Claims you've never actually heard spoken

bone_naga · Jul 5, 2015

Dannyalcatraz said:
Q: what do you call a bunch of white guys carrying guns openly on the streets of Texas?
A: Open Carry advocates

Q: what do you call a black guy carrying a gun openly in an Ohio Wal-Mart?
A: The Deceased

I carry no firearms- not even fake ones: I don't need panicky white people thinking i'm a threat.

That was a sad incident, and I don't think it's the only one. Unfortunately when you combine panicky people that think open carriers are already on the verge of being mass murderers with racial bias, things tend not to end well.

Scott DeWar · Jul 5, 2015

A retraction of a bad post

Scott DeWar said:
forget I made this post

A.
B.
C.
C-1. You break the law, You pay the price

I have omitted obviously offensive material. I would like to use the excuse of "I didn't think that . . . ." But that is where the problem is: I DIDN'T THINK.

I am sorry EN World.

I was tempted to just say "I failed my charisma check"

Janx · Jul 5, 2015

Scott DeWar said:
I have omitted obviously offensive material. I would like to use the excuse of "I didn't think that . . . ." But that is where the problem is: I DIDN'T THINK.

I am sorry EN World.

I was tempted to just say "I failed my charisma check"

forgiven.

A certain political group tends to espouse that mindset. Having grown up on welfare, it offends me because it assumes my mom was lazy. Things are more complex than that, and lazy she most certainly was not.

Here's why I forgive you. Whenever I present a dumb or only half-smart idea, Danny or Umbran usually comes up with what is wrong with it, or makes it better (danny just did that a few posts up for me). They have adjusted my thinking, given me explanations for why a thing was not as good as it could be.

You've retracted your statement. I assume you understand the logical problems with it now. If you were part of that political group and used your new info to better guide them, tone down their rhetoric to reflect compassion and grace, that's a good thing.

Umbran · Jul 5, 2015

bone_naga said:
Back to the individual level, though, defensive gun uses outnumber all gun deaths (including suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths), so I'd say it is still worth consideration.

The number I have heard bandied about is that guns are used in self-defense 2.5 million times each year. Mind you, that number comes from a study done by the NRA, that has a vested interest in the result.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics says that, in the 5 year period from 2007 to 2011, in property and violent crimes, guns were used in defensive action a total of 338,700 times (about 1% of the time, someone tries to defend themselves with a gun). That's total over all five years. And those are just the times guns were used - not the total number of times they were *successfully* used.

The FBI says that, in 2012, only 259 people were killed in a justifiable homicide (a civilian killing a felon during commission of a felony). And that happened to be a five-year high.

According to the 2004 book "Private Guns, Public Health" by Dr. David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, the difference is in a problem of statistics and false positives in the NRA study. In essence, the NRA was extrapolating from a small sample set that is predisposed to reporting that they have stopped crimes with guns.

(cite for some of the above: http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf)

Meanwhile, the CDC reports that in 2013, there were 21,175 successful suicides by firearm**, and 11,208 homicides by firearm***

So, rouoghly speaking, guns are used in defense about 68,000 times a year. Leading to about 250 deaths of felons.

Meanwhile, they are used to kill 32,000+ people a year overall - and generally twice as many people kill themselves with a firearm than kill others with a firearm.

So, yes, defensive uses outnumber deaths. But is is not at all clear that the defensive uses are valuable enough to justify allowing the deaths to occur.

**http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
***http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Scott DeWar · Jul 5, 2015

Janx said:
forgiven.

A certain political group tends to espouse that mindset. Having grown up on welfare, it offends me because it assumes my mom was lazy. Things are more complex than that, and lazy she most certainly was not.

Here's why I forgive you. Whenever I present a dumb or only half-smart idea, Danny or Umbran usually comes up with what is wrong with it, or makes it better (danny just did that a few posts up for me). They have adjusted my thinking, given me explanations for why a thing was not as good as it could be.

You've retracted your statement. I assume you understand the logical problems with it now. If you were part of that political group and used your new info to better guide them, tone down their rhetoric to reflect compassion and grace, that's a good thing.

I too was raised on welfare, but unlike you, My Mom was lazy. I am on a constant vigil to fight that in my own life.

Umbran · Jul 5, 2015

Scott DeWar said:
I have omitted obviously offensive material. I would like to use the excuse of "I didn't think that . . . ." But that is where the problem is: I DIDN'T THINK.

I am sorry EN World.

Sir, you win a number of points for being classy. Thank you.

Homicidal_Squirrel · Jul 5, 2015

Umbran said:
The number I have heard bandied about is that guns are used in self-defense 2.5 million times each year. Mind you, that number comes from a study done by the NRA, that has a vested interest in the result.

You also have to take into account the rise Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws, and how because of SYG laws, incidents not previously considered self-defense have been reclassified incidents as "self-defense. SYG laws, the wonderful one we started in Florida and pushed out to the rest of the country, were basically written by the NRA, so take it as you will.

Scott DeWar · Jul 5, 2015

Umbran said:
Sir, you win a number of points for being classy. Thank you.

Ummm, Wow! Thank you! ! My Grandfather TRIED to teach me manners. I credit him with this.

bone_naga · Jul 5, 2015

Umbran said:
The number I have heard bandied about is that guns are used in self-defense 2.5 million times each year. Mind you, that number comes from a study done by the NRA, that has a vested interest in the result.

A vested interest certainly invites scrutiny, but it doesn't automatically mean the results are wrong. Otherwise I could just as easily dismiss your link from the VPC due to its anti-gun bias. Also, it wasn't an NRA study.

Umbran said:
The FBI says that, in 2012, only 259 people were killed in a justifiable homicide (a civilian killing a felon during commission of a felony). And that happened to be a five-year high.

I think justifiable homicide numbers are a poor measure of defensive gun use. Most DGUs don't kill the attacker. Many don't even require for any shots to be fired at all. The defensive gun owner isn't trying to kill someone else, just end the attack, as opposed to a murderer who is making an active attempt to kill his target.

Umbran said:
In essence, the NRA was extrapolating from a small sample set that is predisposed to reporting that they have stopped crimes with guns.

Quite possible. Any survey generally entails extrapolating results from a small sample population, which leaves room for error, whether it was intentional or not. I will also say that Kleck's 2.5 million number is higher than most other studies.

Umbran said:
So, yes, defensive uses outnumber deaths. But is is not at all clear that the defensive uses are valuable enough to justify allowing the deaths to occur.

I will agree that it's not clear, but it's certainly worth consideration. If the low end result estimate is 100,000 per year and the high end estimate is 2.5 million, it seems likely that the truth is somewhere in between. Not necessarily the middle, but hardly an insignificant number. It's also not clear exactly whether a law that reduces the ability for lawful ownership and use would have an equally proportional impact on criminal use.

Another item for consideration: if crime in the US was only differentiated from other countries by guns, then our non-gun homicide rate should be equal to or in fact lower than other countries (since people that would otherwise kill with a knife or other implement will instead gravitate towards guns). But if you compare the homicide rates in the US and the UK, after you adjust our rate to remove the number of gun-related homicides, we still have a higher homicide rate than the UK.

Please excuse the use of an obviously pro-gun website, but its sources are all cited if you care to check their work. It's basically laziness on my part so that I don't have to look up as many web links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

http://www.leg.state.co.us/clics/clics2012a/commsumm.nsf/b4a3962433b52fa787256e5f00670a71/10498c3a3264be7887257998006fe0d7/$FILE/HseJud0202AttachN.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdgeff.html

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdgbur.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/06/handguns_suicides_mass_shootings_deaths_and_self_defense_findings_from_a.html

Umbran · Jul 5, 2015

bone_naga said:
I think justifiable homicide numbers are a poor measure of defensive gun use. Most DGUs don't kill the attacker.

Of course not. It is only a gauge. The idea that defensive gun use leads to the death of the felon only one time ten thousand does not sound credible. Thus, 250 or so deaths is not consistent with 2.5 million uses. Even with my numbers, the rate is something like one-third of one percent of all defensive uses end in the death of a felon.

It would be interesting to see how many of them end in the death of the defender.

I will agree that it's not clear, but it's certainly worth consideration. If the low end result estimate is 100,000 per year

By the numbers I've already presented, the low end is no higher than about 68,000, two-thirds of what you suggest there.

Another item for consideration: if crime in the US was only differentiated from other countries by guns, then our non-gun homicide rate should be equal to or in fact lower than other countries (since people that would otherwise kill with a knife or other implement will instead gravitate towards guns). But if you compare the homicide rates in the US and the UK, after you adjust our rate to remove the number of gun-related homicides, we still have a higher homicide rate than the UK.

That assumes that the firearm-homicide rate and the non-firearm homicide rates are independent. I am not convinced that is a safe assumption. You'd have to provide some support for that before it can be a major part of an analysis.

In both countries, "violent crime" does not include homicides. Violent crime rates are typically gotten from survey data, as many crimes are not reported to police. Victims of homicide, however, rarely respond to surveys

In 2010, the NCVS had the US violent crime rate at 10.8 per 100,000, about a 1.15 chance of a person being the victim of a violent crime.
The British Crime Survey had the rate in Britain and Wales at 3.1%! Wow! Lots of gun control, but more violent crime!

But, the homicide rates are different:
There were 622 homicides in England and Wales in 2010. With a population about 55 million, that makes the rate one in 88,000
There were 14,022 homicides in the US in that same year. With a population of 308 million, on in 22,000, four times higher.

11,101 of those homicides were committed with firearms. That's one in 28,000 or so. Our firearms homicide rate alone is higher than their total homicide rate.

A couple things we could say that are consistent with the data:
We could say, "People in England and wales like to beat each other up, but they *don't* kill each other," This may be a cultural difference, meaning that you really cannot compare across countries at all.

Or, we could say, "Yes, guns seem to deter violent crime. However, they *enhance* homicide." If so, I am not sure it is necessarily a win for us.