birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
http://m.aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology shows that simply having a gun in the home increases the risk of being murdered, and also increases the risk of someone in the home dying of suicide.
Guns do not, repeat, do not improve safety. They do the reverse.
A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology shows that simply having a gun in the home increases the risk of being murdered, and also increases the risk of someone in the home dying of suicide.
Guns do not, repeat, do not improve safety. They do the reverse.
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
And how does the fact that an "overwhelming majority" of people justify the immoral result? If "an overwhelming majority" of your citizens believed that women should wear black bags everywhere and be stoned to death for showing any flesh would that justify the immorality? How is denying someone who wishes to be armed for self defense, thus leaving them helpless in the event of attack, a justifiable moral decision merely because it makes you or others feel better about your selves or because it increases your false sense of safety?JimC wrote:Most in the debate here have already said that it's up to you yanks to sort out your gun issues; i.e. no one is trying to (or could) "ban your guns"Seth wrote:
I am not and refuse to be made into "acceptable collateral damage" in some hoplophobic scheme to ban guns."
Mostly, we are simply asserting we, and an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens in Oz, NZ and the UK prefer our gun culture to yours...
It's immoral for anyone to deny anyone else the ability to effectively defend themselves. It's just that simple.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
Horseshit "research" long ago debunked.Blind groper wrote:http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ZdK6n0ZHMI
Carrying a gun increases the risk of being murdered by 450%. There are two possible reasons.
1. The kind of people who carry guns move in more violent social circles.
2. Carrying a gun gives people an unreal feeling of power, and makes them react to threats inappropriately, leading them to get killed.
The truth is that it is probably a mixture of the two. But what it means is that guns are a negative influence if your desire is self defense. It makes your 'defense' less effective - not more.
Business 12/20/2012 @ 11:53PM 4,522 views
A Useless Study on Gun Possession
Adam Ozimek
Adam Ozimek , Contributor
Comment Now Follow Comments
In the wake of the recent tragedy new gun control laws are being debated, and so too are the costs and benefits of gun ownership. Unfortunately, a bad study on whether owning a gun actually makes you safer seems to have fooled some people. David Frum links approvingly to an article discussing the study, and Josh Marshall even mistakes academic credentials and peer review as sufficient evidence that it is methodologically sound:
Most of us are aware of studies that show that having a firearm in the home increases rather than decreases your chance of violent injury or death — usually through accidents or suicide. I was not aware of this peer-reviewed 2009 study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study which concluded that people in possession of a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault than those who didn’t have a firearm….
I’m curious to know the real answer. There have been a number of ‘studies’ I’ve seen purporting to substantiate the claim that widespread gun ownership will actually reduce violence. But the ones I’ve seen either come from disgraced amateurs or think tank hacks with zero peer review. Are there any methodologically sound, peer-reviewed studies which show anything like this? Again, serious question.
Unfortunately, a few Ivy League professors and peer review do not guarantee sound methodology, as this study clearly demonstrates.
Luckily it doesn’t take detailed knowledge of statistics to see how deeply flawed and useless the study is. One simply has to look at the study design. Here is what the study does: they matched shooting victims in Philadelphia to a “control group” by randomly calling Philadelphia residences shortly after the shooting occurs and trying to find someone with the same race, gender, and age as the victim. The police department told them if the victim had a gun, and they asked whether the control group respondent had a gun. Then they used regression analysis to see if being in a possession of a gun made you more likely to be shot when compared to a control group of random Philadelphia residents.
They try to control for differences in circumstances by including variables that indicated whether the individuals were involved in drugs or alcohol at the time, whether they have had prior arrests, and other characteristics of the person and their situation at the time. But clearly even after including these measures all else is not equal. The study could not control for whether the individuals were in a situation where they thought they would be in danger. The study could not control for whether the individual was the kind of person who thought that someone they know may be planning on trying to shoot them. They could control for frequency of prior arrest, but not whether the individual was an active gang member. The obvious selection bias is so problematic here that it is shocking the study was even attempted. This study cannot be considered informative, except perhaps about the quality of studies the American Journal of Public Health accepts.
The federal government has resumed the Clinton-era ideological offensive against gun ownership. The opening salvo was fired recently by the federal National Institutes of Health, with a new study purporting to show that gun ownership increases the risk of being shot by 4.5 times.
by Dave Kopel
To really understand what’s going on here, however, let’s go back a few years.
The gun prohibition movement recognizes, correctly, that its objectives will be very difficult to achieve politically as long as so many Americans own firearms. Accordingly, scaring Americans away from gun ownership is an essential component of their long-term strategy. Put simply, fewer gun owners equals fewer gun-rights activists.
Obviously, this fear-of-guns strategy won’t work on NRA members and others who are already familiar and comfortable with firearms, but it could work on people who might be considering buying guns. And it also can be effective in convincing a spouse to veto his or her partner’s contemplated gun purchase.
Because of the great successes in controlling communicable diseases in recent decades, government entities that were set up for the purpose of disease control have looked to expand their operations into other fields--to assure their continued long-term funding.
So back in the 1980s, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) decided guns were a “public health” issue and began funding more and more research on guns and gun control. Some of what was produced was valuable social science, but a great deal was “junk” science, patently designed to create prohibitionist talking points.
Those involved were not shy about discussing their gun-ban goals.
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who was then director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC, explained his aim was to make the public see firearms as “dirty, deadly--and banned.” (Quoted in William Raspberry, “Sick People With Guns,” The Washington Post, Oct. 19, 1994.) A newspaper article on two other leading anti-gun propagandists, Dr. Katherine Christoffel and Dr. Robert Tanz of the Children’s Hospital in Chicago, explained their “plan to do to handguns what their profession has done to cigarettes ... turn gun ownership from a personal-choice issue to a repulsive, anti-social health hazard.” (Harold Henderson, “Policy: Guns ‘n Poses,” Chicago Reader, Dec. 16, 1994.) Many of the propaganda articles were widely disseminated by a credulous media eager to tout supposedly scientific proof that guns were bad. The most popular of these articles was built around a one-sentence factoid that asserted the dangers of guns far outweighed the protective benefits.
Finally, in 1996, Congress cut off gun control funding for the CDC--mainly because the NRA demonstrated to legislators the CDC was buying political misinformation rather than science.
Now, 14 years later, your tax dollars are once against being used to fund a campaign against your rights through the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In mid-September, the University of Pennsylvania released a study paid for by the NIH with $639,586 of your tax dollars. The study’s “conclusion” claimed people who possessed guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot than people who do not possess them.
As usual, media all over the country publicized this latest “good” news. Gun-ban groups jumped on the bandwagon.
Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke announced: “The study’s findings show once again the risks of gun ownership and how having more guns correlates with more gun violence. This research severely undermines the argument by gun pushers that carrying a gun automatically makes a person safer. In urban areas, gun possessors, far from being protected by their guns, are at an increased risk of harm. Restrictions on carrying guns clearly make sense as a smart public safety strategy.”
The lead author of the study was Dr. Charles C. Branas of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He was assisted by four Penn colleagues, including Douglas J. Wiebe of the Firearm and Injury Center.
The researchers interviewed shooting victims in Philadelphia within a few days of being shot and tried to find the ones who possessed guns at the time of their shootings. About three-quarters cooperated. Although the study included people who were killed, it does not explain how data was gathered about them. Perhaps it came from police reports or interviews of people who knew the deceased.
The researchers then used random telephone calls to try to find a “control”--a similar person who had not been shot. They attempted to find persons who lived in neighborhoods with similar economic and racial characteristics, who had similar income levels and so on.
This is called the “case-control method.” The shooting victim is the “case” and the other person is the “control.” Case-control has been used successfully in genuine medical research, most famously in the studies showing that smokers were much more likely to get lung cancer.
Case-control is also widely used in anti-gun research, although with considerably less validity, partly because finding “controls” who really match the subjects is much more difficult.
After analyzing the numbers, the Branas team announced, “individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist,” the likelihood “increased to 5.45.”
In conclusion: “On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses are possible and do occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas. Such users should rethink their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures. Suggestions to the contrary, especially for urban residents who may see gun possession as a surefire defense against a dangerous environment, should be discussed and thoughtfully reconsidered.”
A few flaws in the study are clear.
First, the study said a victim was “possessing” a gun even if the gun was “in a nearby vehicle, or in another place.” It obviously tells you nothing about the risk or utility of the victim’s gun if someone gets shot in a park while his rifle is a quarter-mile away in a pickup truck.
Second, if the study failed to measure gun ownership accurately, then its conclusions are invalid. The authors acknowledge that if just 5 percent of the shooting victims who did not say they had a gun actually did have a gun, then the study would show no statistically significant risk from gun possession.
... the University of Pennsylvania released a study paid for by the NIH with $639,586 of your tax dollars. The study’s “conclusion” claimed people who possessed guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot than people who do not possess them.
The study would also lose significance if it underestimated gun ownership by the controls--the people who were interviewed by phone and who might not be willing to tell a stranger they own a gun. Strangely, Branas and his co-authors neglected to disclose what amount of non-reporting by the controls would undermine the study. A skeptical reader may wonder if under-reporting by even a small percent of the controls would undermine the findings.
Third, 83 percent of the shootings occurred outdoors. Presumably, a significant number of the rest occurred outside the home, in public places such as bars. In Pennsylvania, carrying in such circumstances almost always requires a Right-to-Carry permit. A person carrying a gun without the required permit would, by definition, be breaking the law.
The study excluded persons under the age of 21, who in Pennsylvania cannot obtain Right-to-Carry permits. The study also made no effort to determine if any of the gun carriers were illegal aliens, to whom permits cannot be issued.
So the study actually provides no information about whether its purported risks are applicable to the law-abiding population, because it provides no information about how many--if any--of the gun carriers had lawful Right-to-Carry permits. Additionally, according to the study, 53 percent of the shooting victims had prior arrest records. The researchers tried to find controls who also had arrest records, yet the study did not report what the arrests were for or make distinctions among types of arrests.
Obviously, a “control” who had one arrest record for drug possession 10 years ago is no fair match for a “case” who had an arrest record for armed robbery last year, and three prior arrests for assault. The latter person is much more likely to spend time with, and provoke violent confrontations with, other dangerous people.
In fact, illegal gun carriers with prior criminal records are more likely to be involved in violent confrontations than other people. It is possible that they carry illegally possessed guns because they are even more inclined to consort with violent people and get into fights. But that proves nothing about whether gun carrying by the law-abiding who have Right-to-Carry permits is dangerous.
Moreover, the study’s assumption that the “case” people who were shot were comparable (except in their rate of gun possession) to the “control” people who were not remains unproven.
The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed J. Michael Oakes, a professor of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. “There are some sketchy things going on here,” he said.
“The foundation of the case control study is the sense that those who are the cases are exactly the same as those who are in the control group,” Oakes explained. The Inquirer summarized Oakes’ observation that, “Branas is assuming the people who were shot were no more likely to have guns than a group of controls of the same gender and racial mix.”
“It’s a big stretch,” Oakes said.
University of Chicago Economist Jens Ludwig is one of the most experienced, and most intellectually rigorous, academic supporters of restrictive gun policies. Yet he, too, was skeptical of the conclusion.
“They can’t tease out whether guns are contributing to assault or assault risk is contributing to gun ownership,” Ludwig said.
In other words, people who are especially at risk of being attacked might be more likely than other people to carry guns, rather than the other way around.
Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck put it succinctly: “It is precisely as if medical researchers found that insulin use is more common among persons who suffer from diabetes than among those who are not diabetic (something that is most assuredly true), and concluded that insulin use raises one’s risk of diabetes.” Or as Jacob Sullum quipped on Reason.com, it’s like discovering that people who are wearing parachutes are much more likely to suffer injuries from falling than people who don’t wear parachutes--the risk comes from jumping out of a plane, not from wearing a parachute.
The Philadelphia Inquirer should be commended for interviewing three outside experts about the story. Unfortunately, most of the coverage in the rest of America’s so-called “mainstream” media simply reported the study’s shaky conclusion as if it were a proven fact.
After its release, Kleck wrote a short essay about the Penn study blasting it as “the very epitome of junk science in the guns-and-violence field--poor quality research designed to arrive at an ideologically predetermined conclusion.” Kleck noted the authors had announced guns do not have protective value, yet the authors had not even studied whether a single victim even used a gun defensively.
The Penn article, Kleck wrote, “is merely a reflection of the fact that the same factors that place people at greater risk of becoming assault victims also motivate many people to acquire, and in some cases carry away from home, guns for self-protection . . . For example, being a drug dealer or member of a street gang puts one at much higher risk of being shot, but also makes it far more likely one will acquire a gun for protection.”
Research on people who actually use guns for protection shows the opposite of what Branas and his colleagues claim. Kleck and Jongyeon Tark examined data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual study by the Census Bureau and the Department of Justice that asks individuals if they were crime victims in the last year and, if so, collects information about the circumstances.
Of those who used guns defensively, the Kleck and Tark study found only 2 percent were injured after they used guns. (“Resisting Crime: The Effects of Victim Action on the Outcomes of Crimes.” Criminology, vol. 42, 2005.) These findings were consistent with previous studies of actual defensive gun use, which found such use does not increase the victim’s risk of harm: Gary Kleck, “Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force,” Social Problems, 1988; Gary Kleck & Miriam A. Delone, “Victim Resistance and Offender Weapon Effects in Robbery,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1993; Lawrence Southwick, “Self-Defense With Guns”, Journal of Criminal Justice, 2000.
But the Philadelphia story was not marketed for people who are familiar with social science studies of defensive gun use. It is simply a propaganda tool for people who unquestioningly believe newspaper accounts of what scientists say--and who never notice that their local paper prominently promotes anti-gun studies but never reports the release of studies about the safety benefits of gun ownership.
Unfortunately, one thing is clear: Much more of the same type of disinformation--funded by your hard-earned tax dollars--is likely to come our way in coming months and years.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
More horseshit research.Blind groper wrote:http://m.aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology shows that simply having a gun in the home increases the risk of being murdered, and also increases the risk of someone in the home dying of suicide.
Guns do not, repeat, do not improve safety. They do the reverse.
CDC Releases Study on Gun Violence: Defensive gun use common, mass shootings not
6/27/13 | by Jennifer Cruz
Do fewer guns mean fewer deaths? Not necessarily, according to a study by the CDC. (Photo credit: ABC)
Parents are upset over gun violence. Kids are upset over having to hold up signs all day. (Photo credit: ABC News)
The Committee on Priorities for a Public Health Research Agenda to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence, under the direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently published a study of findings related to violence and guns. Some of the results may come as a shock – to those on both sides of the gun control argument.
The study was conducted as part of the 23 Executive Actions signed by President Obama in January in an effort to reduce gun violence. The order specifically called to “issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”
Some have posed the logical question as to why the CDC would become involved in such a study which focuses on gun violence when the priority of the agency lies in the preventing and control of diseases. The academic community chose to study gun violence as a public health problem, partly because, according to the study, “Violence, including firearm related violence, has been shown to be contagious.” Therefore, gun violence is being studied in the same manner of a contagious disease.
The study did, however, recognize the right to bear arms as a basic human right acknowledged by the United States Constitution.
“An individual’s right to own and possess guns was established in the U.S. Constitution and affirmed in the 2008 and 2010 Supreme Court rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago.”
The initial summary of the study reiterated the need for sound evidence from a scientific standpoint to produce public policies that will best support the rights of the people while still doing whatever possible to protect the public from potential threats of violence.
“The evidence generated by implementing a public health research agenda can enable the development of sound policies that support both the rights and the responsibilities central to gun ownership in the United States. In the absence of this research, policy makers will be left to debate controversial policies without scientifically sound evidence about their potential effects.”
While the problem of gun violence is multi-faceted with no one single solution, the study resulted in a whole plethora of useful information (the entire study can be read here).
There were five primary areas of interest on which the study focused: The characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, gun safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.
It was found that there are vast differences in who is more likely to become a victim of gun violence, with primary factors lying in socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Homicide rates were shown to be significantly higher in African Americans, while suicide rates were higher in Caucasians.
Additionally, the study concluded that high rates of poverty, illicit drug trafficking and substance use all increase the risk of becoming involved in gun violence. In addition, “criminals often engage in violence as a means to acquire money, goods or other rewards.”
However, the study also inadvertently explored some of the myths surrounding what seems like a recent epidemic of gun violence, including accidental deaths and mass shootings.
According to the study, “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century.” Accidental deaths resulting from firearms accounted for less than one percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.
“Mass shootings are a highly visible and moving tragedy, but represent only a small fraction of total firearm-related violence. … It is also apparent that some mass murder incidents are associated with suicides. However, the characteristics of suicides associated with mass murders are not understood.”
The study also explored an often overlooked statistic regarding suicide, especially among veterans. “Firearm-related suicides — though receiving far less public attention — significantly outnumber homicides for all age groups, with suicides accounting for approximately 60 percent of all firearm injury fatalities in the United States in 2009. In 2010, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death among individuals in the United States over the age of 10.”
Yet the study also looked at the effect of having firearms available for self-defense, and found that firearms are much more likely to be used in a defensive manner rather than for criminal or violent activity.
“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed. 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, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
It was also discovered that when guns are used in self-defense the victims consistently have lower injury rates than those who are unarmed, even compared with those who used other forms of self-defense.
The study admitted that the results of interventions for reducing gun violence have been mixed, including strategies such as background checks and restriction of certain types of firearms, as well as having stricter penalties for illegal gun use. However, the study did reveal that “unauthorized gun possession or use is associated with higher rates of firearm violence than legal possession of guns.” In other words, law-breaking criminals are the ones most responsible for gun violence, not law-abiding citizens.
The study also looked at the source of guns used by most criminals, which helps to see partly why “there is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective.”
“More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70 percent of the guns used or possessed by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.”
In reference to gun safety technology, the study claims that “research from the injury prevention field indicates that changing products to make them safer is frequently more effective at reducing injury and death than trying to change personal behavior.”
Is it the guns that are violent or the people behind them? (Photo credit: Lehigh Valley Live)
Judging by what they’re wearing, it was both cold and wet that day. (Photo credit: Lehigh Valley Live)
With the latest gun debate, there has been more emphasis placed on violent video games, movies and other media. However, the study’s findings on the influence of these things were inconclusive.
“The vast majority of research on the effects of violence in media has focused on violence portrayed in television and the movies, although more recent research has been expanded to include music, video games, social media, and the Internet. Interest in media effects is fueled by the fact that youth are spending more time engaging with media that portrays increasing amounts of violence. Although research on the effects of media violence on real-life violence has been carried out for more than 50 years, none of this research has focused on firearm violence in particular as an outcome. As a result, a direct relationship between violence in media and real-life firearm violence has not been established and additional research is necessary.”
The results of this study were surprisingly unbiased for the most part and closely resemble the findings from a similar study conducted following the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, in which the CDC concluded that there was “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence.”
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
- Hermit
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
Immoral result? You mean the immoral result of murders and homicides happening in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France and Germany with arms restrictions compared to the USA - at one quarter to one fifth of the rate compared to yours, while road ragers shoot each other dead in the USA simply because they have a gun handy, or would if they did, or toddlers shooting their siblings or mothers because there is a gun handy and not only do civilians and cops alike shoot others because they might be armed and nobody in the USA seems to think there's something weird about it? You, Seth, have been living in the shitpile that is your nation's gun culture for so long, you don't even notice its stench.Seth wrote:And how does the fact that an "overwhelming majority" of people justify the immoral result?
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
- Brian Peacock
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
I've said the same myself. It seems to be a feature of this debate that disagreement with the pro-gun party is considered an undue undermining of their authority and a threat to their personal security. Just goes to show how guns empower people's self-assured authority and legitimise their self-declared interests, and how paranoid that can make them.JimC wrote:Most in the debate here have already said that it's up to you yanks to sort out your gun issues; i.e. no one is trying to (or could) "ban your guns"Seth wrote:
I am not and refuse to be made into "acceptable collateral damage" in some hoplophobic scheme to ban guns."
Mostly, we are simply asserting we, and an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens in Oz, NZ and the UK prefer our gun culture to yours...
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There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Details on how to do that can be found here.
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
No, the immoral result of being a proximate cause of death, injury and victimization of persons in all of those countries who are harmed by criminal violence because they were barred from possessing effective weapons of self-defense by their government, with your complicity and approval.Hermit wrote:Immoral result? You mean the immoral result of murders and homicides happening in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France and Germany with arms restrictions compared to the USA - at one quarter to one fifth of the rate compared to yours, while road ragers shoot each other dead in the USA simply because they have a gun handy, or would if they did, or toddlers shooting their siblings or mothers because there is a gun handy and not only do civilians and cops alike shoot others because they might be armed and nobody in the USA seems to think there's something weird about it? You, Seth, have been living in the shitpile that is your nation's gun culture for so long, you don't even notice its stench.Seth wrote:And how does the fact that an "overwhelming majority" of people justify the immoral result?
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
That's because it is an immoral undermining of the right of every single law-abiding person on the planet to take whatever precautions they deem reasonable to arm themselves against criminal aggression in order to protect themselves against such aggression as effectively and efficiently as is possible, so long as they only exercise that right within the boundaries of law and reason in the face of a legitimate threat.Brian Peacock wrote:I've said the same myself. It seems to be a feature of this debate that disagreement with the pro-gun party is considered an undue undermining of their authority and a threat to their personal security. Just goes to show how guns empower people's self-assured authority and legitimise their self-declared interests, and how paranoid that can make them.JimC wrote:Most in the debate here have already said that it's up to you yanks to sort out your gun issues; i.e. no one is trying to (or could) "ban your guns"Seth wrote:
I am not and refuse to be made into "acceptable collateral damage" in some hoplophobic scheme to ban guns."
Mostly, we are simply asserting we, and an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens in Oz, NZ and the UK prefer our gun culture to yours...
If you believe that every individual does NOT have a fundamental human right to effective self defense against criminal aggression, using what rationale do you pick and choose who is to live and who is to die under such circumstances and why do you believe that you, or your government, or anyone else has either the moral or legal authority to make such a decision as it pertains to anyone other than yourself?
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
- Blind groper
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
The truth is that there are so many people on the payroll of the gun manufacturers, with their propaganda budget of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that any academic study showing the harm done by guns, will be met by critiques written by the gun makers pets with spurious but impressive sounding rebuttals.
None of which alters the simple facts that :
1. People with guns are more likely to be murdered.
2. People who keep hand guns at home are also more likely to be murdered, and members of their family are more likely to die by suicide.
3. American states with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates.
4. Western nations with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates than western nations with lower gun ownership.
5. Disputes between people where guns are available result in deaths at a rate massively higher than disputes where guns are not available, even if other weapons such as knives and clubs are.
6. 4000 Americans die every year as a result of hot arguments, in wich one of the arguers has a hand gun and uses it.
7. Two thirds of all murders in the USA are done with guns.
8. The USA has more guns per person than any other nation. The USA, with only 320 million people, has over 300 million guns in private ownership, and the USA alone has a third of all such guns in the world as a whole, in spite of the rest of the world having close to 7 billion people.
9. The USA has the highest murder rate in the western world per capita. It is five times as high as that in my country.
10. More than 100,000 Americans each year receive a bullet through some part of their anatomy. That comes, over the average lifetime, to 1 in 50 Americans being shot.
The concluson is that the number of guns in the USA are a curse on all Americans.
None of which alters the simple facts that :
1. People with guns are more likely to be murdered.
2. People who keep hand guns at home are also more likely to be murdered, and members of their family are more likely to die by suicide.
3. American states with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates.
4. Western nations with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates than western nations with lower gun ownership.
5. Disputes between people where guns are available result in deaths at a rate massively higher than disputes where guns are not available, even if other weapons such as knives and clubs are.
6. 4000 Americans die every year as a result of hot arguments, in wich one of the arguers has a hand gun and uses it.
7. Two thirds of all murders in the USA are done with guns.
8. The USA has more guns per person than any other nation. The USA, with only 320 million people, has over 300 million guns in private ownership, and the USA alone has a third of all such guns in the world as a whole, in spite of the rest of the world having close to 7 billion people.
9. The USA has the highest murder rate in the western world per capita. It is five times as high as that in my country.
10. More than 100,000 Americans each year receive a bullet through some part of their anatomy. That comes, over the average lifetime, to 1 in 50 Americans being shot.
The concluson is that the number of guns in the USA are a curse on all Americans.
- Hermit
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
See, in societies with a quarter or a fifth the murder rate of yours, there are three quarters or four fifths fewer people guilty of the immorality of being the proximate cause of them. As for balancing that against any larger incidence of injury, I'll leave it up to you to qualify and quantify. Good luck with that.Seth wrote:No, the immoral result of being a proximate cause of death, injury and victimization of persons in all of those countries who are harmed by criminal violence because they were barred from possessing effective weapons of self-defense by their government, with your complicity and approval.Hermit wrote:Immoral result? You mean the immoral result of murders and homicides happening in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France and Germany with arms restrictions compared to the USA - at one quarter to one fifth of the rate compared to yours, while road ragers shoot each other dead in the USA simply because they have a gun handy, or would if they did, or toddlers shooting their siblings or mothers because there is a gun handy and not only do civilians and cops alike shoot others because they might be armed and nobody in the USA seems to think there's something weird about it? You, Seth, have been living in the shitpile that is your nation's gun culture for so long, you don't even notice its stench.Seth wrote:And how does the fact that an "overwhelming majority" of people justify the immoral result?
One of our best defences is the control of private ownership of things that go bang. We are responsible for three quarters or four fifths fewer people dying by being murdered than in your nation, made "safe" through "Shall issue" policies and other such non-controls.Seth wrote:If you believe that every individual does NOT have a fundamental human right to effective self defense against criminal aggression, using what rationale do you pick and choose who is to live and who is to die
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
Good of you to admit that it is indeed immoral, but all those who impose, advocate or support disarming the law-abiding or restricting their right to effective self-defense, which is according to recent arguments the "overwhelming majority", are guilty of complicity in the deaths and victimizations of each and every victim.Hermit wrote:See, in societies with a quarter or a fifth the murder rate of yours, there are three quarters or four fifths fewer people guilty of the immorality of being the proximate cause of them.
If it saves just one innocent life then it's worth it.As for balancing that against any larger incidence of injury, I'll leave it up to you to qualify and quantify. Good luck with that.
Seth wrote:If you believe that every individual does NOT have a fundamental human right to effective self defense against criminal aggression, using what rationale do you pick and choose who is to live and who is to die
Evasion. Do those who are murdered have a fundamental human right to be armed for effective self defense or not? It's a yes or no question. If your answer is yes, then how can you support disarming such persons? If your answer is no, why don't they enjoy that right and who gave you or your government the authority to remove that right from them?One of our best defences is the control of private ownership of things that go bang. We are responsible for three quarters or four fifths fewer people dying by being murdered than in your nation, made "safe" through "Shall issue" policies and other such non-controls.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
Classic ad hominem tu quoque fallacy. Your presumption that just because someone may be "on the payroll" of someone else it means that their opinions, or their research are somehow inferior is absolutely classic anti-gun propaganda.Blind groper wrote:The truth is that there are so many people on the payroll of the gun manufacturers, with their propaganda budget of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that any academic study showing the harm done by guns, will be met by critiques written by the gun makers pets with spurious but impressive sounding rebuttals.
None of which alters the simple facts that :
1. People with guns are more likely to be murdered.[/quote]
Only the ones in the Philly neighborhood where the "study" was done.
No they aren't, and it's none of your business if someone wants to off themselves.2. People who keep hand guns at home are also more likely to be murdered, and members of their family are more likely to die by suicide.
No they don't.3. American states with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates.
Cherry picking.4. Western nations with higher gun ownership have higher murder rates than western nations with lower gun ownership.
Completely fabricated lie.5. Disputes between people where guns are available result in deaths at a rate massively higher than disputes where guns are not available, even if other weapons such as knives and clubs are.
Mendaciously deceptive factoid.6. 4000 Americans die every year as a result of hot arguments, in wich one of the arguers has a hand gun and uses it.
And therefore it's even more important that their potential victims be armed for effective self defense.7. Two thirds of all murders in the USA are done with guns.
8. The USA has more guns per person than any other nation.
Sadly, yes. It would be a much more peaceful world if every other country followed our lead and armed their citizenry. Done prior to 1900 it would perhaps have prevented the 100 million people who were murdered by various governments because they were unable to resist.
Not our fault that the rest of the world is too stupid and indoctrinated to insist on preserving their rights.The USA, with only 320 million people, has over 300 million guns in private ownership, and the USA alone has a third of all such guns in the world as a whole, in spite of the rest of the world having close to 7 billion people.
Cherry picking.9. The USA has the highest murder rate in the western world per capita. It is five times as high as that in my country.
Yet another statistical lie.10. More than 100,000 Americans each year receive a bullet through some part of their anatomy. That comes, over the average lifetime, to 1 in 50 Americans being shot.
Whatever, slave-boy.The concluson is that the number of guns in the USA are a curse on all Americans.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
- Hermit
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
Of which we have a quarter or a fifth. To put it in other words, your advocacy of the right to bear arms makes you complicit in the murder of four to five times the number of people.Seth wrote:Good of you to admit that it is indeed immoral, but all those who impose, advocate or support disarming the law-abiding or restricting their right to effective self-defense, which is according to recent arguments the "overwhelming majority", are guilty of complicity in the deaths and victimizations of each and every victim.Hermit wrote:See, in societies with a quarter or a fifth the murder rate of yours, there are three quarters or four fifths fewer people guilty of the immorality of being the proximate cause of them.
There's your problem: Gun control saves four to five times the number of lives compared to your advocacy of the right to bear arms.Seth wrote:If it saves just one innocent life then it's worth it.Hermit wrote: As for balancing that against any larger incidence of injury, I'll leave it up to you to qualify and quantify. Good luck with that.
No evasion at all. The answer to your question "Do those who are murdered have a fundamental human right to be armed for effective self defense or not?" presumes that being armed is an effective defence. It is not, as your nation's four to fivefold murder rate in comparison to Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and others proves.Seth wrote:Evasion. Do those who are murdered have a fundamental human right to be armed for effective self defense or not? It's a yes or no question. If your answer is yes, then how can you support disarming such persons? If your answer is no, why don't they enjoy that right and who gave you or your government the authority to remove that right from them?Hermit wrote:One of our best defences is the control of private ownership of things that go bang. We are responsible for three quarters or four fifths fewer people dying by being murdered than in your nation, made "safe" through "Shall issue" policies and other such non-controls.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
- Blind groper
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
The only reason why Seth can make a 'right to self defense' argument even sound good is because of the vast number of guns in the USA. In my country, if you are threatened by a person carrying a weapon, it will be a knife or club, since guns that can be concealed (hand guns) are banned to the citizenry. If I need a weapon to convince such an attacker not to attack, all I need is a knife or club. It is a case of "if you attack, one of us will get hurt, and it could well be you."
Guns are not needed for self defense when the nation has a government sane enough to prohibit guns, and especially hand guns which can be concealed.
Guns are not needed for self defense when the nation has a government sane enough to prohibit guns, and especially hand guns which can be concealed.
- Brian Peacock
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Re: birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.
It's not as if guns are the only legitimate self-defence measure one can take either. As I've mentioned before, a few years ago I was harassed at an atm by three young men who demanded the money I'd just taken out. On that occasion I used psychology - a smile, a direct look in the eye, a "I don't think so mate" and walking away. I was confident, it was a Sunday afternoon, and there were some other people about. I challenged their assumption that I was an easy mark, and even if they had got physical then i) they would have found out that despite my appearance I am more than capable and willing to cause them pain, ii) I would have relished the opportunity to do so, and iii) even if I'd been bested they'd be unlikely to hang around long enough to do me serious harm, their focus being the money and it being the day time in view of others and cctv etc. If they'd been carrying a knife, or even a gun, I would have just given them the money. Likewise if it was a more isolated venue or at night or whatever. Capitulation is a legitimate defensive measure in some circumstances, 'specially if one ways up the cost of a measly £30 against the possibility of lethal harm to one or other party. Like alcohol, guns are not a problem-solver but a problem-enhancer, they don't make things easier for oneself or for others, just harder for everybody all round.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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