Connecticut (et al)

[Tyrannical]

1. Flint, Mich.
> Violent crimes per 1,000: 23.4
> Population: 102,357
Read more at http://bossip.com/599353/its-murrrddddd ... voUUcYl.99

If these stats aren't a reason for carry & conceal..........

At 23.4 violent crimes per 1000 people, that's equivalent to a 2.3% chance per year. Or over fifty years the equivalent of everyone being a victim of violent crime at least once in their lifetime. You may never know when you need a gun to defend yourself, but chances are that day will come in Flint Michigan.

[rainbow]

1. Flint, Mich.
> Violent crimes per 1,000: 23.4
> Population: 102,357
Read more at http://bossip.com/599353/its-murrrddddd ... voUUcYl.99

If these stats aren't a reason for carry & conceal..........

At 23.4 violent crimes per 1000 people, that's equivalent to a 2.3% chance per year. Or over fifty years the equivalent of everyone being a victim of violent crime at least once in their lifetime. You may never know when you need a gun to defend yourself, but chances are that day will come in Flint Michigan.

You don't really understand how statistics work, do you?

[aspire1670]

1. Flint, Mich.
> Violent crimes per 1,000: 23.4
> Population: 102,357
Read more at http://bossip.com/599353/its-murrrddddd ... voUUcYl.99

If these stats aren't a reason for carry & conceal..........

At 23.4 violent crimes per 1000 people, that's equivalent to a 2.3% chance per year. Or over fifty years the equivalent of everyone being a victim of violent crime at least once in their lifetime. You may never know when you need a gun to defend yourself, but chances are that day will come in Flint Michigan.

Rainbow beat me too it but I'll add a LOLWUT; a however do you dress on your own; and finish with a don't ever play poker for money.

[Jason]

Shorter Aspire shorter.

[Tyrannical]

1. Flint, Mich.
> Violent crimes per 1,000: 23.4
> Population: 102,357
Read more at http://bossip.com/599353/its-murrrddddd ... voUUcYl.99

If these stats aren't a reason for carry & conceal..........

At 23.4 violent crimes per 1000 people, that's equivalent to a 2.3% chance per year. Or over fifty years the equivalent of everyone being a victim of violent crime at least once in their lifetime. You may never know when you need a gun to defend yourself, but chances are that day will come in Flint Michigan.

Rainbow beat me too it but I'll add a LOLWUT; a however do you dress on your own; and finish with a don't ever play poker for money.

Yes, there is no homoscedastic distribution, but it is common to illustrate odds like that.

[Seth]

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.

Once again, as I said before, with the exception of a small number of cowtowns and mining communities like Dodge City or Deadwood, and except for Indian wars, the "Old West" was a pretty peaceful place in spite of the ubiquitous presence of firearms.

The error in this bit of "research" is clearly seen here:

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.

This assumption is wrong, and it's not a "fair sampling" upon which one can base conclusions. There were particularly notorious places where violence was epidemic, but they were by no means the standard for society, even in the frontier west.

[Seth]

To Seth

Who had the cheek to say "Rebut that".

It is cheek because that rebuttal had already been made. I showed, with a clear reference and detailed graphs, that gun ownership over 30 years has actually dropped - not risen. There have been three different ways of estimating changes in gun ownership, since no official records are kept.

1. Phone surveys of gun ownership.
2. Face to face surveys of gun ownership.
3. A record of how many applications for background checks.

Methods 1 and 2 show little change over the past 15 years, but a great drop in gun ownership over the past 30 years.

Actually, what any survey on gun ownership shows in the last 30 years is an increasing reluctance on the part of gun owners to admit that they own guns due largely to the threat of confiscation by the authorities and gun owner's refusal to give anti-gun researchers any information that they might use to further infringe on their rights. I've never been asked by a "researcher" if I own any guns, but if I were, I would absolutely answer "no" because it's none of anyone's business whether I do or do not own firearms. The recent incident in New York where a local newspaper published an interactive map with the exact addresses of EVERY licensed gun owner in two counties demonstrates exactly why gun owners won't tell the truth about owning guns. They don't want to become targets for firearms theft, and they don't want to be made social pariahs. And that's exactly what the newspaper wanted to do, it wanted to "out" gun owners and bring community opprobrium upon them as part of its agenda to rid society of guns.

Doesn't appear to have worked, and may in fact have backfired on them as there are early indications that robberies and burglaries of houses NOT on the list of gun owners jumped after the map was published.

Method 3 indicates an increase in applications for background checks, which must be what Seth is basing his claims on. However, those background checks do not indicate more gun owners. They are more likely to indicate gun owners buying their second, third, fourth etc guns, since this result is at odds with the other two methods.

Maybe, unless you realize that phone surveys are pointless exercises in futility and are not in the least bit accurate when it comes to gun ownership, for the reasons cited above.

I think it is obvious to anyone that no increase in gun crime will happen due to a person owning more than one gun, since only the first gun is needed for a gun crime to happen. More guns in one person's possession will not increase the likelihood of that person committing a gun crime.

Indeed. By which statement you blow your own argument out of the water, again. It's still "more guns, less crime" in the US, and has been for two decades at least, so your theory of "more guns, more crime" is just so much uneducated, and evidently uneducatable bilge.

Seth is arguing that gun ownership has increased with no associated increase in gun crime. That theory is crap because the data indicates no increase in gun owners.

Nor does it indicate any decrease in gun owners. Nor does it indicate that there are NOT more gun owners. And still the crime rate goes down as the number of firearms in circulation goes up. You're really getting desperate now trying to support your bogus theory. If you really believe that the massive increase in gun sales (that has the NICS system so bogged down it's taking more than 100 hours to process a record) is entirely made up of current gun owners buying more guns, you're an idiot.

With the same number, or a smaller number of people owning guns, we would not expect an increase in gun crime, and that is what we see.

And yet you have nothing more than your anal excrement upon which to base this facially idiotic claim.

More guns, less crime. Quod Erat Demonstrandum

So once more Seth makes an argument by ignoring the data.

You have presented absolutely NO data whatsoever in support of your claim.

The data I have is more guns in circulation, less violent crime in society, data that you have not disputed because you cannot do so.

[orpheus]

Then gun owners are purposely skewing the data, making it impossible to determine if guns actually are a problem or not. This rather undermines your reliance on your "statistics".

Now why would they do that? It couldn't be because they care more about keeping their guns at all costs than they do about finding the truth - if that truth might mean that guns do harm society?

No, couldn't be that.

[Blind groper]

Seth supplies no evidence, but his own form of religious faith. Seth is a member in good standing of the Church of the Gun. It is an element of religious faith that more guns are better, and any data which indicates anything else must be fallaceous by definition. Forget data. Faith is all.

Note that Seth still claims that the old west was peaceful, despite two of us supplying data to the contrary. But that is the standard religious approach. If the data does not support the faith, discard the data.

On comments about crime rates state by state.
I have said before, several times, that it makes no difference what local state laws are. The thing is that tools for committing murder are readily available. For example : I was told that California has much tighter gun rules than Nevada, and there are a number of types of very nasty weapons that you cannot legally buy in California. No big deal. Just go to Nevada and buy all the nastiest weapons you want, and take them back to California in the trunk of your car. So we see drug dealers in California carrying hand guns of the most lethal sort, which are actually illegal in that state.

Until there are federal bans on certain weapons, those weapons will be found everywhere, and the murder rate will be unaffected by local ordinances.

[JimC]

Facile similarities without any depth. You're also using terms like 'modern' and 'democratic' like we've agreed on a definition in the context. Level of technology? That's practically ubiquitous among first world nations. 'Rule of law'? Once again ubiquitous among the majority of nations in the world - an interesting question to ponder is 'what law(s)'.

The point of this line of argument is to supply evidence for a conclusion that's already been decided upon and the way it is done is by the obfuscation the failure of the argument on its most fundamental level by using ambiguous verbiage and irrelevant and misleading points of comparison so that you may convince the dimwitted and uneducated of the evident nature of your conclusion. Perhaps even convince yourselves of it as well. It won't fly here.

Groper has never shown a thing in the months I've been following his arguments, looking at his 'evidence' and 'data', and responding when I can be arsed to address the sort of specious nonsense he calls a line of reasoning.

In case it hasn't become clear to you by now, what I'm saying is that either you compare like to like by finding a society which matches that of the U.S.A. sufficiently so as to eliminate any unreasonable bias, or you eschew your facile, arbitrary, self-serving, misleading, and false, selective comparisons entirely and compare the U.S.A. to any other nation on earth. Sociology being very complex and all it may take you some time to build up a credible argument on the basis of national comparisons, if it can be done at all.

Still not clear? Arguments based on the comparison of nations, by whatever criteria you decide to invent, are invalid, misleading, garbage.

So, you want to compare the US to the entire world. This will be a reasonably favourable result for the US, of course, because the rest of the world includes many places that are currently in a state of armed insurrection or a near-total breakdown of law and order.

Or, you want the comparison to be with a single other country, chosen to "match that of the U.S.A. sufficiently so as to eliminate any unreasonable bias".

Simple, choose Australia. Both are relatively young countries, initially settled from Britain, with a similar language, no current civil war, similar levels of technological development, democratic style of government etc.

Very different number of guns (specifically pistols and assault rifles, though), and very different laws concerning them.

Very different murder rates, too...

Of course, I know the response, and it slides into Tyrannical's territory: "It's all the fault of our huge number of young gang members of a certain colour, boo hoo"

[mozg]

For example : I was told that California has much tighter gun rules than Nevada, and there are a number of types of very nasty weapons that you cannot legally buy in California. No big deal. Just go to Nevada and buy all the nastiest weapons you want, and take them back to California in the trunk of your car.

Not if you're thinking you can just go to a store and do that.

To buy a rifle from an FFL dealer in another state, the rifle has to be legal in the state where you reside.

To buy a handgun from an FFL dealer in another state, it must be shipped to an FFL dealer in the state where you reside and then you must pass the federal and state requirements to purchase it.

[Blind groper]

mozg

Legal has nothing to do with it. Even Seth has admitted on this forum that owns guns he bought illegally. It is the ability to obtain them across state borders that makes local ordinances kind of irrelevant.

[JimC]

Just thought of more comparisons of the US and Australia. Both have a lot of wide-open spaces, and both have a very important tradition of hunting game with rifle and shotgun.

[Blind groper]

Yes, Australia and the USA seem a good comparison.
Homicide rates in 2012 in killings per 100,000 people per year.
Australia 1.0
USA 4.1

And for further comparison
New Zealand 0.9.

In case Americans think their excuse is gangs, drugs, or ethnic minorities, note that New Zealand has criminal gangs, drug problems, and more ethnic minority as a percentage of the population than the USA.

[Seth]

mozg

Legal has nothing to do with it. Even Seth has admitted on this forum that owns guns he bought illegally. It is the ability to obtain them across state borders that makes local ordinances kind of irrelevant.

Nope, bought them legally, just off-paper private sales.