An old friend made contact via Facebook recently. She was always, um, easily led and is now one of those people internet crackpots look for: all it takes is clicking one ad for a medical secret THEY don’t want to know about and it’s a one-way slide down the rabbit hole. Last week it was how the Human Papiloma Virus vaccine is killing our daughters. This week she seems to have fallen in with, by the ads, militiamen and survivalists. I could drift away from her, like I did twenty-five years ago, but she is a nice person with only good motives and as I age (and as Facebook makes it easier to spread other people’s deceptions) I’ve taken that “Fighting Ignorance” motto to heart. Therefore, I would like to look at Michael Snyder’s blog entry (I don’t think this guy ever saw a conspiracy theory he didn’t adopt as his own) point by point, but I need some help with some of the items. Yes, I could research them myself, but a beautiful part of human culture is our ability to pass along knowledge we have already acquired.
This was, of course, picked up immediately by Infowars, poisoning the well regarding its reliability. Right off the bat I see that my friend and Mr Snyder and anybody who has ever contributed to Infowars need to have “correlation does not imply causation” pounded into their heads. Works the same for her anti-vax beliefs.
#1 I’m having trouble finding data comparing the number of households with guns vs those without guns, especially comparing 1993 (or so) and 2013 (or so).
#4 There were states with strict gun control laws in 1950?
#5 Ooh! Dueling spreadsheets! We’re 14th, not 28th, behind such lovely garden spots as El Salvador, Swaziland, and South Africa (I wonder if they include murders by and of Prawns?). But my, those Hondurans do like to kill each other! :eek: Though that’s a provisional score, pending more data. List of countries by firearm-related death rate - Wikipedia
#6 Isn’t that lovely? Now, remembering how correlation ≠ causation, what factors were also in play during that period? I like to credit the rise of realistic violence in video games for that drop.
#7 & #8 Cite?
#9 Cite? My theory is that the peak of the Baby Bubble reached four years old around 1991, and reports in the Stupid Gun News thread show us how dangerous those little bastards are.
#10 through #14 Just tells us that the UK is the violent shithole it’s always (well, the past 2000 years that we know of) been.
#16 I can handle this one myself. And “the deadliest global city?” Chicago is eighth on the list of Global Cities, and most above us are characterized by very strict gun laws. As are most below us. If anything, I’d take from that list that you need strict gun laws to be a Global city, but we know about correlation and causation.
Half of this comes from “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun”, a paper describing a telephone survey of 4000+ people run in 1993. The paper extrapolated the survey results to say that about 2.5 million “defensive gun uses” occurred in 1992. The paper is definitely worth reading. The other half is a crude estimate of the number of gun-caused deaths in the US in recent years. But it is not possible to tell from the survey how many of the instances actually prevented a crime. The survey also assumes that the responded was the victim. Though, I am not sure who would admit to being the offender.
This also seems to come from the same survey. It states that rape/sexual assualt was the crime being committed in 8.2% of the 2.5M cases. And 46% of all 2.5M cases involved women. I am not sure how they got the 200k number.
The problem with this one is the definition of “violent” crime. In the UK, if two guys exchange blows or threaten to do so, it counts as a “violent” crime. In the US, somebody has to be hospitalized for it to count. This is the problem with comparing any national statistics, which are open to interpretation. Probably the best one to use is murder. Just about all homicides go reported (unlike say sexual assaults) and they are few enough to track all of them (unlike say minor thefts). Even then, the line between manslaughter and murder varies from place to place.
So looking at murders per 100,000 people: UK 1.2, USA 4.8
There are probably pretty good statistic regarding lawful use of a firearm to wound or kill an attacker in self-defense. I’m not so sure the records that concern “brandishing” the weapon and scaring away the criminal are very complete or accurate, though I know it happens to one extent or another.
One thing’s for sure … if you’re attacked by a stronger opponent, or outnumbered, and you have no gun, you may very well become part of a carefully documented set of statistics … they keep excellent records at the morgue and at hospitals.
Defensive uses of guns is like rape in a way - the figures are fuzzy because it doesn’t always get reported to the police, albeit for different reasons.
I find this difficult to believe. In what US state do you assert that hospitalization is necessary before someone can be charged with a violent crime?
Perhaps for a rough estimate of severity? After all, one doesn’t want to be charged with attempted manslaughter for bopping one’s brother-in-law in the nose. And martial arts clouds the issue, a brown belt in shotokan karate is pretty dangerous, whereas a zillion-degree black belt in* tae kwan do* is just a lame-o with a gi.
I am sure that every US state has its own rules for reporting violence. But for comparing countries, FBI statistics are usually used. Their violent crime consists of murder (and non-negligent manslaughter), forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. And the last one requires either a serious injury or a deadly weapon. So a fist fight in a pub would usually not count, unless somebody was holding a broken bottle.
These terms have specific legal definitions and correspond to specific offenses in criminal law. “Violent crime”, on the other hand, is a politician’s term that can mean anything.
Aggravated assault is further discussed here, and some examples are given. Aggravated assault: “During an argument over a parking space, one man pushed another to the ground. The man on the ground suffered an abrasion and a broken wrist. The individual who pushed him was later arrested for assault.” Simple assault: “Several bar patrons were watching a football game on television. The supporters of the two teams exchanged heated words that led to a fist fight. The bartender called the police. None of the participants cooperated, so the police could not determine who started the fight. The police arrested six patrons who had suffered bruises and minor cuts and charged them with affray.” (Affrayis an older offense mostly equivalent to simple assault and used in some states. In the UK it would be counted as a violent crime.)
The 170M comes from this site, though it has been updated in 2005 to 262M (Gun Owners of America should keep up with their propaganda). The sentiment is also better illustrated here. Some of the facts are correct, but they are mixed with a lot of speculation.
This is debatable. All dictators like to disarm the society. Some of them mean to kill a lot of their people, most don’t. Likewise, while a few gun registration programs were followed by gun confiscation, most were not. It’s like saying: “According to XYZ, distracted drivers in the US have killed more than 1 million people during the 20th century. The vast majority of those drivers have been previously issued a driving licence by the government.” This is technically true, but it implies something that is not.
I was asking (as was Odesio) for a cite specific to your claim that hospitalization was a necessary element for the crime to be included in the statistics. Not just threats, actual hospitalization.
You said rather specifically -
And yet here we have a fist fight in a pub, with no mention either of weapons or hospitalization, that was apparently included in the statistics.
I love when gun advocates try to point to the rate of violent crime in the UK to support their arguments. Let’s set aside concerns about the validity of the estimates of violent crime rates in the UK - there are known issues with what is counted as violent crime there. The UK data includes “crimes against persons”, so all robberies get counted under that category, inflating that number relative to US figures. See here for more discussion.
Let’s just focus on the logic of the argument, taking their numbers as given. If the UK is really four times more violent than the US, why is their firearms homicide rate 90 times lower than ours? 3.6 US versus 0.04 UK
Why is their overall homicide rate four times lower than ours? 4.8 US versus 1.2 UK
The argument that gun advocates are always making is that violence (or violent people) causes firearm murders. They argue that if firearms were illegal, criminals would have them but law abiding citizens would not. They argue that if murderers didn’t have guns, they would just use something else.
So, when they argue that the UK is a cesspool of violence relative to the US, they have to answer then why their rates of homicide are much lower than ours, and why their rate of firearms homicide is ridiculously lower than ours.
To the contrary, the logic of their argument shows that if you simply remove firearms from an ultraviolent country, you do in fact reduce homicides, and outlaws don’t have guns.
Interesting points, especially about GB. Please, do go on. (Where’s the temple-tapping thoughtful smiley when I need it? :smack: doesn’t make the same point.
Forget it, campers. She’s a Rand Paul supporter, and I get all stabby around them. Usually they are guys half her age and need a little [del]stabbing[/del] getting hit over the head with a clue stick, but this isn’t going to be worth the trouble for any of us. Thirty years around her pompous blowhard of an ex-husband seems to have broken her.
Well that’s too bad. I was kind of looking forward to picking away at these.
At the same time, I totally admit to suffering from “someone on the internet is wrong” disorder, so you’ve saved me from wasting time by calling off the dogs.
Just FYI, the one item about the publication in the Harvard journal is largely bullshit, in that it was not peer reviewed, that the journal is a student publication with a right wing bent, and that the data apparently has basic errors, like misstating the rate of homicide in Lithuania by an order of magnitude.
This budget bill for FY1997 was the start to prevent the formal collection and research of any gun statistics by the government. It was pushed through by the NRA using their NRA-friendly Members of Congress. They are been subsequent successful bans with various legislation since, all designed to prevent the public from understanding real statistics about gun violence in America.
[ul]
[li]Blackout: How the NRA suppressed gun violence research
Please don’t let me stop you! My giving up hope on a single person does not make that list any more accurate. I’m sure the Peanut Gallery is full of people looking for answers.
The 69% increase in armed robberies seems to be pinched from the NRA’s claim that:*
“In the inner west, robberies committed with firearms skyrocketed more than 70% over the previous year, figures show.”
Rather than giving the national trend over many years, the NRA chose one part, of one city, in one state and just two years of data. The NRA’s use of stats is misleading. Around Australia, robberies using firearms have declined from over 1500 per year in the 1990s to 1100 per year. *
Any statistic that claims crime against individuals rose as a result of the gun ban is suspect because Australians didn’t routinely carry guns before the ban.
That site also says the 19% figure is made up. I know some pro gun groups have cited the large rise in the homicide rate in the year that guns were banned, but that’s because the guns were banned after a massacre. 354 people were killed nation wide in 1996, and 35 of them were the victims of that one massacre. That single event drove up the rate, and was the inspiration for the subsequent gun buy back and ban.
