Wow. Logic, research, and citations in a Pit posting. My hat’s off to you, MsRobyn.
I’d given up on this thread having said my piece, but since this is spefiically addressed to me:
No one thinks having a gun will prevent you from being harmed. The irony of the thwarted expectation variety seems to rely on this assumption. Having a gun gives you more options than you’d have if you didn’t. There are situations in which it indeed would protect you. However, it does not make you immune to harm. There’s no expectation that if you own or carry guns, you are now immortal.
You are also lumping in this woman and her husband into one entity. He could’ve owned the gun he used to kill her even if she were anti-gun and wouldn’t touch them. Her carrying of her gun also does not necesarily affect his views on gun ownership or him owning a gun.
You’re essentially trying to make it sound like the woman was shot with her own gun, and that if she didn’t have her own gun to protect herself, she would’ve been unharmed. That would indeed have been ironic.
But this relies on two faulty assumptions: first, that her ownership and carrying of guns was a necesary part in her husbands access to guns. There’s no reason to assume that the husband did not use his own gun to kill her, which he may have owned regardless of her stance on the issue. And the other assumption is that the only reason she came to harm was because of the presence of guns, as if her husband wouldn’t have killed her with some other method if the guns weren’t available.
I am not failing to understand what irony is. I’m even pointing out what would indeed be ironic. The fault here is that those who find this ironic are making flawed unstated assumptions that lead them to conclude that that the situation is the one I mentioned when it was not.
Thanks, Wombat!
Well, that’s not strictly true; every state has provisions for involuntary psychiatric examination and/or inpatient care. A spouse would certainly be empowered to seek same.
Of course, I would find it difficult to imagine a situation in which I would request involuntary examination of my soon-to-be-spouse that didn’t involve suicide ideations, and I imagine a lot of people would find it difficult to do so even if their spouse did talk about suicide.
What about your promise to return to the thread to address your unsubstantiated and untrue claims about the Kellermann article, or how you intend to handwave away the other articles that come to the same conclusion (that is to say that those with a firearm in the home are at greater risk to die due to violent crime or due to suicide than those without?
I’ve been looking forward to your post, and I am disappointed that you intend to leave your promise unfulfilled.
That’s not the difference.
I know that you know guns don’t make you immortal. The difference in our beliefs is that you think a gun makes a well-trained person safer than not having a gun. I think you’re kidding yourself.
If I had a hammer simply to increase my personal safety that’d be stupid. If I had a car for the purpose of increasing my personal safety that’d be stupid.
If a person wants a gun to go target shooting or hunting, OK, calculated risk. If the person has it for protection they’re deluded.
So, to clarify, in the US system what access to (mental) healthcare assistance do the 57 million without insurance have - I don’t mean long-term straight jacket issues but temporary depression/anxiety/stress style problems?
It just seems possible ready access to guns and little access to mental healthcare help don’t seem conducive. All those massacres, for example . . .
Low income people have access to healthcare via county-administered community health programs. This includes access to mental health providers, though the availability and quality depends widely on the county and state. These are the poorest of the poor- people who work for labor pools, mow lawns for $25 a day under the table, or have no work at all.
Lower-middle income people may have more difficulty, since they generally won’t qualify for the low-income programs and may or may not have employer-provided health insurance.
However, since this guy was a state employee, he (and his family, if he elected it) would have had access to pretty good healthcare through his employer-provided plan.
How about a course of anti-depressants for someone who’s had a bad few months?
Oh okay, I guess it would be the same kind of thing.
Would have cost him $5-15 a month under most health plans. I’m not sure if peace officers are required to report mental health treatment, though- might have been a problem vis-a-vis continuing to fulfil his job requirements.
It seems like an area of interest; easy availability of guns combined with a healthcare system that has barriers to treatment for those who develop short-term mental health issues.
Because other countries tend to do things the other way around it’s interesting to note.
Other countries don’t have the same tradition of gun ownership that the United States does. It’s also a highly charged issue politically, and there are a lot of people on all sides of the issue, and there are a lot of misconceptions and misinterpretations out there about counseling vis a vis gun ownership rights. I’ve heard a good bit from the pro-gun side, and many seem to think that any counseling for any reason is enough to classify you as a head case, and therefore may cause you to lose your guns. (Yes, I’ve heard some very vitriolic language used, but to be fair, it’s coming from both the pro-gun and anti-gun sides.)
Your second point, about short-term medication, also doesn’t work. Medications need time to work and often require adjustments to find the optimal dose and optimal drug(s). These drugs can also be very expensive, which is a hurdle for people who have no drug coverage.
Unless I’ve missed it, your only citation was “the Kellermann article”, and a further list of “Wiebe 2003, Dahlberg et al 2004 and Cummings et al., 1997.” Those aren’t really proper citations I want to spend time looking up; especially as Kellermann has written several studies IIRC and we want to make sure we’re on the same page here. If you want to refer to a specific paper or finding for discussion, please provide the citation in CMS or MLA format so I can find it, or else a link to the full-text article (no abstracts), and I’ll give you my opinion on it.
Other than addressing factual points, I will not get involved in a moral debate in the Pit over my right to carry or use my weapon(s) to defend myself and my loved ones from harm.
I only referenced “analyses” that have been done. I’ve given the full cites and quoted abstracts in the past. It’s not worth taking the time to do so again because I know how they will be regarded, and I don’t want to fall prey to Hentor the Barbarian’s Law of Post Composition.
However, please note that it was Senor Beef who specifically called out the Kellermann study twice, prior to anyone else bringing it up, and made specific and outrageous claims about its methodology. I’m quite sure he could be expected to explain and defend his claims. If and when he returned, I would have expanded by providing the citations.
Do you now properly follow the above? Would you honestly like to look at the references?
Nor will I engage in a moral debate about my having a car to reduce the chances of my family dying in a car accident.
Did you even read what I posted? I didn’t say that she thought she was, as you keep saying, “immortal”–I said she thought that guns made her safer. Do you argue with that? Do you think that she thought guns would make her and her family **less **safe? :rolleyes: Really, isn’t that the biggest argument for gun ownership, especially concealed carry: that it makes us safer?
And then it wouldn’t be ironic. They’re combined here because presumably they shared the same attitudes about gun ownership and use.
**This particular combination **of circumstances is ironic. This one. We’re not talking about a car owner getting struck by a car, nor an anti-gun woman being shot by her pro-gun husband, nor any other different scenario you can envision. Stop bringing up irrelevant hypotheticals.
Yes, you are.
By the way, I see that right now, Senor Beef is still online. I hope that he is taking this time to compose his post either backing up his earlier claims or withdrawing them.
I tend to divide the spousal murderers into two basic groups – the deeply disturbed ones who will stalk their estranged spouse and sooner or later kill him/her, and the ones who do not have an ongoing desire to kill their spouse but instead simply have an anger management or depression problem leading to a moment in which they go over the edge and kill him/her.
I don’t know if anything will stop a deeply disturbed stalker with murder on his/her mind, short of the spouse moving and changing name.
For the people with anger management or depression problems who periodically go over the edge, keeping them away from guns is very helpful, for when they do go over the edge, the easy availability of a gun to them may be the difference between whether their spouse lives or dies.
When it gets to high conflict separations where there are credible allegations of violence, I’m a big fan of (a) get the parties living in separate accommodations (often with the abused in a secret location), (b) prohibit access to guns by the abuser, © prohibit direct communication between the parties, (d) encourage the abuser to seek counselling and/or treatment, and (e) put an emergency plan in place for the abused spouse.
Unfortunately, sometimes it can be very difficult to sort out which party is the abuser, for often false allegations are made, either where there is no abuse, or where the abuser is making the allegations. Want to win a child custody dispute? Have your spouse thrown in jail for allegedly abusing you, get an emergency order for custody while he or she is trying to get out of jail, then put the brakes on the custody case until the spouse’s criminal case is completed after many months, and finally win the custody case based on the status quo of the child having been with you all these many months. That’s how some unethical parents play the custody game. It muddies the water when trying to identify which party is abusing the other (or if both are abusing each other), and when trying to put together a safe course of action.
Even more unfortunately, often an abused spouse does not report abuse, or repeatedly returns to the relationship with the abuser. Often part of being abused by a spouse includes the abused spouse developing a mindset that excuses or tolerates the abuse. Breaking this mindset can be hard to do without external support, and even then, some abused spouses never break this mindset.
Then there are the ones who like to chew on each other’s shins, where each spouse abuses the other, either psychologically or physically or both, each fanning the flames of abuse, and neither being willing or psychologically able to step away from the fire.
Trying to sift through all this shit takes time, and there is no guarantee of either being able to come to a correct decision and, or of the abused person being able to follow through in carrying out an appropriate plan. That’s where the simple steps of restraining a person from directly contacting his or her spouse, and restraining a person from accessing firearms, can go a long way to protecting a spouse in the early innings of a high conflict separation. It may not be fair, but it is somewhat effective , for when a person flips out on his or her spouse, that person will use whatever is at hand – a fork, a rifle, whatever. Guns are particularly dangerous in domestic disputes, for they are quick to use, they are easy to use, and they are designed to kill. If one or both of the separating spouses are emotionally unstable, or have a history of abuse, or if there is an allegation of abuse, I think that it is best to keep the spouses apart from each other and from guns, until such a time as things have cooled down and the issues have been sorted through.
OK, well, if you don’t want to provide them then I suppose in the future if we have a discussion in GQ or GD we can go into further detail on that subject. I guess I’m a bit busy today anyhow to give your arguments due diligence and respect, so there’s no point wasting time on me.
That’s good, I guess? 
My point was I would have liked to discuss facts only, not feelings.
This seems like a timely story pertinent to the discussion at hand.