And of course, even with this new massacre in California, the pro-gun crowd will probably keep cherry-picking their data to show guns don’t kill people.
Guns nor flags. Crazy people with guns, knives, hammers, rope, cars, et do the killing.
That’s right, I’m sure someone with a hammer or rope would have caused just this much mayhem. Hey, then why not legalize bazookas or even nuclear weapons?
Then the good guys don’t need guns, all they need is a hammer or a rope
You think an old man or an old woman living alone ought to rely on their own fighting ability of the response time of a cop in the case of an armed home invasion? It’s an unfortunate fact that a weapon that can be used for self defense can be used for criminal behavior. But as long as humans are human there won’t be an elimination of predatory or antisocial behaviors. So the question is what trade offs are acceptable to a majority of voters?
Oh, if only there could be some examples of Western industrialized countries that function without gun nuts. If only any existed.
This shooting doesn’t really fit the mold of the type of shooting you gun control advocates typically love to politicize. According to yahoo(4th bullet point) they were carrying assault rifles.
Assault rifles? Oh, well, that’s different; we only like to politicize assault rifles.
If only there were a few more gun nuts in 30’s USSR, 40’s Germany or Poland or 50’s China.
Yes, it was either a few more gun nuts or the combined forces of the allies on one front and the Russians on the other.
Gun nuts have superpowers, don’t you know. They’re like a Justice League taking out bad guys everywhere. Come save us, gun nuts!
Here is a visual aid that shows the US color coded by gun prevalence and suicide rates. Isn’t it fair to say that culture has a LOT more to do with suicide rates than the availability of one method of suicide over another? I mean, when you look at who has the lowest suicide rates, they tend to be places where suicide is frowned upon (places with lot of practicing Catholics) or Mediterranean states (not really sure why the Mediterranean makes would discourage suicide but there aren’t a lot of high suicide rate mediteranean countries)
There might be other things that these western, sparsely populated states have in common. I mean, why is the suicide rate in Maine so much higher than the suicide rate in Massachusetts despite almost identical gun ownership rates? Why is Oregon and Nevada’s suicide rate so high when it has a below average rate of gun ownership?
These are relatively sparsely populated states and the suicide rate in states of 600,000 people does explain away why a nation of 300 million that is awash in guns still has a very mediocre suicide rate. If the link you wanted to show were actually there then you would see higher suicide rates in every state with especially high suicide rates in those states with especially high gun ownership.
Maybe there is something to what you say but its not as conclusive or obvious as you seem to think.
Furthermore, these internal differences kind of pale in comparison to the comparison of the US with other countries where gun ownership rates are negligible. If there really were the sort of causal link between the availability of guns and suicide that you claim, then every practically every state in America .would have elevated suicide rates. But they don’t.
So Japan’s suicide rate is attributable to culture. What about Korea?
Guns do not correlate very much with murder rates. You are conflating different concepts.
This is completely false. Guns are highly associated with murder rates. Not only is this reflected in the research we’ve been talking about in this thread, it’s supported by many other studies. As I posted in the other thread, here’s just a few examples:
Duggan, M. (2000). More guns, more crime (No. w7967). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Miller, M., Azrael, D., & Hemenway, D. (2002). Rates of household firearm ownership and homicide across US regions and states, 1988-1997. American journal of public health, 92(12), 1988-1993.
Monuteaux, M. C., Lee, L. K., Hemenway, D., Mannix, R., & Fleegler, E. W. (2015). Firearm ownership and violent crime in the US: an ecologic study.American journal of preventive medicine, 49(2), 207-214.
Additionally, the association between guns in the household and suicide is even stronger than for household homicides. The Anglemeyer meta-analysis demonstrated that across 16 studies, the odds ratio for suicide associated with guns in the house ranged from 1.38 to 10.38, with a pooled estimate of 3.24.
Anglemyer, A., Horvath, T., & Rutherford, G. (2014). The accessibility of firearms and risk for suicide and homicide victimization among household members: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of internal medicine, 160(2), 101-110.
I believe it’s easy to see how higher rates of gun ownership and gun violence in a population conflates to higher levels of excitability and irrationality among non-owners of guns within the group.
Highly associated with murders? Not just gun murders.
The scatter charts don’t seem to show a “high” degree of correlation.
So where is this correlation between gun ownership in a state and overall murder rates in a state? Which of your cites backs that up because at least one of them does nothing of the sort and i suspect none of them do.
It is fair to say that suicidal ideation, and guns, are both public health crises in the US.
Re homicide prevention, I was quite impressed by this book which has nothing to do with gun control:
But I’m also impressed with the idea that when enough people in a society discourage gun ownership, it goes way down, and the number of tragedies fall. Public health measures and gradual changes in public opinion can do a lot, as I believe they have in one country I know a bit about, Taiwan.
You’re responding to statistical analyses with your sense of how scatter plots seem to look to you? Perfect fucking example of antiscience handwaving! Jesus. I see your empirical analyses and I counter with my gut feelings and sense of things!
I gave you cites. Fucking read them. Even the titles alone show that you’re wrong. What are you going to do when you se the text that proves it? I bet you will just run away again rather than acknowledge that your sense is just wrong.
Once upon a time owning guns was not only considered ok, it was seen as a positive virtue. And it isn’t that people then weren’t aware of drunken saloon murders, accidental shootings of/by children or even the occasional murder spree; I could give you cites of all of those in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Today, many (though obviously not all) people see guns as a scourge and owning guns as a near-useless anachronism that ought to be banned. My question is, what changed? Were entire previous generations wrong and today’s gun-control advocates right, or vice-versa?
Can you point to a year in the 19th or early to mid 20th century that had a mass shooting more than once a day?
It’s ludicrous to suggest that past levels of gun violence were consistent with today.
Wait, are you under the impression that, once upon a time, we had less gun control than we do now? The 19th century had outright gun bans within city limits; no guns allowed at all. Not much of a virtue.
Those were local laws and varied by municipality. Tombstone AZ famously had a ban on carrying weapons within the city limits, but that law was strictly a Tomstone law. It didn’t apply across the whole territory. To the best of my knowledge, the feds and states didn’t care what you had.