This is as good of a place as any, not really worth it’s own thread.
Finished my Concealed Weapons Permit class today. I am exhausted, it was a total of 12 hours start to finish. I know more about guns and gun laws that I ever knew there was to know. I don’t have my permit yet, I’ll have to send my application and proof I completed the class to the State Law Enforcement Division, but there should be no problems.
Took it with a friend of mine, and another friend is going to take it next month and I will probably sit through it with him, just for fun. If you live in a state that issues CWPs, I strongly recommend you take the class whether you own or aren’t interested in carrying.
I’m still calling “bullshit” on 30,000 a year: I know, I’ve done the research, shit-for-brains.
Boo-fucking-hoo! Accidents: Poison, Fire, Ingestion (Choking), Drowning, Falls, and Auto all lead firearms up until the mid-teens. Why are firearms accidents singled out above these, when they are so much fewer?
What’s that? Because you’re an anti-gun douchebag?
Considering the low-end estimate of legitimate Defensive Gun Uses is 85,000/year, then yes, firearms are a net gain.
I dun grok this…
Are you saying that you thought someone else on this board approaches the level of Divine Madness which I posses? Perish the thought!
Or did I parse it wrong?
As of today I have my choice of an old Rossi .32 revolver and a .40 Smith and Wesson SA. I need a kick ass holster like my instructor had, although I was the only one in the class with a thigh holster Cool at the range, useless for concealed.
(The page also mentions 29.730 firearm related injuries)
Just making a point why some believe people and guns don’t match so well. Sure, the majority can handle it, but the ones that don’t kinda spoil the fun. Seriously.
Yeah, I bet those are CDC stats too. And thanks for putting a price on a human life, I always wondered how much it was worth.
You can’t count suicides in a “blame the guns” argument; anyone who seriously wants to kill themself will do so, regardless of the methodology available to them. Japan, for instance, has less that .01% gun ownership, and a suicide rate per-100,000 just a fraction less than the U.S. (as of 1998 study released by I.J.E., using data primarily from 1993-94).
The 85,000 was incorrect; it’s 108,000 as a low-end estimate.
The price I put on a human life is no different than the cost/benefit analysis the gun-grabbers use as well, with the difference being that gun-grabbers don’t care how many additional people get assaulted, raped, or murdered as long as it’s not done with a gun.
Whereas I would allow private gun ownership so an to NOT deprive another person the right to defend themselves from criminal attack of any kind (amongst the other legitimate uses of firearms).
Important for suicide is whether or not a means is readily available and how effective that means is. Suicide attempts have a high failure rate for most means, but not for guns (in the Netherlands, that’s trains or high buildings, mostly). The danger of guns in the context of suicide is that when a gun is in the home, it’s both very readily available and very quick. Compare that to people who sliced their wrists in a bath, for instance, who are sometimes found before they die, or using an overdose of medicine, which also often fails.
I just quickly read that article through while eating a sandwich, and I wonder if you did the same. There’s stockpiles of arguments in there suggesting that private gun-ownership doesn’t benefit society.
(Incidentally, I misread your figure as a pricetag, an economical benefit of owning guns. Not as the yearly number of defensive uses, hence my comment on the price tag on a human life. Not that it matters much, just using a different currency, that is potentially even more questionable - after all, those 108,000 uses didn’t save 108,000 lives, but just as often a wallet with 50$ in it). One figure mentioned in the article is that up to a half a million guns per year are stolen, so for every crime a gun prevents according to this figure, 5 guns end up in the hands of criminals. Lots of dodgy figures all round, but so far, I find more anti than pro gun.
As above, criminals apppear to be far more successful at gun-grabbing than any peace loving hippie turned politician so far has managed. Except that at least between 1970 and 1994, and again according to not too reliable statistics, private gun ownership has declined.
Your link:
Based on the NSPOF, an estimated 0.9 percent of all
gun-owning households (269,000) experienced the
theft of one or more firearms during 1994. About
211,000 handguns and 382,000 long guns were stolen
in noncommercial thefts that year, for a total of
593,000 stolen firearms. Those estimates are
subject to considerable sampling error but are
consistent with earlier estimates of about half a
million guns stolen annually.[10]
So far the evidence that suggests people use guns more to kill themselves and each other rather than prevent that from happening, and even then the evidence for the first is a lot more reliable than the evidence for the second.
Also interesting was that your link proposed a fairly high incidence of the wrong kind of people owning guns:
Some correlates of gun carrying are worth noting.
Males who carried guns in 1994 were about two and
a half times as likely to have been arrested for a
nontraffic offense as other men (15 percent versus
6 percent). And a disproportionate share of gun
carriers resided in the South, where the prevalence
of carrying guns was almost double that of the rest
of the Nation.
Also interesting:
Most striking is the
gender gap: 42 percent of men but just 9 percent of
women owned guns at the time of NSPOF. (The gap is
even wider when the focus is on whether the
respondent ever owned a gun.)
And later in the article, it states that about 65% of these women primarily owned guns for crime-prevention, the others for recreational use and such. That means that of all the women owning gun, only about 6 percent own guns for self-defense. Not, all in all, a very major reason for owning guns.
Finally interesting:
Gun ownership (and handgun ownership) was highest
among middle-aged,[5] college-educated people of
rural and small-town America. But one of the best
predictors of gun ownership was the presence of
firearms in the respondent’s childhood home. People
whose parents possessed guns were three times as
likely as others to own one themselves. In fact, 80
percent of all current gun owners reported that
their parents kept a firearm in the home.
And:
But most persons do not own guns, and the NSPOF
included several items to find out why. In 1994,
about two-thirds of gunless adults were actively
opposed to having guns in their homes because they
viewed guns as dangerous, “immoral,” or otherwise
objectionable.
All in all, it seems that at least in 1994, the U.S. and Europe weren’t as divided on these matters as it appears. The pro-gunners, albeit a minority, come from an outspoken, wealthy and influential demographic of society (while males from the South).
I’m back to work. Keep bringing those links in, very helpful.
Yes, Arwin, I’ve read the entire report. Several times over the years. If you want to pick-and-choose select quotes (while ignoring others) to build an argument, I could build a convincing anti-gun argument directly quoting select passages of John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime.
The Cook-Ludwig Survey has all the problems of a national phone survey opinion poll, and I think that they draw too many unwarranted conclusions (or perhaps just put in too many anti-gun biased comments and qualifiers). It would be interesting to see what the results looked like of they conducted the same survey every year for several years.
The Kleck-Gertz survey provided a much wider spread of possible DGU’s; the big number everyone keeps focusing on is “2.5 million” DGU’s. The survey acknowledges that that is a very high-end estimate, and does not represent that as a bedrock-solid number. Yet it is the one that it has been attacked the most for over-and-over again. Kleck-Gertz’s lower-end number was 800,000, their mean was 1.5 million.
This coincides with the spread of several different surveys conducted over the years by states, universities, and polling orgs.; the spread is most likely due to slightly different questions being asked in each survey, as well as the spread of years (decades) between the various surveys.
A DGU doese not mean that a gun was fired, or that a criminal was wounded or killed. In some cases, it need not mean that it was even drawn, or displayed to an attacker. Even if the Cook-Ludwig survey was more accurate (DGU’s at/about 108,000/year), it still represents a net-gain to society in terms of the numbers of assaults/robberies/rapes/murders averted.
And IMO your suicide analysis is flawed. I believe true suicidal will kill themself regardless of method; the person with suicidal tendencies, who is just “acting out,” will doubtful choose a gun. Those people make “small cut” suicide attempts, or climb out on a ledge and stand there before being drug off the side of a building, or swallow a bottle of baby aspirin.
You need look no further than Japan; with little or no gun ownership, they had (as of 97-98) a raw suicide rate roughly 33% higher than the U.S. (age adjusted to very slightly higher than the U.S.'s; like 11.57 to 10.35 per-100,000).
Anyone determined to die will do so, regardless of the means available to them; the emotionally distraught who just want/need help will probably not choose imminently lethal means.
Well that’s exactly what you’re doing. The gist of article is definitely not in favor of guns, my quoting has nothing to do with that. The article is highly critical all by itself.
I fully agree with you on this last sentence.
And as the article says, there are some serious problems with this kind of reporting, and as the article says, there are heaps of numbers that make this incredibly unlikely. Darn it, man, nearly half the article is dedicated to pointing out ‘issues’ with the method used for DGU counting in both surveys:
For example, in only a small fraction of rape and
robbery attempts do victims use guns in
self-defense. It does not make sense, then, that
the NSPOF estimate of the number of rapes in which
a woman defended herself with a gun was more than
the total number of rapes estimated from NCVS
(exhibit 8). For other crimes listed in exhibit 8,
the results are almost as absurd: the NSPOF
estimate of DGU robberies is 36 percent of all
NCVS-estimated robberies, while the NSPOF estimate
of DGU assaults is 19 percent of all aggravated
assaults. If those percentages were close to
accurate, crime would be a risky business indeed!
NSPOF estimates also suggest that 130,000 criminals
are wounded or killed by civilian gun defenders.
That number also appears completely out of line
with other, more reliable statistics on the number
of gunshot cases.[14]
The evidence of bias in the DGU estimates is even
stronger when one recalls that the DGU estimates
are calculated using only the most recently
reported DGU incidents of NSPOF respondents; as
noted, about half of the respondents who reported a
DGU indicated two or more in the preceding year.
Although there are no details on the circumstances
of those additional DGUs, presumably they are
similar to the most recent case and provide
evidence for additional millions of violent crimes
foiled and perpetrators shot.
False positives. Regardless of which estimates one
believes, only a small fraction of adults have used
guns defensively in 1994. The only question is
whether that fraction is 1 in 1,800 (as one would
conclude from the NCVS) or 1 in 100 (as indicated
by the NSPOF estimate based on Kleck and Gertz’s
criteria).
Any estimate of the incidence of a rare event based
on screening the general population is likely to
have a positive bias. The reason can best be
explained by use of an epidemiological
framework.[15] Screening tests are always subject
to error, whether the “test” is a medical
examination for cancer or an interview question for
DGUs. The errors are either “false negatives” or
“false positives.” If the latter tend to outnumber
the former, the population prevalence will be
exaggerated.
The reason this sort of bias can be expected in the
case of rare events boils down to a matter of
arithmetic. Suppose the true prevalence is 1 in
1,000. Then out of every 1,000 respondents, only 1
can possibly supply a “false negative,” whereas any
of the 999 may provide a “false positive.” If even
2 of the 999 provide a false positive, the result
will be a positive bias–regardless of whether the
one true positive tells the truth.
Respondents might falsely provide a positive
response to the DGU question for any of a number of
reasons:
o They may want to impress the interviewer by their
heroism and hence exaggerate a trivial event.
o They may be genuinely confused due to substance
abuse, mental illness, or simply less-than-accurate
memories.
o They may actually have used a gun defensively
within the last couple of years but falsely report
it as occurring in the previous year–a phenomenon
known as “telescoping.”
Of course, it is easy to imagine the reasons why
that rare respondent who actually did use a gun
defensively within the time frame may have decided
not to report it to the interviewer. But again, the
arithmetic dictates that the false positives will
likely predominate.
In line with the theory that many DGU reports are
exaggerated or falsified, we note that in some of
these reports, the respondents’ answers to the
followup items are not consistent with respondents’
reported DGUs. For example, of the 19 NSPOF
respondents meeting the more restrictive Kleck and
Gertz DGU criteria (exhibit 7), 6 indicated that
the circumstance of the DGU was rape, robbery, or
attack–but then responded “no” to a subsequent
question: “Did the perpetrator threaten, attack, or
injure you?”
The key explanation for the difference between the
108,000 NCVS estimate for the annual number of DGUs
and the several million from the surveys discussed
earlier is that NCVS avoids the false-positive
problem by limiting DGU questions to persons who
first reported that they were crime victims. Most
NCVS respondents never have a chance to answer the
DGU question, falsely or otherwise.
Unclear benefits and costs from gun uses. Even if
one were clever enough to design a questionnaire
that would weed out error, a problem in
interpreting the result would remain. Should the
number of DGUs serve as a measure of the public
benefit of private gun possession, even in
principle? When it comes to DGUs, is more better?
That is doubtful, for two kinds of reasons:
o First, people who draw their guns to defend
themselves against perceived threats are not
necessarily innocent victims; they may have started
fights themselves or they may simply be mistaken
about whether the other persons really intended to
harm them. Survey interviewers must take the
respondent’s word for what happened and why; a
competent police investigation of the same incident
would interview all parties before reaching a
conclusion.
o Second and more generally, the number of DGUs
tells us little about the most important effects on
crime of widespread gun ownership. When a high
percentage of homes, vehicles, and even purses
contain guns, that presumably has an important
effect on the behavior of predatory criminals. Some
may be deterred or diverted to other types of
crime. Others may change tactics, acquiring a gun
themselves or in some other way seeking to preempt
gun use by the intended victim.[16] Such
consequences presumably have an important effect on
criminal victimization rates but are in no way
reflected in the DGU count.
Net-gain by what definition …
There are a few types of suicide. There’s one where people plan it for months and months, and those are the ones most likely to get it ‘right’ the first time. Then, however, there are those who just don’t see the future for a while and having the means at hand, they make a desperate move.
So, you want to compare Japan and the U.S. in terms of suicide. You’re probably right, I mean those cultures are so very similar … in the one, suicide was traditionally a sin, in the other, an honorable way to die. I’m willing to agree that the two countries are moving towards each other, but your comment is pointless nevertheless. Just a random quote from the first page I opened on google: “Although suicide is deplored in Japan today, it does not have the sinful overtones that are common in the west. People still kill themselves for failed businesses, involvement in love triangles, or even failing school examinations, death is still consider by many as better than dishonor.”
Smiling bandit you are right in some ways, but not in terms of thread length (14 pages isn’t really long, but I can imagine it does feel that way). What is impressive about this thread, is that unlike many other gun-related threads, it wasn’t closed by a moderator. I didn’t pick much up I came to this thread to learn about guns in the U.S., and although many in this thread will probably disagree, I’m feeling I’ve completed my education. I thank everyone pro and con for taking part. The fact that this thread managed to survive for as long as it did, is in no small part thanks to decent behavior by its participants. Kudos to all.
A shame that I just read the second quoted paragraph, as I now understand the first to have been making an ironic point, and I’d got a truly inspired flame all ready to go, and now I realize it’s not needed after all.
May I ask a question so that we may determine the relevance of your objections to our discluding suicides from the gun death numbers in the United States?
Do you Arwin, as a resident of the Netherlands, believe the very liberal voluntary euthanasia laws of your country are immoral? Does a person truly have the right to seek help terminating their own life when that life has become intolerable?
That’s my point. The Cook-Ludwig Survey is not very gun friendly (small wonder?), and even they acknowledge DGU (they may have qualified their findings into near meaninglessness, but they did put the number 108,000 in their final report). And it’s just one of many surveys, so the Cook-Ludwig report is not the last word, nor set in stone as “truth.”
Thirteen other surveys conducted by various organizations over the years put the number from 700,000 on up to 2.5 million. The truth probably lies somewhere in between those extremes.
Neither the Bureau of Justice Statistics (agency), the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, nor the CDC’s data break down DGU’s by the type of crime averted; it would be almost impossible to in most cases, I’d imagine. Therefore, I don’t call DGU’s “murders averted” or “rapes averted;” I call them assaults, robberies, rapes and murders averted. In all honesty, they are also probably burglaries, car thefts, and vandalisms averted.
Can I say with certainty? No; no one can. The research hasn’t been done yet.
But a DGU is a DGU, and in this country (most places still, Thank OG) a person’s right to self defense has not been taken away by the state, and a person has every right to use whatever means necessary to protect themselves.
Can Americans do a better job of locking up guns? Cetainly; I’ve never argued otherwise. Does it require a federal law and police intrusion into American homes to enforce it? Hell no!
The NRA preaches gun safety with the zeal of an evangelical christian preachin’ Jesus; it’s one of our primary functions as an organization. We preach safe handling, and safe storage, and responsible ownership overall. For instance: I’ve been looking to unload several of the firearms in my collection listed above, but I haven’t. I won’t sell to anyone I don’t personally know to be a trustworthy sort, and the few gun stores that will take outside sales on consignment (so that they can conduct the background check through NICS) are very few and far inbetween. So those guns sit in my gun safe until I find a responsible, trustworthy buyer.
Registration is a prelude to confiscation. The purpose of the second amendment was not so the people could protect themselves from murderers and rapists, but to protect the people from a government gone evil.
In a democracy power flows up from the people to government.
I can think of many examples from history but the most glaring, of course, was when democratic Germany was subverted into a dictatorship by the Nazi’s.
One of the first laws the Nazi’s empowered was a gun registration law. Very shortly after guns were made illegal and storm troopers went door to door with their registration list.
Pesse (Those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it) Mist
Cool at the range, useless for concealed.
Keep up the bad work, fellas!