No. If he was determined to kill them, he would try very hard to. Although given that he was old and had emphysema, I'd think his options were a bit limited.

All I'm saying is that, on the whole, it's a good thing if one has to go to extreme lengths to kill someone. Guns dramatically lower the threshold for lethality.

I'm certainly not calling for a ban on guns, and my point is not based on this one incident. It's simply asking a question: how many unjustified deaths do we deem acceptable in order to preserve easy access to handguns?

I'm willing to accept a reasonable number; stuff happens. But what is a reasonable number?

Okay, it's the Brady campaign, but here are the numbers:
http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/f...ets/?page=home

In 2002, 30,242 were shot to death.

Of that,

17,108 were suicides;
11,829 were homicides;
762 were accidents.

Okay, in a nation the size of ours, I consider 762 accidental deaths a reasonable number. But we should still do what we can to reduce that number, especially because it is the leading cause of death among 10-14 year olds.

The suicides are a tragedy, but if people want to off themselves, they will. I don't think preventing people from having guns is the way to fix that.

That leaves the homicides. The absolute number isn't all that bad, although it's probably high enough to put "shot to death" somewhere in the top 20 causes of death in this country.

More telling, however, is that 77 percent of homicides involve guns.
http://tinyurl.com/bkgd6

Cars, by the way, account for a whopping 0.2 percent of homicides.

So with guns implicated in most homicide deaths, it seems obvious that reasonable restrictions on handguns would drastically reduce the murder rate. Sure, some people would just turn to other methods. But the threshold for lethality would be raised.

So what restrictions would you support if we could reduce gun homicides to, say, 5,000 a year?

That's the sort of conversation I think we should be having.

__________________
Man up.