Sorry, dude. In Freakonomics, the author looked for items which caused a significant increase in violent crimes- and gun ownership had no significant effect at all. This wasn’t just one peice of data pulled by an amatuer, but a complete study done by someone who is likely the best statistian in the world.
The best statistician in the world? :dubious: Wow. Who bestowed that ranking upon him?
Freakonomics isn’t the gospel. There are plenty of holes in the arguments Levitt makes, despite him being the “king of all statisticians”.
So what did you do with his wife?
But how do we count “an instance” when we’re talking about handgun usage? Merely brandishing a firearm aborts the acts of many would-be criminals - do we count those? Or does a gun actually have to be fired? If so, how many rounds? I went to the pistol range Thursday last week. Shot well over 500 rounds of ammo of several calibers. And amazingly enough, didn’t kill anyone. Hell, I didn’t even wound anybody. Is this five hundred handgun uses? Or just one?
Even if you want to count that as just one instance of use, using that as a benchmark, I’d wager there are more instances of handgun than Viagra tablets taken every year. There are billions of rounds of handgun ammunition produced and sold every year in the United States. And tens of millions of rounds reloaded in private homes. It ain’t all stockpiled. In fact, the stockpiled supply of ammo is probably pretty constant - meaning everything produced is consumed.
Again, however you like in order to answer the question you really want to answer, or that you want to be able to convey to others.
Exactly. That’s why it’s important to look at some ratio of event of interest out of the population from the two different populations, rather than to quite thickheadedly say “More people die from handguns than Viagra every year, so therefore handguns are more dangerous.”
If we could get the number of handgun related deaths per year out of the number of uses (however we define that) and the number of Viagra related deaths out of the number of uses (however we define that) then we could compare the two. I don’t know where Uzi’s numbers come from (although he has chosen to exclude suicide by firearm in his figures, and his estimate of the total number of guns seems high), so I would guess that we would want to be more careful, if we could.
There was a debate here several years ago which centered around the lethality of knife wounds (or more precisely, swords and long-knives) relative the gunshot wounds. I can’t find it right now, but as I seem to recall from that thread, of persons actually sustaining a wound by either method, those with gunshot wounds were about twice as likely to die. We could find no data specific to long-knives.
What we neglected to consider though in that thread, is the intention or motivation of the wielder. That’s an important factor, I believe. At least for long-knives, I believe it reasonable to assume that a person committing a violent assualt with such an edged weapon, probably has a greater motivation to kill than does the user of a short-bladed knife or even a handgun. But again, I have no evidence for that.
This report from the National Crime Justice Reference Service reports tangentially on some 1968 data from Chicago, Illinois about homicides that occured during robberies. It makes the claim that handgun wounds are about two to five times more lethal than knife wounds. It also raises the same point I made immediately above about motivation while noting that the Chicago data may, in fact, account for this variable because those homicides all occured in very similar circumstances.
Well, I agree in principle. But I thought perhaps you had some specific definition in mind to use to concretely quantify an “instance” of handgun use. You did say, after all, that “Motorcycles, viagra and 5 gallon buckets must have a much higher rate of times used to fatal incidents than handguns, even including times on the range and that sort of thing.” If you can legitimately score this in such non-equivocal terms as a point of refutation of Uzi’s claim, you have a means of quantification in mind, yes?
Anyway, to go back to the claim explicit in the OP, that more guns necessarily means more murders, the most important variable to be determined in evaluating such a claim has been entirely neglected - the quantity of guns in circulation. And that number has been steadily and steeply climbing over the past 35+ years - particularly the type of guns most often used in murders - handguns. We’re the claim in the OP true, we should see a proportional increase in the murder rate. But we don’t. Rather, the murder rate has been one of nearly steady decline.
I can not believe that people are actually debating this.
There is no reason for pistols of any sort to exist, period, except to kill people. Get rid of the guns, make it hard as hell for anyone to get them, and watch the number of homicides - not to mention accidental deaths - fall. Fucking common sense.
As I noted in the ‘irrational prejudices’ thread, I’ve always thought that gun freaks were immature adolescents trying to over-compensate for having tiny teenie weenies. I haven’t seen anything that would lead me to change my mind.
Well done, DragonAsh! We stand in awe of your mighty debating skills! Logical, comprehensive, with neutral backing cites by respected authorities in the field, without a single strawman, ad hominem or slur anywhere. Masterfully played!
So, what’s your point?
Make them hard to get; get rid of them. An excellent solution. I suppose you have a proposal for implementing that? Or is that too much to ask? Do you prefer to just wallow recreational outrage?
How about cops? Should they be required to relinquish their handguns, too?
Allow me to be the first to request a citation for a study linking wee-wee magnitude with the propensity to acquire firearms. I have a large collection of firearms, but I gotta admit I’ve never compared the size of my dick with the guys at the gun club. You have piqued my curiosity; I’m eager to know if my third leg is in one of the lower percentiles of size. Or should I sell some guns.
You don’t seriously expect that your response here is in any fashion a reasonable “contribution” to a Great Debates thread, do you?
Assistant instructor. We started teaching the technique about 2 years ago in in-service training.
Where are you getting this? In most places in the U.S. the permit is not unobtainable. And as far as open carry is concerned, getting a visit from law enforcement is not the same as getting charged for it. In the places that’s it’s legal and accepted the police are quite educated on it’s legality. Now here in Wisconsin you’d be right: you’re going to have a problem because while there is no specific law against it, most jurisdictions look upon it as disorderly conduct. But in other areas I’ve been in there have been no problems.
True experience: On July 9&10 my wife and I were in South Dakota. I was CCWing in Nebraska & Iowa, but open carried in SD. I was carrying a Glock in an Uncle Mikes Kydex holster on my hip.
Nobody batted an eye, including the people behind the desk of the hotel we checked into.
I wish Open carry were that accepted in Wisconsin. It’s a heck of alot easier than trying to conceal, especially in the summer!
And I just realized this wasn’t a Pit thread. My apologies.
As a sporting shooter I take the gravest offence at your astoundingly ignorant and dangerous comment.
I’d expect this sort of reasoning from an uninformed Soccer Mum, but not an otherwise intelligent and educated member of these boards. It’s exactly that sort of reasoning which means the British Olympic and Commonwealth Games pistol shooting teams have to train in Switzerland, of all places, and why we end up with nonsensical gun laws in this country, in which a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle is a perfectly legal pistol for target shooting, but a 7.62x25mm Tokarev TT-33 isn’t because the barrel is 2.5mm too short.
I’ve never used my handguns to kill anyone or anything, nor have I ever fired them at anything more dangerous than a paper target or a bowling pin.
Oddly, that’s exactly what they did in the UK and here in Australia, and you know what? It hasn’t worked. The Brits are looking and ending the ban on handguns, and even the generally anti- gun or gun-neutral public in Australia are starting to say the legitimate shooters shouldn’t be penalised because of the actions of criminals- who wouldn’t obey gun laws in the first place.
I was going to type something myself, but instead I’m just going to use a quote from another poster:
.
Bravo, UncleBeer. Took the words right out of my mouth.
And you, DragonAsh, should hang your head in shame.
Apparently less common that you think. The CDC has found, after comprehensive research, that there is no evidence either way to support the efficacy (or inefficacy) of any gun control law.
And accidental deaths from firearms pale in comparison to auto, water, fire, etc. Gotta go waayyy down on the list before you get to accidental discharge of a firearm as a cause of accidental death. So why is an accidental death from a firearm so much more heinous than an accidental death in a swimming pool?
So you admit to an irrational prejudice (is there any such thing as a rational prejudice?) of gun owners, and then use your irrational prejudice to leverage a supposedly logical argument against gun owners?
I don’t know whether to accuse you of having a shriveled dick for being such a sock puppet to an irrational prejudice, or of having big brass ones for jumping into GD with a position based upon said irrational prejudice.
I figure it’s 6-to-5 and pick 'em.
Ugh, google is not co-operating much. Here is the only useful link I could find (given my attention span at this point) for how many firearms there are in the US Numbers of firearms
A nice site that puts into perspective the risk each of us faces from certain activities.
A comparison of risk
I guess that every time this erroneous method of comparing raw numbers is made, I’ll repeat myself. How many times in a year do you think cars are used? Pools? Things that could produce a fire? Firearms? The question is not how many deaths, but how many times out of the number of times something is used does it result in death.
I’m really pretty empirical when it comes to these things. If I believed that the net result of firearms was positive (i.e. they did end up stopping attempted crimes more often than they were used to kill someone that they shouldn’t have been), I’d be much more supportive of gun rights. I don’t believe that. I do believe that they give people who over-estimate their risks for being victimized a sense of security that is likely false, at the cost of a higher risk for injury or death to others.
Truth be told, I think that guns in and of themselves are pretty cool, and I have really enjoyed target and skeet shooting in the past. I just think the combination of firearms and people in general is a risk to everyone that is greater than the benefits they bring to their users.
Since firearms laws have tended to disarm the law abiding populace, at least and esp. in the past, the argument can’t be a valid test if that’s your standard.
On a more broad note, it seems the argument falls into the “greatest good” theory - which is a slippery slope - all manner of tyranny can be foisted upon us under this seductive reasoning; stupid gang-bangers killing themselves off is abhorrent but cannot negate my inherent right of self defense. In reality it only points out the need for law abiding folks to protect themselves. There is after all no inherent right to police protection, the onus falls upon the individual citizen. I’m certainly not happy about the whole arrangement, but it’s what we’ve got.
It think the point we’re all trying to make in rebuttal your argument—which is an entirely valid one—is that the number of times guns are used is very, very large. No matter what criteria you use to enumerate it. The number is very likely somewhere in the billions. I was trying to find yesterday some figures to quantify ammo production in the United States but was unable. I don’t know of any other reasonable means of estimating gun usage.
Well, now you’re talking about a narrower category of gun use—those uses that can only be classified as defensive. And there are, of course, many estimates of that number. I’m sure you know those estimates and the arguments for and against them, so there’s no need to rehash it all. But, I think it’s important to note that DGU’s are only a small portion of the larger issue being debated here.
Yeah, again DGU’s aside, it’s very difficult to quantify the benefits of recreational shooting. Same with any hobby or sport. I think it’s unfortunate you feel this way, and I disagree with you about the perceived benefits, but I do respect that your opinion is an informed one—unlike way too many other folks.
Tank, man. That was a little harsh, especially considering the guy said he thought this thread was in a different forum.