Guns used for lawful self-defense Pt. 5

[Blind groper]

Seth

We have been through the gun ownership level before. Two separate surveys have shown fewer people in the USA owning guns, but background checks show an increase in umbers of new guns sold. This discrepancy is best explained as fewer people buying guns, but gun owners buying more guns. In other words, gun nutters are growing more nutty. However, I understand that it is more convenient for you to ignore the survey results and look only at the background checks stats. That is not, though, rational logic.

It does not bother me that gun owners buy more guns. That will not increase the crime or murder rate. They can only murder one person at a time, anyway.

Murder rates are dropping world wide. They are dropping in the USA, and outside the USA. This suggests that the cause of the drop in murder rates is another factor. Or more than one factor. However, murder rates in the USA compared to other western nations still average 4 times as much. The second worst western nation (Finland) still has half the murder rate of the USA. It's high murder rate is apparently due to the very high rate of alcohol abuse. The USA does not have anything like that rate of alcohol abuse, which means its very high murder rate is due to guns. This is borne out by the fact that half of all its murders are with hand guns, and no other western nation has the crazy level of hand gun ownership that the USA has.

[Jason]

Owning a hand gun, increases the odds of the gun owner being murdered, often with his own gun.

Let me see if I understand the above correctly. The claim, as I understand it, is this:

If you own a gun, the odds of you being shot with your own gun increases.
If you do not own a gun, the odds of you being shot with your own gun is nil. <-because you do not have a gun. Derp.
Therefore, it is logical to not own a gun.

See.. that's just some stupid shit to be spouting.

[Blind groper]

Fakuname

You have focussed on the wrong point. Yes, if you are a gun owner and get shot, it is likely to be with your own gun. However, the important point, as shown in NEJM, is that a person who owns a hand gun is 2 to 4 times more likely to be murdered than a person who does not own a hand gun.

This makes the idea of buying a hand gun for self defense quite ridiculous. It is like buying an air bag for your car that contains a hand grenade, so that it kills instead of saves.

[Jason]

No, I focused on the point I wanted to. They can be addressed separately.

I had a post ready in response to your 'point', but I rapidly shutdown my computer because I thought I had to prepare for the imminent and hardly announced visit of one of my older sisters, which turned out to be a false alarm. So.. maybe I'll address it again later. Or maybe I won't.

Change places!

[Blind groper]

That being the case, Fakuname, I do not think you have a point. A person without a gun cannot be shot by his own gun. True. But where has anyone tried to say that?

A person who owns a gun can, indeed, be shot by his own gun. And many have. Hand guns are the usual problem, especially if the owner is lax about storing them securely. Someone in his own home who has a grudge might locate that hand gun, and use it. This has happened many times.

The person most likely to kill you is someone you know. The person most likely to kill a woman is her male partner. A lot of those killings happen in the home, using a hand gun owned and insecurely stored by the main adult male in that house.

The point from the New England Journal of Medicine is that you are safer not owning a hand gun. If you own one, your chances of being murdered increase 2 to 4 fold, and the odds of a member of your family committing suicide increase 2 to 10 fold, depending on how securely the gun is stored.

[Jason]

Currently under duress, and although I've no doubt I'm more than a match for you even so (arrogance!), emotionally I'm not invested. What's a debate without emotional investment? The majority of the works of Parliament no doubt.

So I have faith you'll grant me leave to collect myself until such time as I revisit this court of illogic and emotive appeal.

[laklak]

Of course there's always Laklak, but he's just a complete and utter shit-stirrer...

Moi? I'm a journeyman, nay, a mere apprentice, a freshman, a n00b. Any success I may have enjoyed is due only to my Dark Master, the High Lord Dev.

[Seth]

Seth

We have been through the gun ownership level before. Two separate surveys have shown fewer people in the USA owning guns, but background checks show an increase in umbers of new guns sold. This discrepancy is best explained as fewer people buying guns, but gun owners buying more guns. In other words, gun nutters are growing more nutty. However, I understand that it is more convenient for you to ignore the survey results and look only at the background checks stats. That is not, though, rational logic.

It's you who is being irrational. Simple indisputable fact: Americans are buying guns at a rate unseen in our national history in the last few years. Corollary fact: More guns in the US has not resulted in more crime (of any type) it has resulted in less crime...substantially less violent crime in places where gun ownership is high increasing, and less so in places where gun ownership is low, like Chicago, LA and New York, among other places where citizens are denied their fundamental rights.

These three facts alone utterly disprove your claim that more gun in society mean more crime. You cannot use the UK or any of the other "civilized" nations you like to tout as valid examples of your thesis because in NONE of those other countries has the number of guns in society been on the increase, much less as drastically as it is in the US. Therefore you cannot say what the result of more guns in those countries would be because there is no valid data showing a correlation between an increase in gun ownership and an increase in crime. As you have admitted, crime is going DOWN all over, including in the US.

The only "civilized" country where the absolute number of guns in society is making a dramatic increase is the United States. And you admit below that despite this increase in the number of guns in society in the US, there is no concomitant rise in violent crime rates, in fact there is a significant decrease in violent crime rates in the US despite more guns in society.

Moreover, if one looks at the crime statistics in the UK beginning in 1924, when handgun were banned, we see that the violent crime victimization rate steadily increased until quite recently, when something caused it to decrease slightly. I put it off to the surveillance and police-state policies of the UK, but that's just my opinion.

Nevertheless, you cannot deny that an increasing number of guns in the US has not resulted in an increase in the number of shootings, which continue year by year to decline in number.

Your favorite game to try to evade this fact is to cherry-pick and limit your analysis to "handgun murders" and other forms of intellectually bankrupt evasion. But that doesn't work here because you're not lecturing to a class of credulous Marxist dupes, you're vainly attempting to debate with people who are experts on the subject, and thus you're losing the debate.

It does not bother me that gun owners buy more guns. That will not increase the crime or murder rate. They can only murder one person at a time, anyway.

Do you ever read what you write? If it doesn't bother you then what the fuck are you complaining about.

Murder rates are dropping world wide. They are dropping in the USA, and outside the USA. This suggests that the cause of the drop in murder rates is another factor. Or more than one factor.

Precisely correct. Now do try to actually follow that logical line of reasoning accurately just this once.

However, murder rates in the USA compared to other western nations still average 4 times as much.

What is happening to the murder rate in the US? Is it going up or down?

The second worst western nation (Finland) still has half the murder rate of the USA.

Goody for them.

It's high murder rate is apparently due to the very high rate of alcohol abuse.

And yet you say nothing about banning the causal factor.

The USA does not have anything like that rate of alcohol abuse, which means its very high murder rate is due to guns.

And here is where your logic goes astray. You have admitted several times that guns ARE NOT the cause for increasing crime rates. Now you're making both a false correlation and a false conclusion of causation because your inherent bias against handguns and you're simply assuming that to be the case without any substantive data that a) shows your reasoning is correct; and b) EXCLUDES other causal factors.

By failing to account for confounding factors in your "research" you are committing a basic and egregious scientific error that in your case amounts to nothing less than willful scientific fraud. But then that's no surprise because that's what all anti-gun zealots do, including your Harvard friends.

The correct conclusion, based on the data we have, is that guns ARE NOT the prime factor in the murder rate in any nation. They may be the tool of choice in some instances, but there is no evidence that mere possession of a handgun facilitates the motives for murder, and the willingness to commit murder...or any OTHER violent crimes that do not appear to be causally connected to the absolute number of guns in society. They may however be connected to the absolute number of guns in the hands of persons with a predisposition to commit violent crimes.

But that conclusion, with which I would agree, doesn't justify a policy of removing guns from the hands of persons who are not inclined to commit violent crimes.

It justifies the policy of allowing non-criminal citizens to be armed for self-defense against the potential for violent crime victimization by criminals...whether they themselves have firearms or not, and it justifies stringent, effective and permanent punishment and removal from society for those who use firearms unlawfully to commit violent crimes.

Being dead is an absolute 100 percent effective cure for criminal recidivism.

To put it in simple words for simple minds, more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens leads to substantial reductions in the incidence and rate of violent criminal victimization. More guns, less crime. Quod erat demonstrandum.

[JimC]

Fakuname

You have focussed on the wrong point. Yes, if you are a gun owner and get shot, it is likely to be with your own gun. However, the important point, as shown in NEJM, is that a person who owns a hand gun is 2 to 4 times more likely to be murdered than a person who does not own a hand gun.

This makes the idea of buying a hand gun for self defense quite ridiculous. It is like buying an air bag for your car that contains a hand grenade, so that it kills instead of saves.

To play devil's advocate here, maybe actually owning the gun is not the causal factor. Maybe folks in the US who live in dangerous localities are more likely to buy a gun, in an attempt to protect themselves. Simply living in the dangerous area is the causal factor in their higher likelihood to be murdered, and the gun owning is simply a correlate.

A better test would be to compare people with or without owned guns, all from the same locale. If Seth is right, the gun owners will have a statistically reduced risk of being murdered (even if it is still higher than the national average) because, at least on some occasions, they do successfully defend themselves.

[Seth]

That being the case, Fakuname, I do not think you have a point. A person without a gun cannot be shot by his own gun. True. But where has anyone tried to say that?

You have, you dunce.

A person who owns a gun can, indeed, be shot by his own gun. And many have.

Ninety seven percent fewer times than in 1904, thanks largely to the NRA. But so what? The consequences of stupidity are often death, and I'm fine with stupid people killing themselves, it makes them less of a hazard to the rest of us.

Hand guns are the usual problem, especially if the owner is lax about storing them securely.

We can agree about the need for good gun-handling protocol and practice without concluding that the only way to achieve this goal is to ban guns. The NRA has been successfully educating people about gun safety for more than a century, to good effect. The real problem is that the Marxist Progressives, liberals and their useful idiots have been resisting efforts to make firearms education a priority for our children. When I was young, I took my .22 rifle to school with me on the school bus so I could attend NRA-sponsored safety and marksmanship training. I received every award for marksmanship offered in the juvenile division right up to "Expert Marksman" before I was 12 years old. As a consequence I've had exactly one "accidental" discharge in my life, and that was not a "negligent discharge" it was a malfunction in the action of a 50 year old Parker shotgun which discharged quite unexpectedly when the sear nose fractured due to age and metal fatigue. But because of my NRA safety training, the shotgun was, as all firearms in my possession are at all times, pointed in a safe direction, so the discharge caused no harm.

Surprisingly...to people like you, "school shootings" were literally unheard of except perhaps in the inner-city ghetto schools in my time as a student, and this despite kids carrying guns to school on a weekly basis on the school bus. How could that be if your thesis is true? It can't, which demonstrates that your thesis is crap.

The notion of good gun-handling skills militates for MORE knowledge and understanding by the general population about firearms operation and safety, not LESS.

Someone in his own home who has a grudge might locate that hand gun, and use it. This has happened many times.

How many times, exactly? Numbers please. Perhaps some actual "anecdotes" to prove you're not lying might be nice. Be sure to include along with that list a list of all the times that handguns were PROPERLY stored and NEVER used or were LAWFULLY used to thwart or defend against a crime, just so we can compare absolute numbers to see whether or not you're swatting at gnats with a sledgehammer.

The person most likely to kill you is someone you know.

So? If someone I know tries to kill me I still have a right to be armed so that I can prevent that from happening.

The person most likely to kill a woman is her male partner.

Which militates for a much broader distribution of handguns into the hands of properly trained female citizens...along with some classes in how to pick a partner who doesn't have violent proclivities and how to get away from one who does.

A lot of those killings happen in the home, using a hand gun owned and insecurely stored by the main adult male in that house.

So what? A lot of killings DON'T happen because handguns owned by males and females alike ARE safely stored. And in many cases those properly-stored handguns are effectively used to defend members of the household against intruders. This you would deny to everyone just because a very few violent individuals misuse their firearms to hurt others. That's pretty stupid.

The point from the New England Journal of Medicine is that you are safer not owning a hand gun.

According to them. Of course they did not consider the confounding factor of what the actual result of people NOT being armed with handguns would be, nor did they address the much larger problem of women being bludgeoned, beaten or slashed to death by their violent domestic partner or how an unarmed woman is supposed to defend herself effectively against a bigger, stronger more violent attacker, whether that attacker is a partner or an intruder.

Which is what makes their conclusions utter, biased anti-gun bilge.

If you own one, your chances of being murdered increase 2 to 4 fold,

Horseshit. This study has been thoroughly debunk as the pseudo-science it actually is based on the biased sampling the NEJM engaged in. They only used a very small pool of data which not only focused almost exclusively on the ILLEGAL ownership of handguns in dense urban environments and it completely ignored the lawful ownership of handguns outside of a very small and carefully selected urban population among which domestic violence has a much higher incidence than in the population generally.

In other words, the NEMJ focused on urban black and minority communities where domestic violence occurs at a much higher rate than elsewhere, and they utterly failed to address whether or not the person who killed a) had a criminal history that prohibits them from owing guns in the first place (often a prior domestic violence charge); and b) whether the actual ownership of the handgun was lawful.

That's why the statistoid is crap.

and the odds of a member of your family committing suicide increase 2 to 10 fold, depending on how securely the gun is stored.

That merely militates for more effective education in firearms safety, not a general ban on handguns.

[Seth]

Fakuname

You have focussed on the wrong point. Yes, if you are a gun owner and get shot, it is likely to be with your own gun. However, the important point, as shown in NEJM, is that a person who owns a hand gun is 2 to 4 times more likely to be murdered than a person who does not own a hand gun.

This makes the idea of buying a hand gun for self defense quite ridiculous. It is like buying an air bag for your car that contains a hand grenade, so that it kills instead of saves.

To play devil's advocate here, maybe actually owning the gun is not the causal factor. Maybe folks in the US who live in dangerous localities are more likely to buy a gun, in an attempt to protect themselves. Simply living in the dangerous area is the causal factor in their higher likelihood to be murdered, and the gun owning is simply a correlate.

A better test would be to compare people with or without owned guns, all from the same locale. If Seth is right, the gun owners will have a statistically reduced risk of being murdered (even if it is still higher than the national average) because, at least on some occasions, they do successfully defend themselves.

Yup. It's called "science."

And a positive result of such research would include persons owning guns merely having the SAME LEVEL of victimization as those who do not, so long as the companion murder rate did not INCREASE as a direct result of a person owning a handgun. That would provide a null hypothesis.

[JimC]

My "if" was a big "if"...

[Blind groper]

To Seth
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... _blog.html

This reference looks at the evidence from many studies into your thesis that more guns equals less crime. Final conclusion is that the more guns less crime conclusions cannot be concluded.

There is always a problem with this kind of issue, that has numerous studies by numerous authors. That problem is that if cause and effect are weak, then some studies will conlcude yes and some will conclude no. If the 'yeses and noes' are roughly equal, then the probability is that there is no relationship. That is the case here. Sadly, it does not stop people cherry picking studies and using them to push their own viewpoint, as we have seen Seth do.

On the other hand, those studies were looking at overall crime rates, not murder rates. There is no study I am aware of that was conducted within the USA that nails this one down, and that is a sad outcome from the general paranoia within the USA that prevents basic data to be collected, like which states have the highest gun ownership.

We are left with the observations that the USA has the highest hand gun ownership, the highest murder rate, and 50% of all murders done with hand guns. The conclusion is obvious.

I would also like to say to Seth that the fact that murder rates are influenced by more than one factor does not prevent hand gun ownership being a very major influence. I have not, at any stage, agreed that guns are not a factor in the ludicrously high American murder rate. Just that there are a few other factors also. These other factors are the reason for the small reduction in murder rates (which occur all over the world) in spite of the fact that hand gun ownership stays high.

[Seth]

To Seth
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... _blog.html

This reference looks at the evidence from many studies into your thesis that more guns equals less crime. Final conclusion is that the more guns less crime conclusions cannot be concluded.

Not really. The article quotes the authors of the study who say in essence that it's inconclusive (in their opinion) whether or not the enactment of concealed carry liberalization laws is the direct cause of drops in violent crime rates, which they ADMIT occur. They don't say that either crime or accidental shootings go UP after the passage of such laws, nor do they state that the enactment of such laws IS NOT a causal factor, they merely inject skepticism.

No link between right-to-carry laws and changes in crime is apparent in the raw data, even in the initial sample; it is only once numerous covariates are included that the negative results in the early data emerge. While the trend models show a reduction in the crime growth rate following the adoption of right-to-carry laws, these trend reductions occur long after law adoption, casting serious doubt on the proposition that the trend models estimated in the literature reflect effects of the law change. Finally, some of the point estimates are imprecise. Thus, the committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.

Note the phrase "cast serious doubt" related to the timing of the law versus the decline in crime. They don't say that the decline does not happen, merely that they are skeptical about the actual effect and timing. Of course what they DON'T say is that it's perfectly obvious that the effect on crime will be delayed because it takes some time for the populace to take advantage of the new authority to be armed, and it takes time for the criminal element to be convinced that the danger to their persons outweighs their desire to victimize people.

In other words, the study is just so much political bullshit from a bunch of people who wanted to debunk Lott but could not actually do so by finding a "smoking gun" connection between the decreases in crime and the increases in the number of concealed weapons licensees. So they punted the whole thing by being vague and imprecise.

More pseudo-science.

There is always a problem with this kind of issue, that has numerous studies by numerous authors. That problem is that if cause and effect are weak, then some studies will conlcude yes and some will conclude no. If the 'yeses and noes' are roughly equal, then the probability is that there is no relationship. That is the case here. Sadly, it does not stop people cherry picking studies and using them to push their own viewpoint, as we have seen Seth do.

On the other hand, those studies were looking at overall crime rates, not murder rates. There is no study I am aware of that was conducted within the USA that nails this one down, and that is a sad outcome from the general paranoia within the USA that prevents basic data to be collected, like which states have the highest gun ownership.

We are left with the observations that the USA has the highest hand gun ownership, the highest murder rate, and 50% of all murders done with hand guns. The conclusion is obvious.

No, it's not, which is why your arguments are fallacious. One might look internally at the US for evidence and observe that where handguns are the most strictly controlled and/or banned entirely (Chicago) the violent crime rate is astronomically higher than it is in jurisdictions (Texas, Florida and 39 other states) where concealed carry is lawful. Even if we concede arguendo that the presence of handguns lawfully carried does not reduce crime (though it does) we see that it does not INCREASE either the crime rate or the rate of gun accidents.

I would also like to say to Seth that the fact that murder rates are influenced by more than one factor does not prevent hand gun ownership being a very major influence.

True, but neither does it prove that hand gun ownership by law-abiding citizens IS a causative factor in criminal victimization. And if it's not, then there is no reason to ban handguns. And guess what? It's not. QED.

I have not, at any stage, agreed that guns are not a factor in the ludicrously high American murder rate. Just that there are a few other factors also. These other factors are the reason for the small reduction in murder rates (which occur all over the world) in spite of the fact that hand gun ownership stays high.

Huh? You just torpedoed your argument again. If murder rates are unconnected to handgun ownership then how does your argument that handguns need to be banned stand?

[Blind groper]

Seth

There is absolutely zero science in your assertion than more guns means less crime. The data suggests that changes in gun ownership do not affect crime rates other than murder. Murder is another matter. More guns, but especially more hand guns, means more murders. Half of all murders in the USA are carried out with hand guns. Without those hand guns, and 8,000 human lives each year would be saved. The statistics clearly show that higher hand gun ownership means more murders. Even just owning a hand gun makes you more prone to being murdered.

Murder rates world wide are dropping. Get this into your thick skull. Those murder rates dropping have nothing to do with any increase in gun ownership. It is a global phenomenon, and happens all round the world regardless of whether gun ownership is growing or falling. Other factors are at work.

However, the widespread ownership of hand guns in the USA is still the main factor causing the disgusting high level of murders in the USA. No other OECD nation has anything approaching the very high per capita murder rate that you get in America, for the simple reason that no other OECD country has the same number of hand guns. Since half of all murders in the USA are with hand guns, it is bloody obvious that hand gun ownership is a massive factor.