Reply #41: I don't HAVE any guns. I do have remnants of my long-ago training in science, though

[bean fidhleir]

and that training says that focusing on guns (or knives, or cherry cokes) when you know that they aren't the problem is unhelpful at best. Usually, focusing on the wrong thing lets the real problem get worse; we hear of that all the time in medicine, where failure to correctly diagnose and treat the real problem causes the premature death of the victim.

It's bad public policy to rely on magical beliefs unsupported by evidence. We can easily see that when people want to use their religion as the basis for lawmaking or education. Why can't we see it when the magical beliefs are coming from some other source?

(edit) Could you possibly respond to my request for data, rather than continuing to ignore it? DO you have any data? If you don't, could you please just come right out and say so?