[at-l] Re: Safety

[texas12step@hotmail.com (Texas Twelve-Step)]

> Aside from self-defense training, the police officers also highly
> recommended a book, called "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker.  I've
> included a link to the site for your convenience.  The guest book on the
> site has some more favorable comments as well.
> 
> http://www.gdbinc.com/pubs.htm

Good idea, but the book has a fairly narrow context that potential
readers should keep in mind. Dig the following:

http://www.kuci.uci.edu/~dany/firearms/bookreva.html#gdb
http://www.kuci.uci.edu/~dany/firearms/gdb.html

You can also read an excerpt of the book at Amazon. From what I
gleaned there, it looks potentially very good, but stuff like this...

"...understand that in the last two years alone, more Americans
died from gunshot wounds than were killed during the entire
Vietnam War. By contrast, in all of Japan (with a population of
120 million people), the number of young men shot to death in a
year is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single
busy weekend. Our armed robbery rate is one hundred times higher
than Japan's. In part, that's because we are a nation with more
firearms than adults, a nation where 20,000 guns enter the stream
of commerce every day. No contemplation of your safety in America
can be sincere without taking a clear-eyed look down the barrel
of that statistic."

...is enough to make me wonder how much he really understands
violence vis-a-vis American culture, and for that matter, the
meaning of the statistics he cites. For example, that Vietnam
statistic includes accidents, suicides, and probably even 
justified shootings. Even at the height of the drug war, murder
by firearm didn't exceed 10,000 per annum.

Hopefully, it's just a political bias or sloppy introductory
rhetoric that doesn't negatively influence the rest of his work.
I note that his book *is* popular with the armed personal 
protection crowd. 

But this...

"We live in a country where one person with a gun and some
nerve can derail our democratic right to choose the leaders..."

...is just silly. Name a country, democratic or otherwise, where
this isn't the case?

-TXIIS