Claims you've never actually heard spoken

Morrus · Jul 5, 2015

I don't envy you guys having to have this conversation endlessly.

Scott DeWar · Jul 5, 2015

I purposely stayed away from it.

Dannyalcatraz · Jul 5, 2015

bone_naga said:
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.

Yeah. Lots of dead or injured minorities in the past couple of years who had faux or NO firearms...or sometimes, no weapons at all.

Now, some were legitimately bad people involved in ongoing police engagements. Too many, however, were not.

Dannyalcatraz · Jul 5, 2015

Homicidal_Squirrel said:
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.

SYG laws tend to be drafted pretty sloppily, and applied even more sloppily by juries.

I was stunned by the Trayvon Martin case. I was taught in my Texas CrimLaw (ohhhh so many years ago) that those who initiate a conflict- even verbally- cannot subsequently claim self-defense if the conflict escalates to violence. And on an open, public street, a teenager being followed by a creepy adult male is just as entitled to self-defense as an adult male following a suspicious-looking teenager.

SYG shouldn't have even been a factor in that case.

Dannyalcatraz · Jul 5, 2015

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.

Like I was saying before, guns don't make people more violent, but they make it a lot easier to turn violent impulses into assaults, and turn assaults into homicides.

And as we find all the time, firearms make it MUCH easier to kill someone accidentally or negligently.

Homicidal_Squirrel · Jul 5, 2015

Yeah, SYG laws are written pretty badly. The Florida one had to be fixed because drug dealers were going to drug buys, killing buyers, and claiming self defense. There was also a case of the guy who heard someone breaking into his car. He ran outside, and some guy had stolen his car radio. This guy chased the thief down, and stabbed him to death. The thief had a bad of car radios, which this guy took and sold off. He got off on self defense.

bone_naga · Jul 5, 2015

Umbran said:
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.

Well I think we already said that it is quite possibly lower than 2.5 million, but defensive gun uses don't require any shots at all to be fired, and even when they are fired mortality rates indicate that there is a fairly good chance that the person will live, so it's really not surprising to find low justifiable homicide rates.

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

That I don't know, although one of the links in my previous post addresses the effectiveness of gun use vs other forms of defense.

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

Sure, we can look at that as a low-ball number, although I think the 100,000 is still probably lower than the actual number.

Umbran said:
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.

I never said they were. I didn't assume anything.

Umbran said:
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

That's why I quoted homicide, plus those are the numbers that are typically toted out in gun control debates.

Umbran said:
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.

I'm not sure what your point is since as I already pointed out, our non-gun homicide rate is also higher than their total homicide rate.

bone_naga · Jul 5, 2015

Dannyalcatraz said:
And as we find all the time, firearms make it MUCH easier to kill someone accidentally or negligently.

Accidental firearm deaths are very rare. More people drown each year. I guess you could say it makes it easier to kill someone accidentally, but it's also extremely easy to avoid such accidents.

bone_naga · Jul 5, 2015

Dannyalcatraz said:
SYG laws tend to be drafted pretty sloppily, and applied even more sloppily by juries.

I was stunned by the Trayvon Martin case. I was taught in my Texas CrimLaw (ohhhh so many years ago) that those who initiate a conflict- even verbally- cannot subsequently claim self-defense if the conflict escalates to violence. And on an open, public street, a teenager being followed by a creepy adult male is just as entitled to self-defense as an adult male following a suspicious-looking teenager.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree here. If the situation was reversed and Zimmerman had shot Trayvon simply for following him (since you state that being followed entitles you to self-defense), he would have been wrong and he probably would have been convicted. Following someone isn't initiating conflict.

Dannyalcatraz said:
SYG shouldn't have even been a factor in that case.

It really wasn't. Zimmerman would have been entitled to self-defense even in the absence of SYG. SYG removes the duty to retreat in certain cases. According to Zimmerman's story, and supported by the physical evidence, he was being assaulted and could not retreat. So SYG wouldn't have really been a factor.

Now only Zimmerman knows exactly what happened, how it went down, and who really initiated the physical confrontation, but the evidence just wasn't there to convict him.

Dannyalcatraz · Jul 5, 2015

bone_naga said:
Accidental firearm deaths are very rare. More people drown each year. I guess you could say it makes it easier to kill someone accidentally, but it's also extremely easy to avoid such accidents.

Look at the news: how many kids have blown away friends & family playing with unsecured handguns? How often do you see a report of someone being killed or injured by celebratory gunfire? Both are definitely accidental, neither is particularly rare.

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