I think I was a little unfair to papertiger in my reply. I’ve spent some time in the UK and with UK citizens here, and I do seem to constantly get an attitude from them which is along the lines of “when will you Americans become as enlightened as us Brits and trow away your guns, get rid of that “Congress” and get a proper Parliament, enact National healthcare, etc.” I’m tired of being called a “barbarian” becuase I subscribe to that “barbarian ethic” of believing that you most basic natural human right is the ability to defnd your own life and the lives of your family/loved ones.
I’ve even been in arguments with Brits who tried to convince me that we should repeal the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments (in addition to the obvious Second) because “you blokes have too much bloody freedom.”
Anthracite (why you would liken yourself to coal is beyond me…) wrote:
I agree. I wish I never did.
I also regret using the “I” word, although I think my original argument still stands as it has been corroborated by many arguing the opposite position: ie nice people like you need guns for self defense, which I never disputed.
I can’t recall mentioning anything about fistfights. Although now that you mention it, my best friend’s dad was killed in one and I have had the misfortune to see a few myself. I am well aware of the reality of violence. My point about swordfights has paid off though: 2 people that replied concerning this point were sickened by the thought of people bloodily hacking each other with swords. The same 2 own guns. I would also like to point out I would not really be entertained by a swordfight. My point is that the sickening “real” nature of close combat would deter many perpetrators from ever considering such awful bloody violence, while the ready availability of guns, and the distancing from the actual harm done, are one of the reasons why people illegaly use guns in a criminal situation.
I understand that because there are a lot bad guys with guns out there, you good guys need guns for defense (as well as for recreational purposes). All I am saying is that they would not be needed for defense if they weren’t used in attack. Does anyone agree with this?
Here I was making the point that anything can be used as a weapon, but only the ones which are useable by the majority of people present any problem. Anyway, don’t get me started on the extended oligarchy that is the Labour government. Do Americans beleive that we all consider ourselves superior to them? This is just not the case, I beleive in equality and that everyone has the same right to life (in most cases) as any other. Anything that makes it easy to breach this right, I’m sure you can understand, causes me great concern.
Because, as my profile says, I “am an expert on coal power plants”. You Brits do have some nice ones (Drax, Ferrybridge, etc.)
Correct, you didn’t mention fistfights, I added that to try and illustrate my point better. I wanted to make the point (that I think you agree with) that when violence ensues, there is no kinder, gentler way to hurt someone. I somewhat agree with what you say here. However, there is another aspect (below).
I disagree. Consider the following real-world scenario (this happened to me).
I’m alone, on a country road at 9:30 PM. My car’s distributor has shorted out. This happens all the time, and all I need to do is splice a wire. I am trying to fix it, when Jed and Billy Bob (not their real names) pull up in a pickup and ask to help. After I politely reply no, I have it under control, Billy Bob pushes me back against my car and says he’s going to help me anyways - he’s going to help me undress.
I am 5’6" tall, 120 pounds. I have no self defense training. There is no “smiling policeman” (I’m not quoting you here) nearby to help me, and no one within yelling distance. Billy Bob and Jed are about 6’0 - 6’ 3", about 200 pounds or so each, and intent on doing me harm. Now let’s examine the following two outcomes, if I was in two different countries:
UK: I am gang raped brutally, possibly killed so I can’t press charges. If not killed, I now have a lifetime of trauma, possibly HIV, etc., etc.
US: (What actually happened) - I drop to me knees, reach in my toolbox and get my P85 (since after all, a gun is a tool ), push the gun barrel up into his crotch, and say something silly along the lines of “why don’t you just run along now.” (I wasn’t aiming for his crotch, it just happened that way.) So they do, spinning tires for nearly a quarter mile. I THEN fix my car, and call the police.
Don’t you see that without that sort of equalizer, the strong and evil will ALWAYS be able to take advantage of the weaker and good? What really irritates me is women that have been attacked, and yet nonetheless have convinced themselves that they DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO DEFEND THEMSELVES against men who are, in general, stronger and better able to force themselves on women. I would go one bit further - does one not have a RESPONSIBILITY to their family and loved ones, if not even to yourself, to use any means necessary to defend your life from attack?
I really think there is an attitude. I’m not saying of course that Brits don’t also see plenty of “ugly Americans” that come visit their country and do nothing but bitch and moan about how it’s not like America. I see them myself when I’m over there, and quite frankly it’s an embarassment to me. The UK is a pretty decent place overall, and as a lesbian I can tell you that IMHO your country has the hottest women in Europe. But, I have several disagreements with some societal points.
I concede that guns can be life-savers as well as life-takers. They can close the gap between weaker and stronger (as in Anthracite’s experience). But they can also expand the gap when the stronger person has one and the weaker does not, or both have guns and it comes down to something else. I suppose in the end it all evens out, like most things.
Which seems to be an argument AGAINST gun control rather than FOR gun control. Those most likely to use a gun against another person (excluding cops/military/whatevers) seem to be people who have illegal guns anyway (criminals, after all, prefer guns that can’t be traced back to them). Which means that gun control makes crims stronger than law-abiders, which hardly seems intelligent.
Spoofe, buddy-
would you arm Women, children, OAP’s, homeless, gypsies so that the would be SLAUGHTERED by an organised and trained kiling machine like an Army?
I wouldn’t want ANYbody to be slaughtered, armed or unarmed. Anyway…
Think back a bit before the part of the slaughtering… back before the army is even formed… back before any decision is made to go in and kill said women, children, etc.
Okay, there you are. You’re the High Commander (or whatever) of said trained killing machine. You know that the huge civilian population, which outnumbers your army, has firearms at their disposal. Would you be willing to risk the large numbers of fatalities your army would suffer by subjugating said armed populace? Would you want to pit your army against an albeit-lesser-trained mob with greater numbers?
No, and I’ll tell you why.
Should you succeed in killing or subjugating all those that you wish to kill/subjugate, you won’t have a population/resource base in which to continue on with any other governmental actions, AND your army will lose large numbers of soldiers, leaving you very vulnerable to an outside world that is bound to be pretty damned pissed off at the horrific acts that you’ve just unleashed.
THERE’s the logic in having an armed population… the subject of military control of the state wouldn’t even come up. Ever hear of a “Pyrrhic Victory”?
So let’s flip-flop your question a bit… would you have an entire population helpless to stop a mad fascist from seizing power and grinding the country under his heel?
I still dont think you see what I mean.
Are you talking about forming a untrained malitia to fight an Army?
And of course the Comander would have still gone ahead in your hypothetical situation. He was recieving orders from above. They would just to have send more troops.
Sorry, this is coming a bit late. I’ve been spending most of the last couple of days trying to keep myself out of hot water at work.
I’ve been collecting bits and pieces and will probably discard much of it in the interest of brevity… the rest may seem a bit ad hoc. Sorry, I don’t know a better way to catch up.
First I’d like to ‘attack’ the “over 2 million defensive gun uses each year” claim. First, the accuracy of the number. The Kleck study was conducted in 1993. In that year, an estimated 42 million households had guns. Most estimates and surveys indicate that less than 50% of the households have guns for defensive purposes, but let’s be generous and say that we have 20 million households with a potential for a defensive gun use in 1993. Therefore Kleck’s study indicates that about one in ten households each year use their gun for defense against crime. This strikes me as rediculous, but to add even less credulity, the estimate of criminal violence by armed perpetrators in 1994 was just over 1 million (National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms)
This suggests that there are more people are defending themselves from armed assailants than there are armed assailants!
I also have a problem with Kleck’s survey. In fact, it’s a similar problem to what Kleck stated with the NCVS survey. Kleck argued that the NCVS survey was biased because people were less likely to answer honestly due to lack of anonymity - resulting in underinflated results. However, in Kleck’s survey, it was apparent that the questions were geared toward assessing the value of gun ownership. It’s highly probable that the gun owning public would tend to (1) look at nearly every incident they touched their gun as a defensive use and (2) exaggerate the number of defensive uses. I know Kleck recognized this and tried to adjust for it, but due to sample size, varying environments, etc. I think it is highly probable that Kleck’s survey is overinflating the number of defensive gun uses. Assuming a fairly random distribution of gun owning households and armed criminal violence, I would expect the number of actual defensive gun uses to be more in the range of 75,000 in 1993 (and that’s assuming that everyone who had a gun for defensive purposes used it during an armed attack - pretty generous assumption on my part).
20 million defensive guns divided by 260 million people times 1 million armed criminal attacks.
It’s just a crude sanity check, so I’m not going to defend it too aggressively. It just suggests that the 2 million DGUs is way too high.
As an interesting anecdote, I’m pretty vocal about my opinions regarding guns in my everyday life. Therefore I find myself in many discussions about the merits and demerits of gun ownership. In my 40 years, I’ve only known two people who have claimed to use a gun for self-defense. Interesting that both of these individuals report using their guns for self defense about a dozen times each. Also interesting that both of these individuals have a reputation for stretching the truth beyond it’s theoretical limits…
Well, this could get really long if I tried to pack everything in, so I’ll use multiple posts to make my other points.
Let me see if I get this straight. Sometimes twisted logic gets me turned around in my meager little brain. It seems that the assertion is that there is no correlation
between the UK gun laws and the UK handgun mortality rate. The reason for this claim of non correlation is because the expectation is that there would also not be a correlation between handgun crimes and other violent crimes (rape, in particular), but that since both are lower in the UK, handgun laws have nothing to do with either… And you made fun of my logic!?
The flaw in this logic is that it’s entirely likely that the two types of crime are completely independent and that both are low for entirely different reasons. Is it true that their society is intrinsically less violent than ours? Maybe, but it’s more likely that some of the differences are a function of reporting and labeling. It seemed to me that the incidence of random street violence, bar fights, football hooliganism, and other acts of aggression was higher in the UK than in the US. I’ve spent a lot of time in both countries. The difference is that in the UK there was less likely to be a weapon involved since weapons are restricted and in the UK violent acts were less likely to be reported (it’s a machismo thing).
As for rape, I think there are a number of factors that account for the lower rate:
(1) Young people have much greater exposure to sexual situations on TV, in the movies, and on the radio. This may have a demystifying effect that makes young men less likely to repress sexual feelings until they boil over into acts of rape.
(2) Many instances of what we call rape in the US would not be called rape in the UK (at least, not by the public at large). Particularly instances of “date rape” are lower because they are less likely to be recognized by the law, society, and even the victim as rape. Other types of rape by known assailants may fall into this category. Women are more repressed as a whole in the UK and many victims may tend to convince themselves that they encourage these acts of sexual agression.
(3) Rapist are much less likely to get away with it in the UK than in the US. In the US there are always extenuating circumstances and legal barriers to search and detection of rapists. The system in the US has an unfortunate way of not working for the victim. In the UK, once they decide it a rape, the situation is completely reversed. Police are allowed to follow any lead, even to collect DNA and other biological samples from all of the males in the community. And the prosecution rate is very high.
There are probably other reasons why the rape rate is low in the UK, but as you can see, none of these causes could easily be correlated to the lower incidence of gun related violence in the UK.
One final point in this line of reasoning. Even if the availability of hanguns in the UK has only a 10% impact on the statistic, that still implies that the UK handgun mortality rate is nearly 120 times better than the US due to the difference in handgun laws.
In summary, you argue that since the reported rate of two different types of violent crime is lower and since one of them typically doesn’t involve a gun, that UK gun laws are irrelevant. I argue that this simply means that the UK is doing two things right* - one of which is restricting handguns.
*Note: I use that term loosely. I do not wish to imply that I think that any under-reporting of rape is a good thing, only that it makes the UK statistics lower.
I was indicating a statistic reported a few weeks ago on the local news (the real news). The numbers were supposedly from 1999 and the claim was that there were about 200 more gun fatalities in Texas in 1999 than auto fatalities. I don’t recall the exact numbers and I can’t find a web site with the current data to back this up. Looking at a number of sites I’ve found that over the last several years the numbers have been pretty close, with gun deaths being a few hundred less. It’s still pretty sobering when you consider the number of guns in Texas versus the number of cars… and the number of hours each day that each are used… and the fact that cars are not designed specifically to be lethal.
One last thing about truth and numbers. All statistics should be suspect. The reason is that everyone presenting a statistic has an agenda and they are going to use their statistic to support their agenda. As a consumer of statistics, it’s my job to sort through the statistics and see what makes sense. I use a variety of sanity checks in my daily life, but probably the best one is very common sense. I look at some of the related personal statistics that I am exposed to. I query friends and relatives and see if their experiences jibe with what the folks with agendas are trying to tell me. Here’s my little attemp to share with you my personal statistics on this subject. You don’t have to believe any of this (in fact, it’s your duty to build your own assessment). My only intent is to show how I’ve come to believe in the statistics that suggest guns do more harm than good:
As I said earlier, I’ve been around for nearly 40 years. In that time I’ve owned a few guns (rifles) and have had hundreds and hundreds of discussions about guns. I used to use guns quite a lot for hunting and target shooting. As a Boy Scout, we had our own shooting range near by and I earned a rifle and shotgun merit badge. I was also trained and allowed to fire handguns of various types on the range. As a young boy this gave me a sense of power, but as a grew up I realized that this was not real power - it was merely a placebo. I eventually sold my guns to responsible people and decided that I did not need weapons to make me feel secure.
MY STATS
Number of times guns have been aimed at me: More than 12 (I’ve lost count)
Number of times I deserved it: 0
Number of times guns have been fired at me: 3.5 *
FRIENDS AND FAMILY STATS
Number of friends who have had guns aimed at them: 25 (or more)
Number of friends who have been fired at: 10
Number of friends wounded (requiring medical care): 5
Number of frineds killed in gun accidents: 1
Percentage of friends who have guns at home: Greater than 50%
Number of friends who claim to have used a gun for defense: 2 (suspicious reports)
Number of friends that have been robbed: 12 (or more)
Number of guns stolen from friends: 6 **
Number of friends who have committed suicide with a gun: 1 (14 year old girl)
Number of friends who were shot in their own home, in spite of having a handgun for protection: 2 (one was shot with his own gun ***)
Number of friends who have committed murder with a handgun: 1 (he was executed by the state)
FOOTNOTES
I report one of the shootings as 1.5 because a hunter shot at me once and started to fire a second time. Fortunately, just as the gun went off the second time the guy’s hunting buddy pushe dthe barrel of the gun up and away, realizing that I was not a brightly colored deer on a mountain bike. I was riding in a public park were hunting was not supposed to be allowed.
** This seems to suggest a higher rate than the national average of about 1% of armed households.
*** This stolen gun was used two weeks later by the thief to shoot a convenience store clerk during a robbery attempt.
So, as I said, this is hardly scientific and really couldn’t be construed as proof, but by my reckoning, the statistics that suggest that guns are more dangerous to innocent victims than to criminals seem to be more consistent with my experience.
Sadly, not. There are a few scary ones in there, and I have more than my fair share of redneck friends, but for the most part, I lead a fairly normal life.
Thor, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m all for gun rights. I’m sick of people saying,“guns are killing everyone.” Well, hate to burst everyones bubble but,“guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” guns may be <i>used</i> to kill people, but they rarely go off on their own folks. Some one has got to pull the trigger. I lay most of the blame on bad gun owners. They give responsible gun owners a bad wrap because they won’t watch to see if they put their guns in a safe place and don’t see if the guns are accesible to children or not. The other people I blame are crazy kids. It’s the truth. They are out there.
Joey: well, as you once said to me, “I’m not ignoring you, just give me some time.” I have a couple of major research papers (one of which must be “law review quality”) and a presentation due this month, so my time is kinda at a premium. Still, I’m going to tackle Cook’s criticism of Kleck’s work at earliest opportunity, which will probably be Sunday. sigh.
Joey, that is good work, especially since you’ve been so busy.
One point about your info… (just one)…
The piece about the “2 million gun defense uses”… could it be possible if there were a significant number of households that suffered multiple break-ins? Did you see that mentioned anywhere? I don’t know myself, and if there were a large number of those particular claims, that would add the the number of home-defenses. In high-crime areas, multiple break-ins in a short amount of time wouldn’t be common, but surely not unheard of.
I couldn’t agree with you more (on the first part). If the population at large acted responsibly, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. On the second part however, children are only part of the problem. There are a lot more ‘mature’ adults doing some pretty immature things with guns. Also, there is the criminal element (here I’m lumping in all criminal acts, including crimes of passion and psychosis).
They are ALL out there and, unfortunately in greater force than the responsible gun owners.
Max Torque
No sweat. I’ll keep an eye on the thread for your response. Good luck with your research papers!
SPOOFE Bo Diddly:
Absolutely. There’s no doubt in my mind that some households are more victimized than others and therefore some people are more likely to use a gun defensively. Also, once someone has used a gun defensively once, they are more likely to use a gun “defensively” in future (possibly less threatening) situations. Kleck stated that he tried to adjust his results for these skew factors. How successful he was at normalizing his data,… well…
Granted, however it’s not as ‘scary’ as you might think. He was just an exceptionally ungifted individual (read that as intellectually and emotionally challenged) who got involved with drugs and happened to have a gun.
Remember Master-Blaster from “Beyond Thunderdome”? This guy was a lot like Blaster. I almost felt more sorrow for him than horror at his crime.
), push the gun barrel up into his crotch, and say something silly along the lines of “why don’t you just run along now.” (I wasn’t aiming for his crotch, it just happened that way.) So they do, spinning tires for nearly a quarter mile. I THEN fix my car, and call the police.