My response is never just ‘but what about Japan’, despite the fact I do try to be less verbose these days.
I have read that study, as it’s been posted before, so yes…I do know about it. And I don’t think it’s wrong. It is a factor. But, clearly, there are many other factors involved in suicide rate in a given country. I don’t think, for instance, your assertion that if the Japanese DID magically get guns their suicide rate would rocket up or even change substantially, certainly not in the short term.
Suicide rate doesn’t ‘stay the same’ NOW…there is yearly variance, as there is variance over time. The suicide rate today is lower (per capita) than it was in, say, the 70’s or 80’s, while gun ownership has fallen. The method of suicide has also shifted over time, with some methods used in the past falling out of favor and others taking their place.
Guns are certainly a factor. They are, generally, more lethal than some other methods (though some methods are just as if not more lethal). But they aren’t the biggest factor. Even in the US, with our very high prevalence of guns and nearly universal access, guns are only one method among many for suicide. There are other factors…age, sex of the person committing suicide, etc.
I don’t believe that the rate would change substantially over time. I think that initially, you’d see a decline if you could magically get rid of guns, as it would take time to shift to other methods. But other methods DO exist, and I think that there would be a re-balancing of the numbers, with a new emphasis. The US isn’t going to go from 41K suicides a year to 28K just because there aren’t any more guns. We’d be among the lowest in the world if that were the case, considering our huge population.
ETA: At any rate, I think we’ve hijacked this thread enough. I totally got off topic, so my apologies to the OP. I won’t continue this.
Australia wasn’t mentioned in the report I linked to; it’s a shame you don’t have anything to say about the studies that were mentioned.
With apologies again for not providing the link, the Australian experience is mentioned in the second report. The authors share your reluctance to draw any conclusions about firearms and suicide from the specific experience of Australia. Nevertheless their overall conclusion based largely on US studies is that the link between firearms availability and suicide rate holds. If the case for the firearms/suicide link hinged on the Australian example, your rebuttal would be excellent. As it doesn’t, it’s not a very convincing rebuttal at all.
Even if the pattern you identify holds good across the board (which you haven’t even tried to show) I still don’t follow your logic. Let’s say that some form of firearms restriction in the US decreased the overall suicide rate by 15K, and then, following the pattern of Australia, suicides gradually increased by 1000/year until the initial reduction had disappeared. By the time we’re back to normal, we’ve saved 120K lives. That seems significant.
It would be really interesting to know what your evidence base for this is.
This is back where we started, except you’ve been shown a lot of evidence from the US and elsewhere that the available means of committing suicide is a determining factor in the overall levels of suicide, and that if people don’t have an efficient means to hand then they don’t go relentlessly searching for other ways to kill themselves.
The US paper linked above summarises 14 cross-sectional or quasi-experimental studies of the relationship between firearms and suicide, which overwhelmingly find a positive association. The original paper showed that the finding that suicide rates are mediated by the availability of effective means of suicide has been replicated around the world. It’s entirely plausible that a suicidal impulse strong enough to lead to an actual attempt on one’s life is a short-lived moment of despair which will dissipate if it cannot be acted upon relatively quickly. Personally, I find it harder to accept your model in which the suicidal impulse, once felt, will be maintained until such time as an effective means can be found, however long it takes.
However, the question of ‘risk based’ laws is being debated here also. It’s a reasonable point. (no pun intended).
If you use risk based you put in laws that will save the most loves while causing the least disruption. Banning cars will save a lot, but clearly they are of very high utility- altho certainly by great mass transit that utility could be reduced.
Banning guns saves a moderate number, and in the UK at least (I dont think too many Brits are subsitance hunters) of low utility. (in the two world wars, the fact that many American recruits were familiar with firearms was a high utility)
Banning knives save few, and they are of moderate utility.
Banning smoking saves the most- and it is of zero utility- in fact it is a cause of home fires, air pollution and massive litter.
So clearly, by risk based, you’d ban smoking first, then guns . (and by “ban” I dont mean ban totally the private ownership of gun, just such restrictions to keep them out of the hands of criminals, and useless for home defense or suicide)(just like with tobacco, I’d allow vaping, patches, gun and even chewing ).
I never even implied that, I have no idea how you think I inferred it.
The idea is to ban the things that have the least utility and cause the most deaths.
Of the ten most common causes of death in the USA, three stand out- smoking, obesity and accidents Auto accidents the highest). (guns arent even close)
Smoking kills 500000 Americans, and 50000 non smokers thru SHS. Plus homes burned, etc. No utility at all. And no, we wont have the issue like with Prohibition, since during that failed experiment 70% of adults drank to start, but now only 15% of Americans smoke, and they can switch to patches, gum, pills, chewing, snuff, and vaping.
Obesity kills like 300K Americans but food is of extremely high utility. That doesnt mean we cant do anything, of course.
Booze kills 90K Americans. Utility low, but we tried and failed.
The car accidents- 40000- utility very high. But we are making safer cars every year.
Guns- 15000 (I am going to discount suicides, since suicide is a issue all by itself*). Utility moderate in the USA- quite a few people still hunt, we have sorts, the army likes trained marksmen, etc.
Opioid painkiller abuse kills about the same. Utility- moderate.
Clearly, in a risk based system, we’d pick smoking. 30 times over gun deaths and zero utility.
Next we’d try to cut back on alcohol deaths -without banning. Some effort has been made.
Then, impose moderate restrictions on gun- more or less has already been done. Maybe better background checks and good red flags laws too.
*Suicide- like 50000. Some utility, for people with incurable painful diseases. Red flag laws for guns would help, but better mental health and etc would do better.
*In 1981 Suicide reduction from firearm regulation is disputed by Richard Harding stating where, after reviewing Australian statistics, he said that "whatever arguments might be made for the limitation or regulation of the private ownership of firearms, suicide patterns do not constitute one of them.[77] " Harding quoted a 1968 international analysis of twenty developed countries “cultural factors appear to affect suicide rates far more than the availability and use of firearms. Thus, suicide rates would not seem to be readily affected by making firearms less available.”[78]…Multiple studies have been conducted by Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran, researchers with the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting (WiSH). In 2006 they reported a lack of a measurable effect from the 1996 firearms legislation in the British Journal of Criminology. Using ARIMA analysis, they found little evidence for an impact of the laws on homicide, but did for suicide.[85]… …] In 2012, McPhedran and Baker found there was little evidence for any impacts of the gun laws on firearm suicide among people under 35 years of age, and suggested that the significant financial expenditure associated with Australia’s firearms method restriction measures may not have had any impact on youth suicide…A 2008 study on the effects of the firearm buybacks by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of University of Melbourne and La Trobe University studied the data and concluded “the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”[65]…n 2009 a study published in the Journal of Sociology examined the rate of firearm suicide in Queensland. They found that “gun suicides are continuing to decrease in Queensland” and is “most likely as a function of ongoing gun controls”.[90]
In 2009 another paper from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University also studied suicide in Queensland only. The said “No significant difference was found in the rate pre/post the introduction of the NFA in Queensland; however, a significant difference was found for Australian data, the quality of which is noticeably less satisfactory.”[91]
A 2010 study by Christine Neill and Andrew Leigh found the 1997 gun buyback scheme reduced firearm suicides by 74% while having no effect on non-firearm suicides or substitution of method.[92]*
I think that’s seven studies that said no reduction in suicides by the gun ban, with three that said there was a reduction.
However, what does stand out is this a "1968 international analysis of twenty developed countries “cultural factors appear to affect suicide rates far more than the availability and use of firearms. Thus, suicide rates would not seem to be readily affected by making firearms less available.”"
Please stop putting the word that I’m putting words into other people’s mouths into my mouth.
I don’t think that anybody who has either supported or given a non-committal shrug about blunting knives has said that the stabby problem needs attention because it’s the most deadly thing currently occurring. Which is to say, nobody is taking a risk-based approach - other than people making logically fallacious strawman arguments, anyway. It’s disingenous argument and it’s not impressive.
The simple fact is that the knife thing is getting attention because it’s something that’s pretty visible and which some people are bothered by, seemingly based on the mistaken idea that it’s a bad thing if children are murdered. Yes, the problem is being sensationalistically overstated, and yes, the correct approach to solving this problem is probably to restore funding to the police rather than to just modify the knives (though in theory one could do both). Of course funding the police costs money and making a fiat declaration that knives must now be spherical or whatever is cheap, so guess which idea is pushed? And we can indeed discuss the relative merit or lack thereof of taking the knife approach over other approaches to the problem.
However, even given all that, “BUT YOU HAVE TO BAN BOOZE FIRST BEFORE EVEN LOOKING AT KNIVES!” remains a shitty way to attempt to dismiss the issue. One could legitimately argue that kids getting murdered isn’t a problem at all and thus no response is merited because knife murder is actually good; that would be legitimate argument. But arguing that we have to choke down our peas because kids in Africa are starving is not good argument; the presence of other unrelated worse problems doesn’t mean that smaller problems aren’t problems.
And what the hell did you mean to imply by "Yep, most bad laws were passed based upon ‘someone has to do something!’ ", out of curiosity?
Nope, it’s the actual question. Whether a law on this gets passed will be based entirely on the merits of knife banning. It will not be based on “what’s the first thing we should ban”.
We are arguing that they SHOULD take a risk based approach. Get it? That a risk based approach is best to save to most lives. Unless you dont really want to save live, you just wanna pass silly laws to make peopel think you are doing “something”>
You keep using that word “strawman”, i do not think it means what you think it means.
No one here said “BUT YOU HAVE TO BAN BOOZE FIRST BEFORE EVEN LOOKING AT KNIVES!”. Hey, look there is a real strawman! See *that’s *what a strawman argument looks like. No one- but you- made that argument, and that’s about the tenth thing you have tried to pass off as someone elses words. That’s dishonest debating. Quote someones actual text, it’s quite easy to do. See, I have done it right here. try it!
I wasn’t implying anything (Another word you are not clear on?). I was out and out* stating *that when the hoi-polloi demand that “someone has to do something”- that makes for bad laws. If they instead say “Congress needs to pass such & such a law” then that’s much better. But when all they demand is for **SOMETHING **to be done, lawmakers take the path of least resistance and pass useless laws that make it seem like that they actually doing something.
I don’t think you got the gist of either the RAND report or my summary of it vis-a-vis Australia. It’s a pity because I’m afraid you rather wasted your time hunting for cites about it.
As for your “standout” 1968 study, while I generally agree that studies written 50 years ago using data from 60 years ago are absolutely the gold standard of evidence, and of far more utility than studies conducted this century, I’m afraid I did actually read this one and it is shonky as hell. The “analysis” of 20 developed countries consists of one (1) data table, some elementary ranking, and some lazy, half-baked assumptions. I’d suggest you actually read it to see what you were citing but it’s really not worth your time.
It’s consistent with the past. He reads only the bits that appear to support his arguments. Pointing out facts from speculative conclusions within the very same studies he cites, rarely has the desired impact. Look for a response where he avoids your argument and challenges you for ‘ignoring the science’.
Back to the question of reducing knife violence from +40,000 incidents to +30,000 incidents (and reducing knife homicides by ~100) seems to be a discussion around retooling every knife in the UK or specifically increasing funding of police forces in specific urban areas.
The knife option impacts everyone, impacts typical non-violent knife usage and does nothing to ensure knife violence doesn’t shift to blunt trauma violence.
The police funding impacts specific areas, reduces overall violence and allows for other police functions to refocus potentially improving more a broader range of issues but drives up government expenses.
I’m curious why anyone would consider the 1st option better than the second.
