You asked for a stream of stories about DGUs. I provided that. If I had known that you weren’t really interested in that and were going to handwave it away, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with you either.
What are the numbers, though? The prose in the wikipedia article doesn’t necessarily indicate that suicide rates remained flat or went up after the 1996 law; it could be consistent with an argument that, even if suicide rates dropped, the law had nothing to do with it. Since your claim was that suicide rates didn’t drop, I’d like you to dispute my numbers with numbers showing you’re right – not books I don’t have immediate access to that might not even comport with your original claim.
What did you expect?
I asked for data on guns being used defensively. You provided 5,380 stories spread across nearly 60 years. I am not supposed to note that the instances you provided are a drop in the overall bucket of gun violence in the US?
I never said there were no examples of defensive gun use in the US. There are bound to be some. But when talking about gun policy in America it makes sense to put the good and the bad of guns on a balance and so far the good part is looking to be heavily outweighed by the bad.
Take a look at slide 8 on this presentation, which uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Suicide rates peaked in the mid-late nineties and trended down for a decade, and only recently have been creeping back up. If your contention is that this change has nothing to do with restrictive gun ownership laws, fine, but that’s a separate claim.
It’s one that I would find extraordinary in the way it goes counter to basic economic reasoning, so I’d like to see someone support it with some kind of argument. But it seems to me that Australian suicide rates did drop.
Ahhh, I see. Your post asked about a “stream of stories”, but you wanted data? Ok then, ask and you shall receive.
Most of which have been suicides, which IMHO is a basic human right. As long as you Gun Grabbers include suicides in “gun deaths” you are making a totally bonus point.
There was a time, when I was a teenager, in which – had someone placed a loaded gun next to me and said “Have at it, kid” – it’s pretty likely I would have killed myself. Basic right or not, I’m immeasurably glad today that I never had an easy way out.
Sure. Suicide is often a tragedy. But it should not be a crime, and is not violence against others. Thus counting those deaths as some reason why guns should be banned is bogus.
No doubt, Mental health needs more emphasis in the uSA, preventing unwanted suicides and yes, often murders.
Good point.
Isn’t that one way Canada supports their health care program?
I thought we put paid to that study ages ago.
Right off the bat it should not pass the smell test for you. You just provided a link to an NRA website that collects defensive gun use stories. Presumably they are diligent in collecting these stories.
They manged roughly 5,380 stories over a 60 year period or about 90/year. Yet you now provide a cite that suggests there are 2.2 - 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year.
Do you not find it odd that there are only 90 stories to be found in a given year for something that supposedly happened at least 2.2 million times?
Or that there were a bit over 40,000 people shot in 2015 (as an example and not including suicides). Clearly not all of those were defensive gun uses but even if they were that is waaay off the mark of 2.2+ million DGUs you claim with your cite. The study you showed us predicted a 2.81% hit rate for DGUs. That would get us over 60,000 people shot. We’re missing 20,000 shot people here.
Remember the study you cited interviewed 5000 people and there were a reported 66 DGUs among that 5000. From that they extrapolated the 2.2+ million number.
I expect you will want more than common sense so here are some studies that either refute or imply by their findings that the Kleck study you cite is wrong.
A study from Arizona (below) found two DGU killings in a given timeframe where the study you cited would predict 98 DGU killings and 236 DGU firings in the same timeframe.
There’s more but that is a good start I think.
I agree individuals should be able to end their own life if they so wish with due consideration given before the act.
What about the suicides that are impulsive though? Using a gun in a suicide is, more often than not, a final decision. There are very few do-overs.
Also, if there were no guns people could still kill themselves so not like eliminating guns removes the ability to commit suicide if that is important to you.
I have no reason to believe their effort is comprehensive or anywhere near complete. I strongly suspect they capture just a minuscule fraction of total DGUs. Does that surprise you? You seem to be treating it like it’s the sum total of all DGUs over a 60 year period, and I think that’s a serious error you’re making, repeatedly.
You are the one who provided the link. If you’ve got more by all means lay it out.
Also, I am sure the NRA has not captured every DGU use there is but they are probably the most motivated actor out there to do that collection and have the means to do so. They did go back to 1958 for stories so not like they just grabbed the last year or two from a cursory Google search one afternoon. They seemed to put some work in to it. Not sure why’d they’d just leave it at that list you provided if there was more to get.
What’s more your cite suggests there are at least 6,000+ DGUs per day, every day in the United States. I don’t expect all of them to be reported but I do not think it is a stretch to expect more than 0.25 stories a day to show up in the media. They love stories where the bad guy gets a big dose of karma on the spot along with a local hero saving the day.
I provided the link because you said “I am missing the endless stream of stories of people fending off bad guys with their guns”. I never claimed it was a complete list of all such incidents, just one such “stream of stories”. Your error was in apparently assuming that this particular stream of stories encompassed all DGUs. It does not and I’m not aware of any such comprehensive listing, by the NRA or anyone. Certainly newspaper stories don’t capture all such cases.
What thread do you think you are in?
Did you really mistake what I asked for as a casual request for a few anecdotes of DGUs in the US?
You have put forward a claim that there are literally millions of cases of defensive gun use each year. I am not asking for a comprehensive list of all DGUs ever. I am asking for some evidence of these millions of cases of defensive gun use and not just a handful of stories that in no way suggest they are a sample out of millions. I do not think it is unreasonable to suppose this evidence exists if it is happening over 6,000 times a day, every day, in the US.
Sure. A tragedy, but not a crime.
I took the words “I am missing the endless stream of stories of people fending off bad guys with their guns” as an admission of ignorance, and one that was readily-correctible, so I jumped in to help.
I provided you “some evidence”, in post #105. I offer it up as one data point. Certainly there are others, and each one has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. None are perfect, and in this life I suspect the best we’ll get are some reasonable guesses about the # of DGUs. I don’t expect we’ll ever have a definitive total, given the limitations in reporting methods available to us.
You missed a part (bolding mine):
Then you went ahead and gave me the anecdotes I did not ask for.
Great…thanks for the cite that there are 2.2+ million DGUs in the US each year.
As we often do on this message board I challenged the data that cite offered. The question is do you still think 2.2+ million DGUs is remotely close to the real number or whether it is wildly inflated?
While it used to be illegal to commit suicide in some states I do not think there are any states left where it is still illegal to commit suicide.
We should also add alcohol to the list. Here the government estimates smoking cost the US about $300 billion and alcohol cost about $250 billion in 2010. We certainly restrict alcohol and tobacco to some extent, but their costs are comparable per this one data point.