Stupid Gun news of the day (Part 1)

The BBQ Pit
4161

I don’t get it. Are you saying that defensive gun uses might not have required the use of a gun at all (waving a gun at a burglar that would have run regardless of whether or not you had a gun)? Are you saying that these may not be defensive gun uses might not have been used defensively at all, that the national criminal victimizations urvey is picking up a bunch of false positives?

I’m just trying to get some numbers to make a cost benefit analysis and you seem to be telling me that we can only count the gun deaths and injuries but we cannot even try to estimate any benefits that guns may have because we can’t get enough certainty on the number of DGU so we don’t put anything at all in the benefits column.

We have not proven that guns are a net negative and yet everyone seems to assume that they are. All we know is that there is an correlation between households that have guns and households where people get murdered. There is no causal link between legally owning a gun and increasing your risk of death by 300%. I suspect that there might be some increase of risk of death (certainly accidental death seems to be causally connected to owning a gun and there is probably a link between gun owership and sppousal murder) but these are not the things getting sussed out. I don’t know if its because its too hard to suss out these numbers or because the folks doing these studies are looking for confirmation of preset conclusions so they look for statistics taht will support ther conclusion.

So what does association mean? Does it mean correlation or something more than that?

Well I am not a scientist. But I can see that they are trying to present correlation as causation here.

Its not that we don’t understand how to conduct science, its that we suspect they are conductingn the science in a way to achieve conclusions that they can present as support for their biases. The bias is clear from the statements and interviews and when they conclude that there is a correlation between guns and murder ina household and the media predictably reports on it as if there is a causal link, it is hard to believe that they didn’t know that the media would present their correlation as if it was causation.

When the limitations sections says that they cannot determine if the gun ownership is causing the increased risk of death or is the increased risk of death is causing the gun ownership (as one study did), then what probative value do it provide to say that households with guns also have a higher murder rate?

Your entire argument seems to revolve around namecalling and I wonder if you can even formulate an argument that doesn’t ask the reader to assume that your opposition is stupid. There has to be a latin phrase for that sort of argument.

So has the media been reporting this conclusion as is there is a correlation or as if there is some sort of causation?

I don’t dispute that there is inf act a correlation between households taht own guns and households where a murder occurs. I don’t even dispute that households that own guns are going to experience a higher rate of gun homicides than households that don’t own guns. I dispute that if the average citizen goes out and buys a gun, they have just increased their chances of someone in their home being murdered by 300%. And that is the way these studies are being presented to the general public by media outlets. That is the way these studies are frequntly presented in arguments on this board.

Funny, I feel the same way about gun grabbers. I have changed position on a few things since this debate started, can you say the same?

Where do I repeatedly contend that gun violence is not a public health issue that the CDC has no business examining? I have said that the CDC has been biased and funded biased research. I have said that this bias is why their gun research was restricted. I have said that there are other government agencies that can fund this sort of research just as easily as the CDC. I may have said some other things too but I don’t think I said that the CDC shouldn’t be looking into gun violence.

Both the UK and Australia had much lower homicide rates before their respective gun bans because there simply weren’t that many guns around, criminals were not as well armed as ours are. If we banned guns today in the USA, our criminals would be just as well armed after the bana sbefore it and the law abiding citizens would be disarmed. I don’t see how the UK or Australia example makes a dent in that.

Hasn’t violent crime fallen to its lowest rate EVERYWHERE regardless of what happened with guns?

4162

You sound like one of those people who deny that anthropomorphic global warming is happening.

4163

You mean anthropogenic global warming.

Anthropomorphic global warming is a graph about global temperatures with four fingers, a shirt, and no pants.

4164

Duly noted.

4165

I’ve heard it both ways.

You are right, Dave Hardwick. Science denialism is an epidemic. Global climate, gun violence, vaccines, economics… it has become perfectly acceptable to assume that when the science doesn’t support your position, there is some kind of conspiracy afoot.

4166

Are you under the impression that you have proven things anywhere near as convincingly as as global warming?

4167

You sound like someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

4168

Wait, economics is a science?

4169

Well, this bit certainly sounds conspiracist: “Its not that we don’t understand how to conduct science, its that we suspect they are conductingn the science in a way to achieve conclusions that they can present as support for their biases. The bias is clear from the statements and interviews and when they conclude that there is a correlation between guns and murder ina household and the media predictably reports on it as if there is a causal link, it is hard to believe that they didn’t know that the media would present their correlation as if it was causation.”

You’re saying there’s a conspiracy, in short. You’re saying that scientists are lying to further their agenda and nobody notices. Well, a few people notice. People who are pro-gun in the first place, just like the people denying the science on AGW are political reactionaries or are paid by vested interests.

You’re also mirroring the do-nothing lines used by a subset of deniers, the ones who take such a dim view of human nature that they say that people would rather die than give up a toy. What a shame to hear it so often from Americans, a nation once fired up to change things.

And while I haven’t noticed you using this line, I’ve noticed a parallel between some advocates of legal firearm homicide and a subset of deniers, the deniers I think of as bleak optimists. “Sure,” they say, “the planet is warming, but I bet we’ll see a longer growing season in Siberia. Is that so bad?” The advocate analogue says, “Sure, the firearm homicide rate is linked to the prevalence of firearms, but it’s mostly gang members/inner city criminals/young black men getting killed. Is that so bad?”

4170

Not a conspiracy, a bias. An institutional bias across the health care profession against guns. If there are two ways to present evidence about guns, they tend to present the evidence in the way that makes it look like guns are the problem.

And the reason I don’t think that global warming is anywhere close to being an appropriate analogy is because the certainty of the science is metric light years apart.

There is no real possibility that the global warming is not being caused by carbon dioxide and I think it is probably well established that the warming is not causing the carbon dioxide (the cause and effect are pretty well established). There is no real argument that the increase in carbon is the result of human activity, noone thinks higher carbon dioxide levels is making people burn more coal and eat more meat.

There is a question about whether guns are causing the murders in the study or if the folks who are likely to get murdered are more likely to be armed. And yet the media predictably reports the study as finding a causal connection between firearm ownership and murder.

I don’t think I’ve seen them lying. But they are presenting the evidence in a way that invites the reader to reach the conclusion that guns are bad. Its sort of how the Bell Curve never says that blacks are stupid, they just invite you to reach that conclusion based on how intelligence correlates with socioeconomic success and the socioeconomic position of blacks.

I’m not really sure what this means.

I have not noticed anyone on this board suggest that we should let the criminals/young black men just kill each other of support handgun registration and licensing to prevent criminals and the underage from getting their hands on pistols.

I have seen street gangs and organized crime in places where they don’t have free access to guns and the gangfights there involve axes and swords. I would love to see inner city violence reduced to medieval weapons but I don’t see how we get there without starving them of a fresh supply of handguns. At the same time i don’t want to cut off handguns from people who want to protect themselves from these armed criminals. So I suggest licensing and registration of firearms to reduce the flow of guns into criminals hands to a relative trickle. The hope is that over time the trickle will be small enough that for all intents and purposes, it will be almost as good as making guns illegal as far as criminals are concerned.

4171

Po-tay-toe or Pa-ta-toe, conspiracy or bias, it’s the same thing in your case. Bias in research and experiments is a real thing, and researchers and scientists are aware of it. What you’re suggesting, though, is that the great majority of those who study firearms are so biased that they deliberately fail to control for their bias and then present their biased results to peers, who collude with their biased colleagues to make guns look like they are the problem. Yeah, that’s a conspiracy theory. The research disagrees with your position-- that guns are not a problem-- so therefore, researchers are falsifying and slanting results, and then passing their misinformation along to their accomplices in the media. All that’s missing is the line “wake up, sheeple!”

You claim that one cannot compare your denialism with climate science denial on the grounds of a meaningless (“light years”) exaggeration. I wonder how you know the science for one is “better”. If anything, I’d think that climate systems are more complex, therefore requiring more models of greater intricacy, and much more data, and data that’s harder to obtain, compared to, say, the relatively simple task of comparing households with guns to those without. Of course, there has been, in recent years, much less funding in the US for research on gun violence. The reason being, sorry to say, is that advocates of legal firearm murders politically blocked such research, a particularly effective method of science denial. If there’s a gap between the two bodies of research, your side is to blame.

As for the “it’s gang members who are mostly dying, is that so bad?” argument in favor of lax gun laws, I’ve seen it used in gun debates enough times that I suspect you aren’t really paying attention. A prominent example was Alex Jones when he was on the Piers Morgan show. I won’t link to it because it’s annoying from both angles, but when asked how many US firearm homicides there were in 2012, Jones was ready: “11,458 and about 74 percent of those were gang-related.” Apparently that makes an impressive butcher’s bill palatable for Jones. It’s not true (total US gang-related homicides average less than 2000/year, or about 12% of homicides according to this), but I’ve seen it repeated.

I must say, it’s awfully big-hearted of you to say that guns shouldn’t be meaningfully restricted because then citizens will be at a disadvantage to criminals. You wouldn’t happen to be a rural or suburban white male between 30 and 64 years old, would you? You know, the demographic most likely to favor legal firearm murders and the least likely to be the victim of a crime? Did you ever wonder what the people who actually are most at risk of being the victim of crime-- the ones you want to protect, out of your the goodness big ol’ pig heart, and certainly not because you’d personally be loathe to give up a pestilent liberty-- feel about your pet hobby? They’re the most likely to be in favor of gun control. More bias?

4172

You don’t need collusion for an institutional bias to have an effect. Noone is colluding to twist the results of the data but the questions they ask and how they frame the answers invite us to reach conclusions that their studies to not support.

And its not a great majority of those who study firearms that are reaching these conclusions. These papers and studies do not go unchallenged, there seems to be a rift between the perspective of the health professionals and the criminologists but this is not like global warming as you seem to suggest where everyone but a few crackpots and people deep in the pockets of monied interests agree on almost everything.

You seem to think that all the research goes in one direction or is anywhere near as conclusive as global warming. I don’t think it is.

The reduction in funding was $2.6 million/year. It shouldn’t have been done but its not what you seem to think it is.

And it is my understanding that the science on global warming is about as close as we can get to scientific fact as we are ever likely to get. The “science” on gun violence is not. You have studies that correlates gun ownership rates in a state with gun murder rates in that state and the study is presented as proof that gun ownership correlates with murder generally. And people pick it up that way. You have other studies that correlate having a gun in the house with a 300% higher likelihood of being murdered, the study points out that they may have cause and effect reversed but the rest of the study invites readers to see a causal link between gun ownership and being murdered. And people have doing exactly that.

You can take that up with Alex Jones, I disagree with about 99.3% of what Alex Jones says. I never claim that everyone on my side is a saint, far from it, I think a lot of them are racists and/or assholes. I’m not a single issue voter in guns, I am registered Democrat and I haven’t voted for a Republican in decades

I think that most gun homicides are committed by people who are not allowed to possess a handgun to begin with so I question how much of the annual gun homicide statistic could be reduced by making guns illegal altogether (the old “if you make guns illegal then only criminals will have guns” idea, noone’s really rebutted or debunked the notion that gun laws banning guns does not disarm criminals).

I’m not white and I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.

Who favors firearm murders again? I don’t see that your cite supports the notion that anyone favors murders of any sort.

I agree that I am unlikely to be the victim of a crime and I am even more unlikely to commit a crime. So?

I didn’t grow up in suburbia and I lived in large cities until I had a kid. I’ve been pro gun rights for at least 20 years before moving to suburbia and I spent the first 20 years of my life living in pretty shitty neighborhoods. I don’t see what that has to do with anything.

I have no quarrel with the results of the poll.

4173

Some actual data and analysis, from the New England Journal of Medicine:

Plenty of links there, for those so inclined.

4174

Oklahoma home damaged by 3.5" Howitzer shell fired from vintage artillery pieceat gun range 3 miles away:

Yep. Just a freak accident. No one could have predicted that. Coulda happened to anyone.

4175

Like a whole 45 minutes? Because it strikes me that a thirty minute training to fire a howitzer in a residential area might be a little foolhardy. Forty-five minutes? Yeah, sure. I mean, what more could you really learn in an hour?

4176

Armed bystander saves convenience store manager from being stabbed to death; store responds by putting up “No Guns” sign:

4177

[Woman accidentally shot by vendor at Pennsylvania gun show.](http:// Police plan to charge Pennsylvania gun vendor over accidental shooting | Fox News)

Try this link: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5542670

4178

A man brings his wife and new baby home from the hospital, and is killed by his neighbor, who accidentally fired off a round.

A man killed his wife while cleaning his loaded gun.

Another patriot accidentally discharged his weapon in Wal Mart.

These occurred during a one week period.

4179

More people in the US die each year from acute alcohol poisoning than from gunshots:

4180

Gun nut political correctness: It’s not fair to describe someone who shoots people with a gun as a “gunman” or a “shooter.”