"Gun Control"

"

DalaiLama wrote:

"

Schmodderhengst wrote:

"All firearm deaths

Number of deaths: 33,636"

(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm)

Of course, to some extent murders would be performed with different weapons, but the chances for deadly accidents will be lower.

"deaths" do not equal murder.

Deadly accidents with fire arms were 505 of those 33,000. Murders were 11,208 of those 33,000.
21,175 of those deaths by firearms were suicide.

Suicides in total were 41,149


84 National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 64 No. 2, February 16, 2016
Table 18. Number of deaths, death rates, and age-adjusted death rates for injury deaths, by mechanism and intent of death:
United States, 2013

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

I assume (yes) there would not only be less accidents, but also less suicides and homicides without easy access to firearms. This ofc could only be proven, if the laws would change. We can only be sure about the accidents.

I think it´s harder to kill yourself or especially others without firearms.

Homicide numbers include this, I guess:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0f_nFKVoyQ

Sufficient social systems and training (deescalation, rational behavior) of those who carry guns (not only the police) seems to be a good idea.

edit: I have read your edited version as well, Dalai, thx

"

gndoty wrote:

These are all illegal acts that occur frequently in our society. My proposal is that any gun legislation will not change the behavior of society as a whole. The act of choosing is the catalyst for all human behavior. Choice, regardless of culture or religion, is something that occurs in every society on earth. Should the focus not be on what effects choices made by people?

As stated throughout history, a free society must be a moral society. Is it possible that violence committed with a firearm is heavily influenced by the lack of morality in society? Do guns kill people, or do people kill people? If a person becomes overweight, do we blame the spoon?

That isn't how Gun law came to be in other countries. Guns per capita in America is the highest in the world. Countries with low gun ownership is very different. Guns are expensive. They are owned or carried by the rich or people who need them like law enforcers. Your average civilians in those countries don't have them. When they introduce gun law, it is to keep criminals from getting their hands on one. There is little opposition when they introduce those Gun laws.

"

In my opinion, a morally sound person is far less likely to commit a violent crime with a firearm than an immoral individual. Is it possible that a more rational, moral and free society would result in less gun crime? If heroine were legal tomorrow, would you use it? I wouldn't, because my moral compass says no, not because of legislation.

If John Doe kills someone with an AR-15, why should Jane Doe who responsibly hunts with an AR-15 be considered a criminal? Objects utilized by people for illegal acts are not to blame, the people are. If a person uses a vehicle to run over a crowd on a sidewalk we convict them of vehicular manslaughter or murder. We don't ban vehicles.

So my questions are simple. Why ban or legislate guns, when people and their choices are to blame? Is there a bigger issue at hand? Would the government fear a disarmed society? Historically, what follows the banning of firearms in countries around the world. Is it freedom or oppression? Does the media feed off emotion or logic to influence society?

As with all topics like this, there are opposing views. What do you think?

Armed conflict with Guns are more deadly. If you have a dangerous man armed with AR-15, your average police with his peashooter pistols can't deal with it. They need to call the swat team... Homicide cases where people stab someone with kitchen knives is much easier to deal with.

"

Antnee wrote:

There is a very simple counter-argument to this. If the penalty for an action is the biggest downside of the action, then the penalty is the problem, not the action. (From your post, you're in the "legalize" camp already.. just sayin)

you call it counter-argument, i call it the general defining equation. i like it.

"

Antnee wrote:

"

Juicebox360 wrote:

aka, the only TRUE solution to solving this "gun control" argument is by turning it into a "mind control" argument. once the technology is possible to pacify people with some kind of brain implant, i would suggest every human being be fitted with one. that would bring about true world peace, and humanity wouldn't know any better about this emotion of hate and otherness they don't feel, since its a nasty feeling anyways and we'd all be better off with not having to think such things.

You're going way, way, wayyyyy off the deep end. Unnecessary.

in the current era of human consciousness and politics as we know it... possibly not so in the near- to far-future, when humanity has essentially converged into some kind of transhuman singularity, there will be certain traits which are and are not favourable towards our future advancement. illogical emotions such as hate, anger, jealousy, etc will likely be stamped out in favour of less negatively-impacting emotions, if emotions at all.

Irrelevant really. There are 400 million guns out there and trillions of rounds of ammo. No way to get them all not to mention civil war 2.0 when they tried. Not to mention the fact this individual was a security for a big government contractor and had access to guns as part of his job.

My take is guns prevent much violent crime. 2.5 million cases a year according to research - http://rense.com/general76/univ.htm

If you where able to take them the only ones who will have them are criminals who could operate with total impunity then. arnt AK47s banned in Paris? How did that ban work out?


Whats really too bad is there wasn't a bunch of http://www.pinkpistols.org/ at that gay club. No way this guy could have barred to door and shot people leisurely over hours.


These politicians are just no think reactionaries not unlike the ones who say "ban Muslims"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX4qUsgHa4Y

( Vox channel: "The state of gun violence in the US, explained in 18 charts" )

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

Irrelevant really. There are 400 million guns out there and trillions of rounds of ammo. No way to get them all not to mention civil war 2.0 when they tried. Not to mention the fact this individual was a security for a big government contractor and had access to guns as part of his job.

My take is guns prevent much violent crime. 2.5 million cases a year according to research - http://rense.com/general76/univ.htm

If you where able to take them the only ones who will have them are criminals who could operate with total impunity then. arnt AK47s banned in Paris? How did that ban work out?


Whats really too bad is there wasn't a bunch of http://www.pinkpistols.org/ at that gay club. No way this guy could have barred to door and shot people leisurely over hours.


These politicians are just no think reactionaries not unlike the ones who say "ban Muslims"

More guns = more gun crimes/ more guns deaths. Statistically speaking...

I am sure someone have refuted that research....

My take of this is quite different, theoretically reducing the numbers of guns to the point of a scarcity would reduce gun crimes and gun deaths. This is why those gun control laws and measures work in those countries.

Except this is not possible, America already have a proliferation of guns. Gun controls laws seem to be ineffective. Disarming people actually make them vulnerable. That is the problem with Gun Free Zones. The problem with those areas isn't the lack of guns, but the abundance of victims. Those areas aren't well protected.

"

Schmodderhengst wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX4qUsgHa4Y

( Vox channel: "The state of gun violence in the US, explained in 18 charts" )

2 or 3 charts are OK, the rest are misleading. The mispelling of Obame - make that Obama - is priceless.

Let's look at the video with our critical thinking caps on:

The Slide on "most of those killed by guns are suicides" where they mention 58 suicides and 32 homicides out of 90 per day. That lines up with 33,636 firearm deaths, 21,175 of them suicides and 11,208 homicides.

Guns do make it more possible, but anyone with a plan and the means to carry it out is at the same risk. They mention the difference between men and women. Women attempt more often, while male sucide attempts have a higher rate of completion. This is true regardless of firearms.

The "climbing" suicide rate they mention (largely among middle age white males ) has been statistically correlate with rising women's wages, and men displaced by women in the workforce- so do we advocate for lowering women's wages again?

OK, so much for their accurate slides, now let's get to where they mislead people:

The slide homicide rates by country shows the US with the highest rate of those listed.

Yet, when you look at all the countries, you find the US is to the left of the middle (105 counrties with a higher homicide rate out of 192 countries listed.

Brazil's Laws are more restrictive than the US



- so according to gun law supporters their homicide rate should be lower

Yet Brazil's rate is over 5 times that of the US.



Mexico's homicide rate is double to four times that of the US, so according to the Gun law supporters, Mexico's laws must be even more liberal than the US.. If the US has 56,059 gun dealers (including pawnshops) that are licensed to sell guns, guess how many Mexico has? 80,000? 100,000?

How about: One.

MEXICO CITY - In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. The shop, known officially as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, is operated by the Mexican military. The clerks wear pressed green camouflage. They are soldiers.

The only gun store in Mexico is not very busy.

To go shopping for a gun in Mexico, customers must come to Mexico City - even if they live 1,300 miles away in Ciudad Juarez. To gain entry to the store, which is on a secure military base, customers must present valid identification, pass through a metal detector, yield to the security wand and surrender cellphones and cameras.

To buy a gun, clients must submit references and prove that their income is honestly earned, that their record is free of criminal charges and that their military obligations, if any, have been fulfilled with honor. They are fingerprinted and photographed. Finally, if judged worthy of owning a small-caliber weapon to protect home and hearth, they are allowed to buy just one. And a box of bullets.

Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation's citizens.



South Africa - Gun laws are stricter than in the US, so we should see a lower rate?

No - How about a 10 fold increase?
The gun laws were strengthened in 1994, so there should be a decline since then, correct? No, the murder rate went up by almost a third.

The video talks about the victims of gun violence being disproportionately black men, yet the video completely fails to mention the race and gender of the vast majority of those killing black men (85-90% depending on year)



So let's look at the top four in Gun ownership per capita vs the bottom four, because surely
they should support the video's claim in some fashion.

Top four: US (113 guns per 100 people) Serbia (76) Yemen (55) Switzerland (46)

And the bottom four (Tunisia, Timor, Solomon, Ghana)

Finding correctly sorted and tabulated data was a pain - so your own search results may vary a little in the exact details depending on year and source, but overall they look similar:

So, we'll have to use some 2012 data (UN)

US - number 98, Serbia number 57, Yemen 97, Switzerland 185 out of 192 by homicide

The bottom four in gun ownership rank by murder:
Tunisia 130 (higher than number 4 on gun ownership)
Timor 109 (higher than number 4 on gun ownership)
Solomon (higher than number 4 on gun ownership)
Ghana (higher than numbers, 1, 3 and 4 on gun ownership)

Next we have their "graph" showing Correlation between gun ownership and homicide rate in the fifty states.

She draws a line that is supposed to represent (best statistical fit) for the data. The image shows 8 points above, 8 points near the line, 4 above, 7 points below and 15 points as (outliers).



How is 15/42 (37.5%) of the data "outliers" Also ... we have 42 states - where are the other 8?

Looking up the article cited (shown on screen):
"State-level homicide victimization rates in the US in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership " by Miller Hemenway Azrael in Social Science and Medicine
note the second sentence in the abstract: The present study is the first to examine the cross sectional association between household firearm ownership and homicide victimization across the 50 US states"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17070975

So, I'd call the graphic image on youtube misleading when 8 of 50 points are missing, and over 1/3 of the data is considered outliers.

I checked for full text (only looked for about 15 minutes - feel free to dig more on your own) but couldn't find any of the many articles by this author that weren't behind a pay wall. Considering what I have seen in the video, I have about as much reason to trust that the paper says what the video says it does as I do videos of aliens in Roswell that show glimpses of govt documents.

So - instead of relying on this BOGUS video, let's look for a reputable source that we can look at and vet for ourselves.

Since suicide is within the purview of medicine and psychology, those fields are most likely to have research on this.

We'll use an article from the "American Journal of Epidemiology" (and Oxford journal)
Oxford Journals Medicine & Health American Jnl of Epidemiology Volume 160, Issue 10 Pp. 929-936
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study

authored by:
Linda L. Dahlberg
Division of Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA.

Robin M. Ikeda
Epidemiology Program Office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA.
Marcie-jo Kresnow

Office of Statistics and Programming, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA.

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full

Their conclusion:
Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.


Since we have the full article, let's look at what they actually say about that increased risk:

"Although an estimated 40 percent of adults in the United States report keeping a gun in the home for recreational or protective purposes (3), the risks and benefits of this practice are widely disputed in the literature (4, 5). Ecologic analyses have suggested a link between the prevalence of gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide (6–8) and between regulations restricting access to firearms and rates of homicide and suicide (9–12). Although these studies are useful in demonstrating an association between access to firearms and rates of homicide and suicide at the aggregate level, it is not possible with this methodology to adequately assess whether access to a gun increases the risk of a violent death at the individual level.

To address these limitations, previous researchers have used case-control study methodology to evaluate the relation between gun ownership and risk of a violent death in the home. For example, Kellermann et al. (13, 14) examined the relation between gun ownership and injury outcomes. After they controlled for a number of potentially confounding factors, the presence of a gun in the home was associated with a nearly fivefold risk of suicide (adjusted odds ratio = 4.8)"


(so roughly a five fold increased risk of suicide)

To be thorough, since this is a multivariate analysis to see how much guns play a factor - let's look at one of their source to see about this "increased risk" (both 13 and 14 are by Kellermann. 13 is Suicide, 14 is Homicide)

So here is Kellermann, number 13 referenced source
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199208133270705#+Background.=&t=article+Background.

And here is the relevant table from that article on the multivariate factors:
http://www.nejm.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1056%2FNEJM199208133270705&iid=t004


Like any good researcher does, they mention the limitations of their article

"Fourth, our analysis was restricted to violent deaths in the home. The dynamics of homicides or suicides occurring in other locations may be very different."


So, people committing suicide by driving into a tree wouldn't be in there, nor would someone jumping off a bridge. Is that percentage significant?

Accident or Suicide? Single-Vehicle Car Accidents and the Intent Hypothesis
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-17150135/accident-or-suicide-single-vehicle-car-accidents Depending on the details - maybe 500-1000+ vehicular suicide deaths annually? Those would be additional deaths, so they likely wouldn't detract from the added risk of having a gun.

So, from the table we have:

Adjusted odds ration of committing suicide:

Guns kept in home 4.8 (so, yes a five times associated factor)

Now let's look at the others:

Did not graduate from high school 4.1
drinks alcohol 2.3
Previous hospitalization due to drinking 16.4
Psychotropic medication prescribed 35.9*
Active use of illicit drugs 4.8

*(note there is a medically known physiological cause and effect underlying this one)

So having a gun at home is slightly more dangerous in terms of suicide than not graduating from high school, but twice as safe as someone who drinks and uses illicit drugs.



Both articles are excellent, well researched and sourced. Both use standardized methodology and critical thinking. To be fair to the articles, they were written in 2004, so their information is outdated. At that time owning a gun was considered to be one of the top factors in predicting risk of suicide. More modern psychology and medicine has updated the predictive models based on actual data from suicide outcomes vs assessment factors. (The Columbia Survey is the most up to date, though they may be revising that in September of 2016)

To get an idea what that process looks like (this was a change from 2013) take a look at these three (all related to the previous suicide assessment scale)

http://www.jwatch.org/na31829/2013/08/02/sad-performance-sadpersons-scale

http://www.imt.ie/clinical/2013/08/screening-tool-for-risk-of-suicide-is-failing-patients-%E2%80%94-new-study.html

http://emj.bmj.com/content/31/10/796


While a gun is still a significant factor in suicide, possessing the means for suicide and having a plan for suicide are currently considered key determinant factors in risk analysis.

A gun, a car, a bottle of potentially lethal medicine etc - Having a plan and possessing the means to carrying out that plan are the clinical manifestations that along with expressed feelings of hopelessness or helplessness would cause a medical provider to most likely involuntarily commit someone for suicide watch because they represent the greatest danger to themselves.

Someone who is supposed to be on psychotropic medicine that has stopped taking that medicine can be enough of a factor on its own to have the attending physician put that person on a suicide watch. This factor is significant enough all by itself, that some patients have standing order from the court for this process.

Videos like the one linked trivialize the real problem. People who commit or attempt suicide are in pain - emotion, physical or both. It isn't a problem of guns, it is a neurological and sociological problem.

Gun control will no longer solve that problem than controlling how many aspirin a person can buy at one time will solve that problem.

I wish people like the video makers would quite using drive by thinking to talk about serious issues.

TL/DR in graphics

State rank by suicide rate:



State ranking by gun ownership:


Combined ownership and suicide


Is there a correlation - yes. Is that correlation greater than other factors - no, but the interactive nature of factors means it still can be significant. Personally, if someone in my family were suicidal, a lot of dangerous things, including guns would be removed from the house. More importantly though, I'd make sure the person received treatment (pharmacological if necessary) and therapy, and lots of love and support. Those are the things that have been shown most likely will save someone's life.

We could eliminate a lot of homicides and suicides if we focused more on supporting mental health. A lot of people just snap when they don't know how to handle a situation. What is a minor annoyance to you or me, becomes a major life threatening crisis to them.

We could prevent a lot of heartache and needless loss of life, if we started focusing on the real problem of mental health rather than the perceived problem of gun ownership.

mental health is important too but most people resort to violence and crime if they see no other way. having a social safety net can prevent that.

you call that communism, we call it social care.

it works!

at least i was never was threatened by a gun nor seen some non-governmental person threaten someone with a gun in germany or anywhere in europe, neither in the socialist past nor capitalist presence.

"

vio wrote:

mental health is important too but most people resort to violence and crime if they see no other way. having a social safety net can prevent that.

you call that communism, we call it social care.

it works!

at least i was never was threatened by a gun nor seen some non-governmental person threaten someone with a gun in germany or anywhere in europe, neither in the socialist past nor capitalist presence.

I'd agree that a social safety net is important too. Keeping the people that just don't want to work but can, from using up the funds available for those who really need the system is the tricky part.

They compare to other developed, or let´s better say rich countries. In all the mentioned rich countries there is less violence than in the U.S..

And you are comparing to South Africa ? Interesting. No wonder there´s a lot of violence. Not long after a racist system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid) there´s still a massive inequality (in general) there.

The U.S. also (still) seems to be suffering from this episode in history, more social security and education would be helpful here as well (chances without money from your parents...).