Right. So what happens next is that we dig into your concerns about the literature, and we end up talking about what this odds ratio is or that confidence interval is or whether this association was lagged relative to the outcome. Which is all fine and good, but after each thing is explained and you guys reach the end of the “how to debunk gun studies” bullet points you read on gun blogs, rather than saying “Well, I guess I see how that might be a valid point,” you end up just waving your hands and claiming that all the gun research is biased anyway.
Here’s a question that I’d be interested in knowing the answer to: if proposed laws requiring gun owners to have liability insurance came to pass, what risk would insurance companies assign to owning a gun, and therefore what would they charge?
Before you answer let me point out that insurance companies are in the aggregate very good at estimating things like this; they’d go broke if they weren’t. And since they compete for business, they will likely charge close to the lowest rate that will still yield a profit- if they didn’t someone else would. The result, I am certain, is that they would NOT simply divide the number of gun deaths and injuries by the total number of guns owners, and charge a blanket rate. For example, they would never pay out for suicides, insurance companies never do. They would of course flatly refuse to insure anyone who cannot legally own a gun, so all such shootings wouldn’t be insured. They would presumably charge a base rate for gun owners who have never had any incidents, with perhaps a discount for anyone who has taken a certified safety course; a higher rate for people with one incident in their history; and then a steeply escalating rate for anyone who can’t seem to stay out of trouble.
My guess is, the smart money would say that a middle-class gun owner with no criminal record would have a trivially small probability of committing a shooting that would require compensation.
Let me rephrase the question: what makes you so certain that the studies you cite are credible, and the ones showing a different outcome are not?
That depends; are they liable for accidental discharges that result in property damage, injury or death?
Where have I said that?
Hasn’t that been the message of your last several posts? What I’ve taken away is your saying “Look! Look, here’s the proof of the truth! SEE!” and then saying that anyone who doesn’t is in denial.
Fuck. Read what I wrote. If you want to handwave, just do that. If you pretend that your rejection hinges on methodoligical or statistical issues, and your objections there are rebutted, switching gears to just handwave the results away then is just shitty.
You seem to suggest that the empirical literature is a matter of taste, like prefering Star Trek to Star Wars. It is not.
Hentor, I’m trying to honestly debate you, but I’m genuinely confused as to just what you’re claiming.
Okay, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt if you can go back and reconsider post 5745. Can you clarify what you were trying to say there in a less potentially dickish manner?
What are these studies you’re referring to that show a different outcome? My understanding is that there are metastudies that show that having a gun in the house is a net negative, and then there are other studies that don’t actually address the question (like defensive gun use studies).
No one is a criminal until they are.
Two dudes stopped by police before they could shoot up the world pokemon championship (whatever that means) in Boston.
Net negative for the average gun-owner but, like the children of Lake Wobegon, all righteous white-skinned gun-owners are above average. 
And, how did the study treat non-prosecutable homicides? Damuri Ajashi is on record(*) as effectively claiming that all non-prosecuted homicides by civilians are “beneficial.”
(* - He may have rolled back this claim. I don’t know, I got tired of reading the whiny dolt.)
Small nitpick -
my insurance company does pay out for suicide - after a two year wait period.
You are distorting what he said. He claimed “justifiable homicides” by gun-owning citizens as a benefit of private ownership of guns. Prosecution is kind of irrelevant: a “justifiable” homicide might in fact be prosecuted, and an “unjustifiable” (i.e., criminal) homicide might in fact not be prosecuted, due to issues with evidence or inability to find a suspect.
Where it falls down is in the definition of “justifiable”. By Damuri Ajashi’s standard, the killing of Trayvon Martin might have been justifiable. Insofar as Zimmerman was acquitted, the killing has legally been deemed not criminal, but whether one could call it genuinely justifiable remains a matter of debate (as to whether the situation was created by the killer when it could have been avoided).
If I catch you in my house, does my uncertainty automatically make your life forfeit? “Castle doctrine” seems to make that assertion, but is it a fair one? Where, exactly do we draw the “justifiable” line? Do more people need to die upon that line for us to figure out where it is?
One of the issues for the gun control people remains the fact that the gun itself is not a neutral party. Strict gundamentalists strongly deny this, but it seems pretty obvious to me that a gun at hand is certainly going to affect how a situation plays out. In the Zimmerman/Martin case, if the former had not had a gun in his pocket, how/if he would have confronted the latter would have been very different. I suspect most people do not consider that homicide to have been “justifiable” or even “beneficial”, and if you take the gun out of the picture, a homicide would almost certainly not have happened (Zimmerman probably would not have approached Martin, or would have done so in a much less threatening manner).
So my claim is that guns tend to make people stupid, or at the very least, less careful. Perhaps even less polite. The counter-claim is that “No They Don’t”. I am not quite sure which side the evidence supports, or even which side ought to have the burden of proof. However, I do not believe that “No They Don’t” is a sufficient refutation to my claim.
Crickets? Did I call your bluff or something?
:rolleyes: Fer Chrissake, I didn’t expect to have to do a research project just to post something. There have been enough cites in enough gun threads here that I thought that was uncontroversial.
Quite the opposite, really; study after study shows that homes with guns are less safe than homes without. That’s the uncontroversial position. I thought maybe you knew something I didn’t.
You made 6 posts in a thread discussing the CDC report assessing the existing research on gun violence. From that report:
This is not to say one study is right or another is wrong - but that there clearly are conflicting studies and you participated in at least one thread discussing those. Did you forget participating in a thread that discussed some studies that **Lumpy **was referring to?
Allow me to quote myself here:
You’ve linked to a thread about a defensive gun use study and pointed out 6 posts where I say things like:
I think I did a fairly good job of explaining in that thread why I feel that studies that look at defensive gun use don’t actually address the question, and when I challenged Lumpy I explicitly used DGU studies as an example of the sort of thing I don’t find convincing. So no, I didn’t forget participating in that thread. And I’m still waiting for Lumpy to tell me about these contradicting studies that show a net positive benefit to gun ownership.
Actually no. The study is called “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence”. It’s 113 pages and is essentially a summary of much of the research that has been done across several areas relating to firearm violence. While it discusses DGU, it is not a defensive gun use study.
I agree you did a fairly good job of explaining your position in that thread. I find your position unpersuasive and weakly supported, but I understood your points. But look back at the sequence that led to your criticism. Hentor is made claims that abuot the available research pointing to various conclusions (5738) and further lamented that these great studies get handwaved away (5740). Lumpy then countered by asking what makes the studies that favor a certain position credible, and the contrary position not credible (5742). You then ask what studies are those (5749). But on top of your request, you are excluding any study of DGU.
First, your exclusion of DGU studies is moving the goal posts. That is not the framework under which Lumpy made his statement. Second, what exactly do you think the benefit of gun possession is, if not to be used defensively? A core right of the 2nd amendment is self defense - I would argue that liberty and self defense are the primary benefit, but you are asking for evidence of positive outcomes but excluding any evidence of positive outcomes? You’ve asked for evidence of something but excluded any mention of said evidence. Good luck with that!