, since the event is classified by its highest offence, thus removing it from robbery numbers).

Could you also identify the homicide-suicides where a firearm was the "tool" and assess the likelihood of them occurring where there was no firearm? (An international comparison of the incidence of homicide-suicide might be very interesting in this particular case -- the drug war isn't a factor that can be drug up as somehow proving USAmerican exceptionalism, wholly inadequate though that explanation is even where it might be relevant in any event, for instance.)

It's easy to speak the words you and so many like to speak, and so many speak them so often that I am convinced that coming up with the money to give them weight should be no trouble.