More guns then people

January 7, 2001 2:17 AM

More guns then people "...they found there were 1.4 million guns in the state, just over one for each of the nearly 1.3 million residents..." yikes! good move on the free gun locks though.
posted by cburton (7 comments total)

can you give us a little more, for those of us who aren't registered with the Times?
posted by Sean Meade at 5:10 AM on January 7, 2001

An anti-handgun violence group in Maine is giving away free trigger locks statewide, following a similar plan in Texas, and George W. Bush wants to spend $65 million doing the same thing nationwide.

One factoid from the piece:

They found there were 1.4 million guns in the state, just over one for each of the nearly 1.3 million residents. Nearly 400,000 of the guns were handguns, she said, and about 110 people die each year from gun injuries of all sorts — homicides, suicides and accidents.

If that stat is true, slightly less than 1 in 10,000 people in Maine dies from gun injuries each year.
posted by rcade at 7:46 AM on January 7, 2001

Note that gun locks won't do anything to prevent the suicides or at least some of the accidental injuries. They're still a good idea in general, though. Personally, I think responsible gun ownership includes storing guns in locked cabinets so they're not an object of interest when they're not in use, rather than just locking the action, but it's a step.
posted by ffmike at 8:11 AM on January 7, 2001

http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/national/07MAIN.html
posted by hobbes at 2:13 PM on January 7, 2001

I grew up in a house where my father taught hunter safety lessons and taught my sister and I how to shoot, how to handle all kinds of guns responsibly, how to clean and maintain guns,and how to lock them up properly (in a separate lock up than the ammunition too). It's not that difficult to learn - but trigger locks are a step, at least, as you said, ffmike. I think most people are just too freaked to deal with their own FEARS around guns long enough to LEARN about them - there's really nothing to them. (I also think the 'weapons fear' in school thing has gone to an insane level - I mean, if I had the intent, I could kill someone with a ball point pen if I wanted to. Hell, because of the safety training I had as a kid it would probably be easier for me to kill someone with a large frying pan than with a gun! LOL. But I digress...) There's also the deeper philosophical issues around gun fears - the basic powerlessness that we learn to accept as reality - all of its gets loaded onto "gun" as symbol of "bad". But that's a post for another time perhaps.
posted by thunder at 3:31 PM on January 7, 2001

This shouldn't suppose anyone. I see another simple solution to a complex problem. When he installs his anti-gun campaign, this $65 million will not go towards stopping the people that supply illegal guns to those on the streets. But instead he'll probably create more jails to house those buying the guns.

Similar to the war on drugs let's arrest as many drug dealers as we can but "Mr President what about the head bosses, who control the whole thing." To the American people " I will continue to create laws to arrest each individual who is caught with drugs and depending on how rich you are, your sentence might be lighter. From Mr. Presidentfail. "The big guy funded my campaign for President, I can't do anything to him. Sorry"
posted by passionblack at 8:47 AM on January 8, 2001

A Florida woman woke up to find man on top of her with a knife to her throat, so she pulled her handgun out of the nightstand and killed him. Just as the gun fired, the would-be rapist was probably wishing Florida had a trigger-lock law.

Originally posted here.
posted by mikewas at 11:35 AM on January 8, 2001