Doctors:
1. The number of doctors in Canada is 700,000
2. Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year are 120,000
3. Accidental deaths per physician is 17.14%
Statistics courtesy of the Canadian Dept of Health & Human Services
Guns:
1. The number of guns owned in Canada is 80,000,000 (yes that's 80 million)
2. The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500
3. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.001875%
Statistics courtesy of the RCMP
So statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. Remember, guns don't kill people, doctors do.
FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.
Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!
Out of concern for the public at large, I have withheld statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention. Then we would be in real trouble.
-Thanks to Subhuman
2) Hospital errors in our own country kill, in one year, more people than died in the entire Vietnam war (about 120,000 people). Serious drugs with serious side-effects do serious damage when administered incorrectly. What was the Hippocratic oath again. . ."First, do no harm . . .?"
The average lifespan of the American doctor is about 56, almost twenty years less then the average lifespan of the average citizen. Self-medication, stress, or an incorrect philosophy to health?
3) "The world is a dangerous place, not because of
those who do evil, but
because of those who look on and do nothing.
Albert Einstein
4) Welcome to the forum. Since I am a butterfly person, I also think about these laws, especially since butterfly's are even harder to deploy than switches or folders. I think that the laws were enacted when the police wanted additional tools to control youth gangs on the street. Many hoodlums preferred the cool switches and balis over folder while your average citizen did not. Since they were having trouble finding a reason to arrest these cornerstone troublemakers the knife law gave them added ammunition to target these hoodlums.
Decades later, the law doesn't make as much sense. Although regular citizens still tend to prefer folders over autos, todays' high-tech folders can be deployed as fast or just as fast, blurring the line between folders and autos. Autos are in such wide circulation now that the average citizen has easy access to them, even at the local hunting shop. The law was supposedly to control fast-opening knives, but I think it was really to target a particular group.
Even though the law is a bit oudated, try finding a politician that wants to make reversing it a cause. Politicians are in the business of getting re-elected, and reversing a switchblade law is dangerous territory. We have lots of stupid laws still on the books because lawmakers focus on issues that will make them look good, or issues that are more pressing.
It doesn't bother me that much. Just like drugs for some folks, part of the cache of an "underground" knife is that it is partly forbidden, or at least viewed with suspicion by the masses. I know that is part of the allure of the butterfly for me (or at least was when I was young). So our antecedents left us a legacy that we have to deal with. The knives they carried while hanging out on the street and sometimes causing trouble are seen as dangerous. But they also gave those knives (like the switchblade) a character and cache they wouldn't have had.
