Connecticut (et al)

[pErvinalia]

LakLak is 90'ish?

[laklak]

In another 30 years or so, but who's counting?

[Blind groper]

I live in the country after decades in the city. Country is better. Far better.

We do not have raccoons, but we have a plague of rabbits. I have considered getting an air rifle for rabbits. We had one rabbit that really pissed me off, big time. He was living under our deck, cheeky bastard! Could not block him out since the deck is accessible the full length but is too narrow underneath for me to crawl down. However,the other day I saw him eating grass just in front of our house. I sneaked up with a rock in my hand and threw it. Caught the bloody rabbit on the side of the head and instant death.

I have no sympathy, however, Laklak, for your determination to own a gun for "self defense". As I have pointed out many times, being murdered by a stranger is a very minor risk. But having a gun in the house makes murder or suicide by self, spouse, friend, acquaintance etc., many times more probable, and those are the most common murders. Keeping a gun for self defense has the reverse action, since it increases risk.

[pErvinalia]

Don't get Jonno started about the country...

[pErvinalia]

I live in the country after decades in the city. Country is better. Far better.

We do not have raccoons, but we have a plague of rabbits. I have considered getting an air rifle for rabbits.

I want to get one for the mice in my house. Little fuckers won't eat the poison (or the bated traps) i put out, but they'll happily eat firelighters! What the fuck?!?

[laklak]

BG, did you make a nice stew? Nothing like fresh rabbit, might as well use it.

I don't put a lot of stock in overall statistics, they're too easy to manipulate and they're never broken out the way I want them to be. I have no doubt that having a gun in the home increases the risk of murder, suicide, and accidental shooting. It increases the likelihood of any sort of gun related incident simply because the gun is physically there. But what I want to see is how does it break down? What's the statistical increase for a white, retired, middle class, middle aged, college educated couple with no kids at home, living in a relatively crime free, upscale neighborhood, with no debt or history of mental illness or drug abuse, who both have CCW permits and training and regularly go to the shooting range? As opposed to a low income black family living in a gang infested inner city, or a less-then-high-school educated unemployed white common-law couple living in a rented trailer with a bunch of screaming, barefoot brats. The problem is they lump ALL those incidents together, which tells me nothing of value. As John asked above, how many of these murders are committed by gang members, are drug related, or are criminals shooting each other?

[Blind groper]

Laklak

I don't think anyone can give you statistics as detailed as that. What I can tell you is that, statistically, the person most likely to murder your wife is you. You personally are more likely, statistically speaking, to be murdered by a friend than by a stranger. Your gun in your home creates the chance that your murderous friend will pick it up and kill you with it. The gun in your home increases the odds that you will murder your wife.

Obviously the chances of being murdered are greater for criminals than for law abiding people. However, the chances of a law abiding person being killed by a stranger are low, and the chances of being killed by spouse, friend etc is much higher. Especially if there is a gun in the home.

One thing murder has in common with suicide, is that most such acts are impulsive. So someone gets drunk, gets angry, gets jealous, or some other strong emotion, and commits the act of murder during that impulse. If a gun is available, the murder becomes much more probable. If no gun is available, it is more likely that something less lethal, like fists, will be used to express the impulse.

[Seth]

Shorter Seth: I carry a gun so that I can defend you and your children to the death.

You forgot a word. I fixed it for you...

Nope, I forgot no word. You demand the right to defend others without their consent, the resort of all tyrants, and when your assumed right to defend others backfires and others die you will indeed have defended them to death. Fortunately for the rest of us you can only talk the talk. Now sit down, have another pie and tell us what you did in the great internet war, young Seth.

Well, if they don't want me defending them, they can just say so. But I'll be busy defending myself at the time and may not hear them. Or if they like they can just stand up and say to the murderer "Go ahead and kill me now, so no one has to defend me." I'm fine with that, I respect that choice.

I'll keep shooting all the same.

[Seth]

Good guys become bad guys.
Nicely stated Mr Jonno.

Nicely stated paranoid fear of one's fellow man, the vast majority of whom do NOT become bad guys. And, it so happens that when someone DOES become a bad guy, the best thing you can have on hand is a handgun with which to defend yourself. Since you can never tell which of the people around you is a bad guy with a gun, even in a putatively gun-free society like the UK (isn't that a laugh!), it behooves you to carry a gun so that if you happen to be in the presence of the very tiny minority of people who are, or become so inclined, you can do something about it.

Seth continues to ignore that fact that murders by strangers are a minority of murders. 60% of women murdered in the home are murdered by their male partner, and the presence of a gun in the home increases that probability about 3 fold. Having a gun in the home most definitely does not make it safer for a woman. Totally the reverse.

Except for that whole "very few women are murdered in their homes" part of the equation that you love to elide all the time. The rights of 300 million people are not to be determined by the malefactions of the very, very, very few.

Seth thinks that carrying a gun is like insurance. Nope. Insurance is a small cost to cover you against an unlikely but devastating problem. Carrying a gun actually makes a family destroying problem more likely, so it is the reverse of insurance.

So you say, but then again, you're just plain wrong. There is no causative link between a gun in the home and fatal domestic violence, it's just a correlation that you cherry-pick to make your ignorant argument. Domestic violence, if it's going to happen in a home, will happen regardless of whether a gun is present or not. And the vast majority of people do not engage in domestic violence, so their rights are not to be determined by the actions of a few.

Carrying or keeping at home, some kind of firearm and especially a hand gun, increases the risk of a member of the family being shot. It is the reverse of insurance. It does not protect. It puts your family at risk instead.

So you say. But you're wrong.

[laklak]

BG, I absolutely, 100% believe those stats exist, at least in the form of raw data. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I believe that the reason we do not see them, at that level of detail, is because The Establishment (to invoke a phrase from my early, Mao-loving Uni days) do not want us to have those statistics. If it came out, for example, that 90% of the murders in the U.S. were the result of gang or other criminal activity, and that of those murders the vast majority of them were done by black males between the ages of 14 and 25, it would be difficult to convince the majority of the country that further gun legislation was necessary. Young black men would be more targeted by the authorities then they already are. The entire argument for gun control would collapse, because once those incidents were factored out our murder rates would be lower than other Westernized countries. It would provide great fodder for drug legalization efforts, and they don't want that either.

I have tried to get that sort of information for just the county I live in, and I can tell you it isn't easy. You don't get it from official sources, you have to glean it from media reports and the internet. It takes bloody forever to collate. And, at least in the county I live in, my example above is precisely how it plays out for the last three years. The crimes are drug and gang related and are almost entirely between young black males, and (unfortunately) the collateral damage caused by their drive-by rampages. But we, as a society, aren't about to touch that debate with a barge pole. To even talk about it will immediately result is screams of "racism" or "classism" or whatever other "ism" is the pejorative du jour.

I don't really concern myself with that, though. As someone who has lived in truly racist societies like immediately post-apartheid South Africa and the American South in the 50s and 60s, I know what racism really is, and confronting uncomfortable statistics is NOT racism, it's realism. That is what I want, a realistic, honest discussion, with all data freely available. Until we do that we're doomed to this sort of useless argument.

[Seth]

FBI UCR 2011 Murder by offender


Age Total Sex Race
Male Female Unknown White Black Other Unknown
Total 14,548 9,485 1,138 3,925 4,729 5,486 256 4,077
Percent 100.0 65.2 7.8 27.0 32.5 37.7 1.8 28.0
Under 18 695 633 57 5 254 410 20 11
Under 22 2,938 2,691 241 6 1,038 1,803 70 27
18 and over 9,200 8,101 1,073 26 4,386 4,486 232 96

Looks pretty evenly split between blacks and whites with a large block between 18 and 22 years old.

Sorry the table didn't format properly, I tried. Is there a Table function available?

[Blind groper]

Seth

I have shown you the references and the statistics. Telling me I am wrong is just the old ostrich again with his head in the sand, in case he sees some truth he finds unpalatable. In your case, learning that your guns do far more harm than good, which they do.

On domestic violence.
This is not uncommon in all western nations. I suspect it is more common in my country than in yours, since our very large Polynesian culture contains a sadly very large percentage of abusive husbands. The thing is, though, that with no gun in the house, the drunk and abusive husband beats his wife with his fists. In your country, the statistics show that a lot of the same kind of asshole will pick up a gun, and in his anger, shoot his wife. End result is that New Zealand has, per capita, a lot fewer murders of wives by husbands than the USA. Having more guns just puts women at risk.

To laklak

The idea that drugs and blacks fuel murders does not stack up. My country has a fifth of the murder rate of the USA, and we have a massive drug culture, and more dark skinned ethnic minorities than the USA has. Certainly the drug culture fuels crimes, and violent crimes. But there is a big difference between a violent crime, like being beaten up, and a murder. In NZ we get a lot of beatings due to the drug industry, but few murders. The difference is that our criminals do not have hand guns. The reason they do not have hand guns is that we have made hand guns almost impossible to access, for everyone.

You cannot permit law abiding people to have hand guns without indirectly supplying criminals also. To stop criminals getting hand guns, you have to stop everyone getting hand guns. We have done that in NZ, and Australia, and 23 of the richest 24 countries. Result is quarter or less murder rate.

[MrJonno]

But there is a big difference between a violent crime, like being beaten up, and a murder. In NZ we get a lot of beatings due to the drug industry, but few murders. The difference is that our criminals do not have hand guns. The reason they do not have hand guns is that we have made hand guns almost impossible to access, for everyone

Generally there isnt a lot you can do to stop people trying to kill each other, thats our nature but there is a hell of a lot you can do to stop then succeeding.
It is far far easier to regulate inanimate objects than people and sensible countries target these tools rather than try to predict (and fail) who will misuse them

[Coito ergo sum]

Sam Harris, "The Riddle of the Gun." http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... of-the-gun

[MrJonno]

Sam Harris, "The Riddle of the Gun." http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the- ... of-the-gun

Saw the bit

On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws often seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want ready access to a loaded firearm

and then switched off, good people/bad people is a meaningless division when trying to deal with fragile humans