This is a whole new discussion that would have been lost at the end of Joe Bloggs and guns.
I’ll start with Jab’s post, which is a condemnation of the right to bear arms based on a recent tradgedy.
Here is my response:
I do not want to change my position. Politicians doing the “blood dance” do not sway my mind at all. Media propaganda has little or no effect on my position.
Yes, if that little kid had not had a gun then the shooting would not have occurred. Of course if he didn’t live in a crack house the shooting would not have occured either. If his father was not in jail on breaking and entering charges this murder might not have occured either. If someone had not stolen this gun this murder would not have happened. If this child had even one responsible law abiding adult in his life this would not have happened.
So what do you want to do? Punish law abiding citizens for the actions of a criminal.
Of course you are led by the hand to skip over anyone actually taking any responsibility for their actions, and led to the PC conclusion of blaming the gun.
What law would have prevented this tragedy? This was a 6 year old in a crack house surrounded by stolen guns. In retrospect, all laws seem fairly useless in this house. Surely you don’t think trigger locks and 5 day waiting periods would have helped prevent this murder?
Assuming for ONE SECOND that this is right, add up all the innocent deaths you can attribute to the Second Amendment, and then compare that to the 100 million innocent murders in the 1900’s you can attribute to governments that disarmed their population.
Ok, stop that assumption. It makes no sense. There is not one person here who has advocated guns for crack dealers. No one here advocates stealing guns.
If this is anything, it is an arguement for more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens. This is a perfect example of how criminals will find guns. They will break into houses where YOU live. The criminals will NOT disarm. EVER.
You will happily hold up Kayla as a sacrifice to be laid at my feet, but you will never acknowledge any life saved by a firearm.
You will never acknowledge a woman who is not raped because she is armed.
You will never acknowledge a robber who is stopped by a law abiding person who is armed.
I have never promised that I could prevent every death in America. I have never advocated conditioning our children to be afraid and accept a police state atmosphere from kindergarten. I have only said that the absence of an armed law abiding population would lead to tyranny and even more death.
Freedom is not free. The alternative is even worse.
At first glance I have as much faith in these numbers as the 13 dead children a day number. Since this statistic is being thrown around by the same people, I have no doubt that it is skewed.
Refute what? Even if this is a real statistic, this is contrary to nothing I have ever claimed. The only thing you may be confused with is my assertion that violent crime drops in states that pass “shall issue” concealed permit laws. This is a fact.
I agree that it is a hard equation, but how many people would you have killed by criminals, how many people would you have raped, how many people would you turn into defenseless victims in order to save an unknown amount of accidental deaths?
It is not an equation with saving lives on one side and just giving up guns on the other. It is preventing accidental gun deaths (900 in '97)on one side increasing victims of violent crimes on the other.
Hmmm…
I’m having trouble pegging you on this one. I am tempted to call you elitist. I am tempted to assume that you live in a safe neihborhood with a short police response time. I am tempted to think that you do not live alone. I am tempted to to assume that you think it is OK for IMPORTANT PEOPLE to hire armed bodygaurds while the rest of us ordinary regular people just take our own risks.
I will skip all that because your particular situation just does not matter. This blanket type statement is as crazy as those who would eliminate all abortion, even rape and incest victims.
Are you really trying to say that a 105lb. woman who has already been raped and now lives alone is a coward because she wants to be armed?
Do you really feel that a single mother who lives in a community that is having a recent spate of break-ins during the night is a coward because she wants to be armed?
Do you really think that a man who lives in the country with his family is a coward for having a gun, even though the police are 15-20 minutes away?
What I really think, is that you are reacting exactly as planned. The media is controlling your puppet strings like an expert. You have seen something that has been finetuned to hit all your hot buttons and get you motivated.
You will never stop to ask if any of the laws being proposed would have made a difference in preventing this tragdedy.
You will never stop to wonder why you NEVER hear about people who use guns to defend themselves from criminals even though this happens around a million times a year.
You will only rush off to join the politicians and dance in the blood of the innocent victims without ever really trying to find out what really went wrong here. You will clamor for new gun laws that would have had no effect here. You will refuse to use the gun laws on the books.
More unenforced gun laws will do nothing to save lives.
Well I do not believe in 6 year olds having guns. But the gun was stolen and was being hidden underneath a pillow in the same house as the boy. Unless we allow no guns whatsoever, then there is no law that will stop stolen guns (since they are already illegal). The boy had also been in trouble before at school and had even stabbed a student with a pencil already. Should he have been put with regular students? It seems he was a ticking time bomb and this is when and how he exploded.
As to the part about homes with guns compared to those without. Well duh!! People with guns around are more likely to get killed by them. But there are other ways to do the job. A gun is an expedient way to kill others or oneself, but if suicide or murder is on ones mind, a knife will work too.
The following is copied from www.boortz.com.
So, outlawing guns is good? Not according to these stats.
The death of this girl was unfortunate, but this kid was going to kill someone in some manner sooner or later, gun or no gun.
Jeffery
While you were writing the OP, I was busy writing two more posts on that other thread. In all that time, I never checked back to the forum list. So I missed seeing this new topic till it was too late.
I can’t C&P on these Public Library computers, they disabled that function because, I guess, the fewer functions a computer has, the fewer things there are to go wrong and it will be out of order less often? 
What I’m saying is, some of your objections to my rant are answered on that other thread, but I can’t quote them here without re-typing all of it.
I do have some thoughts on Jeffrey’s post, but I have to think about it. See you on this thread tomorrow, though you may see me on other threads the rest of this day.
><DARWIN>
_L___L
This does NOT mean that there is a cause and effect relationship! This is the most common abuse of statistics- mistaking a correlation with causation. Just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean one causes the other. This is especially true with something a general as “owning a gun”, since there are so many reasons for having one, and so many types of guns.
Arjuna34
I don’t think Kayla was so much a victim of the Second Amendment as I think she was an indirect victim in the War on Drugs, which another poster here has commented has manny American casualties.
I used to be vehemently anti-drugs, and I’ve never used illegal, recreational drugs (yeah yeah, I know, even if I did go to Berkeley). I’ve come more and more to the conclusion that we should de-criminalize drugs. I still am not going to be pro-drug, but I think that we need to eliminate the obscene profit that illegal drugs generate, and take away the motive to protect one’s drug trafficking by violence. I have been half-heartedly there for a long time, but this death has pushed me a lot farther along in that direction.
I don’t have much time to post right now, but I have more thoughts on this topic which I will post later. I think we need to take a long, hard look at what the War on Drugs is doing to this country.
Later!
-Melin
Who is NOT Straight Dope Staff
Siamese attack puppet – California
I’ll wager I know where jab got his numbers…the Kellerman article. If you want to look it up, the reference information is:
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home, Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH; et al, The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 329, No. 15, October 7, 1993, pp. 1084-1091.
This article is often cited by Cease Fire and other anti-gun propagandists. The alleged gist: a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used against the homeowner than against an attacker. The study looked at 398 domestic shooting deaths.
The study was flawed on many levels. First, the number includes suicides. If you’re not already suicidal, owning a gun will not make you more suicidal. In Japan, where gun ownership is virtually non-existent, the suicide rate is much higher than in the US (around 17 per 100,000 population versus 12 per 100,000), despite the fact that guns aren’t generally available. Removing the suicides from the study reduces the ratio from 43:1 to less than 3:1.
Many of the remaining killings were actually defensive; wives used the gun to defend themselves against their abusive husbands. Since the male was usually the gun owner, these were counted as “against yourself”. If you’re not a wife-beater, you don’t have to worry about this. Ratio moves down even farther.
The numbers also fail to take into account occasions on which the gun was drawn but not used, and disregards occasions on which a gun was used but didn’t kill; Kellerman just counted bodies. Taking those uses into acocunt, the ratio swings greatly in favor of firearm ownership.
A good article and more links to suggested reading: http://www.mackido.com/Politics/GunControl.html Of special note: University of Chicago study that demonstrated that, counting murders, robberies, rapes, and assaults prevented by defensive gun uses, the annual societal benefit for each concealed carry permit is around $5000.
Freedom,
Of course, only the first of these propositions is unquestionably true: if you do not have a gun, you can not shoot anybody.
Not living in a crack house, not having a father who is in jail, not having a stolen gun and having a responsible, law-abiding adult in one’s life are not insurmountable obstacles to shooting somebody.
Arjuna34,
So what other than a statistically significant correlation, does establish a cause and effect relationship? If a correlation isn’t good enough, then all the statistical arguments, on both sides, fall.
MaxTorque,
As it should do. A suicide is just as dead as somebody who is murdered. The point is that the gun owners who decide to kill themselves do so. The others attempt some less efficient method and a proportion of them live to regret it.
FWIW, prospective clinical trials in which mortality is a measured outcome include mortality from all causes, not just the disease which is being studied. By your standard, a new medicine which cured, for the sake of example, stomach cancer, but caused suicidal depression in the people who took it would be considered perfectly safe.
The same goes for your argument about “defensive” killings.
Check out Japan’s suicide rate. They have less guns, and less people, but a huge suicide rate. Suicide deaths do not belong in a discussion about sane lawabiding people owning guns.
I don’t want to sound to harsh, but I do not plan to live my life in a “suicide safe” enviroment just becasue some people want to die. After we get rid of guns we can knock down all the bridges, put up fences around all cliffs, put lifegaurds every 100 feet around water, make sure nobody is ever alone, confiscate all razor blades and knives, only dispense pills from the pharmisist directly into people’s mouths, etc…etc…etc…
I am not willing to give up ANY of my freedom because someone else can not handle it.
Suicide Article
Since we seem to be moving the thread here I respond here instead of on the other thread.
The death of this child is tragic. It pulls at the heartstrings, and solicts an emotional response. However, you want to know what else pulls at my heartstrings.
#1) A woman comes downstairs in her apartment building and seemingly buzzing an apartment in order to be let in the security door. Thinking nothing of it, she opens the door to leave. The man immediately attacks her and pulls out a knife. Although caught off guard she reacts quickly enough to reach into her coat pocket and fire her gun. She fires several shots, three of which strike the assailant killing him.
This assailant was looking for his fourth victim. He had done similar attacks on two women who survived, and one who didn’t. The earlier victims were forced back to their apartments. They were then tied spread-eagled on their beds and gagged with nylons or some other article of clothing. They were they raped, tortured and mutilated for three hours. This include have foreign objects stuck into their bodies, forced sex, and having their genitals slashed.
The third women apparently vomited with the nylon in her mouth and died.
Without her gun, the fourth women would have been just another victim.
#2) A recividist criminal breaks into a home with a 40 yr old couple inside. He has a knife, and immediately orders the man to sit in a kitchen chair, which he complies. He ties the man up while telling the wife if she moves he will kill her husband.
Once he is secure, he orders the woman to bring him some money. She goes upstairs and returns with a jar filled with coins and explains that is all the money they have. The criminal flips. He smashes the jar onto the head of her husband. He then picks up another chair and smashes him on the head until it breaks. Then he gets a cutting board and hits the man so hard that the cutting board breaks in two!
Finally, he turns on the women and slashes her with the knife repeatedly and then flees. When he is gone, she crawls to the phone and calls 911. She survives to suffer the nightmares of having seen he husband brutally murdered before her eyes.
#3) A woman has rented out part of her condo to a man. The man ultimately refuses to pay rent and is a general nuisance. The police can do nothing because he hasn’t broken the law, and all she is forced to get a legal eviction.
Hoping that she can simply reason with the man she goes to see him. Shortly into conversation he turns on her and rushes her threatening to kill her. Fortunately, this woman has taken a firearm self defense course, and keeps the distance between them long enough for her to fire and hit him twice. Although the bullets do not immediately stop him and he beats her badly, he weakens and dies.
#4) A woman is in a parking lot (crowded at that!) putting groceries in her trunk. A criminal comes up behind her and shoves her into the trunk. He then gets the keys from her purse and takes the car (nobody in the parking lot bothers to call it in! good grief). He drives out to a secluded area in the woods. He goes back to the trunk and opens it. To his surprise, she has her gun out that was in her jacket and shoots him as he opens the trunk. He was found to have been a serial rapist, responsible for raping several other women.
#5) A woman is getting into her car when a man grabs the door, rips it open and jumps in. As she scrambles to get out the other door, another man jumps. She fights back but ultimately is overpowered by the two men.
She is driven out to an abandoned cabin where she is raped and tortured for two days. Strangely, enough the two men leave her alive.
So, imagine we get rid of the 2nd amendment and instead make all firearms illegal except for police and military personnel. Let’s call it Amendment X, which states “Guns shall not be owned by the private citizen. Period.”
How quickly would you be claiming that these people above were sacrifices on the altar of Amendment X?
Guns are not the problem. The problem is the wrong people getting a hold of guns. Nail dealers who sell guns illegaly to the wall. Nail people who give guns to kids to the wall. Nail criminals who use guns in the commision of crime to the wall. But don’t take guns away from everybody. That is not the answer.
I agree with Glitch. Let’s say all guns are banned except as he said those of the police and military.
Now, will the criminals give up their guns? Will they register them? Of course not, their criminals.
Now, if these criminals know that the law abiding citizens are less likely to have guns (they have turned them all in) and the criminal knows they still have their gun, then they can with much greater boldness, go about commiting crimes with little fear of getting shot by their intended victim.
The guy in the stuff I quoted earlier, John Lott from the University of Chicago, has found that as many as 7,000 times a day someone uses a gun in self defense, usually without even having to fire the gun.
Those who want the guns gone, still rely on the fact that a criminal does not know whether or not you have a gun and is less likely to attempt a crime on someone that they believe may have a gun.
I am not saying guns are for everyone. But getting rid of guns is not the answer. We must punish those who use guns in crimes.
No matter what Bill Clinton says, a trigger lock would not have saved this girl. The gun was stolen, do you really think the guy that now owns the gun would have a trigger lock on it? Only law abiding citizens obey the laws, and law abiding citizens then inherently do not use their legal guns to commit crimes.
Also, I believe I agree with Melin that the war on drugs is not working and that the illegality of it drives up the prices and therefore causes more theft, murder, and other crimes.
Jeffery
Freedom,
Suicide rates per se have nothing to do with it. The point is that the evidence purports to show (I haven’t read it) that gun ownership is a mortality risk. Suicide is one of the forms in which that mortality is expressed. You can’t then pick and choose the kinds of mortality you want included as outcomes.
I’m not making a point about guns, here. I’m making a point about scientific method. The inclusion of suicides in the data was correct if mortality was the outcome being measured.
Many people attempt suicide, or at least deliberate self-harm, during periods of depression, then regret it later.
If you don’t think that these people’s lives are important, then that’s your judgement. But remember that nobody is immune from mental illness.
This,
Does not equal this:
I think everyone’s life is important. I also think life is full of risks. I think the option of lowering everyone to the lowest common denominator is a horrible way to live.
We are talking about the risks of firearms and how dangerous they are. I do not think eliminating guns will lower the suicide rate. Therefore, suicides should not be included when talking about gun deaths. They skew the numbers and make things look different then they really are.
Freedom:
Let’s see: because you don’t think that eliminating guns will lower the suicide rate, we shouldn’t look at numbers relevant to that assertion. Excuse me?!
If, indeed, a resident in a house with guns is five times as likely to suicide as a resident of a gun-free household, that completely undermines the contention that there’s no gun-suicide link. And I’d say that’s common sense.
What common sense is depends on how you look at the world, of course. If you divide the world into ‘criminal predators’ and ‘peaceful responsible people’, then you reach different conclusions than someone who sees a lot of shades of gray. And if you divide the world into people who really, really want to end it all, and people who have no desire whatever to do so, then it’s common sense to you that making guns less available will have no effect on the suicide rate.
But people who consider suicide have various levels of desire to off themselves. A handy gun makes it easy to make a quick, irrevocable decision that might not have seemed so necessary a day later. Under this model, it’s pretty commonsensical that the presence of the easiest means of killing oneself would raise suicide rates, and its absence would lower them.
Anyhow, that’s my common sense, and the numbers seem to back it up. So it seems to me that including suicides among the casualties of guns makes perfect sense.
Arjuna:
Trust me, I’m professionally required to understand the difference. Which was one reason why I didn’t make any arguments depending on the much higher likelihood of being a homicide victim in a household that had a gun - such as needing the gun because you’re living in a more dangerous area to begin with.
However, it’s hard for me to see what other factors could enter into the suicide numbers. And absent some other expanation, the obvious explanation - availability of guns makes suicide easier - must be given some credibility.
Glitch:
I get pretty tired of hearing that, because I’m for gun control, I’m for banning all guns. I’m not even going to bother arguing with someone who sets up that straw man.
Freedom again:
Funny, I’d make a similar statement: I don’t want to give up my life because someone else couldn’t handle his freedom.
One point I made on the MPSIMS thread is that, with guns, there’s a disconnect between the risk and the responsibility. It’s all well and good, if I’m grousing about my dead-end job, for you to say, “Get off your duff, take some courses, go on some interviews, take responsibility for your life.” Here, the potential for responsible action, and the rewards and consequences of taking or not taking such actions, are in the same hands - mine.
But with guns, the responsible person - the gun owner - isn’t usually the person who winds up with a hole in them. If you want your kid to be safe from being shot, you can’t even identify the parties that might place him at risk. The sources of risk are diffuse; there’s no individual here to demand responsibility of. There are hardened criminals, but there are also ordinary citizens who might leave their guns unprotected when their kids’ playmates are over. Or ordinary citizens who lose it in a traffic confrontation. Or minor criminals who put up someone else’s kid for a couple of weeks, but don’t otherwise change their habits.
I’ll read Lott’s book when I get a chance, but the main thing I see is that guns are far more plentiful than they were thirty years ago, and we have far more gun killings than thirty years ago. Other developed countries with much more restrictive gun policies than ours don’t seem to be havens for criminals.
Pardon me if I see the rising tide of guns (and the associated risk) as an ongoing deprivation of freedom. Something’s missing from the whole equation, and that’s the question of why we’re in a society where so many people need to have guns to feel safe, when that’s not the case in most of the Western world. The vast majority of Americans don’t want to have to pack a gun to be safe; they want a society like all those other guys have - one where you can be safe without a gun.
Arjuna - my response should have read:
Which was one reason why I didn’t make any arguments depending on the much higher likelihood of being a homicide victim in a household that had a gun - because there are other factors that might explain that increased likelihood, such as needing the gun because you’re living in a more dangerous area to begin with.
Sorry about the omission.
Maybe homes with guns have more suicides because suicidal people tend to go out and buy guns specifically to commit suicide, because they think it’s the easiest method. If you somehow banned guns, then maybe you’d find a correlation between sleeping pill ownership and suicide, or rope and suicide instead.
It’s hard to separate out the people who committed suicide BECAUSE a gun happened to already be there, and the people who decided “I’m going to kill myself”, and then, having already decided to kill themselves, decided to use a gun (either going out and buying one, or using one already in the house).
Arjuna34
I don’t know how accurate John R. Lott is, on the whole. But I just read an article by him on the Texas State Rifle Association site, which said:
3500 additional poisonings per year, of kids under the age of 5.
I went to the CDC"]http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/data/nvs47_19.pdf]CDC link from the Joe Bloggs thread, and looked up the injury tables. The CDC had 132 total deaths by poison in the under-15 age bracket in 1997.
Maybe this was an exception. But he was using this stat to dig really hard at those he disagreed with, and he didn’t check it out, despite its being suspiciously large (which was why I checked it out; it seemed incredible to me that such an increase would be invisible).
But while the subject of poison deaths and aspirin caps is a tad off topic, the point is that Lott’s name shouldn’t yet be given the status of a magic wand. His work needs more scrutiny first.
That CDC link, again - sorry about botching it, above.
As Jois says, “Oh, I’m gonna keep using these #%@&* codes 'til I get 'em right.” I know how she feels.
Any thoughts as to what method of suicide would be popular if guns are outlawed.
Maybe walking out in front of your car.
How you gonna feel then Bucko
What straw man? The large majority of gun control advocates are not in favor of removing guns from the police or military, therefore I didn’t want to put words in a pro-gun control person by saying a ban on ALL guns (a counter I hear a lot is “I am not talking about a TOTAL ban, just get them away from private citizens”. I think you are seeing things that aren’t there , Firefly.
But I can understand not wanting to debate me or answer my posts for other reasons.