That’s fine, but it’s a different question – I’m asking about a comparison between accidental shootings and lives/injuries prevented from the use of guns.
After the fact, I don’t think there’s a way to confirm whether a burglar really might have hurt someone or not, even if they didn’t intend to. I doubt every stopped burglary prevented injury or death, but it’s reasonable that some of them did; I don’t know how to determine which are which so I’m willing to look at the totals, 'cause why not? We’re just throwing ideas around here.
Because it takes you down a rabbit hole of fantastical wonder. If the homeowner shot a burglar, did that prevent an injury? What if they shot and missed? What if they just brandished a handgun or racked a shotgun and chased the burglar away? What if the pizza guy had the wrong address and they answer the door with a gun because they’re just that type of person. Did that prevent an injury? These are all things that get counted in DGU surveys.
Counting up totals based on self-reported hypotheticals means absolutely nothing.
You also have to know whether or not any of those violent crime victims did have a gun in the house; after all, guns are a pretty terrible means of self defense, so if one was present and it failed to prevent an injury or death, that needs to count against the total.
From LHOD’s link above, self-reporting doesn’t seem particularly accurate for this data at all. But if there is an accurate count of burglaries stopped by homeowners with guns, then I’m certainly curious about that number.
I’d say that’s not actually what you want to know, though. What you want to know is A) all of the burglaries and attempted burglaries that happened in a certain geographic area, B) whether or not the burglary resulted in an injury or death, and C) whether or not a gun was present in the house during the burglary. I don’t think you want to be concerned about whether or not the gun was “used,” because that opens the question up to too much interpretation.
Even then, an attempted burglary that was foiled by a gun is probably more likely to be reported than an attempted burglary that was foiled by a homeowner flipping on the lights and saying, “Who’s there,” so I don’t think your numbers are going to be all that great.
FWIW, I think the studies I’ve seen DO support the notion that having a gun on your person if you happen to find yourself a victim in the middle of a criminal act does provide a net safety benefit. That is to say, I think it goes without saying that I’d rather have a gun in my hand during an actual burglary than not have one. But I think the risk of firearm ownership other 99.999% of the time that people aren’t getting burgled outweighs that benefit.
One of the challenges is that medical journals are not often available for free. For instance, I cannot access historical Journal of American Medical Association archives online without subscribing. So when I say that there was an article published in 1989 in that journal, that was called, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation”, that’s easily findable. But if I say that within that article, P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, was quoted by the author as saying, "We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” I can only link to other sources that quote the same section, not the article itself. The JAMA article is cited, is a primary source, but unless you are a member you cannot access it. Given your distrust, I’m not sure what the point of offering a comprehensive case would be.
I would love to read the 1994 American Medical News article, *Gun Control as Immunization, *but it’s not available online that I can find. So as shorthand summary, I offered the Reason article because it has some key points, and is relatively short. The Reason article is a summary yes, but within that summary are numerous quotes, people referenced, specific studies referenced, etc. If you are willing to dismiss that as ‘half-truths, lies, and strawman arguments’ (what definition of Gish Gallop are you using, it’s unclear) then what is the point of presenting a case? I offer a single example that is directly on point, you discount it as aged. I offer a summary of multiple actions and you discount the summary as not a primary source, untrustworthy, too voluminous, etc.
Again, the name of the person that actually scribed the text in the US Public Health Service goals is a distraction. You refer to it as “someone” when in reality, it’s representative of one of the goals of the agency as a whole. To limit that to any particular individual is misleading. Yes, an individual at some point wrote those words. Then, it went through whatever process the agency has of editing, revising, and finalizing the goals of the agency and published it. It is a fair statement to say it was a goal of the agency. It is not a fair statement to say that “someone wrote a sentence with a dangling modifier that only makes sense if it means that confiscation would not be acceptable”
The same thing with Rosenberg. He was not the head of the CDC. He was the Director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control which I wrote when I first referenced him. There is no reason to try to peg his position more accurately than that, since that was his actual position. It’s like trying to call Obama some guy that got elected by some antiquated process sometime, somewhere instead of just saying he is the President of the United States. Yes, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is a sub program of the CDC. The NCIPC was responsible for overseeing gun violence research within the CDC. You say you’re aiming for accuracy, but the way you frame it is not informative.
You may focus on the latter part where he indicates that we “didn’t have to ban cars” whereas I am more concerned about the former part characterizing guns as a public health menace.
Here is the Washington Post article from 1994 that is referenced in the Reason article:
I can’t find the 1987 CDC report referenced from the Reason article. I acknowledge that finding certain quotations, especially online, is difficult.
The Dickey amendment was 2 decades ago. The events leading up to it are described briefly in the Reason article. The folks that CDC was funding at the time Hemenway, Kellerman - they still publish articles. Their views haven’t changed. Folks pushing for all sorts of gun control schemes views haven’t changed over that time. The NRA’s views haven’t changed over that time. Do you have evidence that the conventional wisdom at CDC would have changed?
How is this offensive? When agencies act stupidly, we lose trust in them. Do you dispute that? I think the CDC acted stupidly, therefore my trust is diminished. You don’t have to agree with the reality, but you should accept that it is true because it is. Whether it’s unreasonable or not is debatable of course. Calling something unreasonable is hardly persuasive.
I don’t think these characterizations are accurate, again.
The CDC prior to the Dickey Amendment spent $2.6M on what it called research, and what congress called gun control promotion or advocacy. The budget at the time was $2.2 billion. By what definition is that considered “significant”? 0.1%?
This assumes that homicide, suicide, and accidental death and injury behave like other diseases or injuries. I think there is an argument to be made in the case of unintentional injury or death, and possibly one in the arena of suicide prevention from a mental health standpoint, but in no way is homicide like other diseases. The treatment as such assumes that firearms cause homicides and that is unsupported. It’s more accurate to say that Congress in their opinion didn’t find the CDC work had merit and prevented them from engaging in taxpayer funded gun control advocacy.
It is probably true that without the Gingrich revolution, the Dickey Amendment doesn’t pass. The rest of your statement here is conjecture. When Rosenberg says, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol – cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly – and banned.” you could construe that as speaking only for himself as his personal opinion and not as the Director of the NCIPC, but I don’t. Why do you? As a public official, he must know that is how his statements will be construed so it’s not unrealistic to think that the statements made are in that context.
I want to clarify - when I say “ban guns” I don’t mean *all *guns, I mean any subset. So, the direct quote of the head of the NCIPC is not sufficient to establish the statement? Does the CDC need to put out a press release or something that says they want to do that and nothing less will satisfy? The evidence based on statements made, conclusions draw, studies funded, evidence ignored, all point in one direction. It’s sufficient in my opinion. I accept it is not sufficient in yours. If you are willing to dismiss the aggregation of all the evidence that points in one direction, then we are at an impasse.
Kates’s longer work, with citations, was written earlier, and published in the Tennessee Law Review. The full article is here, including citations. Of course, they aren’t online citations because well, internet not being what it is now back in 1994. It’s more in depth than the Reason article so I’m sure you’ll continue accusations of Gish Gallop or whatever that’s supposed to mean. My point is not to address each and every assertion or quotation because that’s fruitless. The point is, the belief that the CDC is not an impartial research agency when it comes to firearms is not without support, and not based on a single idea or event.
If you accept that this is a forthright representation of my and others’ views on the CDC, I don’t think it’s necessary to continue on this path. I accept you disagree.
Given **iiandyiiii’s **criteria some of your examples would count. Why do you think scaring off a person intent on robbing or harming you shouldn’t count? The problem you identify is that we don’t know because the event was prevented. That’s the entire basis of the comparison - things that are known to have happened vs. things that are unknown if they would have happened. If you are unwilling to count any manner of thing that did not actually happen, i.e. prevented events, then the comparison isn’t a bad one, it’s an impossible one. That’s why I first asked clarifying questions because at the end of it all, if the response is to dismiss anything that is self reported, well, what the fuck is the point?
Your original question has been largely addressed to the extent possible. The scales tip heavily in favor of gun ownership if you believe the available survey data. If you don’t believe the data, or think it unreliable, or insufficient to draw a conclusion, then okay. The belief is not one without evidence, however.
I have no idea why they are reported upon so rarely. There are 20-30K fatalities involving cars each year, yet they are hardly all newsworthy. Bears shit in woods and all that. We know there are 20-30K suicides each year, yet they are hardly reported on. I have no idea what the most common types of DGU would be. I suspect it would be people in their homes defending against burglary, and store owners defending against robbery - but that’s conjecture on my part. Consider from **LhoD **link, 3.7M burglaries, of which 1M events where someone was home. The DOJ sheet doesn’t discuss what actions were taken by the people present, but I think it’s safe to say some proportion of those 1M acted to defend themselves. I think with 300M+ firearms in circulation, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-10M concealed carry permits in the states that issues them (ignoring the 6 constitutional carry states), it’s not at all surprising that there are many events each day. And in the instances where attempts have been made to quantify the totality of those events, the numbers are high.
Because we have no way of isolating whether or not the gun made a difference in the outcome, which is the thing we’re actually trying to figure out. If there are 100 households with guns, and 100 households without guns as a control group, and each of the 100 households with guns say that they scared off 5 burglars last year, that’s an insane amount of crime prevention. But if the control group had no injuries or deaths, then what conclusions can we draw? Clearly having a gun makes you no safer, despite an impressive number of reported cases of defensive gun use.
Nonsense, science does this all the time. We can compare two different populations and control for certain factors to see an effect. We don’t know that smoking is bad because we counted all the cigarettes that people didn’t smoke.
It seems to me you don’t consider prevention of property crime to be a defensive gun use, wishing only to count instances where injury or death was prevented. Is that accurate?
Yes; because the flip side of owning a gun is accidental injury or death. I don’t know how to compare a toddler accidentally shooting themselves or a teen suicide to a TV that’s not stolen. You may want to make that calculation but I have no interest.
DGU include protecting property, so quite obviously it’s not a comparable statistic. Injury/deaths are what he wants compared and shooting some guy who’s cutting my bike lock doesn’t count as an injury prevented.
This fits me too (for the purposes of this thread, at least) – I’m willing to consider the possibility that in some burglaries, injuries or death might be prevented, but my original question doesn’t concern incidents that only involve risk to property.
DGUs can include anything under the sun, including scaring away the pizza guy who’s at the wrong house. But I don’t want to fall into a trap here, my point isn’t that I want to count this and not that, my point is that counting isn’t necessary; it’s a meaningless statistic. If guns make you safer, then that should be evident in the life expectancy of gun owners.
eta: And to make this hijack relevant to the OP, if there’s a benefit to a large percentage of the population carrying a handgun every day, that should also be evident in the life expectancy of the population.
Not necessarily – I acknowledge that stopping some burglaries in which the burglar intends to steal might still be a prevention of injury or death ('cause people willing to break in and steal might be willing to harm if they come across someone inside), but not all, and I’m not interested in those incidents that don’t. To distinguish these, perhaps we could look at national statistics for burglaries/home invasions and see how many resulted in injury or death for someone inside the home.
Feel free to look into it because with this I can’t figure out your position or the criteria. The passive phrasing saying, “perhaps …we can see…” is too nebulous for me to be interested. I stated the reason I clarified my questions in post #22. If you would have taken this position instead, I wouldn’t have bothered because you’ll get no satisfactory answer.
At least you now have the easily searchable unintentional firearm injury and death figures, so yay.
You misunderstood my answer (and perhaps I misunderstood the question) – I want to compare injuries/deaths to injuries/deaths, and while some burglaries or other property crimes might involve risks of injury and death, obviously not all do.
I suppose if we want to involve all incidents involving property crimes, we could compare them to all accidental discharges of weapons which result in property damage. I’m not sure if those numbers are tracked, but based on some of the idiots I knew in high school, it’s probably very, very high.
I don’t know why you’d feel sad about posting data, though, unless the only thing you’re interested in is engaging with me. I post stuff to engage with and inform everyone, so it’s okay (to me) if sometimes I do “extra work” that may not answer a particular person’s question; someone else might find it interesting.
Not sure why anyone would be upset by language like “perhaps we could…” – this is an informal discussion, not an official debate; when I’m uncertain about something, I’ll use less-than-certain language. What’s wrong with just throwing around ideas?
Have a hard time believing you are arguing honestly here. You were putting forth the idea that any time a “good guy” uses a gun it should go in the win column when clearly iiandyiii wanted to compare actual personal injury or death prevented caused. There is no way you believe every good guy gun use prevented an injury or death.
