"Doug Miller" wrote in message
et...
In article , "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


In Texas, as in most of the country, only 13% of burglaries are ever
solved
("cleared"). That gives you some pretty questionable stats, if you're
trying
to figure out how many burglars were involved.

From FBI stats of a couple of years ago, the number of burglaries cleared
in
Dallas is somewhere around 3,990. The number of burglary arrests is just
under 1,700. So looking at it the way you suggest, you get about 2.4
burglaries cleared per arrest made. Projecting to Dallas's total number of
burglaries (a little over 23,000), it would mean you have around 9,600
burglars.

The actual number of burglars, therefore, must fall somewhere between
1,700
and 9,600. Let's be generous and say that the 1,700 arrested committed all
of the burglaries (I guess that would also mean you have no more
burglaries,
'cause all the burglars have been arrested g). If that unlikely event
were
true, the two burglars killed represent 0.001 of the burglars in Dallas.
If
the 9,600 is closer to the actual number, they represent 0.0002 of the
burglars in Dallas. If you can notice *either* of those differences, you
have very good detectors indeed.

The moral of the story is, there's no way to wiggle out of the fact that
your two dead burglars aren't going to help your crime situation. While we
were talking 3 more probably took up burglary for a career.


Still two fewer than there would have been. That's a good thing in my
book.

So, it appears that killing criminals is what you consider "good," and the
original issue you were arguing -- the relative safety of that neighborhood,
compared to places that are a lot safer -- is not your real concern at all.

But that was the original argument, Doug. Perhaps the discussion has come
around to the thing you feel is really important.

Maybe you don't care -- you're in a safe place, so to hell with everyone
else,
eh?

I *do* care, and I don't care much if you kill bad guys or not. The issue,
and the whole argument, was about whether it's better to move your family to
a safe place or to stay in a dangerous one and shoot it out with the bad
guys. You and Randy have this theory that locked-and-loaded gun owners are
the source of all safety. Confronted with the facts to the contrary, you
keep reaching out for confounding speculations that support your position,
and then, when you see that there is no support for your position, you turn
the corner and start arguing something else. Like, for example, the thing
that's good in your book is killing a couple of criminals, no matter that
doing so hasn't improved the safety of Dallas by any measurable amount at
all.

All of which comes back to my original position. If you find yourself in a
dangerous position, the reasonable first thing to do is to defend yourself
and your family as best you can, and that may well include arming yourself.
But if I were in that position I'd know that I was just buying some time at
the very best, that I couldn't kill enough of them to make a damned bit of
difference, that the danger would remain the same as long as we were there,
and the only responsible thing to do, for my own sake and that of my family,
is to get out of there as fast as I could.

The fact is that Dallas has a serious social problem. You won't solve it by
trying to kill the criminals, and the evidence is that Dallas has a very
large number of well-equipped gun owners and has for a long time, but the
criminals keep coming. You keep doing the same thing and expecting a
different result, and we all know what that means, eh?

If you want to solve the problem, you can take a look at the things that
have really worked, like the way Rudy Giuliani made a radical improvement in
NYC's crime, and take some political action to make something like that
happen. But judge the real situation your family faces honestly before
subjecting them to your crusade. If it really is that dangerous, it isn't
responsible to keep them there.

--
Ed Huntress