Profile much?
I thought that it was :rolleyes: that needed improvement.
The First Aid analogy doesn’t really work though, unless you’re envisioning just holding the criminals at gunpoint until the police arrive. Active medical treatment is a better comparison to self-defense, both in that you are taking on the role of the professionals and in that the potential to make the situation worse increases dramatically the less training and the worse judgment you have.
So, why do cops carry guns?
They don’t even need exposure to crime. They have just been conditioned to be afraid and overblow the risks associated with guns. Many gun owners I know (here in Northern Virginia) used to be in this category but have become comfortable around guns after a few trips to the gun range. I don’t know if the involuntary reflexive fear of guns ever entirely disappears but they can eventually become more rational and less emotional about guns.
But it wouldn’t stay at that level. Once we started putting people in jail, people would stop trying in such large numbers.
I think the study you are linking to says that the incidence of murder is twice as high among gun owners. The murder is not necessarily by gunshot.
This correlation does not prove causation. Similar studies have shown that the risk of being murdered are much more correlated with things like being single, renting your home, and drug use. Do we really think that being single is what causes the increased murder rate. Of course not. Isn’t it possible (or even likely) that the causation is reversed or that the same factors are causing both things? i.e. perhaps higher rates of gun ownership is caused by higher perceived risk of death by the decedent.
Or we could read the studies more closely and stop trying to place burden after burden on gun ownership and then wonder why gun owners don’t trust gun control folks.
This is truly a stupid suggestion. Can we place a special tax on women to house all the rapists in prison? How about we just put people who break the fucking law in prison?
That’s just crazy talk!
Are our crime rates really higher than the rest of the world? If we eliminated drug possession, wouldn’t our crime rates be pretty normal? Wouldn’t our incarceration rates be pretty normal?
So you are proposing even more laws that you don’t want to enforce to fix a problem for which the law is ill suited to solve?
I mean for fuck’s sake! Some of you are proposing sending people to jail for 3 to 5 years for a crime committed with a gun that some criminal stole from them but you don’t want to send a convicted felon to jail for trying to buy a gun.
What sort of warnings do you propose would prevent (or reduce) intentional shootings?
About 2 children are killed unintentionally by firearm every week (~100/year) half of them are in high school.
There are about 100 kids a month are shot to death every month. 90% of them are teenagers, many of them are in youth gangs.
I don’t know what you think these warnings would do. The majority of gun murders are committed by criminals, minors and wifebeaters. The incidence of some gun owner just having a bad day are relatively small in comparison. The incidence of concealed weapons carriers committing murder is tiny.
Its still illegal for prohibited persons to buy a gun. Felons still can’t buy guns but the seller has no way of knowing that they are selling to a felon unless they go through a gun dealer.
Personally I don’t mind licensing and registration, its about the only way that universal background checks can work. I understand that gun control folks will never be satisfied until we ban guns entirely (that’s why they keep bringing up Australia as a shining example) but I trust our democratic process enough to believe that they will never be able to ban guns and the federal government will never confiscate guns until this country has changed so much that confiscation would hardly be necessary anymore.
Classic! Keep this gem in mind, folks, as we dig into this turd of a post. What Damuri Ajashi means here is that we should read gun blogs so we can get our talking points about how to handwave away studies.
Remember how he says we should read studies more closely? Well, he first said this:
It doesn’t take any more close reading than reading the abstract of the paper to see this:
This is a facile handwave. No study proves correlation. That doesn’t mean that we reject all science, unless we’re engaged in motivated reasoning and unless gun blogs tell us we should say that “Correlation does not prove causation!” Another popular one is “Even the authors identify limitations in the study!” Gun blog talking points 101.
These studies include measures of covariates to control for the other factors that are associated with homicides and suicides. (Imagine exactly what the gun blogs would tell Damuri to say if they didn’t control for any covariates!) The risk of homicide are doubled when a gun is in the home OVER AND ABOVE the effect of these covariates. Pointing at the covariates that scientists have included as controls in their model as if that undoes the effect associated with guns in the home is ignorant. Another facile handwave.
So, we can’t say that causation runs in the direction of the effects identified in the studies, but we CAN say that “reverse causation” is present? Handwave, handwave, handwave.
We could imagine anything we want, but then we’re not “reading the studies closely.” We’re reading right through the paper itself to the fantasy explanations beyond them that the gun blogs are telling us must be there.
That probably works because so few long guns are used in crime but if a long gun is used in crime and they really wanted to enforce the law against anyone that sold the gun without a background check, how would they know that each person in the chain of title between the FFL and the criminal had conducted a background check? How can they figure out who first sold the gun without a background check if there is no registration requirement? if they are simply keeping all the background checks organized by serial number and the person whose back ground was checked, it seems like you’ve got a registry right there.
Here is a little background on the Gun Control Act of 1968 in an article written by a member of LBJ’s white house staff. The GCA is meaningful legislation but it was the consolation prize for the gun control lobby after they shot themselves in the foot by doing stupid things.
Long story short, in the wake of the LBJ/MLK assassinations, LBJ tried to pass licensing and registration. LBJ was not ignorant about guns nor was he a wishful thinker. He tried to get licensing and registration passed during the window of opportunity created by the national tragedy of two political assassinations so close together. Unfortunately for LBJ, an ignorant senator from Connecticut stalled then process in order to try and pass a gun ban and by the time they were able to get something to the floor for a vote, all they had left was the Gun Control Act of 1968 which only placed restrictions on sales by FFLs.
Sure you can blame the NRA for the failure of licensing and registration but its not really their job to cooperate with the gun control side to pass gun control legislation. The gun control side had the opportunity to pass universal background checks but shot themselves in the foot by trying to ban guns. Its pretty much what happened after Sandy Hook. We probably could have had universal background checks (and eventual licensing and registration) in the immediate aftermath but the relentless retarded march towards a meaningless, ineffective, assault weapons ban stalled the process long enough that they couldn’t even get fig leaf legislation past the senate.
I don’t think the study even says that.
And yet it still happens:
We know where almost all guns used in crime comes from. They are sold (legally) from about 1% of all gun shops and somehow find their way into the hands of criminals.
It was a consolation prize after the gun control side shot themselves in the foot going for gun bans rather than licensing and registration (the method preferred by LBJ).
See, we have universal background checks in CA. We also have licensing and registration of all firearms (except interfamilial and C&R in some cases). And what happens next? You would think that this meets the goal of gun control advocates right? Nope.
Now the current Lt. Governor and potential 2018 candidate Gavin Newsom is proposing through ballot initiative to ban or confiscate all standard capacity magazines in the state, and implement background checks for ammunition purchases.
Another reason why gun rights supporters should never ever compromise on guns. No matter what there will always be a push towards gun control until there is a complete ban, and probably continue after that. “Common sense” is a thin fig leaf for banning.
Its mostly straw purchasers from gun dealers followed by guns purchased from criminals who steal guns from gun owners. Private sales really are not the problem. the problem is straw purchasers (and perhaps a gun storage issue).
Licensing and registration would make straw purchasing an uncommon event.
Fortunately licensing and registration addresses both those issues.
cite?
AFAICT all we have so far is correlation between gun ownership and getting murdered. If we recognize that most people who are shot to death are engaged in criminal activity or have been in the past perhaps the gun ownership is not the cause of the death but the risk of death is the cause of the gun ownership.
As for incarceration rates…Oh my word no. Not even close.
The USA currently has about 5 times the incarceration rate of the UK. Drug offences make up about 20% of that number so even if you locked up no drug offenders at all you’d have about 4 times the rate of the UK.
But of course you’d have to then take into account the 15% of the UK prison population due to drug offences (because you can’t just ask for that to be removed from the USA figures) which takes you back to almost the previous ratio.
And be aware that the UK incarceration figure is pretty much the highest in Europe.
So no, even without drug incarcerations your prison population is laughably large.
If you want to compare crime rates across countries you really need to specify which crimes you are bothered about. You’d be best to choose categories that are directly comparable.
America has more guns than most other industrialized nations by several orders of magnitude. If guns were a driving facilitator for suicides, you might expect the suicide rate in America to eclipse the suicide rate in of other industrialized nations but the fact of the matter is that the US suicide rate is dead fucking average for industrialized nations.
I am sure that there are some cases at the margins where a suicide would have been prevented in the absence of a gun but it turns out that jumping off a building is a really good substitute for shooting yourself in the mouth. And while suicides are frequently driven by temporary mental states (and a lot of times they are not), the “Impulse” characterization makes it seem like suicides are the result of spur of the moment impulses that will pass after a few minutes. These “impulses” frequently last long enough for people to write suicide notes, drive to a bridge and jump off.
Once again the US suicide rate is dead fucking average among industrialized nations.
I’m going to guess that you are going to take issue with whatever cite is provided. We need better studies in this area.
How is that well poisoning? I personally don’t believe in letting potential bad legislation stand in the way of good legislation but I have to recognize that the concerns of gun rights folks who don’t trust gun control folks is well justified by the behavior of gun control folks in the past. The gun control folks may even believe they are telling the truth when they say that all we need is law A, B and C; but they are ultimately rarely satisfied with the result of their “common sense gun legislation” and then try to pass more “common sense gun legislation”. That’s just the history of gun control.