Given your riot shield example, I’m sure you already understand this, but “defensive weapons” or even “offensive weapons” don’t need to necessarily result in a death for them to be used successfully in self defense. For example, if a home invader, intent on murdering me, broke into my home and I beat him with a club until he changed his mind and retreated, that would be a successful employment of a weapon in my own defense, but it wouldn’t show up in the statistic of “people killed by clubs” because the murderous home invader wasn’t killed by my defensive employment of the weapon at my disposal, he was only warded off.
Do you see how this short story might relate to your insistence on comparing gun “deaths” of bad guys vs family members? You said earlier “… I don’t have a vested interest in disingenuously skewing the data by leaving out a major subset of gun uses.” If that’s true, you should have no problem including the defensive gun uses that do not result in a death in determining their utility as “defensive weapons”, correct?
Do people in different regions have different suicide rates?
and
Are people within a given region more likely to commit suicide if they have access to a gun?
The first question is important and complicates (read: screws) the idea of doing a straight-numbers comparison between different regions. Ignoring it entirely and trying to argue that owning guns makes a country less likely to commit suicide in general is silly and not worth serious consideration.
Though I will concede that when you’re compiling your stats to check whether gun ownership increases suicide rates you have to take into correct for region and year. That is important information that you sort of pointed out, so thank you.
Correct. I would be interested in credible statistics that indicated that homeowners warded off a home invader with their weapon without killing them. These numbers would be compared with non-gun-owning homes that also managed to fend off home invaders nonfatally, which I’m sure happens.
I’m not afraid of data. I just don’t really believe that the data is going to show that armed vigilantes are commonly driving off invading hordes. I’m willing to view data that shows otherwise, though. And if that data described my current living region, I’d consider the relative merits of moving away from such a warzone.
So, when you requested the cite you knew all this, but you didn’t acknowledge how what you were asking for would skew that data to conform with your narrative? Ok, glad we worked that out. By including the suicides and not normalizing the data it’s going to come back with a pretty disingenuous result, which is why I was curious in the first place as to why you were asking for it and why your initial response puzzled me.
I didn’t mention normalizing for region and year because that was presumed to be given. Presuming the data wasn’t being deliberately twisted disingenuously, anyway.
Similarly, I would include suicide data because removing it would be twisting the data disingenuously. That detail I mentioned explicitly, because I’m used to people trying to pretend that suicide isn’t an issue and/pr isn’t facilitated by guns.
I think it would be less disingenuous to simply not include the suicide data at all if you weren’t going to normalize it. Basically, there is a level of suicides that are going to happen regardless of the tools available or method used, so including them in the home to demonstrate how homes with guns are more or less likely to harm the homeowner’s verse likely to be used in defense without that is automatically skewing the discussion heavily in favor of the narrative you are going for. Removing them completely would, of course, skew it the other way. You obviously agree with the latter…do you see why I’m taking issue with the former?
I’m not pretending that suicide isn’t an issue, however, I think that this has been vastly overplayed by the anti-gun side. Like I said, many countries have a higher per capita suicide rate than the US, despite the fact that the US has more guns than basically everyone…there are more guns in the US than people, after all. Thinking that this rate would magically disappear or even change substantially has never been something I’ve seen demonstrated very well. I have been convinced over time that, perhaps, the success rate of suicides would go down somewhat if we were able to substantially reduce the number of households with access to guns, as guns are singularly deadly tools while other methods people try in other countries without guns are less efficient…but the delta would, IMHO, not be all that large between the current suicides using guns and whatever would be used 5 or 10 years later.
The picture I’m seeing is that home invasions are quite infrequent, but if you do get home invaded, and they have a gun, and you have a gun, you’re better off than if they have a gun and you don’t have a gun and you choose to come at them with something else.
But I’m not forgetting that home invasions are still quite infrequent. They are MUCH less frequent than the people selling the rambo home protector image are trying to convince you they are. And they’re less frequent than the use of those “defensive” guns against family members including their owner.
It’s sort like what I mentioned before, rigging all your doors and windows to blow your entire house up when they’re opened. I am damned certain that that would result in a reduced incidence of theft and other home invasions, at least through the doors and windows. Whether that would generally make the occupants safer is another matter.
Or put another way, supposing you had a gun that shoots three bullets into you for every home invader they stopped. Would that be a defensive weapon?
Man, I explicitly said that “we should compare gun-owning houses to the ‘control group’ - people who don’t have them. What are the home invasion rates, the murder rates, and the suicide rates there?”
I didn’t DO the former! :mad:
It’s my understanding that guns are the go-to tool for suicide for a reason. It’s also my understanding that suicide is often spur of the moment and convenience matters a lot.
How large the delta would be is, of course, largely unpredictable. But suicides are such a dominant usage of guns that I feel reasonably confident that the delta, even if not large, would probably exceed the times they stopped home invasions on its own.
And that’s not even counting how often privately owned guns are used for straight-up murdering people.
Is it that you’re only looking at the subset of DGUs involving home invasion and ignoring the DGUs against other crimes? I thought we both understood that we were talking about DGUs against criminals generally, not just the home-invading variety, and that we were using “home invasion” as just one example of a crime that DGUs can stop.
I’ll tell you straight up that I’m a little suspicious of any stat that has such a ridiculously huge margin of error.
If you talk about anything but home invasions the ‘defenders’ start crossing over with the aggressors - they’re all just people walking around with guns. And you start getting into the unavoidable fact that by the time the defender pulls on the aggressor, the aggressor has probably already shot at least one person himself.
This is fuzzing the specific talking point, but since this thread is about the legality of all guns, it’s reasonably to point out that we’re not really comparing the armed defender with unarmed defenders versus armed defenders. We’re comparing unarmed defenders versus unarmed aggressors. Obviously any gun control tactic that goes far enough to get them out of the hands of the innocent should also work aggressively to get them out of the hands of the criminals.
Also, note that we’re specifically only talking about home invasions where the invaders are dumb enough to get caught by somebody in the mood to defend their castle. Cases where the joints are robbed with nobody catching the perpetrators aren’t helped by guns at all.
(Well, unless you had autocannons or something, but I don’t hear about that much.)
If you intended to ask me that (as I’m the guy he was quoting), I actually have no real idea why most CCW carriers bother to carry. (My instinctive theory of “as a security blanket” is really just rude speculation.) It probably varies by region.
I’d imagine that there are areas where a majority of CCW carriers are carrying them to commit crimes, (starting with ‘having an unlicensed firearm’ and going up from there) but those wouldn’t be very nice neighborhoods.
Sure, I’m trying to gauge our level of common thought processes by asking you what you figure you’d conclude that the value is no longer infrequent. 1M, 10M, 100M events per year? Just as a reference. If I were to say, a single instance is too many! Well, that is interesting and all, but you may conversely think that 1 is terrible but not enough to be considered not-infrequent. Trying to see if we’re in the same ballpark.
Was there a particular part of this article that you felt bolstered your claim about “the belief that guns are defensive weapons is based on lies told by lying liars …”? If so, would you mind quoting just that piece? Otherwise, I’m not seeing the connection you apparently are.
That’s understandable. You can be suspicious of it all you want, but it’s the best data we have available to us.
It’s the job of the police and the courts to sort out who the aggressors and defenders are, and they generally do an adequate job of it. This isn’t nearly the mysterious unknown you seem to think it is.
This is wrong. There are lots of DGUs, including home invasions, where the criminal being staved off isn’t even armed with a gun, and certainly in most cases they have not “already shot at least one person”. What kind of narrative is running through your head where this is the typical DGU? It seems far removed from reality.
I’m not following you here. I think you’re the only one that’s making these comparisons between armed and unarmed parties. The DGU statistics I cited earlier were just various surveys estimating DGUs overall, without regard to whether the criminals were armed or unarmed.
I don’t see that this is ‘obvious’ at all. Mexico, for example, has done a pretty good job of getting them out of the hands of the innocent and largely failed to get them out of the hands of the criminals.
For some of us yes. For others not so much. My Wife was interested in them for a very small while, but was not interested in getting proficient. I don’t think she knew what it takes to be a competent, safe shooter. She lost interest, and that’s fine. I would prefer that she was a shooter, but have never pushed it.
I have been shooting since I was 9 years old. It takes time and dedication. I am now at 56 years old learning the guitar. Being good at anything takes time.
I don’t need to kill anything. I hate setting mouse traps. I do live in an area that I do like the ability to try to defend myself. They have also been good for scaring bears off. Police? 911? Hahahahahh.
Roving bands of home invaders? Seriously? No. Though I do live at least 20 minutes away from any help that might come. And yes, we have always had dogs for the first alarm system
I’ll agree here. SOME are waiting for a TV show to come to life.
That’s mostly true for me. Make them inoperable? No point in that. I am not against additional restrictions. I and many gun owners do get aggravated that those that want to put additional restrictions on don’t seem to know a thing about guns.
And I understand that I’m not typical in my ownership, and where I live.
I don’t even have a real solid grasp on the national population; I certainly wouldn’t care to speculate on the frequency of events in it!
But here, I’ll say this: if the average person is experiencing (on average) at least one of these events a year, that pretty damned often; if it’s at least one event per five years that’s still pretty bad, and if it’s at least one event per ten years (per person, on average) that still enough to raise eyebrows.
(I’m currently up to zero events in forty years, personally. So even with statistics being lobbed at me the threat doesn’t really hit home at an emotional level.)