Guns used for lawful self-defense Pt. 5

[Blind groper]

Seth

A big difference between you and I in our arguments is that I am a pragmatist, and you are a woolly thinker. I set a goal (saving human lives) and determine strategies to achieve the goal (removing hand guns from civilian possession).

You, on the other hand, use pseudo-religious woolly concepts like "inalienable rights" (which do not exist) to justify the continuance of harmful and damaging behaviours.

[Seth]

Seth

A big difference between you and I in our arguments is that I am a pragmatist, and you are a woolly thinker. I set a goal (saving human lives) and determine strategies to achieve the goal (removing hand guns from civilian possession).

I set a goal of protecting innocent lives and suppressing criminal victimization. I just don't really give a flying fuck what happens to the criminals I'm suppressing in the process. They forfeit their right to consideration and concern the moment they choose to violently victimize others. The more violent their crime, the more justifiable the use of defensive physical force against them, up to and including deadly physical force.

You, on the other hand, use pseudo-religious woolly concepts like "inalienable rights" (which do not exist) to justify the continuance of harmful and damaging behaviours.

And you use vacuous concepts like "I'm a mindless, amoral, ethics-free moron" to justify protecting criminals instead of victims.

[Blind groper]

No, Seth.
You have no goal related to protecting lives, which is shown by your refusal to believe the results of reputable researchers who found that owning hand guns substantially increased the number of people killed. Your sole interest is in preserving your selfish ability to play with lethal toys.

You have also, on many occasions expressed a callous disregard for human life. So come clean and admit your interest in this issue is entirely self centred.

[Seth]

No, Seth.
You have no goal related to protecting lives,

Liar.

which is shown by your refusal to believe the results of reputable researchers who found that owning hand guns substantially increased the number of people killed.

They are not reputable researchers and their conclusions are fallacious.

Your sole interest is in preserving your selfish ability to play with lethal toys.

And your sole interest is visually inspecting your upper colon 24/7.

You have also, on many occasions expressed a callous disregard for human life. So come clean and admit your interest in this issue is entirely self centred.

Depends on the particular human life involved. I am entirely uninterested in the lives and safety of violent criminals...or Marxists (who are in many ways worse than violent criminals and who have certainly killed millions more people than violent criminals have in the last century).

As for me, my motives are strongly NOT personal and are motivated primarily by my concern for the lives and safety of innocent people, which is why I carry a gun. Sure, if I'm attacked I'll defend myself, but more importantly I'll defend anyone else who is under attack at risk to my own life because I have the skill, knowledge and capacity to do so, even if it means sacrificing my life to save others.

You will of course dismiss this, but I don't care because I know what I believe and you can go fuck yourself.

You, on the other hand, are a coward who transfers the risks you face to others by expecting them to protect you and provide for your safety. That's immoral and unethical in the extreme. Why should some cop, who just wants to go home to his kids at the end of the day be required to place himself at risk just because you're too much of a coward to provide for your own safety?

[Blind groper]

The short answer to your question, Seth, is that not having a hand gun is safer, for everyone. There is no heroism in carrying a tool for murder and putting peoples lives at risk.

[Seth]

The short answer to your question, Seth, is that not having a hand gun is safer, for everyone.

No it's not. It's not safer for the individual who would or could have prevented a criminal victimization by having one, and that's the only thing that matters. Your vacuous fears about somebody else's gun does not rise to the level of a public policy imperative, even if it could, which it can't in the US.

Your argument is, and has always been as stupid as the argument that we should ban automobiles because not having automobiles is "safer, for everyone." And automobiles are orders of magnitude more dangerous than handguns are, yet we don't ban them.

There is no heroism in carrying a tool for murder and putting peoples lives at risk.

True, which is why it's important to keep them out of the hands of criminals who do use them for murder and putting peoples lives at risk. But since I do neither, nor do the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of law-abiding handgun owners, there is a strong moral, legal and ethical argument for us to be carrying our handguns...so that we can take care of business and keep criminals from doing bad things with handguns...or any other weapons.

[Blind groper]

Seth

As always, you ignore inconvenient facts.

Let me remind you of the research papers published in the NEJM that showed that owning a hand gun puts the owner at a 2 to 4 fold greater risk of being murdered, and puts members of his family at a 2 to 10 fold increased risk of dying from suicide.

Owning a hand gun does not, as you claim, help with self defense, or help with defening others. Instead, it increases the risk of people dying, including the hand gun owner and his family.

If your aim is improved safety, then a hand gun is doing the exact opposite.

[Seth]

Seth

As always, you ignore inconvenient facts.

No, I ignore specious and irrelevant, and deliberately biased research.

Let me remind you of the research papers published in the NEJM that showed that owning a hand gun puts the owner at a 2 to 4 fold greater risk of being murdered, and puts members of his family at a 2 to 10 fold increased risk of dying from suicide.

As I said...

Owning a hand gun does not, as you claim, help with self defense, or help with defening others. Instead, it increases the risk of people dying, including the hand gun owner and his family.

Even if, arguendo, it does (and it doesn't), that's a risk that every person gets to analyze and respond to themselves, not one that the government or Internet pundits have any authority over.

If your aim is improved safety, then a hand gun is doing the exact opposite.

We disagree. In any event my aim is to respect the rights of the individual to be effectively armed for self-defense if that individual so chooses.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Do you seriously believe that, or are you just doing your troll thing?

The research shows clearly that hand guns are harmful. The concept of "rights" is deeply flawed, in that those so-called "rights" are just what governments find expedient.

So how much of what you are posting is actually sincere?

[Collector1337]

A big difference between you and I in our arguments is that I am a pragmatist

I set a goal (saving human lives) and determine strategies to achieve the goal (removing hand guns from civilian possession).

Great! blind groper, is here to save us from ourselves! He is going to impose on us and take our liberty away for our own good because he knows better than us! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Except not. Mind your own fucking business and leave me the hell alone. Your bullshit is just like when the religious try to impose on atheists. You can keep the bullshit your peddling, I want no part of it. You should worry about yourself and leave the rest of us the fuck alone. In fact, I will fight you to my last dying breath to keep you from imposing your will on others and taking their freedom away. You should be ashamed of yourself. Let people live their lives the way they want, with freedom, not your fucking authoritarian bullshit. You sicken me.

You, on the other hand, use pseudo-religious woolly concepts like "inalienable rights" (which do not exist) to justify the continuance of harmful and damaging behaviours.

It's not up to you to tell other people how they should live their lives. You talk about the religious, but you are doing exactly what the religious do, saying that you know better and demanding that people live the way you want them to. Well, guess what? Fuck you. Go impose on somebody else. Your "it's for your own good" arguments are absolute garbage. The fact you are blind to the disgusting, vile hypocrisy you perpetrate gives us a great window on to your cluelessness.

Go preach somewhere else.

[Seth]

Defensive Use of Guns

Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence,
although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996;
Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive
gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by
criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to
more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about
300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the
other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only
108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization
Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a
controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per
year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken
from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is
difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically
about defensive gun use.

A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous
or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding
crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual
defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the
crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have
found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims
compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck,
1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck,
2004). Effectiveness of defensive tactics, however, is likely to vary
across types of victims, types of offenders, and circumstances of the
crime, so further research is needed, both to explore these contingencies
and to confirm or discount earlier findings.

Even when defensive use of guns is effective in averting death or injury
for the gun user in cases of crime, it is still possible that keeping a
gun in the home or carrying a gun in public—concealed or open carry—
may have a different net effect on the rate of injury. For example, if gun
ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by
those who invade the homes of gun owners this could cancel or outweigh
the beneficial effects of defensive gun use (Kellermann et al., 1992,
1993, 1995). Although some early studies were published that relate to
this issue, they were not conclusive, and this is a sufficiently important
question that it merits additional, careful exploration.

Source: National Research Council

Looks like the NRC has bitch-slapped Obama with his own bias.

[Blind groper]

What the NRC said in that quote is the usual cop out. In other words "We need more research", and "we do not know."

The NEJM did not opt out like that. They reported clear findings that hand gun ownership increased incidence of both homicide and suicide. In other words, the ownership of hand guns resulted in more people dying.

This is the rational and logical conclusion anyway. With one in 5 shooting victims dying, while only 1 in 400 stabbing victims die, then more hand guns means more deaths. Really simple.

The USA with 100 million hand guns, has 8,000 hand gun homicides and 12,000 hand gun suicides. Other OECD nations with almost no hand guns in civilian hands have close to zero hand gun deaths. So again we see more hand guns mean more people dying.

To Collector.

Wipe your chin. You are dribbling.

[Collector1337]

Wipe your chin. You are dribbling.

Wipe your vagina. You've got sand in it.

[Seth]

What the NRC said in that quote is the usual cop out. In other words "We need more research", and "we do not know."

No, what they said was, "Although some early studies were published that relate to this issue, they were not conclusive..."

The NEJM did not opt out like that. They reported clear findings that hand gun ownership increased incidence of both homicide and suicide. In other words, the ownership of hand guns resulted in more people dying.

Here's just one example of why the NEMJ article is full of shit. Under "Multivariate analysis" we find this statement:

We found no evidence of a protective benefit from gun ownership in any subgroup, including one restricted to cases of homicide that followed forced entry into the home and another restricted to cases in which resistance was attempted.

However, eight paragraphs ABOVE this statement is the following statement:

Attempted resistance was reported in 184 cases (43.8 percent). In 21 of these (5.0 percent) the victim unsuccessfully attempted to use a gun in self-defense. In 56.2 percent of the cases no specific signs of resistance were noted. Fifteen victims (3.6 percent) were killed under legally excusable circumstances. Four were shot by police acting in the line of duty. The rest were killed by another member of the household or a private citizen acting in self-defense.

How, exactly, are the lives of the 15 people whose lives were SAVED by guns in the house, "no evidence of a protective benefit?"

How, exactly, are the 43.8 percent of victims who attempted resistance, and the 21 persons who were unsuccessful in using a gun for self-defense, "no evidence of a protective benefit."

It's complete and utter bollocks to suggest that those 184 people, 21 of whom HAD guns and TRIED to defend themselves is not clear and compelling evidence of the benefits of having a gun in the house to protect against violent criminal victimization.

The 184 who attempted to resist might all have been saved if they had been armed. Or only some of them.

But if even ONE of them was saved that's all it takes, because the right to effective self defense is not a statistical argument, and has never been a statistical argument. It's an absolute right of each individual who has a 100 percent right in every circumstance to use whatever weapons are best suited, and do, prevent them from being criminally victimized.

And the simple fact is that in this study of only 420 cases taken from very specific densely populated urban areas, in 15 of them, or TWENTY EIGHT PERCENT of the cases studied a firearm was successfully used to prevent a criminal victimization, as proven by the very study that you cite. (This can be a bit confusing because Kellerman et al failed to distinguish between innocent victims and "victims" (homicides) who were actually the perpetrators of the underlying crimes that lead to a justifiable homicide 28% of the time. This is but one of the mendacious ways in which Kellerman subtly twisted and manipulated the data to reach his pre-determined political conclusion.)

If we run some numbers the way YOU do it, we take the 8000 homicides per year you claim and we can conclude that 2240 of those cases were cases of justifiable homicide, according to your pet researchers.

But that's obviously not the case. As the NRC paper, which undoubtedly reviewed the NEMJ research as part of the "early studies" that they found inconclusive, states, "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)."

And here's some other analytical nuggets for you to digest:

In a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, "The students of Dr. Mark Ferris's Mathematical Statistics 460" class ask, "In how many of the homicides was the victim killed with a gun that was kept in the house rather than a gun that was brought to the house by the perpetrator?" The question is a relevant one since, as the letter also notes, the study's authors had stated in part based on their findings that "people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes [p. 1090]." In other words, advising people against keeping a gun in the home doesn't make sense unless it causes an increase in homicide risk.

Kellermann's first response to the students was incorrect: "Ninety-three percent of the homicides involving firearms occurred in homes where a gun was kept, according to the proxy respondents." In a follow-up letter (four years later) Kellermann acknowledges his error, but still fails to directly answer the question.

Kellermann's own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim's home. (GunCite's analysis of Kellermann's data.) (The data, such as it is, is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/archive.prl?study=6898). 34% is probably on the charitable side since it assumes all family member or intimate homicides were commited by offenders living with the victim which is highly unlikely given that not all intimates (as defined in the Kellermann dataset: spouse, parents, in-laws, siblings, other relatives, and lovers) were likely to have lived with an adult victim.

A subsequent study, again by Kellermann, of fatal and non-fatal gunshot woundings, showed that only 14.2% of the shootings involving a gun whose origins were known, involved a gun kept in the home where the shooting occurred. (Kellermann, et. al. 1998. "Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home." Journal of Trauma 45:263-267) ("The authors reported that among those 438 assaultive gunshot woundings, 49 involved a gun 'kept in the home where the shooting occurred,' 295 involved a gun brought to the scene from elsewhere, and another 94 involved a gun whose origins were not noted by the police [p. 252].") (Kleck, Gary. "Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner's Chances of Being Murdered?" Homicide Studies 5 [2001].)

Source: Guncite

Thus is the Ninteen Ninety Three NEJM "Kellerman" article thoroughly debunked and dismissed as the propaganda it is. It was reviewed and found wanting by more than just the NRS, but the NRS study, commissioned by an impassioned Obama after the Sandy Hook shooting, up and bitch-slapped both Obama AND Kellerman good and hard.

And your cheek looks red too.

[Blind groper]

Quoting NRA reports, and the utterances of Lott and Kleck is not very convincing.

For those not familiar with the work of Dr. Arthur Kellerman, let me paraphrase. He is a medical specialist and researcher, who deals with emergency medicine, both in clinical work, and in research. He devbeloped a major concern about guns due to his hands on experience treating gunshot wounds. He soon realised that this was not a minor problem, but an epidemic. His research came up with an initial, and exaggerated figure for increased risk of 43 fold (which you will note I have never quoted), but he has since reviewed his work, and now quotes a 3 fold increase in risk of being shot if you have a gun in the home, compared to not owning one.

Naturally, his work has been severely attacked by the NRA, and by its allies, like Lott and Kleck. Seth, as a person who assiduously collects NRA propaganda, has access to all the shit written against Kellerman, who remains a well respected researcher, who is regarded with regard and respect by researchers and academics in his field.

Kellerman's publication written up in the New England Journal of Medicine was not the initial exaggerated estimate, but a later and more accurate assessment after further work.