Except that your link doesn’t have any such numbers. It has a couple of anecdotes, with a quote from the police saying that they don’t have any statistics.
As for “knowing that you won’t find an armed victim”, you do realize that guns are still legal in Australia? In fact the only kinds of guns you can’t have unless they are disabled are “machine guns, rocket launchers, full automatic self loading rifles, flame-throwers, anti-tank guns, and Howitzers”. All of which are essential for home defense against burglary, I’m sure.
Is it really that hard to accept that the US has the highest overall rate of gun violence in the civilized world by at least an order of magnitude? And that this is due to a tolerance for guns to a level that is unknown anywhere else in the civilized world?
You’re looking right at a graph that shows no long-term change and saying it indicates a “marked” decline? OK.
This statistics-denialism is as hard to accept as creationism or global warming denial, because, like them, it’s just not true. The control group is the UK and Australia before their gun bans. They had the same crime levels as they do now. Whatever the factor causing the difference in crime is, it’s not the gun laws.
No, I’m looking at the graph of homicide incidents in which the annotation states “The figure shows that although there have been fluctuations from year to year, the number of homicide incidents has shown a steady decline since the inception of the NHMP [the statistics agency] in 1989”. But if you look at it closely, it actually shows an uptrend until just around 1996, the year of the national firearms act, when it starts to decline. More or less the same thing is observed on the graph of total homicides. And it’s supported by studies. The same thing is also observed in Canada following stronger firearms laws in the 70s – I have some graphs of that somewhere.
Right! :rolleyes:
Thing is, the stats are not even subtle! They are so in-your-face obvious that trying to deny them just flies in the face of reason, to put it mildly. It’s clearly just a cultural and emotional “I don’t care, I just want my guns!”.
Comparing two test groups without a control group is incredibly ignorant. It’s denying a basic principle of statistics in the same way that creationism denies a basic principle of biology.
The US has more murders than Australia. But* it had more murders than Australia before Australia’s gun ban*. In fact, the gap was even wider at that time, as US murders have gone down markedly over the past 50 years even though gun restrictions have gotten looser in that time. You need a control group before you compare statistics! Go back to the ninth grade!
Well, in this case, the control group for “the effect of gun bans on murder in Australia” is “Australia before the gun bans.” But actually using elementary experimental design properly leads us to realize that the gun bans had little to no effect on Australia’s murder rate, so that’s why people do things like just post the current US and Australian numbers and hope that people who failed high school math don’t notice the problem with doing this.
To a certain extent, you are correct. I am 5’ tall and weigh 110 lbs wringing wet. I couldn’t defend myself against a determined Middle Schooler with a baseball bat.
Open carry sends a pro-gun message. I support rules against it for the same reason I like the cigarette advertising limitations, and support to law against walking down the street openly guzzling from a whiskey bottle.
P.S. But in none of those cases would I send the miscreant to jail, or give violators a criminal record. A fine should work. Second offense? I’m OK with police pouring the whiskey down the police station drain.
That’s a good point. Carrying an open whiskey bottle, or a visible gun, down the street, is making a statement. According to this web site that celebrates open carry of tools for killing people, it’s “the ultimate way to make the ultimate statement about your Second Amendment protections.”
If you want to walk down a Philadelphia street carrying a sign saying that you should have the right to open carry (whether of a gun or a whiskey bottle), I support that. I just don’t support the carry itself.
As for the US Constitution, that highly imperfect document means whatever the US Supreme Court says it is. And I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to rule either the first or second amendment prevents a state from outlawing open carry, even if a gun-loving GOP candidate is elected president next year. Time will tell.
There’s 300,000,000 guns in the United States … a tiny few are used in crimes. That means a truly huge number of guns are not used in crimes. So what’s the problem? I understand reducing violence, but if guns caused violence, there’d be millions of corpses scattered all around. Get a grip, 299,000,000 guns have never been used in a crime.
Once again, when we are talking about gun violence, we are not just talking about crime. Also, not all gun violence, whether crime related or not, results in death.
That 300 million guns in the US is an old number, having been in media use since 2008, when it was probably fairly accurate.
With gun sales running at least 10 million per year, with a high of 14 million in 2012, a figure of at least 360 million guns would be a conservative estimate to use now.
That also discounts the number of guns that are damaged beyond repair, confiscated, or destroyed. It hardly matters in any case, because an increase in the number of guns combined with a documented decrease in gun violence only skews the number higher.
As for your question that you continually demand an answer to, Czarcasm, suicide by gun rates have diminished significantly as well and continue to trend downward, at least in the age group 10-24 (CDC, 6 MAR 2015). I have no reason to expect that other age groups would trend upwards, as that would be a notable statistical aberration that would be pounced upon. I’m sure that supposition won’t be good enough, either, so if I’m bored and feel like indulging my internal wannabe lawyer I might look it up tomorrow.
I swear, every time we do this the gun rights advocates have to provide cite after cite after cite, even though we’ve done this a million times and the answers don’t change. I can see how lawyers might get to hate their jobs.
On the other hand, the CDC states that 33,000 people were killed by a firearms-related injury in 2013 (including suicides). (FastStats - Injuries)
People lecturing about unnecessary death statistics in this country (and how we cannot ignore gun suicides) should be much more concerned with alcohol than with guns, since it kills roughly 3x more people each year.
But they’re not. Why? Because the anti-gunner position is rooted in politics, tribalism, and irrational fear, not logic. Anti-gunners don’t like guns and they don’t like the political positions that guns represent. They are afraid of the idea of private citizens owning deadly weapons and believe that right should be entrusted to the state. They believe privately-owned weapons should be as ineffective as possible as a matter of principle. The linked Newsweek article has very little do with saving lives, and a lot to do with making statistically harmless things illegal because they scare the author.
The actual statistics show that alcohol is a far more serious threat to public health than guns. But alcohol is not as scary to a New York City-dwelling journalist as a gun is. It doesn’t represent a political position and is widely used by people in all walks of life, so no one gives a shit. There are no editorials in Newsweek arguing for alcohol prohibition, or for a ridiculous “compromise”, like “we’ll let you keep the beer and wine but no hard liquor.”
No one wants guns to end up in the hands of criminals, especially not law-abiding gun owners! I would support engaging with the gun control lobby on issues of mutual concern (e.g. universal background checks) if I thought they were actually approaching the discussion from a rational perspective. But as long as their attitude is exemplified by emotional, fearful, irrational articles like this one, I don’t expect anything productive would come out of it.
Well, you probably know this, but still: Among developed nations with a “western” society and culture the US do have the most lenient stance on gun control by far. Do you really think it is a valid position to suggest that all the others act out of “politics, tribalism, and irrational fear, not logic”?
I don’t know much about how the gun control debate has played out in other countries. I was speaking only of the US.
But your point is well-taken nonetheless. What I should have said was “Because the anti-gun position that this article represents is rooted in politics, tribalism, and irrational fear, not logic.” It is certainly possible to approach gun control from a rational, logical perspective in the US. Unfortunately, the gun control lobby doesn’t seem interested in doing that.
