Connecticut (et al)

[laklak]

As far as I'm concerned the suicide statistics are absolutely meaningless in this discussion. I fully support any person's right to end their own life, at any point in time they choose. My Dad did it with a handgun, it was quick and effective. Though I miss him terribly it was his absolute right to step off this merry-go-round on his own terms and in his own time.

People kill themselves every day, some do it with a handgun or hanging or poison, some take a LOT more time and do it with booze or Big Macs or cigarettes. I'll certainly do it under certain circumstances, it ain't nobody's business but my own. Whether 10,000 or 50,000 people off themselves every year has nothing to do with my owning guns.

[Blind groper]

To FBM

That is not what I am saying.
What I am saying is that the USA has a major problem with guns and gun murders. Mozg was trying to deny the problem.
A bit like a global warming denier trying to say global warming is not happening, or a religious fundamentalist denying evolution.
I am not happy seeing members of this estimable forum becoming irrational deniers.

[Seth]

To Seth

You are misusing statistical claims.

No, you are.

I am not sure if this is because you do not understand statistics, or if it is because you are deliberately trying to mislead us.

I'm quite sure that your misuse of statistics and bogus arguments is deliberately intended to mislead.

On at least one previous occasion you told a deliberate lie.

So have you. By the way, where, exactly did I tell a "deliberate lie?" I'd like to see the context and the statement you claim is a lie.

You said that gun laws were adequate and anyone wanting to buy a gun had to have a background check.

I seriously doubt I said that, so you'll have to cite the passage in context.

I have since demonstrated that this does not apply to gun shows, which are a major source of firearms to criminals.

A criminal can serve his time, leave prison, and go straight to a gun show and buy a weapon designed to be devastating as a people killer.

Not very often. Here's some actual research done by actual professionals at the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2001:

Inmates serving time in state prisons during 1997 said they obtained their guns from the following sources in percentages:
Purchased from a retail store 8.3 percent
Purchased at a pawn shop 3.8
Purchased at a flea market 1.0
Purchased in a gun show 0.7
Obtained from friends or family 39.6
Got on the street/illegal source 39.2

Source

Are you deliberately lying again, Seth, in your misuse of statistics?

No, you are.

You implied that a statistical claim was also a personal claim on an individual. I have never made such a claim. I said that having a gun in the home increased the risk of a family member being shot, which is statistically true. I did not say that datum applied to individuals.

Except it's not "statistically true." The "research" which you use to support this claim has been long ago debunked by experts as at best bad science and at worst deliberate lies and propaganda.

But individual matters are not what is taken into account in determining policy - in this case gun laws - and the statistical truths - that which affects the most people - are what is important.

Well, I'm sure to a Marxist like you, that's true. However, for Americans, individual rights are equally important and in some cases, as in the case of the right to keep and bear arms, are MORE important than bullshit statistical arguments.

My life is not a statistic, and my right to keep and bear arms to defend my life is not subject to tyranny of the majority popularity votes by anyone. That's why the ban on government infringement on that right was placed in the Constitution in the first place.

In this case, the fact that having a gun in the home increases the risk of being shot means that the self defense argument for having a gun, and especially a hand gun, in the home, is just so much bulldust.

To you it is, but then you'll believe anything that supports your hoplophobe agenda, true or untrue. To Americans, however, it's an individual, unalienable, fundamental, natural right to have a gun in the home (as the SCOTUS has recently ruled) and the risks are far outweighed by the rewards, as evidenced by the soaring gun-ownership rate and the declining crime rate.

It must be SO inconvenient for your biased and fallacious arguments that more guns in the US actually does correlate to less crime, which blows your asinine argument that more guns in society will inevitably result in more gun crimes completely out of the water and into orbit.

Sucks to be you, doesn't it?

[Seth]

On Seth's statement that gun ownership has increased.

That may well be total crap. Not an unusual thing with claims made by Seth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ip-us-data

According to two sets of surveys, there is no significant change in percentage of households with guns over the past 15 years.

There is a small increase in number of background checks into would-be gun owners, but that may or may not translate into increased gun ownership. The problem is that things are so disorganised and chaotic with the very loose gun laws in the USA that no one really knows how many guns are out there.

That "disorganization and chaos" is not a flaw, it's a deliberately designed feature of the system intended to frustrate as much as possible the government's desire to register all firearms for eventual confiscation.

[Seth]

Another claim made by Seth is that concealed carry reduces crime. This is a claim made by Dr. John Lott, who is a gun advocate who has written two books on the subject, and seems to be making $$$ from book sales and media appearances. In fact, Dr. Lott is now a thoroughly discredited researcher, who has made numerous documented mistakes, and is even considered (possibly) to falsify his data.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/1 ... ott/191885

Anyway, I try to quote reputable references. This time it is a report from Yale University. This report shows that concealed carry does not reduce crime, and probably increases crime. The researchers even suggested the increase in crime by concealed carry means roughly an increased cost to the USA of a billion dollars per year, though this figure had a high margin of error.
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/Ayre ... omment.pdf

So concealed carry does not reduce crime. It probably does the opposite.

Add to that, the other inaccuracies in Seth's statements. There is no credible evidence of an increase in number of people owning guns over the past ten years. There is no credible evidence that there have been 2 million per year cases of successful self defense with guns.

Kinda makes Seth's arguments look pretty sick!

You're a liar, on all counts.

[Seth]

As has been pointed out to you numerous times before, that study failed to take into account whether the firearms were legally possessed in the first place, and so is utterly useless when it comes to making any kind of assertions about lawful firearm owners.

The biggest cause of death by a hand gun in the home is suicide. 87% of all deaths with a gun in the home are suicide. Are you really trying to tell me that all those suicides only happened where the gun was illegal?

Go one, pull my other leg. It plays Yankee Doodle!

Evasive pettifoggery. We're discussing gun crime and criminals and you consistently inject this bullshit strawman into the argument as if it actually means something. It doesn't.

[Blind groper]

Seth

I have been posting evidence. Reports from reputable universities. And all you can do is accuse me of being a liar?

Do you not realise how weak that is?

Like when you told the whole forum that the wild west had more guns than today and less crime. You were half right. They certainly had more guns. They also had a massively greater rate of murder.

It is easy to argue with you, Seth. All I have to do is investigate your claims and show that they are all garbage. I am developing a Seth hypothesis. Like that everything Seth believes is taken holus bolus from NRA web sites, or web sites from allies of the NRA, who do not care about the fact that everything they say is bullshit.

Did you buy John Lott's books, Seth? It must have been a disappointment to you when I showed that he has been discredited as a researcher, and that a big part of what he says appears to have been made up.

[orpheus]

worth listening to:

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/20/167694808 ... ian-market

transcript here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =167694808

[FBM]

To FBM

That is not what I am saying.
...

Yeah, I know, but I'm saying that it's implied. Why not include people in "under-developed" countries in the stats? The "comparing apples and oranges" argument is just another way to say that "those people are so different from us that they don't count." It's remnants of classical idealism, which was used to justify colonial exploitation in Africa, the Americas, Asia, etc. They're poor, often dark-skinned, speak different languages, don't have the same kind of educational, governmental, etc, systems we have, etc, therefore they don't count. It's arbitrary and culturally/racially arrogant. Not directing that at you, mind you, just at the idea.

[Seth]

worth listening to:

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/20/167694808 ... ian-market

transcript here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =167694808

The most salient part of this exchange is this:

Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, which is well known for it's intractable hostility to the private ownership of firearms and seeks to ban all of them said, "Now the technology of it is that because of advances in metallurgy and plastics technology it is now possible to make very small handguns that are capable of holding many more rounds of ammunition than say 20 or 30 years ago and are easily concealed on the person. So that means that people are walking around with great lethality in their pockets.

The NRA's point of view is that it's kind of a, well, people who use these guns in a bad way are bad people. Our point of view is no, these guns are available to people. People have moods, they have various emotional needs, they have moments of anger, they have moments of depression. So by putting these guns out in the population, it's not that good people are not going to use them in bad ways, it's that potentially, anybody can end up using them in a bad way. That's why we, in a more rational society, restrict access to lethal weapons."

Not once in the entire interview was the 2nd Amendment, it's meaning or purpose discussed, and not once was it acknowledged that the RKBA has been ruled by the Supreme Court to be an individual right with several purposes, one of which is self defense, and another of which is defense against tyranny.

What we see from Diaz is simply a repetition of the leftist gun-banner mentality of "I don't trust anyone else in society to handle a gun safely and I'm afraid that gun owners will become spontaneously insane merely through the possession of a gun, so we have to ban "lethal weapons" because somebody somewhere might sometime misuse them."

It's pure opinionated idiocy, and has nothing do with facts.

More importantly it's a compositional fallacy and therefore entirely illogical. He falsely presumes that because people do bad things, or have "various emotional needs" that it is appropriate to deny firearms to EVERYONE because SOMEONE might do something bad with a gun.

This is again pure propagandistic idiocy. We don't regulate everyone based on what some deranged or depressed person might do that's bad, we regulate actual behavior, and we punish those who step over the boundaries of acceptable public or private conduct.

If we regulated everyone based on what a very few individuals might do, we'd definitely ban cars, and five gallon buckets, and bathtubs, and all sorts of things that people use to do bad things.

That's not how it works though, and his argument is asinine and stupid.

[Blind groper]

Once more Seth pours his personal opinion upon us without the slightest evidence to back it.

[Seth]

Seth

I have been posting evidence. Reports from reputable universities. And all you can do is accuse me of being a liar?

Do you not realise how weak that is?

I really don't care what you say. You're a mendacious zealot who will lie with impunity and ignore any facts which destroy your arguments and your opinion is of no interest whatsoever to me. I only rebut you lest anyone think you've made some salient point. I'm not going to waste my time refuting you because I've already done so and you simply ignore the facts, so I'm going to call you what you are. A liar.

Like when you told the whole forum that the wild west had more guns than today and less crime. You were half right. They certainly had more guns. They also had a massively greater rate of murder.

Nope.

It is easy to argue with you, Seth. All I have to do is investigate your claims and show that they are all garbage. I am developing a Seth hypothesis. Like that everything Seth believes is taken holus bolus from NRA web sites, or web sites from allies of the NRA, who do not care about the fact that everything they say is bullshit.

Think what you like. You're wrong and I've demonstrated exactly how. That's all I need to do.

Did you buy John Lott's books, Seth? It must have been a disappointment to you when I showed that he has been discredited as a researcher, and that a big part of what he says appears to have been made up.

You'd like to think he's been discredited, but in point of fact he and others discredited those who attacked him by showing that their research was flawed and biased.

And you still cannot get around the fact that your thesis, that more guns will result in more crime has been conclusively and undeniably proven by the simple fact that gun ownership in the US has never been greater, and it continues to climb at record rates, and yet the crime rate continues to go DOWN, which proves you're simply wrong.

Rebut that.

[JimC]

To FBM

That is not what I am saying.
...

Yeah, I know, but I'm saying that it's implied. Why not include people in "under-developed" countries in the stats? The "comparing apples and oranges" argument is just another way to say that "those people are so different from us that they don't count." It's remnants of classical idealism, which was used to justify colonial exploitation in Africa, the Americas, Asia, etc. They're poor, often dark-skinned, speak different languages, don't have the same kind of educational, governmental, etc, systems we have, etc, therefore they don't count. It's arbitrary and culturally/racially arrogant. Not directing that at you, mind you, just at the idea.

It depends totally on the purpose of any comparison. A key reason for comparing a number of different societies is to analyse any striking features, such as the high rate of gun homicides in the US. A comparison works best if we try to restrict the number of possible variables as much as possible. These emphatically do not include race (e.g.. South Korea and Japan can justly be compared to the US), but certainly should include:
* presence or absence of armed conflict/civil war (any point in including Syria at the moment?)
* democracy vs other political systems such as military dictatorships
* rule of law
* economic development level

If we restrict the comparison to a basket of countries with minimal variation in such key features, then we are not confounding our conclusions by the actions of as many variables.

[Ian]

Like when you told the whole forum that the wild west had more guns than today and less crime. You were half right. They certainly had more guns. They also had a massively greater rate of murder.

Nope.

Let's see if Seth has the capacity to learn new things...

Homicide Rates in the American West

by Randolph Roth
(July 2010 version)

Was the “Old West” violent? Scholars have established that it was not as violent as most movies and novels would suggest. Murder was not a daily, weekly, or even monthly occurrence in most small towns or farming, ranching, or mining communities. Still, homicide rates in the West were extraordinarily high by today’s standards and by the standards of the rest of the United States and the Western world in the nineteenth century, except for parts of the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most data that historians have gathered are preliminary, based on a single source such as newspapers, legal records, or official statistics, rather than on multiple sources. They are minimum counts, not estimates of the number of homicides that occurred. But preliminary data are available for Oregon, British Columbia, Texas, nine counties in California (which together held 57 percent of the population of central and southern California), eight Native peoples in California, five cattle towns, five mining towns, and two counties each in Arizona and Colorado.

To appreciate how violent the West was, we need to consider not only the annual homicide rate, but the risk of being murdered over time. For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year, meaning that 0.165 percent of the population was murdered each year—between a fifth and a tenth of a percent. That may sound small, but it is large to a criminologist or epidemiologist, because it means that an adult who lived in Dodge City from 1876 to 1885 faced at least a 1 in 61 chance of being murdered—1.65 percent of the population was murdered in those 10 years. An adult who lived in San Francisco, 1850-1865, faced at least a 1 in 203 chance of being murdered, and in the eight other counties in California that have been studied to date, at least a 1 in 72 chance. Even in Oregon, 1850-1865, which had the lowest minimum rate yet discovered in the American West (30 per 100,000 adults per year), an adult faced at least a 1 in 208 chance of being murdered.

If we assume the towns and counties that have been studied to date were representative of similar towns and counties, and that their inhabitants were a fair sample of the inhabitants of similar towns or counties, we can also be confident (because of the laws of probability) that homicide rates were high in towns and counties that have not yet been studied. For instance, we can estimate that there is only a 1-in-200 chance that the homicide rate for all Western cattle towns was less than 97 per 100,000 adults per year, if the five cattle towns studied to date were typical (as there is every reason to believe). The chance that the rate in all cattle towns was low or moderate by the standards of the most of the rest of the United States and other Western nations—10 per 100,000 adults per year or less—is vanishingly small.

The data on homicides in the nineteenth-century West appear in the WORD, EXCEL and CSV worksheets below. State-level homicide rates for the United States, 1907-1941, are available in Randolph Roth, "American Homicide Supplemental Volume: American Homicides in the Twentieth Century," Figures 1 through 8, available through the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University (http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/).
http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hv ... 0west.html

By comparison, the city with the highest homicide rate in the modern-day US is currently St. Louis at 35.5 per 100,000. The overall US rate today is 4.2

Why am I bothering to post this? Because I want to see whether or not Seth even has the capacity to admit that he just might be wrong about one of his "facts" that he uses to prop up his ideas. And if he can admit that much, then maybe there can be some common understanding as far as a base of knowledge upon which to build a reasonable conversation. I'd like to have a reasonable conversation, but I can't have an exchange of ideas with someone who literally does not understand what he's talking about.

[FBM]

To FBM

That is not what I am saying.
...

Yeah, I know, but I'm saying that it's implied. Why not include people in "under-developed" countries in the stats? The "comparing apples and oranges" argument is just another way to say that "those people are so different from us that they don't count." It's remnants of classical idealism, which was used to justify colonial exploitation in Africa, the Americas, Asia, etc. They're poor, often dark-skinned, speak different languages, don't have the same kind of educational, governmental, etc, systems we have, etc, therefore they don't count. It's arbitrary and culturally/racially arrogant. Not directing that at you, mind you, just at the idea.

It depends totally on the purpose of any comparison. A key reason for comparing a number of different societies is to analyse any striking features, such as the high rate of gun homicides in the US. A comparison works best if we try to restrict the number of possible variables as much as possible. These emphatically do not include race (e.g.. South Korea and Japan can justly be compared to the US), but certainly should include:
* presence or absence of armed conflict/civil war (any point in including Syria at the moment?)
* democracy vs other political systems such as military dictatorships
* rule of law
* economic development level

If we restrict the comparison to a basket of countries with minimal variation in such key features, then we are not confounding our conclusions by the actions of as many variables.

Why economic development level?