Guns used for lawful self-defense Pt. 5

[Seth]

Seth

First.
Burglars.
You do not need a gun to deal with burglars.

You don't get to tell anybody what they need to deal with burglars.

As I told you before, I have a burglar alarm in my house, and remotes that contain an alarm button. Press that and the house screams, and lights flash, and no one can stand being there without both hands pressed over their ears. No burglar would hang around, both because of the pain of the noise and because they would know that the noise would attract too much outside attention. I would also be calling 111, although I agree with you the burglars will be long gone by the time the cops arrive. But no guns will be fired, and no one hurt, which is more than you can say for your personal and insane approach.

See, there's this little problem, perhaps they aren't there just to burgle you.

You boast that you can draw a concealed hand gun in 0.75 seconds. I do not believe you.

Fine by me. Go read what Sun Tsu has to say about underestimating your enemy.

At least not under realistic field conditions, which are very different to setting yourself up carefully for a speed test.

Er, that's why I train under "realistic field conditions." At least as realistic as one can find at a gun range. The point, however, is to train, because if you don't you will stand there with a slack look on your face while the other guy shoots you. I'm gonna be that other guy if I possibly can.

Your video showed a guy, who is doubtless a champion at quick draw, and who is well prepared beforehand, with clothes loosened and gun ready, drawing in 1.5 seconds.

If you're not wearing your holster and gun and clothing as you normally do, you're not training properly, and he's nowhere near a champion quick-draw. Those guys, the ones with speed holsters and .45 Colt Peacemaker single-action pistols can draw and fire FROM A SIGNAL in 0.2 seconds or so, because they train all the time. Theirs is a specialized sport however and may or may not translate well into defensive shooting. Go do some Google research numbnuts. There's plenty of YouTube videos out there for you to look at.

If a person had a gun pointed at you and finger on the trigger, it would take a lot less than that time to move his finger 2 mm to send a bullet through your heart.

Well, you are correct that pulling the trigger takes no time at all, but that's not what counts in a gunfight. What counts is having a plan, training for that plan, and beating the other guy to the punch. There are hard facts of human physiology involved here that you can go and look up if you care to. Do you know why the police call for a "three second rule" (sometimes 2 seconds) between cars? For exactly the same reason I've cited: normal human perception and reaction time. Physiology dictates that the average person takes 0.75 seconds to perceive a threat, and another 0.75 seconds to decide what to do about it, which makes for an average human reaction time of 1.5 seconds. I've told you to test this yourself, but evidently you're too cowardly or too stupid to do so.

Anyway, the two components of importance here is the perceptual delay between one visible condition and another. In other words it takes the average person, even one who is pointing a gun at me, 0.75 seconds to perceive that I have moved my hand. Then there is the decision delay, which usually takes 0.75 seconds as well. This is the time the individual needs to analyze the threat and decide what to do. Training can cut this particular delay down significantly. When one trains to react automatically to the presentation of a handgun pointed at you the total time to first shot can be reduced quite a bit, but it still takes 0.75 seconds to perceive someone pulling a gun on you.

But the thing about a robbery is that if the guy has a gun pointed at you, he's been doing so for much longer than 0.75 seconds and even longer than 1.5 seconds because his intent is NOT to kill you, his intent is to use the gun as a threat to overcome resistance with fear. Therefore, he's always going to have 0.75 seconds of perceptual delay and a minimum of 0.75 seconds of decision time delay from the instant I start my draw until he can actually pull the trigger. Usually it's a lot longer than that because most thugs don't train nearly as hard as I do. As for me, supposing that he's pointed a gun at me for 5 seconds and is screaming "Give me your wallet or I'll bust a cap on your ass." again and again while gesturing with the pistol. I knew exactly what I was going to do 1.5 seconds after I first saw his gun, I'm going to kill him. There is no perceptual delay because I've already perceived the threat, and there is no decision delay because his natural process of trying to rob people rather than just murder them takes far longer than the 0.76 seconds it takes me to draw and fire AFTER I've perceived the threat, analyzed it, and decided what I'm going to do about it. At that point, the buzzer goes off WHEN I MOVE TO DRAW MY GUN...for the crook. For me there is no delay other than the physical time it takes me to draw and fire, which I've already told you I can do in 0.76 seconds per an electronic timer.

So, he's always going to be three-quarters of a second behind, and that's enough time to draw, fire and move out of his line of fire so that even if he does jerk the trigger he won't hit me because now he has to start all over again perceiving and deciding what to do to reacquire his target. In the meantime I'm putting two in his chest and one in his head.

You can believe it or not, I don't give a fuck, but the data is out there for anyone with enough wit to find. There's reams of it, and probably hundreds or thousands of videos of people doing the same thing. Cops write articles about it in gun magazines. I didn't make this up, it's been well known for a very long time, long before I even went to the police academy, which by the way is where I learned it.

Finally, on anecdotes.
Let me see if I can get through to you.
Quack doctors use anecdotes as 'evidence' even though their practices are total bullshit. Someone like a homeopath will have lots of anecdotes because outcomes are variable. So the homeopath will say " Mrs Jones had your condition, and I gave her snake oil remedy X, and she got better within 3 days." Anyone intelligent will know that a person who is probably already recovering from an illness getting better in 3 days is no miracle. But idiots believe the homeopathic (basically sugar pill) remedy had 'cured' her.

Red herring and strawman. Failed simile.

In exactly the same way, you can cherry pick examples of things that happen that fit your version, fantastical though it is, of reality. There are a little over 200 cases a year (according to the FBI) where a citizen shoots a felon dead. At the same time, there are over 4,000 cases where two people argue and one pulls out a hand gun and murders the other.

And there are nearly three million cases per year where the good guy shows, aims or fires his weapon without killing the perp that result in a crime not occurring or one being thwarted. You insist on mixing apples and oranges all the time because your numbers don't add up. That there are (arguendo) only 2OO cases per year of a crook being KILLED by a DGU is entirely beyond any relevance, it's just stupid train of logic you're stuck on. At the same time people are lawfully killing 200 criminals, there are millions of DGUs that are effective at preventing a criminal victimization that include a range of consequences, from no shots fired to serious injuries short of death. You cannot even attempt to compare 200 lawful killings to 4000 cases of arguments ending in death because they are incomparable and irrelevant.

If you pick anecdotes from the 200 per year, you will find enough anecdotes to fill this thread. And as a generalisation, it is bullshit. Weighed against the 4,000 deaths from hand guns from arguments, the 200 felon shootings become meaningless.

If actually shooting a felon dead were the metric, you might be right, but it's not, and you're wrong. The purpose of a DGU is to stop or prevent a crime from occurring by using a firearm in any of several effective modes to either dissuade the criminal from continuing the activity that prompted you to draw your gun or to physically prevent him from continuing that activity by discharging the gun, which may result in injury short of death or no injury at all, although I decry warning shots as a waste of time and ammunition...and rather dangerous these days as one lady found out when she fired a warning shot at her abusive ex-husband and ended up in jail for 20 years.

If you have legal authority to discharge your firearm, then by all means put the bullet where it needs to be...in the attacker.

The actual metric involved is how many people are NOT criminally victimized in ANY manner BECAUSE they possessed and made use of a gun to stop or prevent the crime from succeeding, and THAT, as the NRC says, happens at least as often as criminals use guns to victimize people and quite plausibly much more often.

Anecdotes are dishonest, misleading, and utter crap. They are not presented by honest debaters as 'evidence'. If you use them, you are as dishonest and filled with bullshit as the quacks who use exactly the same technique to promote their fraudulent 'remedies'.

Well, I'm not citing anecdotes you see, so your comment is a strawman fallacy. I'm publishing authoritative recitations of facts from police files that can be verified simply by inquiring of the custodian of the public records in the jurisdiction where the incident took place.

That makes them examples of DGUs which comprise data, each example being an individual data point in a data set. Not anecdotes.

Someday perhaps you'll be able to understand the difference, though I seriously doubt it.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Anecdote means story. The story can be true or false. Being true does not stop it being an anecdote. Just as a homeopath who quotes a person who took his bullshit remedy and got better in 2 days. If someone gives homeopathic bullshit remedies out every day, over time he is going to build up any number of examples where a person got better just afterwards. These are bullshit anecdotes, even though they are true, because they ignore all the occasions where the patient did not get better.

In the same way, your anecdotes are cherry picked bullshit, designed to mislead, because it fails to mention all the occasions in which a gun is used and the user winds up dead. Or someone else who is innocent ends up dead. Cherry picking anecdotes, even if they are true, is a totally dishonest way of debating.

Your views of DGU's are also bullshit. As I have pointed out many times, Lott's figure of 2.5 million has been discredited by many other researchers. Some of them have tried to reproduce the figure with their own surveys and failed. Face it, Seth, your hero Lott has feet of clay.

The FBI figure of 80,000 is much more realistic. But what they do not measure (because they cannot) is how many such occsions are gun usages that are not needed. Like your grandmother example, who used a toy guitar successfully. My personal estimate is that only 1% of those 80,000 DGU's represent a case where a gun was truly needed.

And the presence of those hand guns in US society lead to 8,000 hand gun murders each year. This cannot be justified.

[Seth]

Seth

Anecdote means story. The story can be true or false. Being true does not stop it being an anecdote.

Oh boy. Let's begin counting the logical fallacies in this post.

Let's examine your logic step by step:

P1= Anecdote is synonymous with story
P2= Stories can be true
P3= Stories can be false
C1= True stories are anecdotes
C2= False stories are anecdotes

So far it's a logical, but pointless construction. All you've shown is that anecdote is synonymous with story and that both anecdotes and stories may be either true or false. Granting that the two terms are synonymous, (they really aren't, which is why there are two different words available, each having a slightly different colloquial connotation) you have proven nothing of interest.

Definition of synonymous (adj)

Bing Dictionary
syn·on·y·mous
[ si nónnəməss ]

having same meaning: meaning the same, or almost the same, as another word in the same language, or being an alternative name for somebody or something having similar connotation: having an implication similar to the idea expressed by another word

Synonyms: identical, the same, one and the same, equal, tantamount

anecdote
  Use Anecdote in a sentence
an·ec·dote
[an-ik-doht] Show IPA
noun, plural an·ec·dotes or for 2, an·ec·do·ta [an-ik-doh-tuh] Show IPA .
1.
a short account of a particular incident or event, especially of an interesting or amusing nature.
2.
a short, obscure historical or biographical account.
Origin:
1670–80; < Neo-Latin anecdota or French anecdotes < Late Greek, Greek anékdota things unpublished (referring especially to Procopius' unpublished memoirs of Justinian and Theodora), neuter plural of anékdotos, equivalent to an- an-1 + ékdotos given out, verbal adjective of ekdidónai to give out, publish ( ek- ec- + didónai to give)

Can be confused: anecdote, antedate, antidote.

Synonyms
story, yarn, reminiscence.

Definition of story (n)

Bing Dictionary
sto·ry
[ stáwree ]

factual or fictional narrative: a factual or fictional account of an event or series of events
short fictional prose piece: a work of prose fiction that is shorter than a novel
plot of fiction or drama: the plot of a novel, play, motion picture, or other fictional narrative work

Synonyms: tale, narrative, account, yarn, legend, fairy tale, chronicle, anecdote

Here is where your logical reasoning begins to go awry:

Just as a homeopath who quotes a person who took his bullshit remedy and got better in 2 days. If someone gives homeopathic bullshit remedies out every day, over time he is going to build up any number of examples where a person got better just afterwards. These are bullshit anecdotes, even though they are true, because they ignore all the occasions where the patient did not get better.

P1= Homeopathy is bullshit
P2= Anecdotal claims of homeopathic healing may be incorrectly attributed to another non-homeopathic cause of healing.
C1= All anecdotes claiming homeopathy is successful are bullshit.

This is not a logical construct.

It's an example of the fallacy of Begging the Question.

Your first premise assumes a conclusion that has not been proven.
Your conclusion is simply a restatement of your first premise, which is circular logic.

It's also a completely failed analogy because anecdotes about homeopathic remedies being successful are not observed facts, they are specious assumptions founded on observer bias.

Reports of incidents in which a citizen used a handgun for self-defense are not all anecdotes or stories, many of them are recorded observations of things that actually occurred that are corroborated by the evidence. A report differs from an anecdote or story because it is not fictional, it is a recitation of events or observations. Using your dubious logic, the observations of falling objects are anecdotes that bear no relationship to demonstrating the existence of gravity. We know that's utterly fallacious.

Each DGU is an event, just like the emission of neutrons from a star. Many DGU events have been observed, just as the existence of neutrons has been observed. Some DGUs are positive, successful DGUs and others are negative, failed DGUs, just as some observations of subatomic particles reveals the existence of neutrons and some reveal the existence of electrons. We do not dispute whether DGUs, neutrons or electrons are physical facts of the universe do we?

Your only complaint seems to be you don't think it happens often enough to justify allowing people to own handguns. That's a value judgment (opinion) you're entitled to, but it's hardly a "fact."

In the same way, your anecdotes are cherry picked bullshit, designed to mislead, because it fails to mention all the occasions in which a gun is used and the user winds up dead. Or someone else who is innocent ends up dead. Cherry picking anecdotes, even if they are true, is a totally dishonest way of debating.

This is both a logical fallacy and a fallacious analogy. Based on your statement "even if they are true," I'm going to assume for the purposes of argument that we are now talking about true stories (anecdotes) that are better defined as reports.

P1= Reports of DGUs are misleading because they do not include reports of unsuccessful DGUs.
P2= It is dishonest to mislead in a debate.
C1= Reporting DGUs is a dishonest way of debating.

The flaw in this syllogism is very obvious. First, there is no logical reason why an individual report of a DGU should be accompanied by a companion report of a failed DGU. Second, even if there were a logical reason to do so, no evidence is presented quantifying successful versus unsuccessful DGUs upon which one can make the inference that reporting a DGU is a dishonest way of debating.

Your first premise is flawed for that reason. But the worst error is that there is no logical connection drawn between P1 and P2. Whether or not it is dishonest to mislead in a debate is not relevant to whether reporting positive DGUs and not negative DGUs constitutes misleading. You have not produced a logical or rational basis for the claim that reporting only one kind of DGU is misleading. You simply assume it as a part of the premise. This is the fallacy of Petitio Principii, or circular reasoning.

It may or may not be true that each positive DGU (meaning a successful one) is matched by a negative (or unsuccessful) DGU. But you have not proven or even attempted to prove this link, so it is just as possible that there are 10,000 positive DGUs for each negative DGU. We don't know, nor is it axiomatically relevant.

First of all, that is a logical failure:

P1= Successful DGUs are good
P2= Failed DGUS are bad
C1= There must be an equal number of successful and failed DGUs to make any individual DGU good.

This does not follow. The number of failed DGUs has nothing whatever to do with the value of each successful DGU.

You then produce an unsupported value statement based on your first premise that is elucidated in your conclusion. You have neither shown that presenting only one data point is misleading because it does not present another data point of the opposite polarity. That's not true. Data is data. Each data point stands on its own, perforce. If it were the case, as you wish, that there be zero negative DGUs this would still not impeach the value of each positive DGU, nor would it lead to a rational statistical conclusion that all DGUs are bad because some DGUs are bad.

My position requires me to produce data points consisting of verifiable reports of successful DGUs. My position does NOT include an obligation to present data points that do not support my argument. That's YOUR job. Feel free to post data points of unsuccessful DGUs in response to my data points of successful DGUs. But you can't just get away with making a bald assertion impeaching the value of positive DGU data by declaring that it's "dishonest" not to also present the other side.

Your views of DGU's are also bullshit. As I have pointed out many times, Lott's figure of 2.5 million has been discredited by many other researchers. Some of them have tried to reproduce the figure with their own surveys and failed. Face it, Seth, your hero Lott has feet of clay.

This is just a bald assertion. Even the NAS admits in the most recent and therefore most up to date review of the literature that the actual number of DGUs is unclear and that the numbers have been debated for a decade, but that DGUs occur "at least as often" as CGUs (criminal gun uses), as well as specifically referring to the "many other researchers" results as "inconclusive." You utterly ignore the NAS's conclusion because it runs counter to your claim. In this you are making a fallacious appeal to authority. "Kellerman says..." or "many other researchers say..." is an appeal to authority because the credibility and reliability of your cited authority has been challenged by other, more credible and dispassionate authority: To wit: The National Academies of Science, who clearly state that much more research needs to be done, but who also state categorically that DGUs occur "at least as often" as CDUs, according to "nearly all studies" of the issue. It seems that the NAS doesn't believe that Lott has "feet of clay" given the fact that they explicitly cite his work positively in association with the "nearly all studies" statement. They do NOT refer to Kellerman's work in the same way at all. In fact they dismiss this "early work" as "inconclusive."

The FBI figure of 80,000 is much more realistic.

And for that reason I'm willing to concede arguendo to using what you admit are the most reliable numbers.

But what they do not measure (because they cannot) is how many such occsions are gun usages that are not needed.

Like your grandmother example, who used a toy guitar successfully. My personal estimate is that only 1% of those 80,000 DGU's represent a case where a gun was truly needed.

Well, your personal "estimate" is more of an uneducated and entirely biased WAG that you make because it suits your bias. You have presented no data at all showing that any of the stipulated 80,000 DGUs were "not needed." You simply try to assume it as a given fact. It's not. Not in the least.

For one thing you are being logically inconsistent in conceding to the FBI number of 80,000, which implies that these carefully-documented events have been examined by relevant and competent authority and have been judged to be needed. The evidence supporting this conclusion is the purpose of the FBI study, which was specifically to document with reliable and verifiable evidence the estimated number of lawful, and therefore "needed" DGUs that occur in the US each year.

For another, your opinion on the matter of "need" is entirely irrelevant and specious because you are not an expert on the subject, so your claim is a fallacious appeal to authority.

And the presence of those hand guns in US society lead to 8,000 hand gun murders each year. This cannot be justified.

And here's another logical fallacy. It's an Appeal to the Consequences of a Belief.

So, what we actually have are a number of unsupported opinions from you:

Guns are bad.
It is dishonest to report only successful DGUs.
Each positive DGU must be reported alongside a negative DGU (evidently even if there are not enough of one or the other to make a matching pair ).
Only 1% of successful DGUs are "needed."
Eight thousand handgun murders each year fails to justify the non-criminal use of more than 20 million handguns, including a stipulated 80,000 successful DGUs that actually protected ten times the number of people killed with handguns.

This is not a scientific conclusion, it's an ideological and even religious belief which you're trying to pass off as the truth.

It ain't, Sparky.

[Blind groper]

To Seth, re anecdotes.
Your arguments remind me of a fish squirming on a hook, and unable to avoid the reality tha it has been hooked.
I have never denied that DGU's happen. That is how you get your anecdotes, after all. However, an anecdote does not prove a generalisation, any more than a story of getting better after a homeopathic remedy proves homeopathy is a valid method of treating the sick.
Anecdotes are an invalid debate method, and I will continue to point that out as long as you continue to use them as a dishonest attempt to mislead.

[Blind groper]

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... _id=343781
Further to the rebuttal of Seths mantra of "more guns, less crime" the above reference is a scholarly account of how more detailed statistical analysis shows the flaws in Lotts claims. This paper by Professors Ayres and Donoghue, from Yale and Stanford.
They show that having more concealed carry permits leads to more, not less, crime. While they are not prepared to be specific about why, they pointout the following.

1. When more civilians carry guns, so do more criminals. Not just that, but those criminals, expecting civilians to have guns, will be more ready and faster at drawing their own gun and shooting.
2. When more guns are around, minor disputes are more likely to escalate into illegal shootings.
3. Already there are over a million burglaries of firearms, putting guns into criminal hands, each year. More guns will increase this.
4. Puts an extra burdon on police who have to waste time checking on gun permits.
5. More guns means an increase in accidental shootings and fatal suicide attempts.

Conclusion
More guns =more crime, and especially, more shootings.

[Seth]

To Seth, re anecdotes.
Your arguments remind me of a fish squirming on a hook, and unable to avoid the reality tha it has been hooked.
I have never denied that DGU's happen. That is how you get your anecdotes, after all. However, an anecdote does not prove a generalisation, any more than a story of getting better after a homeopathic remedy proves homeopathy is a valid method of treating the sick.

Strawman fallacy. I've never claimed that a single report "proves" the generalization. I merely cite them as data points to rebut your claim that DGUs are exceedingly rare, something you said long ago but now appear to have abandoned because the facts are against you.

Peachy. I take it then that you stipulate to the FBI figure of about 80,000 valid DGUs per year, yes?

Anecdotes are an invalid debate method, and I will continue to point that out as long as you continue to use them as a dishonest attempt to mislead.

Again, for the zillionth time, what I cite are not anecdotes they are reports of factual occurrences no different from any scientific report of an observed phenomenon.

Why, pray tell, is the presenting of reports describing valid DGUs "invalid?" Just because you say so?

Sorry, that's not the way science work.

[Seth]

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... _id=343781
Further to the rebuttal of Seths mantra of "more guns, less crime" the above reference is a scholarly account of how more detailed statistical analysis shows the flaws in Lotts claims. This paper by Professors Ayres and Donoghue, from Yale and Stanford.
They show that having more concealed carry permits leads to more, not less, crime. While they are not prepared to be specific about why, they pointout the following.

1. When more civilians carry guns, so do more criminals. Not just that, but those criminals, expecting civilians to have guns, will be more ready and faster at drawing their own gun and shooting.
2. When more guns are around, minor disputes are more likely to escalate into illegal shootings.
3. Already there are over a million burglaries of firearms, putting guns into criminal hands, each year. More guns will increase this.
4. Puts an extra burdon on police who have to waste time checking on gun permits.
5. More guns means an increase in accidental shootings and fatal suicide attempts.

Conclusion
More guns =more crime, and especially, more shootings.

And yet, despite the veritable explosion in the number of guns in our society, none of your factoids are true.

1. You have zero critically robust evidence that more criminals carry guns merely because citizens do. Nor do you provide a scintilla of evidence that armed criminals are any more (or less) likely to shoot, nor that they are "faster" than citizens. It's a bald, unsupported opinion and nothing more.

2. You have exactly zero critically robust evidence that more guns means that "disputes" lead to more illegal shootings. The facts show exactly the opposite. They show a drop in violent crime, not an increase.

3. Where is your citation substantiating your claim of a million more gun thefts? Where is your evidence that all million of those allegedly-stolen guns end up in the hands of criminals who use them to commit crimes? And finally, how do you account for the fact that with tens of millions more guns entering our society crime, including gun crime continue to go down every year? That fact disproves your claim before it's even born.

4. Who cares? The police serve us, we do not serve their convenience and our rights are not to be infringed based upon police inconvenience.

5. As for accidental shootings, the answer is the same as it is in question 2; which is to say what you claim simply has not happened.

All five debunked, which means your recommendation is specious and, unnecessary and improperly infringes on a constitutional rights.

More guns, less crime. That's what the studies tell us.

Buh bye, I'd say better luck next time but that would just encourage you to make stupid claims again.

[Blind groper]

To Seth

The facts do not say more guns less crime. That is just a slogan or mantra, and comes from incompetent statistical methods used by Lott, as Profs Ayres and Donoghe showed.

On the fIve points in my previous post. As I made clear, they were points made by Ayres and Dohoghue, who are highly qualified researchers. Since they are points made as quotes from their work, I personally do not have to prove them. Nor do Ayres and Donoghe claim they have been proved. They were made as possible reasons why their finding of more guns = more crime might be true. 5 hypotheses.

However, even though these ideas, like most in the social sciences, have not been proven, they make good sense.

1. Criminals more likely to carry guns. Note that in my country, and in all 24 richest nations, except the USA, a criminal carrying a hand gun is a major rarity, in spite of the fact that you have pointed out many times, that if they want them, they will find a way to get them. In the USA, though, where hand guns in civilian possession is common, so is it common in criminal possession. If hand guns in civilian hands does not lead to hand guns in criminal hands, then why is this so common in the USA, but not in any of the other 23 nations?

2. Guns escalating disputes. There are over 4,000 hand gun murders in the USA each year that come from escalations in arguments, in which the shooter had a hand gun. It is reasonable to expect, since arguments and disputes are almost universal, that more hand guns will mean more such disputes will end in a shooting.

3. Burglaries putting guns in criminal hands. Your quibble here, Seth, comes from you not bothering to read my post. I did not say an increase of a million. I said there were, right now, over a million burglaries each year in which a firearm enters criminal hands.

4. The burden on police. Time is a resource police need to do their jobs. If their time is wasted chasing up gun permits, they cannot protect against crime. That hurts civilians.

5. More guns means more accidental shootings and suicides. We already know that more hand guns means more suicides. Not more suicide attempts, but more attempts that result in a death. The NEJM article I quoted showed an increase of 2 to 10 fold in successful suicides in homes where a hand gun is kept.

On DGU's
What is rare is a DGU where the gun was needed.
Events classified as DGU's include any time a person draws a gun in response to a threat. I am willing to accept the 80,000 figure for this.

However, in how many of tose 80,000 cases was the gun needed? Very few. My reason for saying that is to compare the situation in the USA with the situation in my country and in other wealthy nations,where people do not go round carrying hand guns, and DGU's are very, very rare. Yet, despite the fact that in those nations guns are not normally used to respond to threats, the level of victimisation is not terribly different to the level in the USA. This shows that guns were not needed to avoid a threat.

My guess is that, of that 80,000 DGU's, only 1% of the time were the guns really needed. That guess is based on the low level of victimisation in nations where there are close to zero hand guns in civilian possession.

[Seth]

To Seth
Here's some bum-custard I just squeezed out of my ass that I'm trying to pass off as rational discussion.

[Collector1337]

1. Criminals more likely to carry guns. Note that in my country, and in all 24 richest nations, except the USA, a criminal carrying a hand gun is a major rarity, in spite of the fact that you have pointed out many times, that if they want them, they will find a way to get them. In the USA, though, where hand guns in civilian possession is common, so is it common in criminal possession. If hand guns in civilian hands does not lead to hand guns in criminal hands, then why is this so common in the USA, but not in any of the other 23 nations?

So, I don't get to have guns. But, some criminals still do. And there will always be criminals no matter what, unarmed or not.

I'd MUCH rather be able to defend myself, instead of being at criminals' mercy, whether they are armed or not. Why the fuck would I want to live in some stupid society, where a gang of criminals can break into my house, where I have a wife and children to protect, and even if they are unarmed, I am completely at their mercy. Sure, maybe they just want to rob me, but what happens when want to rape my wife and daughters, and kill me or beat me within an inch of my life?

This is a fucking better option than me shooting this scum, or even just scaring them off?

Do you see how massively stupid your unarmed society is?

I absolutely refuse to be at the mercy of criminals and you can never make me, because I will always have guns, no matter what.

2. Guns escalating disputes. There are over 4,000 hand gun murders in the USA each year that come from escalations in arguments, in which the shooter had a hand gun. It is reasonable to expect, since arguments and disputes are almost universal, that more hand guns will mean more such disputes will end in a shooting.

I could give a shit about idiots who can't control themselves. I've never pulled a gun on anyone because I couldn't control my emotions. I won't have my life and ability to protect my family dictated to me by a bunch of unhinged, anger management cases.

Fucking idiotic reason #2 demolished.

3. Burglaries putting guns in criminal hands. Your quibble here, Seth, comes from you not bothering to read my post. I did not say an increase of a million. I said there were, right now, over a million burglaries each year in which a firearm enters criminal hands.

Criminals like to steal things? Really? Great work professor.

Other people's crime is no reason to deprive me of my liberty and my ability to protect my family.

4. The burden on police. Time is a resource police need to do their jobs. If their time is wasted chasing up gun permits, they cannot protect against crime. That hurts civilians.

I can agree with you on this one. You should not need a permit to buy or carry a gun. I should not need permission to protect my family. The police should be investigating crimes and catching the criminals who perpetrate them, not fucking bothering me, a law abiding citizen, with bullshit permits I shouldn't need anyway.

5. More guns means more accidental shootings and suicides. We already know that more hand guns means more suicides. Not more suicide attempts, but more attempts that result in a death. The NEJM article I quoted showed an increase of 2 to 10 fold in successful suicides in homes where a hand gun is kept.

Again, accidental shootings and suicides are not my concern. Humans are just like any other animal. Nature will weed out the stupid ones. I am 100% in favor of this. This is a good thing which benefits all humans so that the smart survive. I am against overpopulating the Earth with a bunch of idiots.

Could you tell me why you are in favor of overpopulating the Earth with morons who will do nothing but burden the rest of us and put strain on our limited, finite resources?

On DGU's

Are you ever going to admit that there are lots of defensive uses of hand guns, but we just don't know about them because they are not documented because the police never need to be called?

If some thugs try to rob or rape me, but I completely foil their plan by pulling a gun on them and they run away, there's not much point in calling the cops. The crooks are long gone. Calling the cops is just going to be a waste of my time. Can't you admit that there are lots of hand guns used in defense, and they're just never reported?

[Blind groper]

To Collector

Rebutting your points.

1. You seem to think self defense is impossible without a gun. That is a fallacy. If the nation, like mine, bans hand guns, then very, very few criminals will have them, and you having a hand gun wil also be unnecessary for self defense. As I pointed out earlier, my house has a burglar alarm, and I have remotes with alarm buttons. Press one and the house screams, and any burglar or home invader will run away. That is effective self defense without a gun.

You think guns pulled in disputes do not affect you. What if the dispute involved you or a member of your family? Death close to you would change your views really, really quickly.

You suggest people should be allowed to have guns concealed with no permit, and that would save the police time? Actually the reverse would prevail, since the police would be chasing around after every citizen complaint they saw a suspicious character with a gun. Not only that, but it would permit all those criminals and nut cases who currently are not permitted guns, to carry one. The murder rate would shoot up enormously.

You suggest that stopping suicides leads to overpopulating the Earth with morons. Hardly. There are 12,000 suicide deaths each year in the USA out of over 300 million. This is not enough to affect evolution. Yet each one of those 12,000 deaths is a human being who is tragically killed, who might otherwise have a full and productive life.

You suggest that the total number of DGU's will be greater than the 80,000 the FBI estimate. Perhaps. I cannot know that and you cannot. It may be that the 80,000 estimate takes that into account.

Far more important, is the simple fact that the vast bulk of those DGU's are not needed. People in other nations get along without guns, and their rates of violent victimisation are no higher than the USA, showing that in the majority of cases, those guns are not needed.

[Seth]

To Collector

Rebutting your points.

1. You seem to think self defense is impossible without a gun.

There's your problem Sparky, you are incapable of paying attention. I don't think self-defense is impossible without a gun at all. I think any weapon or technique or tactic that leaves you alive and (hopefully) your attacker dead is an excellent thing. It's just that the handgun is the single most effective, efficacious, well-designed, easy to use, reliable and best self-defense weapon ever invented, and when it comes to self-defense the whole point is to have at your fingertips and instant disposal any and all weapons which would be most effective in rendering the attacker incapable of continuing the conduct that justifies the use of self-defense.

And until they invent the Phaser, with an infallible "stun" setting, the handgun is the very best tool for the job, bar none. It is the right of a victim to have superiority of firepower and defensive armament because it is his RIGHT to survive the attack, regardless of what it costs his attacker, who has NO right to attack, or survive that attack.

That is a fallacy. If the nation, like mine, bans hand guns, then very, very few criminals will have them, and you having a hand gun wil also be unnecessary for self defense. As I pointed out earlier, my house has a burglar alarm, and I have remotes with alarm buttons. Press one and the house screams, and any burglar or home invader will run away. That is effective self defense without a gun.

Unless it isn't. Then you're dead. I'll continue to maximize my chances of survival by carrying the best, most effective tool for self-defense ever invented thanks.

You think guns pulled in disputes do not affect you. What if the dispute involved you or a member of your family? Death close to you would change your views really, really quickly.

That's bad tactics, not a reason to deny a victim the most effective means of self-defense on earth. The threat to my family is precisely WHY I carry a gun, so that I have at least arms parity with a potential attacker.

You suggest people should be allowed to have guns concealed with no permit, and that would save the police time? Actually the reverse would prevail, since the police would be chasing around after every citizen complaint they saw a suspicious character with a gun.

Er, the point of carrying a concealed weapon is that it's concealed. I've been carrying for 30 years or so and have never once been stopped or approached by the police to check out my permit. In fact the only time it's ever come out of my wallet is when *I* produce it and give it to the officer in order to reassure him that I'm one of the good guys when I have some official voluntary contact...like reporting my insane ex. That's just a precaution to prevent misunderstandings should I inadvertently "print through" or "flash" my gun. And I've been thanked by every cop I've afforded that courtesy...which Colorado law does not require. Some states say that if you are contacted by the police and you have a permit you are REQUIRED to produce it and tell them you are armed. That just leads to potential bad things, and has more than once, when you run into some paranoid pussy of a cop who fails to understand his authority or his rights and flies off the handle when he finds out that he failed to do a proper pat-down during a contact and suddenly he finds a gun he wasn't expecting.

Happened to a fellow a year or so ago who was stopped for a traffic offense. He did everything he was told, producing driver's license and all that, just as he was ordered to do, but he didn't mention his pistol or permit. The law did not require him to do so. When the cops took him out of the car to search it (without PC or permission, as cops often do...illegally) the cop found the gun in the holster and went ballistic and beat the shit out of the guy and arrested him despite the fact that the guy had been calmly repeating "I'm wearing a sidearm and I have a permit" for about three minutes prior to that. The cop was caught on his own dashcam abusing this citizen, who did everything the law required of him and more. Evidently the cop was frightened and embarrassed that he hadn't conducted a proper traffic stop and vehicle search (which he didn't have authority to perform in the first place) and he missed a gun that, under other circumstances could have gotten him killed, so he panicked and tried to take it out on the driver.

The key to carrying a concealed weapon is to keep it concealed. And not to do things that make the police interested in what you are doing. I've been doing just that for more than a quarter-century and have NEVER had a cop "chase me around" thinking I'm a "suspicious character."

Moreover, cops in "shall issue" states know what the law is and they accept the fact that a law-abiding citizen may be carrying a concealed handgun as a requirement of being employed as a police officer. If they think this produces too much risk for them to be comfortable with, they are free to not be cops.

Most importantly, even cops understand that the vast, vast majority of handguns in this country are never, ever used to commit a crime, and they respect the rights of citizens to arm themselves for self defense, and they know that for the most part if you look like a scumbag and act like a scumbag, it's prudent to pat you down, which is explicitly permitted by the law. On the other hand, if you don't look or act like a scumbag, the cops have no need or cause to be looking for legal weapons, so they don't. I don't look like a scumbag and I'm always respectful and polite to cops, even when they are being assholes, and I've never had a cop even know I was packing unless I told him.

In other words, once again you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Not only that, but it would permit all those criminals and nut cases who currently are not permitted guns, to carry one. The murder rate would shoot up enormously.

Utter horseshit. It's illegal for a criminal to carry a handgun. It's illegal for a previous offender to carry a handgun. It's illegal for a person with no criminal history to carry or so much as lay a finger on a firearm or ammunition of any kind with the intent to use that weapon to commit a crime. And it's illegal to use a firearm in the commission of a crime. It's also illegal to possess a firearm if you are mentally incapacitated, drunk, insane, or have malicious intent. Always has been. Always will be. Therefore, universal CCW, or "Vermont style" (no permit needed) will not, as you suggest without foundation and against all evidence to the contrary, cause the murder rate to "shoot up enormously."

You really are mentally deficient aren't you? Criminals carry guns illegally because they can, in spite of the host of laws making it illegal for them to do so. But that has nothing whatever to do with law-abiding citizens lawfully carrying guns.

You suggest that stopping suicides leads to overpopulating the Earth with morons. Hardly. There are 12,000 suicide deaths each year in the USA out of over 300 million. This is not enough to affect evolution. Yet each one of those 12,000 deaths is a human being who is tragically killed, who might otherwise have a full and productive life.

So what? It's THEIR LIFE to dispose of as they please, for better or worse. You are not allowed to negatively impact MY chances of living a full and productive life by taking away my firearms in order to try and prevent someone who doesn't value THEIR life from killing themselves. Besides being useless, since a person intent on suicide can find many other ways to kill themselves without a handgun...which leads us to Japan and it's suicide rate...it simply ignores the rights of everyone else to legitimate armed self-defense which even you admit happens at least 80,000 times a year.

You suggest that the total number of DGU's will be greater than the 80,000 the FBI estimate. Perhaps. I cannot know that and you cannot. It may be that the 80,000 estimate takes that into account.

Go read the report you dunce. Better yet, read the NRC report where it says that handguns are used "at least as often" for self defense as they are for committing crimes.

Far more important, is the simple fact that the vast bulk of those DGU's are not needed.

That's not a "fact" that's your opinion, and like assholes, everybody's got one and often times the opinion and what comes out of the asshole are identical.

You cannot predict exactly when or where a legitimate DGU WILL occur, or will NEED to occur in order to save someone's life. You know you can't because each crime is individual and different. Even if you could scientifically prove that X percent of people will be victimized by criminals in ways that would require the use of a handgun for lethal self defense, you cannot predict precisely WHO will legitimately need to do so, WHEN they will need to do so, or WHERE they will be when that is forced upon them.

That being the case, it's prudent for every law abiding person to carry a handgun against the possibility, no matter how remote you might think it is, that they will need it to save their lives. The choice is left up to the individual and he gets to analyze the risk/benefit factors and decide for himself. What's really interesting about our law is that while Congress (and every other government agent) is prohibited from INFRINGING on the RKBA, Congress actually has full and unfettered authority to REQUIRE people to keep and bear arms. That authority is granted under the Congress' power to raise and equip armies and to regulate the militia. This concept of obligatory firearms ownership is older than the US itself. For example the ordinances of Jamestown required each male settler to keep and bear a rifle along with a specified amount of powder, balls and certain survival gear, like a blanket. They were required to produce these rifles and equipment EVERY WEEK after church for inspection and drill.

That this power lies with Congress demonstrates the value that our nation puts on an armed citizenry, and that's a very high value indeed.

God, wouldn't I like to see Congress mandate that every non-criminal adult be required to own an AR-15, a handgun, and a specified amount of ammunition and supplies, similar to what Switzerland requires of it's "unorganized Militia" personnel, who are required to keep a fully-automatic battle rifle and ammunition in their homes.

And better yet, Congress, under its authority, could mandate that firearms training be taught in the schools to every student, and could require demonstrated proficiency with those arms and proficiency in small-unit military tactics as a condition of getting a high-school diploma.

All this Congress CAN do lawfully.

The one thing it CANNOT do lawfully is infringe on the right to keep and bear arms that each individual citizen of this nation enjoys.

People in other nations get along without guns, and their rates of violent victimisation are no higher than the USA, showing that in the majority of cases, those guns are not needed.

Until they are, some 80,000 to nearly 3 million times per year. Oh, and yes the rate of violent victimization in other countries, including specifically the UK, is higher than it is in the US.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Please read my posts carefully, and when I am replying to someone else, please read what they said also, so you know what I am replying to.

Your last post was a series of straw men. Utter garbage.

[Seth]

Seth

Please read my posts carefully, and when I am replying to someone else, please read what they said also, so you know what I am replying to.

Your last post was a series of straw men. Utter garbage.

Go fuck yourself, I'll do as I please and my rebuttal was exact and precise, and correct.

[Blind groper]

I think I might take Daedalus' advice, which was very good. It is pointless arguing against religious fanatics. Fundamentalist members of the Church of the Gun will never respond to reason.