That’s comparative to saying someone is a little pregnant.
Lethal force is lethal force and there isn’t a scale on it. Officers are issued firearms/ammo that have the highest stopping ability. There is no standard that I know of that pertains to issuing firearms/ammo on the basis that it will probably only stop but not kill someone. For one thing, no such gun exists. In fact, in recent years police have been upgrading to higher power rounds like .40, and some are going back to the 45. But handguns in and of themselves are underpowered. The only reason cops carry handguns is because they’re easy to carry. But arriving at a scene where using force is a high possibility you’ll see them pull out a shotgun or rifle. If such weapons could be routinely carried on the body easily they would be.
Using a firearm is always considered lethal force, regardless of the weapon, caliber, or even location on the body shot at. Under the rules of your post officers would not be allowed to shoot at the chest or head because the chances of death would be higher.
Not really. In fact recently our firearms training has changed to training head shots directly out of the holster because there have been cases of suspects shot in center mass that went on to kill/injure the officer.
I know that I’m not doing that, and I haven’t seen anyone else doing that. I’m just noting that the studies being called for by the people arguing against the OP actually have been done, and tend to support the OP. Of course, it would be exceedingly difficult to demonstrate cause regarding this matter, as it is with most every question of scientific inquiry. Rather, we have to rely on the accumulation of results from a variety of studies and then make a determination, if we are comfortable at that point with the available research.
I wouldn’t say we’re anywhere close to that yet, but the data that are available do not tend to support the hypothesis that more guns yield fewer homicides or decreased violent crimes. The only one I know of coming up with contradictory results is Gary Kleck. Not only has his methodology been roundly questioned, but when all the results of one type are coming from one person or one research group, you have to look at those findings a bit more skeptically.
Now, this is not my particular area of research, so there could be studies that I’m not familiar with. I did co-author one paper looking at some correlates of gun carrying, but not in a data set that would at all be relevant to the questions at issue here. I pretty much just do a new search on the topic every time one of these threads come up.
I just don’t think that “relative risk”, as measurede by usage, is a very good indicator of the danger of a handgun. If I shoot an intruder with a gun that has been under my bed for 27 years, I have killed him on purpose after a single use. What does that say about relative risk?
It says that the plural of anecdote is not data. The relative risk would be determined by the number of times within the population that your situation arises in comparison to the number of times that a guy grabs the gun from the closet and shoots his wife, or might also include the number of times that the gun is found by a 10 year old, who shoots it out the window and kills a postal worker who is taking a break across the street.
You’re right. I shouldn’t have framed the hypothetical in terms that were slanted in such a way. However, what about a gun that has been in existence for 120 years being used to accidently kill a 4-year-old. I don’t think it makes much sense to consider the ratio you propose (fatalities/uses) if the liklihood of use isn’t also taken into consideration.
I think it’s a good measure. Yes, it sat under your bed all those years, but if it was in operational condition, then it was actively guarding your home.
new point:
It’s easy enough to dismiss all social statistics with “correlation does not prove causality;” however, in a not clean lab like the real world, the best you can do is observe a correlation, posit a causality, and then test it, by removing and adding the posited independent variable. Per Cecil’s article, the best I can see is that if you make a handgun harder to obtain, the overal crime rate is relatively unaffected. However, Cecil did not exceptions for rape and murder. The OP’s about murder.
Any stats on what happens to a place’s murder rate when you pass a law restricting access to guns? In other words, a before/after, not a here/there?
The only ones I have seen are overseas. They show, IIRC, that people just reach for knives instead. The data on places like DC are misleading, because they don’t reflect socio-economic factors. Otherwise, they would show that restricting guns leads to increased violence., which is foolishness. The guns come in from Virginia, etc. That is why “correlation does not equal causality.” There are just too many factors involved, and it is really hard to do research on people over the long-term. The costs are too high.
That’s really not so much the case. Much of these analyses could be done with existing data, such as the injury and mortality data collected by the CDC. The real problem is with the poor data regarding the prevalence of guns and their use. There just aren’t really good sources of data for how many guns are out there, how many people own them, and in what manner they are used. There are many agencies who would, I’m sure, be very happy to pay for good research on the topic, including the CDC and NIH, among others.
Not from a legal standpoint, but there isn’t any reason you can’t still look at the history of a weapon and see how many times a shooting was actually lethal. Irrelevant if the police aren’t doing it, of course.
Alright, I had thought they were being issued smaller/wimpier calibers for general purposes. Though your point that high-risk incidences they take out the big guns also jives with what I have heard or seen. So…obviously I am wrong. (And if I recall right you were a police officer so, that makes it easy.)
I had thought that the point of aiming for the main body was so that you were more likely to hit.
Alright.
Know about the lethality of a stabbing versus a shooting (i.e. odds to result in death?) …See if anything I said was accurate.
Unfortunately, you were a “good citizen” and weren’t armed, in accordance with the law, and now you’re dead, killed by a criminal with a firearm. Woops.
That’s exactly what I mean. I didn’t say I liked it.
How many firearms are there in the US? ~270,000,000? If each firearm is only fired 5 times a year (many are not fired that much, but some are fired far more than that) that gives us a number of 1.350 billion uses. Divide that by the ~11000 people killed each year and you arrive at 122,727. So, every 122,727 uses of a firearm results in someone dying. Still safer than using viagra by about 5 times.
Frankly, given all those guns and the distrust people seem to have about their neighbours ability to handle them, it is shocking that there isn’t open warfare in the streets on a regular basis.
Dual purpose. More likely to hit, more likely to hit a major organ equating to stopping power. But not always. Which is why, like I said, modern training is starting to focus on head shots directly out of the holster (draw & fire scoring a head shot within 1.5 seconds, point shooting only, no use of sights). Seeing that most police shootings take place from 21 feet or less it’s not as difficult as it may sound.
There are plenty of places in the U.S. where open carry is legal, and acceptable.
Florida is not one of them, so it may seem like an anomaly to you. I, however, have been across the entire country and have seen it done (and have done it) with no disturbances caused by it, including in large cities like Phoenix. So what’s your point?
No - “open carry” would be problematic. My view is that people have an inherent right to defend themselves wherever they might be - not just at home - typically this would mean in their car, at the park, in a restaurant, etc. As a practical matter this means a firearm. As it stands now, “normal” folks are more or less disarmed. “Concealed Carry” is interesting in that an unobtainable permit is required, conversely “open carry” is certainly legal in some states - though likely to invite a visit from law enforcement.
That’s a dubious conclusion, even when based on this one report. The authors themselves discount the supposed increase in homicides as being statistically insignificant (relative risk (RR) of 1.08), though they claim that the increase they found in gun homicides in concealed carry states was significant (RR of 1.11, not a whole lot different from the “insignificant” 1.08).
Other studies have found homicide rates to be lower in concealed carry states. This analysis cites a 1992 FBI study purportedly showing that violent crime rates were the highest in non-concealed carry states.
As I’ve said on this board previously, I am skeptical that concealed carry laws have any consistent effects on violent crime rates, pro or con. Advocates for and against these laws have made strident claims which have not been borne out. In my state of Ohio, you would have thought (based on the anti-concealed carry advocates) that citizens would be dodging bullets on a daily basis if the law was passed. Instead, there’s been no demonstrable effect on crime rates that I know of.
All these laws do, in my opinion, is make a small subset of the populace feel safer, whether they really are or not.
The OP would have done well to leave concealed carry out of his argument.
You’re correct, and you have highlighted something I scanned over without paying enough attention to. Although the rate of firearm homicides increased after the “shall issue” laws were passed, the increase, in that study, was not statistically significant, which is evident in the fact that the 95% confidence interval includes the value of 1. That means that the study cannot be interpreted to demonstrate that “shall issue” laws are associated with an increase in homicides by firearms. (Although clearly, they were not associated with any sort of decrease).
Thanks for pointing this out, and I apologize for failing to catch that.
