Like everyone else we were horrified at the massacre in Tuscon a week ago. A day or so after ,one of the networks presented a program that seemed to us to be a disguised anti-gun message. This moved us to do some research on murder rates. We read summaries of gun laws in 7 states, along with data on murder rates, and did not find any correlation between the two. Some states with permissive laws had low murder rates; others had high murder rates. The same was true for those with restrictive gun laws.
Data such as these moved us to conclude that the problem is societal not modal (for example, recall the Tylenol incident during the Reagan presidency. In that case, a mentally incompetent individual poisoned numerous bottles of Tylenol on store shelves, leading to many deaths and the advent of tamper-proof closures). Some of the factors we considered were population density, ethnic and racial groupings and poverty rates. We have no data to draw any conculsions other than the one that the problem is modal, not societal.
We also wonder why there is such a large proportion of the population with mental disabilities.
One does recall that some years ago there was philosophy that stated "If it feels good, do it."
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