[QUOTE=silenus]
How many of those murders were committed by people with concealed-carry permits?
Thought so. Your “analysis” means nothing.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly, has it ever occurred to the OP that the cities with higher murder per capita rates will have law abiding citizens fearful of their lives and therefore arming themselves?
And it isn’t a catch-22 since a vast majority of the gun offenses are perpetrated by those who do not obtain a gun legally.
First, I apologized for my posting - less for the content than for the fact that it was clearly not appropriate for GD. Second, I also noted that it was an ‘irrational prejudice’ - not a ‘rock-solid, scientifically supported fact that can not be argued under any circumstances’. In any event, I’m not going to ‘hang my head in shame’ because of my opinion.
Accidents are always going to happen, be it cars, swimming pools, trees, whatever. Lots and lots of people die in cars every year. No one suggests we get rid of all the cars - as a society, we’ve agreed that the net benefit of cars more than outweighs the harmful side effects. I’m sure a specific number of kids die each year from falling out of trees - does anyone really advocate cutting down all the trees?
Guns offer no such ‘benefit’ to society. The exist purely to kill, accidentally or otherwise. I agree 100% with Hentor that there is no net benefit (i.e., guns stopping crime and/or saving lives more often than they end up killing or injuring someone they shouldn’ have). The ‘protection’ offered those who have guns in their house is a false sense of security. A little Google-fu came up with a NYT article from 2003 study from the Annals of Emergency Medicine, that concluded that gun owners were two times as likely to be killed by guns than those that did not keep firearms at home, and people shot were substantially more likely to die than people injured with non-gun weapons. ‘Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home’, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993, concluded that having a gun in the home meant a 2.7-times increase of getting killed in that home compared to a home without one.
Study after study has shown that having a gun is more dangerous, not less. The price we as a society pay is way too high for the minimal benefit we receive.
“Guns offer no benefit to society”
Sure they do. They allow me to protect myself, my family, my property, etc., from criminals who wish to do me harm.
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
“Guns offer no benefit to society”
Sure they do. They allow me to protect myself, my family, my property, etc., from criminals who wish to do me harm.
[/QUOTE]
The ‘protection’ you think you have is outweighed by the increased likelihood (2.7 times, according to the NEJM study as below) that you or your family - the people you think you are protecting - are going to die in your home by those very firearms you look for ‘security’.
Some benefit. I would never gamble with my family like that. I personally don’t love my DVD player so much that I’d risk my son trying to protect it.
Or can you provide stats that suggest that you and your family are *less *likely to die in your home compared to my firearm-less home?
[QUOTE=DragonAsh]
Guns offer no such ‘benefit’ to society. The exist purely to kill, accidentally or otherwise. I agree 100% with Hentor that there is no net benefit (i.e., guns stopping crime and/or saving lives more often than they end up killing or injuring someone they shouldn’ have).
[/quote]
Guns do not exist purely to kill. If they did, the characteristics which make them most useful for killing (high bullet capacity, large calibers, concealability) would be pervasive; all guns would be designed giving the most weight to those characteristic. But they’re not. There’s a certain subset of all guns which are designed with these characteristics, but more models have other characteristics which reduce their relative lethality. Your claim is patently false; a simple and quick survey of the offerings of gun manufacturers will reveal many, many models which do not display the most lethal characteristics.
And those with guns are many, many more times likely to successfully defend themselves from a violent assualt with a gun than persons who do not own guns. In fact, so many more times that the ratio approaches infinity. Your argument is flawed and unpersuasive.
Is this a Phillip Cook study? Does it include suicides?
Even if this is true, which is hotly contested because many studies have also shown a net benefit from gun ownership, the decision is made by the person most directly affected - the dead gun owner. If gun owners are more likely to killed by a gunshot, then the increased likelihood of that happening was caused by their own decision to purchase a gun. It affect no one else. (There are, of course, other types of gunshot deaths of persons who have not made a decision to own a gun, but since you’re not making that argument as debit to the net benefit of guns, I’m not required to rebut it. Yet.) Free societies allow individuals to make decisions of risk upon their own rationales. To proscribe individuals that choice with respect to guns - or with respect to anything, in fact, opens the door to all kinds reductions of freedom.
Going to die? Horse-fucking-shit. Approxmately 60% of the homes in the United States have one or more firearms in them. People aren’t dying in droves from those guns. In fact, almost none of them do. The number of accidental and purposeful gunshot deaths from the legally owned guns in one’s own home is vanishingly small.
I never understood that study. I mean, obviously there is more of a chance of a gun accident in a home with a gun. You are around the gun on a regular basis, you clean, fire, show it off…etc. How often are you robbed? probably not as often as you are around your gun. So the sheer chance of hurting yourself with your gun, as opposed to a criminal, is skewed in the gun owners favor.
To me it’s like saying you are 10x more likely to cut yourself on a knife in your home. Well duh! I’m in my home and around my knife more than I am others homes and knives.
Anyway… Guns are not the problem in america, so many people are killed not because they have a gun, but because so many people have no respect for themselves or others.
[QUOTE=Dob]
I never understood that study. I mean, obviously there is more of a chance of a gun accident in a home with a gun. You are around the gun on a regular basis, you clean, fire, show it off…etc. How often are you robbed? probably not as often as you are around your gun. So the sheer chance of hurting yourself with your gun, as opposed to a criminal, is skewed in the gun owners favor.
[/quote]
Actually, skewed in the opposite direction.
No - it’s more like saying that you are 2.7 times as likely to cut yourself than to cut a slice of bread. Furthermore, that study didn’t involve accidental shootings.
I think that these types of qualitative condemnations done post-hoc are really not very explanatory or helpful.
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
No - it’s more like saying that you are 2.7 times as likely to cut yourself than to cut a slice of bread.
[/QUOTE]
I have to retract this statement - it doesn’t accurately reflect the comparison in that pariticular study.
[QUOTE=DragonAsh]
The protection you think you have is outweighed by the increased likelihood (2.7 times, according to …
[/QUOTE]
Not interested in statistics, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics - more importantly our rights are not dependent on statistics.
Some utilize a “benefit to society” standard of firearms ownership, so it follows that the tipping point of their support of same need only reach a certain level of societal benefit. In other words, if the law-abiding can be persuaded to kill enough “bad guys”, it’s all good.
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
Not interested in statistics, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics - more importantly our rights are not dependent on statistics.
[/QUOTE]
Well, you might not be interested in them. But the fact is, statistics are the only measure available to us of societal phenomena. If you don’t want to accept the measurements, then all you’re left with is unsubtantiated opinion. Or perhaps anecdotal evidence. Both of these are vastly inferior to a properly controlled multivariate statistical study. And they’d be a piss poor basis on which to form laws - and particularly so for laws which attempt to regulate so basic a freedom.
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
Not interested in statistics, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics - more importantly our rights are not dependent on statistics.
[/QUOTE]
No, but our rights (more specifically your rights- Australia doesn’t have a “Right To Gun Ownership” Clause in our Constitution) can be taken away by an Act of Parliament (Congress, whatever) by Politicians that were dependent on statistics…
[QUOTE=UncleBeer]
"…vastly inferior to a properly controlled multivariate statistical study.
[/QUOTE]
You keep your properly controlled multivariate statistics, I’ll keep my firearms, thanks.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
I hope you did not mean, allowing citizens to go armed in public like in 19th-Century Dodge City, or one of Heinlein’s early novels.
[/QUOTE]
Just to nitpick, and demolish historical myth here, but the incorporated parts of Dodge City had fairly strict restrictions on handguns (it was illegal to carry an armed gun in public). Carrying guns in public was allowed in the unicorporated part of the city, south of the railroad tracks (which was also the location of most of the town’s saloons and brothels.
And in the 15 years of Dodge City’s heyday, when it was a major cowtown, there were no homicides in the incorporated part of the city, and 15 homicides in the unincoroprated part, or one a year (and a few of those were shootings by law enforcement officials, and another one of those might be considered today an accidental shooting). So, in spite of its reputation, and while it was probably more violent than a western town that wasn’t a cattle hub, Dodge City was not particularly violent. You were certainly safer there than you would have been at the same time in a place like New York City.
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
You keep your properly controlled multivariate statistics, I’ll keep my firearms, thanks.
[/QUOTE]
This is as thoughtless an attitude as an uninformed assertion that all guns should be taken away altogether. Certainly the issue of our deciding as a country that we should restrict certain actions is not one to be taken lightly. However, the right to bear arms cannot be reasonably argued to trump all other rights, and if that right is too often in conflict with the right of everyone to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then that conflict would have to be resolved. Those multivariate statistics are best way of figuring out whether some difference between numbers is random or systematic.
I mean, for instance, if it were clearly the case that more innocent people were denied the right to live than were actually saved or protected by handguns, would you maintain that you nevertheless had a right to keep your handguns?
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
And in the 15 years of Dodge City’s heyday, when it was a major cowtown, there were no homicides in the incorporated part of the city, and 15 homicides in the unincoroprated part, or one a year (and a few of those were shootings by law enforcement officials, and another one of those might be considered today an accidental shooting). So, in spite of its reputation, and while it was probably more violent than a western town that wasn’t a cattle hub, Dodge City was not particularly violent. You were certainly safer there than you would have been at the same time in a place like New York City.
[/QUOTE]
Whoa, hold your horses there, pardner. ‘Safer in Dodge City than in NYC?’ Put down whatever you’ve been smokin’, dude, 'cause it’s bad stuff.
First, the 1880 census for Dodge City - during the town’s 10-year (not 15) heyday period - gives a population of under 1,000. That’s for the entire town. If we just take your ‘one per year’ average, that comes out over 100 homicides per 100,000 people. New York City’s homicide rate has been under 10 per 100,000 for the past few years, I believe.
Secondly, my reading and google-fu-ing suggests years when 15-25 were killed in a single year. The first killing to be recorded in Dodge City was in 1872, when 15 men were killed, all were buried in Boot Hill. Most of the recorded killings at the time involved law enforcement officials (either shooting or being shot); gunfights between gamblers and crooks weren’t recorded as closely; the bodies were dumped in Boot Hill, end of story.
Finally - if there were some killings in the ‘guns ok’ portion of town, and zero homicides in the ‘no guns’ portion of the town…well, that kind of suggests something, doesn’t it?
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
"…if it were clearly the case that more innocent people were denied the right to live than were actually saved or protected by handguns, would you maintain that you nevertheless had a right to keep your handguns?
[/QUOTE]
In this hypothetical, why are these innocent people being denied their right to sefl defense? The only possible answer is that the government restricts their right to self defense. That’s what’s happened historically in the US. Your question is really whether the government should have de facto disarmed the law-abiding and rendered them helpless against criminals.
[QUOTE=DragonAsh]
Secondly, my reading and google-fu-ing suggests years when 15-25 were killed in a single year. The first killing to be recorded in Dodge City was in 1872, when 15 men were killed, all were buried in Boot Hill. Most of the recorded killings at the time involved law enforcement officials (either shooting or being shot); gunfights between gamblers and crooks weren’t recorded as closely; the bodies were dumped in Boot Hill, end of story.
Finally - if there were some killings in the ‘guns ok’ portion of town, and zero homicides in the ‘no guns’ portion of the town…well, that kind of suggests something, doesn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
Almost all of the murders in Dodge City (the 15 men you’re talking about) took place in the first year after it was founded, before there was any effective town or county government, and most of the violence attributed to the city comes from that first year, before any effective law enforcement or civil society existed. After that time period, Dodge City quiets down a lot.
Add to that the fact that much of the population of Dodge City at any one time was transient…they weren’t citizens of the town that would show up in census records, but instead drovers, cowboys, etc., who would come into the place in a cattle drive, stay a short period of time, and move on. They were the source of most of the violence as well as the victims of most of the violence. Like I had said, if you were an actual resident of Dodge City, especially one living north of the railroad line (the “town” area, where the cowboys largely didn’t go), you were safe from violence.
And yes, the fact that there were no killings in the “guns not allowed” part of town and killings in the “guns allowed” part of town, does suggest that restricting firearm ownership reduces the murder rate. I never claimed it didn’t. Of course, I never claimed it did, either. I’m agnostic on that matter, because of course, the fact that there were many more killings on the south side of town than the north, also suggests that a nother way to reduce the murder rate is to keep out violent drunken transients.
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
In this hypothetical, why are these innocent people being denied their right to sefl defense? The only possible answer is that the government restricts their right to self defense. That’s what’s happened historically in the US. Your question is really whether the government should have de facto disarmed the law-abiding and rendered them helpless against criminals.
[/QUOTE]
Huh? Who said anything about being denied the right to self defense? Knifes, bats, whatever - citizens can still defend themselves. Why are guns needed?
If I’m reading this thread correctly some gun proponents have said ‘get rid of the guns and people will just reach for knives anyway’. Well, great. Let them. I haven’t heard about too many kids accidentally killing themselves or their buddies by playing around with knives.
[QUOTE=DragonAsh]
Huh? Who said anything about being denied the right to self defense? Knifes, bats, whatever - citizens can still defend themselves. Why are guns needed?
[/QUOTE]
You didn’t answer the question.
And I’ll answer yours with the rhetorical - “Who’d bring a knife to a gunfight?”
Firearms are the only practical defense for the elderly, the weak and infirm, etc. And for the able-bodied for that matter. I didn’t say anything about being denied the right to self defense because it’s a given, and should hardly need to be pointed out - many jurisdictions prohibit citizens from carrying firearms in their cars, public places, etc., so they are denied the right of self-defense in any meaningful sense of the term. If you’re going to argue that criminals carrying semi-autos versus me and my Swiss Army knife is somehow a reasonable state of affairs…