Holy cow, I did touch a nerve didn’t I? OK, to try to parse all this down- Revenant Threshold asks if carrying is an effective defense, why don’t more gun owners do it? He’s conflating two things I said which aren’t quite synonymous: I said that most guns aren’t carried and most of the public doesn’t carry. Discounting all the long guns that aren’t suitable for routine carry, that leaves handguns. The people who don’t own handguns aren’t going to carry of course, and of those who do there might be several reasons they don’t carry. They might own a handgun but not be an “active” gun owner- it might be stuck away unloaded in the back of a closet somewhere. Or they might feel that their personal risk is low enough that carrying isn’t worth the bother. In some jurisdictions a handgun may be kept on private property but public carry is still difficult to do legally; if you add up NYC, other places on the East coast like DC, much of southern California and Chicago, even now it’s difficult or next to impossible for tens of millions of Americans to publicly carry.
Why robbing the bar where all the off-duty cops hang out isn’t a good idea:
(skip to 2:10)
Ah, not so. I’m not making an argument that, if gun owners don’t carry, therefore guns are not protective. I’m making an argument that an argument pro-gun-ownership based on their protective qualities is invalidated if most gun owners don’t carry.
The equivalent isn’t saying that helmets aren’t protectie because lots of motorcycle riders don’t wear them; it’s saying that being in favour of helmets because they’re useful for protection is invalidated if most motorcycle riders don’t wear them. The protective quality of a helmet - or a gun - is immateriel to the argument. It could be great, it could be useless. But if they aren’t being used by most people who own them, it doesn’t* matter*, in practice.
Where we depart would probably be that I wouldn’t give great odds to anyone else in that situation. The robber’s fucked, but quite possibly so are a lot of other people.
[QUOTE=JXJohns]
You are making an argument against concealed carry then? A significant majority of people keep guns in their home to protect, you know, their home.
[/QUOTE]
Sort of. It would be both concealed and open carry, but i’m not making an argument against it, per se, but pointing out how one particular argument for it might not actually work out in practice. But yes, I am specifically referring to carried guns, here.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Holy cow, I did touch a nerve didn’t I? OK, to try to parse all this down- Revenant Threshold asks if carrying is an effective defense, why don’t more gun owners do it? He’s conflating two things I said which aren’t quite synonymous: I said that most guns aren’t carried and most of the public doesn’t carry. Discounting all the long guns that aren’t suitable for routine carry, that leaves handguns. The people who don’t own handguns aren’t going to carry of course, and of those who do there might be several reasons they don’t carry. They might own a handgun but not be an “active” gun owner- it might be stuck away unloaded in the back of a closet somewhere. Or they might feel that their personal risk is low enough that carrying isn’t worth the bother. In some jurisdictions a handgun may be kept on private property but public carry is still difficult to do legally; if you add up NYC, other places on the East coast like DC, much of southern California and Chicago, even now it’s difficult or next to impossible for tens of millions of Americans to publicly carry.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure your parsing down disagrees with what I’ve been saying. Your paragraph here pretty much does come down to “the majority of gun owners don’t carry”, as i’ve been interpreting that particular point of yours so far.
Really didn’t expect to be watching part of a film when I clicked on that. That’s fairly depressing.
OK, so you are making a speculative argument against a claim that nobody here has made. How many gun owners do you think need to carry to make people safer? Must it be a majority?
Being in favor of wearing helmets for protection is not invalidated even if most motorcyclists don’t wear them. The individual who wears his helmet, gets his protection even if the majority don’t.
Right, it only matters to those who use them with regards to the helmet. With guns you can at least luck out if someone in the vicinity has one. Like this lady:
You already agreed the robber would be deterred, so nobody would get hurt. Alternatively they could hold him at gunpoint and still nobody would get hurt, or they could aim the gun at the robber before they shoot him and nobody but the robber would get hurt. Please notice how the old man in the above video aimed his gun and shot the attacker and not the victim.
It’s an argument based on a claim that Lumpy made.
How many? Now, that’s the question for debate.
Sure, but the majority would not be able to say “I should be able to own a helmet because of the protective quality they give.”
Or you coulld get shot by someone in the vicinity who has one. So you can have bad luck on that score, too.
I agreed the robber would be deterred. Hence me saying it would be a moron who would attempt a crime while in the midst of many carriers. If we’re going to look at that moron, though, who isn’t deterred, I am not convinced that - in such a situation - all those people who are armed and inclined to stop him would be capable of that with no unfortunate errors. Especially in a situation where there are multiple armed persons and it is potentially unclear as to which “side” everyone is on.
And, with respect, that “please notice” sentence is fairly condescending. I’m capable of watching a video. Interesting that even the narrator says “Amazingly, the woman is not shot”, though, which the shooting range manager interviewed towards the end also agreed with. Perhaps a less capable marksman would have less success at such a thing. They’re fairly entangled, at least.
Right an argument you inferred “based on a claim” Lumpy made, but an argument that he didn’t make.
Right and I’m asking your opinion. How many?
Are you kidding me? You don’t think the majority should be able to argue for the freedom to wear a helmet, whether they choose to do so or not?
Right, so we should really focus our efforts on gun safety and marksmanship. I completely agree.
What percent of robbers do you think would not be deterred in that situation? Of that percent, what percent of the time do you think the guns owners would end up shooting each other?
The hero in the video was a 72 year old man, and he had no trouble shooting the bad guy 3 times, and the victim zero times. Please notice 72 year old men generally aren’t considered that capable when it comes to physically difficult tasks.
But he did. And when he came back to parse it out better, he made the same argument, so far as I can tell.
It’s the kind of thing i’d need to see statistics on before I had an opinion as to where on the line it would fall based on where we’re talking about.
Certainly they may. But not based on the argument that they’re useful for protection when that majority of helmet owners aren’t wearing them. With other arguments? Yes. With that one? No, because that majority aren’t using them to that end.
Good to know! Somehow I suspect our ideas as to what form that focus should take will likely differ, but, we do agree on that point.
A tricky question. I don’t think I could narrow it down and say “Yep, 34% of robbers wouldn’t try it in this situation”. The most I think i’d be able to say would be that a considerable majority of criminals would be deterred in such a situation - that is, it would be a rare event that someone would attempt some (obvious) crime in such a situation. Of course, there’s always those for whom deterrence is ignored, “crime of passion” and all that. As to the second part - I don’t know at all. We could posit that the gun owners were trained and safety-conscious, but, likewise, that could easily imply the same of the criminal. In the end, though, it seems like the question would be one of the number of carriers there. If we say, entirely hypothetically, that 90% of carriers present are trained and capable, but 10 people shoot, that’s still a possible problem.
We don’t know that he had no trouble - for me personally, with little-to-know experience of gun use, I have you on one side, and the narrator (who has unknown experience) and the shooting range owner (who it seems fair to say likely has considerable experience) on the other. Personally it seems like a tricky thing to do. We don’t have the hero’s words on the matter, sadly. Perhaps he found it extraordinarily easy. Perhaps he had trouble, but got lucky.
I wouldn’t have said that 72 year old men were physically incapable so generally that we can assume this particular one could not have done this were it difficult. We could also say that his age means that he’s had extra time to be practiced at gun-handling; similarly, we can’t really know that. Either way, it seems a little odd to cite a video, even as an anecdote, where all the people giving their opinion seem to disagree with you.
No he didn’t
I’m sorry you couldn’t tell.
Can you offer a rough guess?
I’m sorry you don’t understand.
Robbery is a crime of passion?
Yeah, he got lucky 3 times. Perhaps you should get a clue about what you are talking about so you won’t be “just supposing” all the time.
OK, I’m a health care professional so I know that older people do in fact perform less well than average on physical performance tests. I also know that most defensive gun uses are at very close range, and I shoot guns a lot so I know it’s not very hard to shoot a human size object at close range.
That’s the media’s war on guns for you. Snatching symbolic victory from objective defeat. Good show on you for taking it farther. Why not just admit the lady was saved by a bystander with a gun, and he didn’t shoot up the joint Rambo style?
Well, that seems to have gone downhill.
Ok, let’s be clear. What is your interpretation of what I think Lumpy said, and what would you say Lumpy said?
I’m leery of making rough guesses - rough guesses turn into certainties if we’re not careful. But ok, let’s say… somewhere around 40%. The problem, it seems to me, if a criminal is weighing up the averages, is that by and large we tend to overevaluate high percentages and underevaluate lower ones. So 75% is almost certain, and 25% is highly unlikely. It isn’t, but that seems to be the way people think, so for deterrence value I could see a criminal thinking 40% wasn’t too bad a risk.
Yes, it can be. Lots of other unpleasant crimes, too.
It seems entirely plausible to me. The two were close together. He was aiming with one hand, and in an awkward firing position.
I didn’t deny that, in general, old people perform less well than average physically. I’m saying that it is not so widespread a rule that we can say that this, single example of a 72 year old person, must therefore be physically incapable of a difficult task. It’s too small of a sample size.
It seems to me that, unless your practice was in such a situation, you might not quite grasp the entirety of what it’s like to shoot someone, under those difficult circumstances, when the target and non-target are entangled, and when it’s an actual life-or-death scenario. Perhaps the hero here does not have the training that you have - or the skill, maybe. Or the eyesight - as a health care professional, do 72 year old men typically have worse than average hand-eye coordination?
But I did. I called him a hero. He was. I give full congratulations to the man. Without him, the lady would, very likely, have died. The criminal may have escaped, or attacked another person. The hero did good. I salute him. I’m happy to agree with that.
If anything, I would say I have a higher appreciation for what he did than you do. I consider his task a very difficult one to accomplish. You consider it an easy one. While we both agree as to his heroism, I have a considerably higher appreciation and respect for what he managed to do. It was tricky - yet he did it!
Also, so far as i’m aware, i’m not a member of the media.
At this point I’m not even sure if you can answer your question. You seem to flip flop back and forth between general and specifics at your convenience to better suit your argument. As such I don’t even think you are being genuine.
Which of us do you think is better able to judge the difficulty?
I can answer my question. Lumpy made the argument that carrying a gun was useful for protective purposes. He also made the claim that a majority of gun owners didn’t carry. He restated his position in his most recent post, which agrees with both his previous post and my interpretation of what he said in the post he originally quoted. My question then of him, and at one point to you, was whether the latter point (most gun owners don’t carry) invalidated the first (guns are a useful tool for protection) as an argument for gun ownership.
Of my being genuine, I suppose I can only assure you that I am, and point to my claims on Lumpy’s claims here being the same as what I originally interpreted his post to mean;
[QUOTE=Me]
It seems a bit odd to have one paragraph saying that guns are a highly useful tool for the levelling of the playing field, and then on the other saying that people apparently don’t widely use this tool. If the majority of gun owners keep theirs locked safely away at home, then why is a gun being useful for protecting oneself outside of the home an argument? People apparently aren’t taking them there.
[/QUOTE]
If what you mean is that i’ve made other arguments since then, certainly, I have. But I haven’t altered or switched or flip-flopped that argument.
I would wager that a person experienced and trained with guns would, at least, have more personal experience at judging that difficulty. So that’s certainly you over me. But it’s also that shooting range owner in the video you linked over me, too, and he disagrees with you. There’s also that narrator, who could be anywhere on the scale of experience. So that’s three, one of which has experience handling guns, against one, again, one of which has experience handling guns. If you want, you can erase me and that narrator entirely from the whole thing (which I would say would be unreasonable; experience with guns being useful, but not the only useful, tool to measure such things, but eh) and it’s two experienced people in disagreement.
I agree with that. Do you agree or disagree with that?
I agree with that. Do you agree or disagree with that?
The latter point does not invalidate the first. Helmets reduce the risk for injuries in motorcycle riders. At some point in time most motorcycle riders did not wear helmets. One fact did not invalidate the other.
The distance looked to be maybe 5-6 feet. I’ll tell you exactly how easy the shot was. It was so easy that a 72 year old man could do it 3 times, one handed. My guess is the gun shop owner just trying to make for good TV.
You guys are really talking past each other. Let me rephrase together in a different format:
Premise 1: carrying a gun is useful for protective purposes
Premise 2: a majority of gun owners don’t carry for varying reasons
Conclusion?: Premise 2 means premise 1 is not effective anymore?
Have I summarized that accurately?
This seems like a silly argument (I believe you are making it in good faith). The conclusion simply doesn’t follow for the population in premise 1 as a whole - it only applies to those in in premise 2.
With less than 10M people with CCW permits (and even add some figure for those states that do not require a permit) the vast majority of gun owners do not carry. You cannot draw conclusions about those that do carry, from the population of those that don’t in this manner.
I think it would depend on the person. We could give a gun to me, right now, and it would be not improve my ability to protect myself. We could give a gun to you, and given your references to your training and history with gun ownership, quite possibly it would increase yours. I’m beginning to think that it would decrease mine, though. 
I don’t know; i’d need to see some statistics.
Sure, but those are not the categories i’m comparing. There’s essentially three groups;
Motorcycle riders who don’t own helmets.
Motorcycle riders who own helmet and wear them.
Motorcycle riders who own helmets and don’t wear them.
Now, i’m not saying that, because that third group don’t wear helmets, therefore helmets aren’t good protection. That they don’t wear helmets has no bearing on whether or not they’re good protection. It’s immateriel. However, if someone was to make the argument that helmet ownership was a good idea because of their protective qualities, but that *second *group contains the majority of helmet owners, not the third, then the argument for ownership - not the protective qualities - is negated in practice. More so still when it comes to guns, which have different qualities than helmets.
That something was done is not an ultimate expression of it’s probability. I can toss a coin ten times, and get tails nine times. That’s unlikely. And yet, I did it; it was so easy that a person with no sleight-of-hand knowledge could get nine tails out of ten. The problem is sample size, effectively; even a difficult task can be accomplished if we only have a small sample size to look at.
That it happened, in other words, doesn’t, by itself, say anything about the probability of that something occurring beyond that it is greater than 0%. Put another way, if we assume that for a task to be successfully concluded implies its ease, then no difficult tasks would ever be accomplished, because it happened, therefore it was easy.
As to the gun owner wanting to make good TV - possibly. Theoretically speaking, there could also be reasons why you might say something other than that which is based on your own experience. Who knows? It seems unfair and unreasonable to discard someone’s arguments based on some entirely theoretical assumptions of bias or ulterior motive, which is why i’m taking all your posts as being entirely genuine and without such evasions for some other purpose. I guess we either give the benefit of the doubt, or we don’t.
[QUOTE=Bone]
You guys are really talking past each other. Let me rephrase together in a different format:
Premise 1: carrying a gun is useful for protective purposes
Premise 2: a majority of gun owners don’t carry for varying reasons
Conclusion?: Premise 2 means premise 1 is not effective anymore?
Have I summarized that accurately?
[/quote]
Possibly. If you mean that it’s “carrying a gun” which is not effective, no, I don’t believe, that; whether people carry has no effect on whether, if they were carrying, they would have additional protection, or not. If you mean that premise 1, as an argument, is not effective anymore, then yes, that’s what i’m saying.
Not so, because the argument is one for gun ownership, and that’s an argument that has wider effects than allowing law-abiding citizens to carry. If we limit the circumstances and say that the only effect allowing gun ownership has is that law-abiding citizens get to have guns, then certainly, you are correct - it only applies to premise 2 (though, of course, those who own but don’t carry would have possible issues with putting forth that argument). But the circumstances are not so limited.
The only information I require for the argument and conclusion is their existence, which Lumpy believed, and which you appear also to believe. If I wanted to make some further conclusion or argument i’d need to know statistics first - which is why i’ve made no conclusion which would require those statistics, only the existence. Which, again, was reliant in the first place upon Lumpy’s claim, not something i’ve created myself. For me it was always a matter of “If A, then B” than “A is so, therefore B”. I don’t know what proportion of gun owners carry.
I understand that is what you are saying. That is not the argument that **Lumpy **has made, nor anyone but you. Just because a small population of folks actually carry does not diminish the argument that carrying in general offers protective benefits. Carrying is useful for those who carry, and for those around others who may be carrying and could render aid. Full stop.
Seriously. Kable has told you, I’m telling you, Lumpy has said as much. At this point it would be better if you would make your own argument rather than hang on to an inference that you alone have picked up.
Yes, I agree with this. I’m not claiming that Lumpy made that claim, nor that anyone else has, and I haven’t done so at any point. That is my claim based on Lumpy’s claims.
Again, i’m not claiming that gun owners not carrying diminishes the protective value in carrying. It has no effect. It is immateriel. I’ve said this many times. I believe that whether a majority of gun owners carries or not, this has zero effect on whether carrying has a protective effect. What i’m saying is that it has an effect on the argument pro-gun ownership based upon that protective ability, which, again remains existent or not with no regard for how many people carry.
You’ve all told me repeatedly, but I am not making the inference on Lumpy that you think I am.
Again, all that I am claiming that Lumpy said was;
- That a majority of gun owners do not carry.
- That carrying a gun is useful for protective purposes.
That’s it. That’s all i’m claiming, and all that I have claimed, that Lumpy has said.
I think so, I just don’t get the conclusion.
I agree, though at this point I am questioning the “good faith” aspect.
Perhaps.
I have no idea what % carry. Seems we both think the more the merrier.
[quote]
Sure, but those are not the categories i’m comparing. There’s essentially three groups;
Great.
What?
I’d be willing to bet any amount of money you want that you can’t roll 9/10 heads on your first try, and any number of additional tries you want. $100 an attempt sound fair to you? How about $10,000 cause I’ll bet any amount you can afford, over and over again.
Probably.
So which part of that is wrong?
Tell you what, I’ll pay you $10 every time I don’t get 9 heads out of 10 flips, you pay me $10,000 every time I do get 9 heads. I’ll play that game for as long as you want, over and over again. Heck, I’ll pay you $90 every time I don’t get 9 heads.