* Australia: Readers of the USA Today newspaper discovered in 2002 that, "Since Australia's 1996 laws banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%."²

* Canada: After enacting stringent gun control laws in 1991 and 1995, Canada has not made its citizens any safer. "The contrast between the criminal violence rates in the United States and in Canada is dramatic," says Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser in 2003. "Over the past decade, the rate of violent crime in Canada has increased while in the United States the violent crime rate has plummeted." ³

* England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997.⁴

* Japan: One newspaper headline says it all: Police say "Crime rising in Japan, while arrests at record low."⁵

3. Fact: British citizens are now more likely to become a victim of crime than are people in the United States:

* In 1998, a study conducted jointly by statisticians from the U.S. Department of Justice and the University of Cambridge in England found that most crime is now worse in England than in the United States.

* "You are more likely to be mugged in England than in the United States," stated the Reuters news agency in summarizing the study. "The rate of robbery is now 1.4 times higher in England and Wales than in the United States, and the British burglary rate is nearly double America's."⁶ The murder rate in the United States is reportedly higher than in England, but according to the DOJ study, "the difference between the [murder rates in the] two countries has narrowed over the past 16 years."⁷

* The United Nations confirmed these results in 2000 when it reported that the crime rate in England is higher than the crime rates of 16 other industrialized nations, including the United States.⁸

4. Fact: British authorities routinely underreport crime statistics.

Comparing statistics between different nations can be quite difficult since foreign officials frequently use different standards in compiling crime statistics.

* The British media has remained quite critical of authorities there for "fiddling" with crime data. Consider some of the headlines in their papers: "Crime figures a sham, say police,"⁹ "Police are accused of fiddling crime data,"¹⁰ and "Police figures under-record offences by 20 percent."¹¹

* British police have also criticized the system because of the "widespread manipulation" of crime data:

a. "Officers said that pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics."¹²

b. Sgt. Mike Bennett says officers have become increasingly frustrated with the practice of manipulating statistics. "The crime figures are meaningless," he said. "Police everywhere know exactly what is going on."¹³

c. According to The Electronic Telegraph, "Officers said the recorded level of crime bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed."¹⁴

* Underreporting crime data: "One former Scotland Yard officer told The Telegraph of a series of tricks that rendered crime figures 'a complete sham.' A classic example, he said, was where a series of homes in a block flats were burgled and were regularly recorded as one crime. Another involved pickpocketing, which was not recorded as a crime unless the victim had actually seen the item being stolen."¹⁵

* Underreporting murder data: British crime reporting tactics keep murder rates artificially low. "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. 'With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham,' [a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary] concludes."¹⁶

5. Fact: Many nations with stricter gun control laws have violence rates that are equal to, or greater than, that of the United States. Consider the following rates:

High Gun Ownership Countries					Low Gun Ownership Countries
Country	Suicide	Homicide	Total*	Country		Suicide	Homicide	Total*
Switzerland	21.4	2.7	24.1	Denmark		22.3	4.9	27.2
U.S.	11.6	7.4	19.0	France		20.8	1.1	21.9
Israel	6.5	1.4	7.9	Japan**		16.7	0.6	17.3

* The figures listed in the table are the rates per 100,000 people.
** Suicide figures for Japan also include many homicides.
Source for table: U.S. figures for 1996 are taken from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The rest of the table is taken from the UN 1996 Demographic Yearbook (1998), cited at http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html.

6. Fact: The United States has experienced far fewer TOTAL MURDERS than Europe does over the last 70 years.

In trying to claim that gun-free Europe is more peaceful than America, gun control advocates routinely ignore the overwhelming number of murders that have been committed in Europe.

* Over the last 70 years, Europe has averaged about 400,000 murders per year, when one includes the murders committed by governments against mostly unarmed people.¹⁷ That murder rate is about 16 times higher than the murder rate in the U.S.¹⁸

Recently articles have appeared where citizens in Right to Carry states have seen their names and addresses published in newspapers by gun control advocates.  The RTC partisans are always upset; the anti-gunners always gleeful and ready to publish the next states list.  Bring it on.

Holding a RTC license in Louisiana, I look forward, nay, I yearn for some flaccid Democrat or RINO reporter to publish my states RTC names and addresses.  Fair is fair.  The minute they publish their article, I publish mine.

'My name and address was published in the newspaper as having a Concealed Carry permit.  This is true.  I not only conceal carry on my person, but firearms are dispersed throughout my house.  From the list that was published, the reporter doesn't carry a concealed weapon and doesn't have a firearm in his home.  His name and address is....'

Quit whining and fight back.

Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research says it would be better not to have a CPAC than to have one that presents conservatism as a hostile, people-hating ideology.

The American Conservative Union, the primary host of the event, issued a statement in which ACU Chairman David Keene said, “Ann Coulter is known for comments that can be both provocative and outrageous. That was certainly the case in her 2007 CPAC appearance and previous ones as well." 

So let me get this straight.  Everyone knows Ann and her firebrand rhetoric, yet the ACU still featured her, Amy Ridenour is an unknown but can now claim her 15 minutes of fame, Michelle Malkin still might have taken her kids to hear Ann, and Cliff Kincaid would be in the Mens Room with a bookcover of Ann.

PenisEnvy.

The test, which will be given randomly to students at Pequannock Township High School, can detect whether alcohol was consumed up to 80 hours earlier. . . .

Pequannock Superintendent Larrie Reynolds said the policy approved last week should be a deterrent to students who feel peer pressure to drink.

Under the program, students who test positive will not be kicked off teams or barred from extracurricular activities, Reynolds said. Instead, they will receive counseling--and their parents will be notified.

This strikes us as overly intrusive, but we had to laugh at the quote from the ACLU's Deborah Jacobs: "Medical care and treatment are issues between parents and children."

Does that include contraception and abortion?

Like most liberals, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) Director of Communications Marjorie Signer Story can't bring herself to admit what they stand for.  She says that the Institute on Religion and Democracy distorts their mission.  The IRD isn't concerned with her "mission", only her support of abortion.  As with a politicians voting record, Ms Signer finds this exposure uncomfortable.

In Animal Farm, "Four legs good, two legs bad" became the tenet.  The RCRC has two of their own scrawled on their website.  "Pro-life, Pro-Family, Pro-choice" and "Religious Coalition supporters are pro-choice not in spite of our faith but because of it."  That last one is a bit qqueer.  They kill babies because of their faith.  Their 'faith' is more akin to the ancient Mayans than to Christianity.

Killing babies in the womb or 'partially birthed' became acceptable to some 'religious' denominations at about the same time parents and ministers began allowing young ladies to attend church in their tight Gap drawstring velveteen cargo pants topped with a plunging sleeveless empire waist T.  This was their enlightenment.  Here's a commandment that hasn't appeared on the RCRC website, yet.  "Me good, baby bad".