Earlier you didn’t seem to have much hesitation speculating on the frequency of events. You said this:
Since you “don’t even have a real solid grasp on the national population” would it be safe to assume that your claims of “quite infrequent” “MUCH less frequent” and “less frequent” are just the result of wild guesses?
Ok. I have no intention of playing gotcha so I’ll kick out some of the things I can remember off the top of my head. All figures are approximate so I don’t have to keep typing “approximately”. There are about 120M householdsin the US, depending on the year. There are about 3.5M home burglaries per year. If it were truly random, then that’s about 2.9% of households robbed each year. Not quite 1 in 10.
Of the 3.5M home burglarlies, a little north of 25% of the time someone is home, or about 1M events each year. Of those 1M events, about 25% of the time someone becomes a victim of violent crime. So that represents a bit north of 250K people each year victims of violent crime when present during a home burglary. Obviously this probably varies by location.
I’ve had my house robbed. I didn’t like it.
You asked earlier about people defending themselves while home with a firearm and not killing the person:
I don’t have the comparison factors handy, but there is this from the CDC, among others:
No, that’s a self serving opinion. You would do well to learn the difference between the two. In any event, you’re carrying as if your opinions are the real world. They’re not. They’re just opinions. The real world is millions of firearms, perhaps hundreds of millions, already exist in American society. You can regale us ad inifinitum about woulda coulda shoulda.
Let me summarize my position.
Guns are just tools and necessary ones for a large number of law abiding Americans. If you tried to confiscate all of them, it would cause an explosion in disease and damage caused by wildlife and possibly a new Civil War. You may not be into hunting (I am not either) but a lot of people are. Texas alone is overrun by feral pigs and 70 percent of them have to be killed every year just to keep pace so that they don’t destroy the entire ecosystem.
Guns are some of the most durable objects ever invented. You can’t just let them fade out either. They work just as well at a 100 years old as they do brand new and they generally don’t wear out unless they are abused. How are you going to get those back? Your grandfather’s deer rifle will work just great on people as well.
The 2nd Amendment - You can read it however you want but the Supreme Court has already ruled on it. The ruling favors individual gun rights and that is all that matters.
You can’t stop really smart lone wolf killers. They will find a way but you can focus on the much greater number of day-to-day killings that represent the vast majority of gun deaths in the U.S.
Again, I am completely in favor of reducing the number of accidental gun deaths but I don’t think any policy should be driven because of spree killers.
In that case, my apologies for the snark (I’m trying to keep it in check, honest), but it’s so obvious that I thought there had to be another point.
False Equivalence rides again.
But no, I meant fewer people would have high capacity clips if they were banned and they had to modify them, instead of just plunking down cash for them ready-made.
Is this a faith statement, or is it subject to falsification? That is, what kind of evidence do you have that guns can’t be used to protect you from attacks with knives, clubs, or other weapons?
Same question, more or less - can you prove that owning a gun causes suicide?
Regards,
Shodan
Then they cannot be taken away, you don’t need to worry about them. Some words on a parchment are nothing compared to the protection of god. He will smite any who try to take your guns.
Yes, I see that, as someone in the middle. I was actually thinking that the complete ban side was much smaller than it was, but now I am seeing that it comes out of the woodwork after a few rounds of 2A’s insisting that there is nothing that can possibly be done.
Those for unfettered access to guns will ignore anyone in the middle looking for compromise, laughing at our ineffective efforts to reduce untimely deaths dealt by having such easy access to guns.
At some point, those of us in the middle pack it in out of frustration, then they do get to deal with the people who do want to take all their guns. Then they point to those people as evidence that anyone who looks to reduce the gun violence just wants to ban guns.
I can see discouraging some reactions, like shutting down a perfect sniper vantage point during events, but I would not mock people for being concerned about being the next victim of a mass shooting.
If someone says that they are not going tot go to a concert or a game, because they are concerned about their safety, would you actually mock them for that?
Once again, a pro-gun advocate shows that just because someone is pro-gun, does not mean that they are good at identifying targets.
If this was a shooting situation, you would be apologizing to his corpse.
You probably cannot use all suicides, just the difference between households with guns, and those without. That would be the number prevented. Given that most forms of suicide are less than 10% effective, and guns are 90%+, say we use a figure of 75% reduction in suicide by gun.
As for those asking if that would mean that we would have a lower suicide rate than other industrialized nations, sure, why not? We claim to be the greatest nation ever. We have the best economy, we have affluent wealth, an american citizen has everything going for them, so why should we not have a much lower rate of suicide?
This is a little personal here, but during the 2008 recession and slow recovery, I had some depression issues. I never saw anyone about it, but I was having serious difficulty getting out of bed to go rejected for another job interview that, even if I got it, wouldn’t stop, but only slow my financial hemorrhaging. I had some dark thought from time to time, and some levels of suicidal ideation. In the end, every morning, I decided that it was easier to just get up and go, and even if I failed to get the job, that would still be less humiliating than a failed suicide attempt. If I had a gun next to my bed, I don’t know what I would have done, but I am glad that I never needed to find out. Convenience and reliability make suicide a much more palatable idea.
Is this supposed to be a serious point?
Sigh. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re doing little more than disagreeing over the definition of “defensive weapon”.
I don’t consider blowing your oppenent’s head off to be a defensive action. Even if you do it while defending something. That’s not defense. That is what’s called “an attack”.
Most guns have only one use - attacking. (Some can be turned horizontally and used as iron bars to block melee attacks, but that’s not really their standard usage.)
I recognize that there are people who consider blowing the hell out of anything that bothers them to be a defensive maneuver. I disagree with their use of the language and consider it disingenuous. Guns can be used while defending things, but they’re not “defensive weapons”, by my perception of the poorly-defined term. If they were, they’d still be defensive weapons when in the hand of the dude breaking in.
I would be quite surprised if the ownership of a gun is ever the sole cause of suicide (perhaps guilt at owning a deadly weapon?), but the stats are extremely clear that the remarkable effectiveness of guns as suicide tools increases the incidence of suicides. Particularly if we only count successful suicides, which seems reasonable considering the fact that a large percentage of people who fail at killing themselves don’t try again.
No. That is what’s called “self defense”.
Technically no, because I never said you were being attacked at the time; I just said you were “defending something”. To get all semantic and all.
But I’m really running out of fucks to give about this semantic dispute.
Suicides don’t count.
If guns are a causal factor in suicides, our suicide rates would be through the goddam roof but our suicide rate is pretty average for OECD nations. So there is no real obvious link between guns in our society and the suicide rate.
A few decades ago the CDC funded a study that showed an association between the presence of a gun in the house and the murder of someone residing in the house. That same study showed that renting your home, being single or being a frequent drug user were even MORE associated with being murdered. The CDC only highlighted the association between guns in then house and the likelihood of being murdered and congress reacted by pulling funding from them and telling them to never advocate for gun control again.
Is it possible that people who are likely to be murdered are more likely to go out and get a gun.
Of course suicides count. (I can make autonomous declarations as well as the next person!)
You don’t want to be comparing against other OECD nations. You want to be comparing against non-gun-owning houses in the same OECD nation (and rough time period).
So what you’re saying is, there’s an association between the presence of a gun in the house and the murder of someone residing in the house. Color me surprised.
And also there’s an association with being a frequent drug user and getting murdered. Color me real surprised.
And also there’s an association with being single and a renter and getting murdered. Well, uh, shit. Any home owners wanna go on a date?
Of course it’s possible. Is it possible that this isn’t really making that big of an impact on the big picture?
Do ready and easy methods include tall buildings , hanging by a rope, jumping in front of a train, etc? Or just guns?
Is there any chance that someone in the household buys a gun for the purpose of committing suicide?
The presence of a gun probably does increase the rate of suicide at least a bit. It almost has to but our suicide rate is pretty average for an OECD nation. With all our guns, why aren’t we leading the pack?
Korea is 24.1
Poland is 18.5
Russia is 17.9
Japan is 15.4
Finland is 14.2
Sweden is 12.7
Our suicide rate is 12.6/100,000
France is 12.3
New Zealand is 12.3
Europe generally is 11.9
Guns account for about half or all successful suicides. Where do you think suicides would be if we didn’t have the same access to guns?
Yes.
If a person, in the comfort of their own home, with no confusion or time constraints to contend with, cannot tell ally from foe, then how am I expected to believe that he would under stressful situation like those that he claims to carry a gun to defend us from?
The rest of the English speaking world defines these things differently. The Person who instigates a threat against another person is the attacker. What the other person does to thwart that attack, including inflicting bodily harm (counter attacking,) or death on the attacker is “defense.”
When I am sleeping peacefully in my home, and a swarm of Ninjas tries to asassinate me, and I impale them one at a time with my toothbrush or strangle them to death with my underwear, I am engaging in defense. Not everybody is as lethal with Underoos, or an Oralb as me. Hence, home defense with a gun.
Most of them would still be alive.
If we claim that this is a great country, and we claim that it is better than all the european countries, then shouldn’t we have a lower suicide rate, not a higher one?
No one is talking about a sole cause. It was shown to you that gun ownership went up as suicide went down, and you objected that correlation wasn’t necessarily causality. OK, fair enough - correlation isn’t causality with suicide stats. Unless and until you can show causality. You are trying to push correlation as causality when it suits you, and waving your hands when it doesn’t.
This is incorrect, since most DGU do not involve shooting anyone - the threat is enough to deter the attack, without any shots fired. But leave aside this rather bizarre notion that defending yourself is attacking - so what? Using an attacking weapon in self-defense is not wrong, and it is something that ought, if possible, to be preserved.
If someone breaks into my home and threatens me, and I shoot him and you want to call that an “attack” or using an “attacking weapon” - how does that affect the morality at all? And why should it matter to its legality?
Referring to self-defense as an attack is the part that is disingenuous. Let’s not confuse the issue.
Regards,
Shodan
Protecting yourself is one thing.
Many feel that that right extends to their property. Some even feel it extends to their neighbor’s property.
Do you dispute that guns are an effective suicide tool? What would it take to “show” that placing a gun to your head and pulling the trigger is correlated with a successful suicide?
It’s disingenuous. To call pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger. An attack.
Damn, man. I want to just drop this tedious semantic argument. Would you stop making me sound like the sensible one here? It makes me feel like there’s something salvageable here, when there really isn’t.