It’s like standing with your pants on fire and debating whether to douse yourself with gasoline or just cut off your legs. Neither solution is ideal, and meanwhile your ass is starting to char.
I don’t believe in a causal relationship between the presence of guns in our society and the societal conditions that makes having guns seem so necessary. Something else preceded, or developed concurrently–or even in accordance to–the rise of gun ownership. On the other hand, while I support reasonable restrictions (licensing, waiting periods, closing gun show “loopholes”), I don’t believe that removing guns would bring about any desired or significant societal change.
The problems simply lie elsewhere. Both camps look for answers, and both see guns. For one side it’s the problem, for the other it’s the solution.
That would be tough. In 1997, 225 children under 15 died in bicycle accidents altogether, so that has a hard time being ‘hundreds’ more than anything. (While he was citing 1996 data, it’s hard to believe that the numbers changed that much from one year to the next.)
The CDC gives 630 gun deaths among the under-15 set for 1997, breaking down into 346 homicides, 127 suicides, 142 accidents, and 15 undetermined/other. So deaths in bicycle accidents beat firearms accidents, 225-142, but total firearms deaths beat total bicycle deaths, 630-225, in the age group under discussion.
Lott goes on to say:
The CDC data doesn’t outright contradict this one, but it sure makes it sound pretty unlikely: for kids under 5, there were 439 deaths in 1997 due to “fire/hot object/substance”. Were over one-third of these due to cigarette lighters? It’s possible, I suppose, but as Damon Runyon would say, it’s not the way to bet. But Lott is pretty sure of himself, concluding:
My suspicion is that we’ve got a Lott of debunking ahead of us. (Pun intended; no apology. The guy has it coming.)
I never hear anyone suggesting a complete disarmament of all private citizens, except in the occasional ‘let me take an extreme position and see how far I can push it’ sort of context.
For instance, I don’t believe in banning handguns or hunting rifles, but a few gun threads back, I argued that restricting guns to law enforcement people might well be an improvement over the way things are now. But that doesn’t make me an advocate of banning all guns from private hands.
I’m a member of Handgun Control, Inc., the USA’s most influential gun-control group. They don’t argue for a ban on handguns or hunting rifles.
Before Columbine, it was tough to find anyone influential arguing for a handgun ban. Now there are a few significant voices (e.g. the Washington Post) that take that position. But ‘a few significant voices’ isn’t the same thing as ‘most gun-control advocates,’ by any stretch of the imagination.
And who, of any influence or visibility, is arguing for a total ban on all guns in civilian hands? Anyone in the House or the Senate? Anyone actually influential among gun-control types? Any major newspaper (or even major columnist)? Glitch, I don’t know who you’re talking to, but they’re not representative of any widespread sentiment.
So that’s a straw man you’ve propped up there. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain the difference between him and the gun-control movement as it really is.
Here we go with this
‘firearms are dangerous’ bullshit again. Firearms are not dangerous; improper use of firearms is where the danger lies. If want to keep throwing that strawman in these debates, you’re gonna have do disguise it better than that.
Wrong again RTF. According to the Department of Justice, the number of hangun homocides in 1998 is nearly equal to the number of handgun homocides in 1975. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/weapons.htm
Maybe I haven’t made my point clear. The person getting shot didn’t use a firearm improperly; somebody else did.
And in a society with 80 million gun owners, the usual conditions of human nature are going to apply to gun owners. Some are going to use guns properly, some aren’t. Some are going to be peaceful honest people (sorry, Lib); some are going to be hotheads. Some are going to be law-abiding types, some petty criminals (like the ones where the first-grader who shot his classmate were staying with), and a few are going to be hardened criminals. Some are going to keep guns away from their kids, and some are going to be careless.
The point is, when you’re talking about the behavior of large numbers of people, things get predictable. You’re going to have irresponsibility, stupidity, anger, and all the other human vices. And if you put guns in the hands of a large number of people, it is as predictable as the sunrise that a fair number of them are going to be used improperly, and some of those will be used to lethal effect against people who most of us would prefer to see live.
So if improper use of guns is dangerous, then guns, in abundance, are dangerous. QED.
And as I have stated, therein lies the danger. It’s the person using, or in this case mis-using the gun that is dangerous. An object in and of itself poses no danger. Only the application of the object imposes danger.
RTF, you are right in saying that if a large number of people have guns some bad things are going to happen. But most of the time the bad things will come from the criminal element.
These folks will not participate in any registration of their guns nor in handing them over. So with less peaceful folks having guns there is more incentive for the criminals to do their thing.
What about a waiting period? Let’s say that a woman has been beaten by her husband/boyfriend she swears out a warrant and a restraining order on him. She finds out he has made bail and may be on his way to her house. Now the cops usually will not do anything unless he shows up (could be too late), if there is no waiting period, she can go get a gun for protection with one, she may soon be dead.
Also, Clinton is talking about more laws, how about enforcing the ones we have now. It is illegal for a felon to even attempt to purchase a gun, yet out of the 1000s of cases over the last few years of felons attempting to purchase a gun, almost none of them have been arrested and jailed.
If we cannot get rid of guns, why don’t we issue a bulletproof vest to everyone?
That argument doesn’t have any relevance to me, you could say the same thing about a tank, a bomb or a bottle filled with poison. I think it’s more pertinent to weigh the usefulness of an objects versus its potential harm, and then determine if the object should be readily available. (In the case of guns, my opinion is that the potential harm outweighs the usefulness and therefore guns should not be available to the general public.)
Unc, I think you’re right, but only in a very technical sense. A gun, locked in a room away from people, is not dangerous. But because of its properties, it is, on average, much more dangerous in combination with human beings than, say, a kazoo. And it’s the reasonable expectation, based on human norms, of what will happen with these objects in the hands of eighty million different people, that represents what we have to deal with.
For instance, in the next several weeks, Census forms will be distributed among us; they’ll be out there in numbers comparable to the number of guns in America. But the danger represented by the wide distribution of these forms is negligible, since the forms’ properties differ significantly from those of guns. No one will get killed with a Census form because, even given the human capacity for good and evil in unpredictable combinations, the object doesn’t have properties lending itself to that sort of abuse.
So the properties of the object say something about its potentials for various sorts of abuse. And if we distribute an object among large numbers of people, we have to assume, statistically, that it will be abused in whatever manner possible. Census forms will be returned to the Census Bureau with “Government is evil!” scrawled across the front of the form. Guns will be fired at innocent people.
Once you have a large enough group, you have to assume a certain amount of improper, irresponsible, and unwise use of whatever you give them, because they’re human. The only way to more than marginally affect that unwise use and its consequences is by changing the rules of the game - by limiting the characteristics of legal guns, or by requiring specific training as a precondition to gun ownership, or whatever. (I’m not ready to discuss specific changes in gun laws at this point in the discussion - sorry, Jeffery - because right now, I think I can only debate this one point well.) But without some force acting on gun owners and users as a group, individual non/decisions to act more responsibly, or less so, with one’s guns, will cancel out, over the population of gun owners as a whole.
All right, you suicide fans, here’s why the suicide numbers should be disregarded:
Kellerman’s study was done in King County, Washington. Over the years 1978-83, Kellerman observed, in homes where a firearm was kept, 12 unintentional deaths, 41 criminal homicides, 333 suicides, and 3 ‘unknown.’ During the same period but looking only at homes where no firearm was kept, by applying Kellerman’s percentage statistics to his numbers*, there were 50 criminal homicides and 347 suicides. In short: if you’re determined to kill yourself, you’ll find a way, whether or not you own a gun.
By the way, to demonstrate the flaws in Kellerman’s methods: in homes with guns, there were 9 justifiable/defensive homicides during the above period, compared to 4 in homes without firearms. The 389/9 is where Kellerman’s “43 times more likely” comes from. Applying that to our numbers from homes without firearms, we must conclude that the “death risk factor” increases from 43:1 with a gun to 99:1 without.
That’s utterly false, of course. It’s false because Kellerman’s methods were flawed. Reason: we only considered deaths, just like he did, and because we considered suicides, which occured more often in the absence of firearms than in their presence.
Example: Kellerman states that firearms were used in 49% of all suicides in King County during this period. 333/.49 = 680 total suicides. 680 total suicides - 333 gun suicides = 347 non-gun suicides.
Here’s an example of a high correlation, but no cause an effect: Study the rate of lung cancer among owner of cigarette lighters, and compare with people who don’t own a lighter. If the rate of lung cancer is double, or triple, or 20X, do you conclude that lighters cause cancer? Maybe the gas in the flames is being inhaled while the lighter is lit. Maybe ownership of a lighter makes someone more likely to smoke (because it’s so convienent if you already have a lighter), and it’s the smoking that causes lung cancer. To really tell, you’d have to test two groups of people, where the ONLY difference was the use of lighters. It’s very hard to do a study like that, but otherwise you have hidden dependent variables running around creating correlations WITHOUT causation.
A better study would be to take a group of people without guns, and give half guns to keep for 10 years. Hopefully these two groups are identical, at least with respect to owning a gun. Then look at the suicide rate for each group. Repeat the test with a group of gun owners, but this time take the guns away from half of the group (good luck!).
This would be a start at separating the just the actual presence of a gun on the likelihood of suicide vs. any other factors that contribute to suicide that would also contribute to buying a gun, but wouldn’t be directly related.
Of course, the suicide stats above have already been shown to be meaningless, but the idea is still valid- you have to be very careful when look at stats like that.
I deny the validity of this statement. If this were true, it seems to me, that with the increase in gun ownership there should be a corresponding increase in gun abuse.
This is not the case. In the chart I provided above from the DOJ it shows the number of gun homicides in 1998 nearly equals the number of gun homicides in 1975. It also shows a current 7 year downward trend.
You’re right, Arjuna. I’m sure you would find a correlation of the kind you describe between ownership of cigarette lighters and lung cancer. This is because there is a causative relationship beween the two: they are collateral effects of a common cause (smoking) which increases the likelihood of both owning a lighter and contracting lung cancer.
I have to confess that I didn’t read your first post carefully enough. You did say that
which is perfectly true. It may be, for example, that smoking does not cause lung cancer. It may be that it’s the ink on the cigarette packets, or the gas from the lighters. It may be that the genetic predisposition take up smoking is associated with a genetic predisposition to lung cancer (this suggestion has been advanced seriously in relation to obesity and heart disease and a similar one to HIV and AIDS). You can pull the “correlation isn’t causation” objection to any hypothesis you object to, which is what makes it such a weak objection.
What I asked was not “can you show me a correlation where there is unlilkely to be a relationship of causation” but “can you show me proof of any causative relationship which amounts to anything more than an observed correlation”? I’ll wager that the answer is no.
