Just a quick footnote. That figure of 22,000 operative gun laws is 1992 BATF estimate. I’m sure the number currently far exceeds 22,000.
Unc…
Y’know, there was an instance just a week after the Santee shooting, where an ex-student went back to his old school and started shooting.
Nobody was killed.
Why?
He was stopped. By a security guard. WITH A GUN.
What does that tell you?
You’ve posted twice since Andros asked the question about how many deaths were prevented by honest gun-wielding citizens, and have conspicuously failed to answer. Do you have a figure, or is it an intuition (a reasonable intuition, but still just a gut feeling unless you have some evidence to back it up).
As an aside, saying that 13,000 deaths a year is a small price to pay is just completely fucking horrifying to me.
Well, you got me. I’m completely rethinking my earlier belief that we should ban security guards.
Uh, did you even think about what you were saying before you typed this? It’s like saying “Compare the number of sword related deaths in the Crusades to those caused by the actual fists of warriors.” Why would there be more stabbing deaths in a war which involves guns?
Anyway, I’m sure that it’s been mentioned in this post, and I know it’s been brought up so many times before (including bumper stickers), but a gun can’t kill someone without a person pulling the trigger. If guns are banned, then insane kids are still going to be able to kill a bunch of other students, it will just take more effort, such as learning how to make a bomb out of easilly attained materials. Of course that kind of information can be found in books, so maybe we should start burning them?
That security guards serve an important function, and that armed nuts need to be stopped by any means possible? Or are you equating a professional security guard, trained accordingly, with the average gun-owner?
Get some civilization, Mr.Zambezi–you make rather barbaric statements. Perhaps you will change your mind on what constitutes a “small price” when one of your family is gunned down senselessly by someone who enjoys the freedom to own a firearm.
Unclebeer, doesn’t it strike you that you are falling prey to paranoia? The language you use here definitely sounds like paranoia or fanaticism–or both.
Hansel…
He probably ignored it because that questions been answered a dozen times before, in other gun threads, and it always results in a massive hijack coming in.
However, seeing as how this thread seems to be devolving, anyway… John Lott’s estimate is that close to 2 million instances of home invasion where the presence of a gun is simply made known, and the intruder departs, without a single shot fired or anybody getting hurt.
Seeing as how I know that this is going to spark a debate, and seeing as how I have no intention on debating that topic - AGAIN!! - I will not address any follow-ups to that. If you want to debate John Lott’s accuracy, go find an old gun thread and resurrect that.
Abe…
Whoosh, Abe. Whoosh.
Please take note of the part that’s bolded and italicized. I put extra emphasis on it specifically for people who choose to be obtuse, but I guess you still missed it.
Get some education, Mr Abe-- you make rather ignorant comments.
Well, apparently the price of accidental car-related injuries is acceptable, and the number of gun-related deaths is lower… so, therefore, gun-related deaths are acceptable.
C’mon, Abe, you need to try harder than this.
Please explain how it sounds like paranoia or fanaticism - or both - when his words jibe with the philosophies of the ACLU and current happenings of the day.
Or are you saying that freedom is something that continues to thrive without any work towards keeping that freedom strong and secure? You simply sound naive.
Oh, sorry…
Hansel, John Lott published the book More Guns, Less Crime, and his studies indicated that higher levels of concealed-carry permits issued in a specific area coincided - and probably had a direct involvement - with lowered crime rates in those areas.
Among other things.
Again, if you want to debate John Lott, go find an old thread, as this is simply rehashed material. Talk about yer -gry questions…
I’m pretty sure that guy would have wreaked even more havoc had he posessed a gun. Why wouldn’t he have?
— G. Raven
There’s a reason I’ve not answered the question of lives saved in the course of defensive gun use by law-abiding citizens. We’ve been down that road any number of times recently and gotten no where.
The estimates of defensive gun use (DGU) per year range from 2.5 million (Gary Kleck) to one million (NCVS estimate) and all the way down to something like 80,000 (David Hemmenway). The numbers are unreliable. It’s also difficult to just how many of these DGU’s actually prevented a killing. I’ve not put a number to it because I don’t believe it can be done with any accuracy. However, to assume that no lives are saved to somewhat offset the number of deaths would be absurd.
What we do have though, are these numbers.
[ul]
[li]15.6% of the people using a firearm defensively stated that they “almost certainly” saved their lives by doing so. – Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995[/li][li] In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first. – Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995[/li]
When using guns in self-defense:
[list]
[li] 83% of robbery victims were not injured. – National Crime Victimization Survey, 1985[/li]
[li] 88% of assault victims were not hurt. – National Crime Victimization Survey, 1985[/li]
[li] 76% of all self-defense use of guns never involve firing a single shot. – National Crime Victimization Survey, 1985[/li][/ul]
[/list]
You may draw your own conclusions from that.
And this needs to be said again as it has also been completely ignored, the vast majority of people killed by guns are criminals, killed by other criminal while engaged in criminal enterprise. These assholes can shoot each up all day long for all I care. They’ve made a conscious decision to embrace violence. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Fuck ‘em.
I’m not going to address this here, except to say that Spoofe has ably covered it. I think we can do this better in the upcoming “Slippery Slope” thread, to which I’m still writing to introduction and opening argument Stay tuned … Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel …
But of course I do know that. Which was why I referred to the “success” rates in each case. Just to reiterate, the guy with the edged weapon (who was after all the subject of the OP) killed only 25% of his potential victims, while the guy with the gun scored 100%. These men were operating in near identical environments. So it’s not about numbers, it’s about the comparative efficiency of the weapon in question. I was using two examples which are more similar than not, with the major point of contrast being the choice of weapon. In terms of testing the hypothesis that guns are a greater problem than knives/swords, I think it’s a good start.
Disregarding the cogent information is also a good debating tactic.
Man, that’s your claim. I absolutely agree that its highly unlikely I’d find evidence to back it up. You based your claim on the following
Why “compelled” to use a sword? Is it psychological? Or are they unable to get their hands on their weapon of choice, namely a gun? Why does this mean they have a greater wish to inflict harm? As for the point about a single wound, what are you trying to say? That a single wound from a sword is less likely to be fatal than a single wound from a gun, requiring the assailant to, in the vernacular, have another stab at it? Guns are lethal precisely because of the damage they can inflict with a single wound.
**
Since we’re talking about swords, try this link which describes how one man was able to fight off his sword-weilding attacker and escape with defensive wounds. His companion was killed. I would suggest that the fact that the attacker could be fended off tends to qualify the assertion that swords are at least as lethal as guns. This article describes how a man armed with a samurai sword attacked, wounded but failed to kill 11 people in a church. Had he had a gun, I would submit, the death toll would have been considerable.
And finally, I brought up the Indy thing by way of illustrating to people what they already know: given the choice in a conflict, they’d rather have a gun than a sword. I admit it was a bad move on my part, because it required the reader to do a little work and demonstrate a little imagination. Never again, I promise.
Cute. Sounds like a sound grab from “A Few Good Men”. I guess I could point out that if those 13,000 had been killed over the same number of years, rather than each year, there wouldn’t be a debate.
Your relationship with your government is your prerogative. I don’t have that problem with mine. Hell, I even vote. I don’t feel any need to maintain a personal arsenal to guard against tyranical governance or loss of property. I’m lead to believe that despite these manifest failings, the Australian model confers a comparable level of freedom and liberty to the American one. I’m quite chuffed that this disgusts you.
Mr Franklin was a truely a sage of his time … as to whether such a intellect would maintain precisely the same philosophical position in current times is probably a question that neither of us is qualified to answer.
Never-the-less, what I would be interested in hearing from Mr Zambezi, UncleBeer and your goodself, having stated your agreement that 13,000 homicides per annum was a small price to pay, what you would consider as to constitue a fair price? What level (if any) would be too high a price?
What would be acceptable? I can’t really see this being a terribly relevant question. IF gun homocides were going up, so would my need to protect myself. If people were conducting nightly raids and murders on american homeowners, I would definitely want the ability to protect my wife and child.
** abe said**
It is not barbaric. My beef with gun control advocates as well as environmentalists is that they tend to concentrate on teh outcome and ignore the cost. Banning a weapon will not prohibit its use. IT may diminish it though. What it surely does is almost eliminate its use by those who abide by the law andhence teh ability of the law abiding to defend themselves.
I agree that there should be certain limits, e.g no gun ownership for convicted felons, no private ownership of ICBM’s (as if anyone could afford it or deploy it.)
So let me turn the cost benefit question around: *how many knife deaths are acceptable before we ban knives? *
or * how many people must die before we ban alcohol?*
If it saves just one life, is it really worth it?
Wait a minute, woolly. You’ve just stated that I accept 13,000 gun homicides as small price to pay. You’ve completely ignored my qualification of that number, which I again stated in the post just above. That figure represents largely criminals, killed by other criminal while engaged in criminal enterprise.
So, let’s try to break that number down a bit. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics, 1998, “Most gun related crime is caused by gang activity. The percent of homicides involving guns by gang related activity approaches 92%. Additionally 73% of gun homicides are committed in the course of the commission of other felonies.”
So, we now have a mere 8% of 13,000, or 1040, gun homicides per year that are not otherwise crime related. In a nation of 265 million people. Hardly an epidemic and in the large picture, not worth the fuss. Yes, each individual death is a tragedy to someone personally, but overall, it’s insignificant.
Whoops! My bad. Of course I meant less lethal, not more. Sorry for the confusion. Again, though, you are using single instances to attempt to prove a trend. But let’s take a closer look at those instances posted so far. We have what now, 9 dead and 35 wounded, giving us a lethal rate of 9/44 or about 1 in five? Hmmmm. This doesn’t seem to be proving the contention that guns are far more lethal than edged weapons. And since we were initially speaking of swords, rather than the more inclusive edged weapons, I submit the rate could be even higher than one in five. Swords, by their nature, should be more likely to cause more serious injuries than mere knives.
Are swords a bit of a red herring at this point? I think they were only introduced to this debate in response to my idea that knives are less lethal than guns.
As someone who supports greater gun control, I would have no problem in also restricting swords. In my mind, this is consistent with my own beliefs on the utility of owning a sword compared with the utility of restricting ownership of them. If anything, there is even less usefulness in owning a sword than there is in owning a gun.
Knives, on the other hand, are much more of an interesting topic, since the utility of these is obviously much greater.
(Note: I’m using ‘utility’ in the sense of usefulness, not in utilitarian terms)
Perhaps knives need more classification. Thre are long knives, short knives, arkansas toothpicks, daggers, butterknives, butcher knives…
I found it interesting that in NY where a knife over 6" was illegal, I could readily buy 12" butcher knives. I think that the style and intended use was more important than the substance.
Anyway, a kitchen knife may have utility, but does a bowie knife or rambo knife? I would suggest that if the weapon potential were indeed a problem, one could simply outlaw knives with a point. All knives would have to have a rounded end. In addition, since a razor sharp straight blade is more deadly than a serrated edge, but is no more usefull in the kitchen, that all knive must be serrated. By making these changes, the utility of teh knife for legal purposes would not be hampered, but the use of it as a weapon would be extremely diminished. The knives wouldn’t be usefull for dressing game, but then, we do not live in a society where we need to hunt.
This is, of course, analagous to outlawing semi-auot rifles or “assault weapons.”
Now, if such changes would eliminate a few thousand knife deaths would it be worth it?
My first thought is that I would support that, Mr. Z. Certainly, I would have no problem with any knife designed to be concealed being restricted. I’m not sure how you could legally defend a kitchen knife being okay but a Bowie knife being restricted, though. I’m sure someone would find a way to argue that the style of knife cannot always be linked to its intended use.
I can’t believe some of you are actually contemplating knife restrictions. Forks can be deadly as well, maybe we should bam the use of forks without rounded edges. Hell, why not ban heavy, blunt objects such as baseball bats, weights, most any type of tool, bed posts, chair/table legs, parking meters, etc… basically leaving people living in empty, padded rooms (bare, rigid walls can be used as a weapon if you bang someone’s head into it repeatedly).
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by UncleBeer *
Wait a minute, woolly. You’ve just stated that I accept 13,000 gun homicides as small price to pay. You’ve completely ignored my qualification of that number, which I again stated in the post just above. That figure represents largely criminals, killed by other criminal while engaged in criminal enterprise."
This is true, you did, and I did, but was primarily because I’m not familiar with how you would draw that distinction … you know which crimes, what onus of proof, which jurisdictions and what period, just the usual liberal waffle.