Bone, I’ll try to respond to your post later–it can be time-consuming to do so. This one is an easy comment, though:
This is true, but there’s a lot to control for. I’d expect people at greater risk of victimization by violent crime to be likelier to purchase guns, AND to die more often from homicide, than people at lesser risk of such victimization. In compiling these stats, if you don’t control for risk of victimization, the stats might be misleading.
Did you see post # 17? I asked specifically if property defense counted. Your “clearly iiandyiii wanted to compare actual personal injury or death prevented caused” is refuted by the affirmative response in post #18. The meaning was interpreted the same way by posters in post #19 and #39.
You are correct, I do not believe every good guy gun use prevented an injury or death. Good thing I never stated nor implied this.
I’m not upset as you say here, nor sad as you say in the post above. Uninterested is more accurate.
The problem with passive and open ended language that you favor is that it leaves open avenues for creatively recasting statements. Here’s how the sequence plays out:
Not me: Let’s compare A : C & D.
Me: Shouldn’t it be A & B : C & D?**
Not me: **Yes, that’s good.
Me: Does B include X?
Not me: Yes, I think.
Me: Okay, here’s A & B compared to C & D.
**Not me: ** Great, now I know C & D, except, B shouldn’t be included. And I doubt A even exists so let’s just use ZERO for that side of the comparison. C & D is much more than ZERO, case closed!
This is parody somewhat. It’s also tiresome.
No need unless there was something new. It is time consuming and I myself would have passed had the question been presented as it is now. Like I said, tiresome.
Fair enough. If you don’t control for risk you could probably show that locking your door increases your chance of getting burgled. My point is simply that if you wanted to prove door locks worked to prevent burglaries, you wouldn’t ever count up all the instances where people left their houses with the door locked and returned to an un-burgled house and call that gigantic number “burglaries foiled by locked doors.”
Apparently there was a misunderstanding. At no time was I interested in any events that only risked property and had zero risk to people – and you never stated it that way. When discussing burglaries and the like, I made the assumption that some of these involve some risk to people (even when, ultimately, they are prevented with no injury or death), and I should have explicitly said that those are the only ones I’m interested in.
I apologize for any misunderstanding, but that’s all it was.
There is nothing they WANT To research that wouldn’t be advocating for gun control. They keep track of how many people die from gunshot wounds.
They keep track of all sorts of shit so they should have no problem keeping track of how many times a concealed carry permit holder used his gun defensively versus accidentally shot someone while carrying his gun.
The problem I see is that people will argue about what is defensive use. Was the Treyvon martin shooting a defensive gun use? Using the most likely criteria, it would be but I don’t think that is a really good argument for increasing the prevalence of concealed carry.
Well, yes and no. States that adopt conceal carry laws have seen violent crime rates drop faster than the national average. But that might be because conceal carry laws are frequently adopted along with other “tough on crime” legislation so you can’t tell what is causing the faster drop in crime rate.
But I bet if the numbers went the other way, some would see it as irrefutable evidence that conceal carry is exactly as horrible as they always thought it was.
There are about 600 accidental deaths every year. Very few of them are the result of a conceal carry holder accidentally shooting someone while walking around with a concealed weapon. The most common killing committed by a conceal carry permit holder is suicide. Conceal carry holders are on average more law abiding that the general public and (in Texas at least) they are more law abiding than the police.
Guns are used by concealed carry permit holders much more frequently but as I point out with the Treyvon Martin case, you could argue about whether the presence of a gun was a good thing despite the defensive gun use.
The time frame you suggest is after Obama instructed the CDC to start doing research again. The CDC did so and the results AFAICT is that more research is needed and there is no conclusive proof either way on much of anything but there are a few stubborn facts that seem unavoidable:
Every study on the issue of defensive gun use shows a significant number of defensive gun uses.
Voluntary gun buyback programs are ineffective at reducing gun violence.
Assault weapons bans don’t seem to have any effect on the rate of gun violence (mostly because of the next item).
Assault Weapons account for a tiny sliver of gun homicides.
Mass shootings account for a tiny sliver of gun homicides.
Given the inconclusive nature of any of the studies out there, why should we impose more and more gun regulations “just to see if it will work”
The law banning advocacy was passed in 1995 and the research mentioned in your post was started in 1996. I’m not sure how that isn’t a relevant time frame.
There was clear bias among the researchers that the CDC was funding and among CDC officials as well.
It doesn’t count as gun violence research unless it is funded by healthcare professionals and conducted by economists. The stuff funded by law enforcement folks and conducted by criminologists doesn’t count.
It almost sounds like you want a statement from the current head of the CDC saying “I want to ban guns”
Institutional biases do not just go away, especially when those institutional biases are based on personal biases and preconceived notions. We would not take a statement about trying to reduce the number of Jews at Harvard in 1979 and again in the 1990s and conclude that those biases no longer exist because they haven’t publicly expressed those biases recently so there is probably no bias against Jews anymore.
You can’t just wave away the comments of the head of the CDC section in charge of overseeing gun violence (among other things) and pretend he’s just some low level flunkie.
The bias is probably significantly reduced these days because the folks at the CDC have seen how damaging it can be to the organization to use their bureaucratic position to advance political agendas (and if you ask folks at the CDC under the age of 40 or so, they will probably agree that the CDC had a bias when the law was initially passed). The most recent report (linked above) show a much more detached and objective attempt as addressing the problem of gun violence in America. They now look at both sides of the issue. The mere fact that they acknowledge that defensive gun use exists and the fact that they use a multidisciplinary approach rather than merely an epidemiological approach is a vast improvement over their prior posture. But it is pretty clear that the folks in charge over there had a bias in the past.
If you are really just going to compare accidental injury and death against prevented injury and death, I think the evidence leans heavily in favor of concluding that accidents are significantly outnumbered by defensive gun uses.
I also don’t think you are being fair to the gun control side. The gun control side of the argument would say (or should say) that you should also include gun injuries and deaths caused by folks who could legally purchase the firearm used in the injury or death. IOW, all murders and gun injuries caused by folks who were legally allowed to purchase the firearm used at the time the crime was committed. Still, its hard to get away from the rather large numbers that every study on defensive gun uses spits out.
But as previously noted, not only do DGUs fail to differentiate when there is a risk of injury or death from instances in which the risk is only to property, but the self-reporting numbers seem to be wildly different numbers from the other methods of determining DGUs. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that I’m not ready to conclude that, due to the apparent shakiness of the self-reporting numbers.
Those are good questions, but not the ones I was asking.
That’s probably fair, I recall a reading an article from way back during the height of the Bernie Goetz controversy in NYC where they determined that only 1 in 7 victims of muggings were seriously injured (I think this meant required medical attention) during the robbery. Of course some of those injured ended up dead but the vast majority of them ended up with nothing worse than getting pushed to the ground and maybe a few bruises. Does that mean we can ignore 85% of defensive gun uses when comparing accidental gun injuries/deaths, maybe… but it also means that you are ignoring a bunch of other harms that are being prevented by defensive gun uses.
Why? When comparing how useful guns are to how harmful guns are, why would you inject when guns are irrelevant?
When we measure the effectiveness of smoke detectors or vaccines or fire extinguishers we do not count the times when they don’t make a difference against them. We don’t say “well 1000 people got the vaccine and infections went from 300 to 100 so we have to count the 100 people that got infected despite having the vaccine against it”
Or are guns special?
On what do you base that opinion? Considering that the accidental rate of gun death at ~600 and defensive gun uses is probably in the hundreds of thousands?
The ratio of robberies to deaths from robberies is somewhere between 0.35% and 0.8% (based on a study of robberies in Detroit between 1962 (relatively low crime period) to 1974 (relatively high crime period).
The ratio of aggravated assault to death is significantly higher at about 2% (5/100,000 deaths from aggravated assault :: 250/100,000 aggravated assaults).
I’ve got no idea how the DGUs divide out between preventing someone who is only interested in the money in your wallet and preventing someone who wants to hurt you.
In trying to compare like to like it might make sense to consider whether there is a higher concentration of folks who are at higher risk of getting themselves killed in the population of gun owners.
Good news, Damuri Ajashi! I’ve invented a miracle device that helps protect people from the Boogie Woogie Virus, or BWV, that you may have heard about. This dreadful dancing disease spreads through airborne contact and kills dozens of people every year. My device is a nanobot injector that reads the human immune system response and, when a BWV response is detected, boosts the immune system by 1000% using specially constructed nanobots! Amazing, right!?
Now, there’s a downside. Sometimes the nanobot injector glitches and injects them directly into the brain instead of the bloodstream, killing the wearer instantly. Regrettably, this happens dozens of times per year. But thanks to our “Always On” internet connectivity, we can precisely record every time our nanobot injectors encounter a BWV response and inject protective nanobots, and it ends up that it happens six hundred thousand times per year. What an amazing medical breakthrough!
What’s that? You’re still worried about the dozens of people per year who die from nanobot-brain-injections? Dude, 600,000 is so much bigger than dozens, how can you doubt its effectiveness?
What’s that? You think that the normal, unassisted immune system is obviously capable of dealing with the Boogie Woogie Virus almost all the time, based on the evident ubiquity of the virus and the relatively low death rate, and that the nanobot response is therefore almost always unnecessary? Why? When comparing how useful my nanobot injector is to how harmful it is, why would you inject when my nanobot injector is irrelevant?
DA, you and I have gone back and forth on this multiple times; at this point, I can only assume that there’s some willful ignorance involved. Am I treating guns differently? Of course not, I’m holding them to the exact same standard to which we hold any other treatment. You’re the one who’s willing to throw conventional science out the window on this issue.