Another shot at the case against gnus

[Hermit]

Mind you, Jim, I'm not at all trying to prove that fewer guns mean more lives saved. I am content to merely show that more guns don't save more lives. There are just too many factors involved that determine the rate of murder and homicide besides gun ownership.

I am confident that as soon as Seth returns from his suspension, he will weigh in with extreme statistical outliers such as South Africa and Washington DC, and claim that they prove that I am wrong. Even more likely, he will move the goal posts once again by citing the Second Amendment, the Founding Fathers and the need to safeguard The Freedom Of The Individual from the ever present threat of The Tyranny Of Government in his effort to prove that Gun Ownership is A Good Thing. Of course, by doing that he'll have to totally ignore that Gallstones' flowchart is not about any of those things. It's about "less gun control = more lives saved", but then our resident lolbertardian has always been enthusiastically employing evasion, changing tack and any other dishonest debating technique he can get his hands on.

[JimC]

Mind you, Jim, I'm not at all trying to prove that fewer guns mean more lives saved. I am content to merely show that more guns don't save more lives. There are just too many factors involved that determine the rate of murder and homicide besides gun ownership.

I am confident that as soon as Seth returns from his suspension, he will weigh in with extreme statistical outliers such as South Africa and Washington DC, and claim that they prove that I am wrong. Even more likely, he will move the goal posts once again by citing the Second Amendment, the Founding Fathers and the need to safeguard The Freedom Of The Individual from the ever present threat of The Tyranny Of Government in his effort to prove that Gun Ownership is A Good Thing. Of course, by doing that he'll have to totally ignore that Gallstones' flowchart is not about any of those things. It's about "less gun control = more lives saved", but then our resident lolbertardian has always been enthusiastically employing evasion, changing tack and any other dishonest debating technique he can get his hands on.

It always depends on where you start from, I think. Given that America is currently awash with guns of all descriptions, it may even be true that attempting to impose gun controls there would actually increase the number of deaths. "You can't get there from here" as the old Irish joke has it...

However, I'm pretty damn certain that suddenly relaxing all our current gun controls would definitely increase our rate of violent deaths.

Anyway, stuff it all - as long as they don't impose gin controls...

[Hermit]

It always depends on where you start from, I think. Given that America is currently awash with guns of all descriptions, it may even be true that attempting to impose gun controls there would actually increase the number of deaths.

However, I'm pretty damn certain that suddenly relaxing all our current gun controls would definitely increase our rate of violent deaths.

Abolishing all of our gun controls might cause a spike in homicide rates, but merely winding them back to pre-1996 conditions probably would not. As for what might happen in the USA is anyone's guess. Given the readiness to kill at the drop of a hat, as evidenced by people shooting garage intruders, and the legislative support via stand-your-ground get-out-of-jail passes to that sort of culture, it would not surprise me if there was an upward spike. Gun owners might just simply retain firearms illegally, and the growing sentiment of "if something scares me I'll deal with it by letting a few bullets loose in that general direction" remains.

Anyway, stuff it all - as long as they don't impose gin controls...

I'll drink to that. The more gin you swill, the more Cabernet-Sauvignon is left for me.

[JimC]

Hermit wrote:

Abolishing all of our gun controls might cause a spike in homicide rates, but merely winding them back to pre-1996 conditions probably would not.

pre-1996 conditions would still have Seth frothing at the mouth...

You might be right, but I prefer to leave them where they are right now, rather than experiment. Mind you, I'll always support the right of sporting shooters with bolt-action rifles to hunt, particularly introduced species...

Such as cane toads...

With .303s...

[Hermit]

I'll always support the right of sporting shooters with bolt-action rifles to hunt, particularly introduced species...

Such as cane toads...

With .303s...

Just imagine how much more effectively you could deal with the plague of Queenslanders toads if you had AK47s on hand, or being able to squash the commie bastards pests with Sherman tanks.

[JimC]

I'll always support the right of sporting shooters with bolt-action rifles to hunt, particularly introduced species...

Such as cane toads...

With .303s...

Just imagine how much more effectively you could deal with the plague of Queenslanders toads if you had AK47s on hand, or being able to squash the commie bastards pests with Sherman tanks.

rEv, you have been warned!

(although personally, I'd prefer an invasion of Tasmania first - those in-bred bastards need a damn good culling...)

[Robert_S]

Dwayne Ferguson, a leader in the anti-violence organization Mad Dads was arrested last week on two felony charges stemming from the fact that he was carrying a loaded firearm at an elementary school.

“I’m sure Dwayne went into the school not thinking he had the gun on him,” said Rev. James E. Giles, a friend of Ferguson and president of Back to Basics Outreach Ministries. “We know this for a fact, that he called out to a Buffalo police lieutenant asking why the school was in lockdown, and that they were looking for a man with a gun.

Yep. he's kinda dumb. From a quick Google search, these Mad Dads seem to be trying to do some good in tough situations.

[JimC]

Sure, I forget I have a loaded shotgun on me all the time...

[Seth]

Good looking flowchart, that. Pity it's designed in a fact-free zone.

So, the net effect of more guns is a saving of lives? Let's compare some statistics between the country you live in and the country where I live.

USA
Gun ownership per 100 residents: 89
Murder rate per 100,000 population: 4.8
Homicides by firearm per 100,000 population: 1.60
All deaths by firearm per 100,000 population: 4.80

Australia
Gun ownership per 100 residents: 15
Murder rate per 100,000 population: 1.0
Homicides by firearm per 100,000 population: 0.13
All deaths by firearm per 100,000 population: 1.06

A gun control test that uses actual facts arrives at a different conclusion to that suggested in your flowchart.

As usual your analysis ignores far too many variables to make it valid.

Here's the only fact that counts: In the last 40 years or so the number of guns in US society has exploded (pun intended). There are now more guns in US society than at any time in history, and yet the murder, violent crime and certain categories of property crimes had dropped and continues to drop.

Therefore, more guns, less crime.

If you were correct, crime of all sorts would be climbing in the US, not going down, and crime in Australia and the UK would be going down, but it's not, it's going up.

That's the fact, Jack.

[Gallstones]

No Gun Ever Killed Anyone by Mallory Millet

In the 1970's I was alarmed to hear that my big sister, Kate Millett, who had serious mental health issues which had agonized my family and her friends for many years, was organizing a group called The Mental Patients' Project in order to claim that the psychiatric community and society were "oppressing" people and "stigmatizing them with labels such as psychotic, bi-polar, schizophrenic, borderline personalities," etc and unconstitutionally imprisoning them in hospitals thereby violating their civil rights. We, as a family, had struggled for years with Kate's issues, many times attempting to hospitalize her so she could obtain the serious help she so obviously obviously needed. She was a brutal sadist, a violent bully at whose hands everyone about her suffered. Throughout my childhood I was menaced and immeasurably traumatized, as I'm sure was Elliot Rodger’s younger sibling whom he, in fact, intended to murder.
...
DO NOT start the usual vilifying of the NRA and the constant claptrap about guns. Half of the people Elliot Rodger killed last weekend were felled by the knife. What? You want to confiscate all knives? Or make people get permits to own a knife? Most of the people injured were hurt by his car. Shall we outlaw cars? Let's start thinking straight: Do you seriously want to blame the instrument for the actions of the user? We may as well blame the keyboard for the poison pen letter or the telephone for the obscene phone call or death threat!!! Make no mistake about it. It's not guns, not male chauvinism, not white male privilege or male rage. It was the deconstruction of the mental health system in our country achieved in the seventies and eighties by a mad little gang of meddlers led in their mischief by Kate Millett.

Stop saying the warning signs were missed. They were not missed. The Rodger family was begging, pleading for help from therapists, the police; just as did my own family, my mother, my sister, Sally, my cousins, nephews and I intervened our guts out to absolutely no avail. There is no system left in this country to deal with these traumas. This is a mental health issue and no more. We are surrounded by phony bleeding hearts who can coolly step over the sacred bodies of the wretchedly ill lying about our streets and sashay into a shop to eat a sandwich. Shame on all of you and may an huge share of the blame fall upon the shoulders of the perpetrators of this mercilessness, my sister, Kate Millett, and her fawning, ghoulish band of "liberating" acolytes. These people are the ones responsible for this chaos in our world.

Let the blame for these types of crimes lie precisely on the shoulders of persons who commit evil not upon the instruments used to do these atrocities. One properly armed citizen could have stopped Elliot Rodger in his tracks and saved several of those lost lives and limbs.

My purpose in writing this account is to beseech, to beg, to plead with the reader to put your thinking straight about these matters. Stop the hogwash about the instruments used whether they be guns, baseball bats, knives, or blunt instruments. Think straight: Behind each of these outrages is a sick, homicidal person hell-bent on destruction by any means possible. We need to be able to restrain such people. We need an effective commitment process in order to help the mentally sick and to serve those whom they will inevitably kill, harm or maim. God bless these nineteen families and may we all learn what we should have known all along: Something sane must be done with our mental health system!!

Complete text at the link.

[JimC]

Good looking flowchart, that. Pity it's designed in a fact-free zone.

So, the net effect of more guns is a saving of lives? Let's compare some statistics between the country you live in and the country where I live.

USA
Gun ownership per 100 residents: 89
Murder rate per 100,000 population: 4.8
Homicides by firearm per 100,000 population: 1.60
All deaths by firearm per 100,000 population: 4.80

Australia
Gun ownership per 100 residents: 15
Murder rate per 100,000 population: 1.0
Homicides by firearm per 100,000 population: 0.13
All deaths by firearm per 100,000 population: 1.06

A gun control test that uses actual facts arrives at a different conclusion to that suggested in your flowchart.

As usual your analysis ignores far too many variables to make it valid.

Here's the only fact that counts: In the last 40 years or so the number of guns in US society has exploded (pun intended). There are now more guns in US society than at any time in history, and yet the murder, violent crime and certain categories of property crimes had dropped and continues to drop.

Therefore, more guns, less crime.

If you were correct, crime of all sorts would be climbing in the US, not going down, and crime in Australia and the UK would be going down, but it's not, it's going up.

That's the fact, Jack.

All I really care about the very clear-cut comparison is that it makes me very thankful to live somewhere where my chances of being gunned down are considerably lower than the US...

[Hermit]

Here's the only fact that counts: In the last 40 years or so the number of guns in US society has exploded (pun intended). There are now more guns in US society than at any time in history, and yet the murder, violent crime and certain categories of property crimes had dropped and continues to drop.

Therefore, more guns, less crime.

Let's see now. Crime in the USA? Let's look at statistics from the Uniform Crime Report.

Crimes per 100,000 population

1962
Total 2,019.8
Violent 162.3
Property 1,857.5
Murder 4.6
Forcible rape 9.4
Robbery 59.7
Aggravated assault 88.6
Burglary 535.2
Larceny-Theft 1,124.8
Vehicle theft 197.4

2012
Total 3,246.1
Violent 386.9
Property 2,859.2
Murder 4.7
Forcible rape 26.9
Robbery 112.9
Aggravated assault 242.3
Burglary 670.2
Larceny-Theft 1,959.3
Vehicle theft 229.7

Seems like not only am I right with what I pointed out, but also that you are manifestly wrong with your mantra of "more guns, less crime. Again.

[Seth]

the growing sentiment of "if something scares me I'll deal with it by letting a few bullets loose in that general direction" remains.

Strawman. No such sentiment exists in the mind of any rational gun owner, and never has, as the acute lack of accidental shootings as compared to the number of privately owned guns in the US proves.

The only place this sentiment exists is in the minds of ignorant hoplophobes and anti-gun religious zealots.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but the exception merely proves the rule.

[Seth]

Here's the only fact that counts: In the last 40 years or so the number of guns in US society has exploded (pun intended). There are now more guns in US society than at any time in history, and yet the murder, violent crime and certain categories of property crimes had dropped and continues to drop.

Therefore, more guns, less crime.

Let's see now. Crime in the USA? Let's look at statistics from the Uniform Crime Report.

Crimes per 100,000 population

1962
Total 2,019.8
Violent 162.3
Property 1,857.5
Murder 4.6
Forcible rape 9.4
Robbery 59.7
Aggravated assault 88.6
Burglary 535.2
Larceny-Theft 1,124.8
Vehicle theft 197.4

2012
Total 3,246.1
Violent 386.9
Property 2,859.2
Murder 4.7
Forcible rape 26.9
Robbery 112.9
Aggravated assault 242.3
Burglary 670.2
Larceny-Theft 1,959.3
Vehicle theft 229.7

Seems like not only am I right with what I pointed out, but also that you are manifestly wrong with your mantra of "more guns, less crime. Again.

All you've shown is that the rate of certain categories of crime were higher per 100,000 in 1962 than they were in 2012. But then again there were far fewer people in the US in 1962.

What was the peak for crime in the US? Where is it now as compared to the peak? When did the practice of granting CCW permits begin in earnest? What has the crime rate been doing ever since then? Why has the crime rate been steadily declining since it's peak despite the presence of more guns in the US?

There are three categories of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Your statistics lie.

[Hermit]

All you've shown is that the rate of certain categories of crime were higher per 100,000 in 1962 than they were in 2012. But then again there were far fewer people in the US in 1962. [...] Your statistics lie.

WTF? Which part of "per 100,000" don't you understand?