Brian Peacock wrote:I would like to see some weight lent to this charge of cherry picked statistics from Seth, rather than the mere repetition of the assertion. How can we have an informed debate if one party cites some apparent fact or stat and the other just goes "That's wrong" and dismisses it on that basis. I'm mean, it's not like Seth's all-knowing or an infallible authority is it? There's other stuff too, but that'd be a start.
BG carefully choose his comparison nations specifically to exclude nations with high murder rates and strict gun control, like virtually all of the world outside of the EU, like South America, the Balkans, Russia, etc..
If you're going to use statistics to make an argument, at least have the courage to look at ALL of the statistics and place America's gun violence problems in perspective to the rest of the world's gun violence problems. If you do so, it lands somewhere in the upper portion of the midrange, although I don't know precisely where it ranks.
And then you also have to analyze the effect of the government gun policies on violent crime and gun ownership statistics because it's not a simple thing to prove causation based on a snap judgment like BG makes that there are fewer murders where guns are restricted. As I've said time and again, the facts are clear: There are hundreds of millions more guns in the US than there were even in the 1970s and our violent crime rate continues its steady decline everywhere law abiding citizens are not debarred their possession. Conversely, in places where citizens are not permitted to possess firearms (much less carry them concealed) such as DC, Chicago, Detroit, LA and New York City crime rates are substantially higher than elsewhere.
BG dismisses Lott's research, but Lott is hardly the only person who has done the research, and his initial research done for the first edition of "More Guns, Less Crime" has been updated and triple-checked by Lott and his peers on several occasions and his results are consistent with the results of other studies which show exactly the opposite of what BG claims. Furthermore, these various scholars have carefully analyzed and debunked BG's favorite sources like Harvard and demonstrated why their methodology and conclusions are flawed.
BG engages in circumstantial ad hominem and plain ad hominem attacks on Lott (while ignoring all the supportive research by others) on the specious argument that Lott lies about his research because he sells a book on the subject, a proposition for which he has absolutely no credible evidence whatsoever.
The issue of why gun violence is more prevalent in one place than another is not as simplistic as the number of guns available, as BG has admitted several times, it has to do with a complex set of social factors that are not amenable to knee-jerk conclusions such as BG's.
This is demonstrated by Switzerland, for example, where military full-auto battle rifles are in nearly every home in Switzerland but the gun crime rate is quite low. And then there's Russia, where civilian gun ownership is essentially forbidden, but possession of firearms, including fully-automatic AKs is commonplace and violent crime is rampant.
Even in the putative paradise of New Zealand violent crime, including gun murders, occurs. BG simply dismisses any argument that an armed victim has a better chance at surviving such an attack than an unarmed one does, and he goes to great lengths to try to support this conclusion by engaging in speculation and hyperbole based on his absolutely zero level of knowledge of armed self defense and his utter refusal to admit that pretty much ANY defensive gun uses are legitimate, despite admitting repeatedly that the FBI itself has verified at least 80,000 legitimate DGUs in the past. He argues that the 9000 handgun murders prove that handguns must be banned, but refuses to consider the fact that even using the most conservative FBI verified number of 80,000, nearly ten times as many people are protected from harm by lawfully-possessed firearms.
And of course in order to even begin to make an argument, as specious as it may be, he has to simply deny that potential victims of violent crime have a right to be armed for effective self defense that outweighs any statistical generalized argument about overall public safety concerns.
"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
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