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Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
I don't mean "question" someone's post. I mean doing some research into the supposed facts and statistics that Harry likes to include in his posts, and which are all to often pulled out of the air.
To quote from a rather lengthy article on the subject:
The U.S. has a high gun murder rate, whereas a country like England with strict gun controls has almost no gun murders and a very low murder rate. Doesn't this show that gun control is effective in reducing murder rates? Not exactly. Prior to having any gun controls, England already had a homicide rate much lower than the United States (Guns, Murders, and the Constitution: A Realistic Assessment of Gun Control, Don B. Kates Jr.). Japan is another country typically cited (see Japanese Gun Control, by David B. Kopel). (Briefly discussing the difference in homicide rates between England and the U.S. is Clayton Cramer's, Variations in California Murder Rates: Does Gun Availability Cause High Murder Rates?)
Gun control opponents can play similar games. The Swiss with 7 million people have hundreds of thousands of fully-automatic rifles in their homes (see GunCite's "Swiss Gun Laws") and the Israelis, until recently, have had easy access to guns (brief summary of Israeli firearms regulations here). Both countries have low homicide rates. Likewise this doesn't mean more guns less crime.
The U.S. has a higher non-gun murder rate than many European country's total murder rates. On the other hand, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Mexico have non-gun murder rates in excess of our total murder rate.
Mexico also has a much lower suicide rate overall than the UK, and has little or no gun control. Homicides are very high, but then the drug cartels are in charge of much of the country.
You should never post in anger, because your argument will end up full of holes. The fact that the desire to breed is an important drive for "many" women does not give them the "right" to do so.
I suppose you might remember the case of the woman, here in the States, who gave birth to something like 8 children over her lifetime and murdered every last one of them (or most of them). I can look it up for you if you never heard of it. Are you saying that the state must honor her right to produce her little murder victims, or just that once she has exercised her breeding rights, then she can't exercise her apparent drive to murder?
I happen to think that the state has a duty to keep people like that from breeding, and as long as it is done with a hearing and not arbitrarily, that women like that should be prevented from breeding. There are a lot of women who have a biological "drive" to reproduce (thank the maker that I am not one of them), but that does not mean that they have any desire to be a parent, much less a good parent.
I'll just admit to being on the other side of the fence with regard to people's biological drives giving them "rights" .... a man might have a very strong desire to breed, but if he carries that out through the means of rape, I think he's ended his "right" to do so. Feel free to disagree.
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I'm sorry but the gap between what I 'should' do and what I actually do is often cavernous. That's just the way it is with me.
And if the state has a duty to prevent these women from procreation, how is to be enforced, who makes the judgements, who are the ones who control the procreation of these individuals? How could we possibly trust anyone to make a decision on stopping people from procreation. I hope you're not advocating some kind of sterilisation or anything of that sort by the state? The example of the woman who had 8 children then murdered them is so gruesome and sickening that I hesitate to ask the following question, but I must: why wasn't she imprisoned after the first killing?
Also, there is a 'right to reproduce' as mandated by the UN, it's article 16 of the human rights declaration of 1948. Also ratified in article 12 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950.
I don't think it's helpful to confuse rape with a biological drive, a biological drive that is apparent in all species on this planet - if only for pleasure (and why not indeed). Rape is a sickening violent crime and those who perpetrate it should be imprisoned to the maximum extent of the law.