According to this... http://www.indianaeconomicdigest.net/main.asp?SectionID=31&SubSectionID=135&ArticleID=55793

There are roughly 1600 police & civilian employees in the Louisville PD (2010).  Assumming all were cops, that would make a ratio of about 398 people per officer in Louisville, Kentucky. (higher if I use Wikipedia's population numbers instead of the data provided by yourself)  Big difference in just the public salaries for NYC to maintain those kind of numbers.  You may think that it is worth it, but I don't.

Duh, sorry.  I looked at those numbers wrong.  15% then?

I was going off that other chart, which explicitly notes that NJ & PA are included in the NYC stats.  That said, let's take a good look at the link data above...

Kentucky Louisville Metro Population 637,428     Aggragate violent crime rate 585.8 Per 100K population
New York New York         Population 8,336,002  Aggragate violent crime rate 581.7 Per 100K population

Based upon that number alone, your odds of becoming any kind of violent crime victim in Louisville are slightly higher than NYC but roughly 13 times as many such crimes are committed in NYC than Louisville.  The number of licensed handgun owners in NYC (excluding current & former cops) is less than 1%, while more than 10% of the adult population in Louisville has a license just to carry concealed because open carry doesn't require a license.  So what does it take to get such comparable numbers?  NYC has 36K uniformed police officers, or rougly one cop per 232 people. (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department)  Meanwhile, Louisville has no numbers that I can find published, but there is this...http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/09/safest-us-cities-may-suprise-you/1

Also, your reference data notes that aggravated assualt is more than 50% more likely in NYC than Louisville Ky (327.6 per 100K in NYC versus 290.2 per 100K in Louisville) and this obviously only includes reported crimes, hard to say how many such crimes occur and go unreported (or improperly recorded) in either locale.
 

While that is impressive, it's distorted in the same way that Cincinnati's stats are distorted.  No rational person considers the surrounding suburbs and exurbs to be "the city".  Remove NJ & PA stats from the mix and where does NYC actually fall?  Probably not bad, in any case; a police state does have it's pratical effects, but I still wouldn't want to live there.  And like I said, I've known people that were born there, and I've known people that moved there; and none that I've known have recommended living there.

EDIT: As an example, I've lived in the city most of my life (and yes, Louisville is a real city, about the same size in both population and land area as Washington, DC.) and I was 32 before I had even met anyone that had been mugged in Louisville, and he was a mildly retarded and occasionally homeless man that was targeted while sleeping in a public park.  I've yet to meet anyone else that has ever been mugged here.  On the other side, I lived in Cincinnati for 12 years, and had my car broken into three times.  (I've never been robbed or vandalized living in Louisville)  While I was never mugged in Cincinnati myself, I've known half a dozen personally who where mugged, two in the parking lot of my apprenticeship school parking lot after class.

I can't find NYC, where is it's ranking?  I did find my city at 153, putting it higher than Cincinnati, Ohio.  I've lived there too, and I've got to call BS on that as well.  They must be using some kind of adjustment for urban size or population density, because there has never been a day that Louisville was more dangerous than Cincinnati.

EDIT:  Ah, I see.  They are including Middletown, Ohio and the 5 counties in Northern Kentucky that are generally regarded as the "greater metro area" of Cincinnati in those stats.  Middletown is fairly safe, but those five northern Kentucky counties are incrediblely safe, completely throwing off those averages.  So safe, in fact, that the Cincinnati International Airport was deliberately built in Kentucky; which often confuses travelers.

So that's a yes?

You've only been registered on this forum for two days.  Did you register just to troll?

And even that is far from certain.  Everything in life involves risk, and a statute cannot take that risk away no matter how much some people wish it weren't so.  A concealed carry license holder slightly reduces the risk of violent crime for the society in which he lives, because sane criminals respond to the increases in encountering an armed victim for what it is, and increase in the risks involved in their chosen occupation.  But the CC license holder does this also at the increased risk of accidental harm done to himself or to family members from the simple presence of a loaded (and not locked up) firearm.  It's somewhat like giving your little kid a Rubella vaccine; for Rubella isn't a significant risk to a healthy child, but a child infected with Rubella is a huge miscarriage risk for any expectant mothers that might come into contact with said child.  In other words, we don't give little kids the MMR vaccine because there is a great risk of harm to that particular child; we do it to protect other children.  In reality, the risk of harm is greater from complications of the MMR vaccine itself than from a natural infection of any of these childhood illnesses.

Well, at least we can agree on that.

How would they 'divest' without taking a huge tax penalty?  Either way, govco wins.

I think that you are missing the point.  Even those who wrote that law can't define an assault rifle.  That's because there is no way to define one that isn't also a hunting weapon.  Fully automatic weapons, such as are used in the military, are not (by law) assault weapons.  While that document was actually a law, I could get a selective fire AR-15 with little trouble and some more money, perfectly legally, as a Class III weapon; but I couldn't buy a semi-automatic AR-15 without mortgaging my house.  Furthermore, that document actually never banned even the 'assault weapons' that it defines, it only banned their manufacture & import.  It didn't stop private sales of existing weapons stock, nor even the sale of decommissioned semi-auto military firearms such as M-14's.  In effect, all this document did while law was make several firearms collectors I knew suddenly wealthy, as they could sell their stock on the open market for four times what they paid for them.  In the end, that document would have done nothing at all to prevent this nutjob, or any other, from buying an AR-15 (probably legally) from another private owner so long as he was willing to spend money that it took, which apparently he was.

In short, statutes passed by Congress cannot actually change reality.  Nutjobs can get guns in America and they can get guns in Russia, Canada, Australia and Britain.  

Wel thank God he was inexperienced with his equipment.  If he had been carrying mil-spec magazines things might have been even worse.

I disagree on that point.  NYC is a police state, the cops can stop and frisk anyone on the street that they like.  That's not my America.  That wouldn't fly where I live, and I know a guy who was born and raised in NYC who moved to my home city, and would never go back.  I was bike/bussing for my commute, and was talking to this transplant (from the Bronx, IIRC, but didn't sound anything like those tv actors, I've never been anywhere near NY myself) and he was talking about going downtown and seeing a Tea Party rally, and being surprised about how many rednecks with rifles he could see in plain view and the police weren't doing anything.  I responded with a "have you met an unarmed white man since you moved here?" (he is black, and I'm white)  When he loked at me sideways I said "I bet you haven't.  You live in one one of the most heavily armed urban populations in America, and our violent crime rates are way under NYC's".  I said it plainly and loud enough that most everyone on the bus at the time (about 12 people) could hear me.  Other than myself, only the bus driver was white, and not a soul tried to contradict me or reacted at all.  Also, there is a plain as day "no weapons" sign at the front of the bus.  My buddy just looked at me, looked at the bus driver (who was only about 6 feet away) and started to laugh.  When he started to open his mouth with that look in his eyes, I cut him off and said, "Do not ask the obvious question.  I'm legally prohibited from answering it at this time."  And then the bus driver just laughed.

In my state, home invasions are rare, but often deadly.  Sometimes for the victim, sometimes for the attacker.  The same is true in 'no knock' police raids, because if a cop dies and it can be proven that 1) the cops didn't announce and 2) they made a mistake and ended up at the wrong house (this does happen, cops aren't very careful about such things) then the homeowner not only gets off for self-defense, but the department ends up buying them a new house over the damage done.  If the homeowner dies defending himself, there is a good chance a cop goes to jail for manslaughter.  So 'no knock' raids don't happen and regular raids are few and far between.  They are more careful here, too.

BTW, I live 15 miles from here...

http://www.knobcreekrange.com/events/featured-events/machine-gun-shoot

I'm surprised it didn't jam.  Those things suck.  There is a reason that a US soldier will carry six loaded magazines of 30 rounds each, but are not even permitted to use a drum magazine of any size.

Under the right conditions, almost certainly.  401k's too.

I asked for a definition, not an example.  What about an AR-15 makes it into an assult weapon?  What about an assault weapon makes it a different kind of weapon than, for example, a hunting rifle?

The key point here is that he didn't.  We can muse all day about what an armed citizen or two in that theater would have changed the outcomes, but the truth is that it would depend upon the citizens.  The vast majority of concealed carry licencees wouldn't have been able to stop this rampage early because it was so quick and the odds of the licencees being able to properly identify the orginally shooter from another CC, and without getting shot himself, are long.  But that's not the point.  Rampaging lone nutjobs are hard to prevent in any case, and guns are old tech, easily reproduced by one machinist.  Making them illegal is not going to prevent people who are motivated to possess them from aquiring them.  After all, most guns are illegal in Mexico & Britain, and in both cases the culture has changed enough that wise police keep firearms nearby, if only in their squad car.  The greatest factor in the use of firearms in violent crimes is not the legality of the firearms, but the culture in question.   Gun violence is very rare in Canada, but that still isn't an argument in faovr of doing the same in the United States.  Canada is a relatively uniform culture, while the US is a mix of amny cultures of varying degrees of conflict.  Feel free to do whatever you think that you can to change that culture, but if your plan involves using the force of government to restrict my ability to defend my own family from harm, by restricting my access to the best tools for the job or by any other method, you are already wrong.

Please define "assault weapon" for this conversation, because I'd wager that you don't really know what that means.