[cherdano]

I suppose the unified crime reports by the FBI are the best source for statistics about homicides, in particular the expanded homicide data.

There are some 11,000 gun homicides accounted for (I can't find data including man-slaughter). Josh's figures probably take gun suicides (~ 17,000), unintentional shooting (~650), justifiable homicides (around 600) into account (some of the numbers from http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm).

[jdonn]

Yes I'm astonished there can be that many suicides by shooting every year. Live and learn.

"1) Gun deaths in the USA are about 10-13,000 per year."

That's what Mike said. I suppose he was just careless in his wording if all he meant was homicides.

[Winstonm]

Quote

The only thing that can be gained by allowing people to own guns is protection against other people with guns. Well, if only these other people didn't have guns then!

This argument is invalid. Again I point out the the entire purpose of a weapon, any weapon, is an attempt to level the playing field or to gain an advantage. A person with a gun never has to use it in order to utilize its benefit - and that benefit is to make the physically weaker the equal of his opponent.

Here is an example: a 60-year old man with a touch of arthritis, who weighs 150 pounds (68 kilos) and is an accountant who never played any sports in his life is accosted in his home by a 25-year-old weightlifter, who weighs 225 lbs (102 kilos)and wrestled for his high school team and ran track.

Can the old man run away? No, the younger is faster.
Can the old man overpower the younger? No, the younger is stronger and better trained in combat.
What is the old man's option? To allow the young man to do anything he wishes - either steal, injure, or kill at his whim.

This is the law of the jungle - the strong survive and the weak are their victims.

Now suppose in this scenario the old man has a loaded shotgun. What has the gun done to the scenario? It has elevated the old man's strength to be equal to or greater than that of his opposition. He does not have to use the gun; the simple ownership and ability to use it has changed the scenario from the law of the jungle to the law of civilization where the weak have an equal right with the strong to survive.

If the young man himself is armed there is stalemate - an equlity of strength. There is no guarantee bloodshed will not occur, but if it does it will occur on a level situation of strength.

It is only when the weaker cannot own a weapon that there is disparity - and the law of the jungle is reprised.

[cherdano]

The fact that 85% of gun owners are men is enough to show that the argument "Weapons level the playing field" has almost no intersection with reality.
Winston, what would you guess: how often are handguns used as a self-defense, compared to how often they are used to attack someone (murder, armed robbery, etc.)?

[Al_U_Card]

99.5% confidence .....limit?

[jikl]

Americans and their &*%*^%^&% guns. I am so glad I came back to Australia.

Sean

[jdonn]

Law of the jungle??? You have to be kidding. Every example I have heard from supporters of gun ownership is some hypothetical situation that never really occurs, or some what-if scenario. Meanwhile in REALITY the one and only thing we know with absolute certainty is millions of people keep being killed by guns.

Let me expand upon your example, since apparently fictional situations are the only valid arguments.

Young man goes to rob old man who has no gun. He punches old man a number of times who has to spend a month in the hospital, takes his things, and leaves. 0 people end up dead.

or

Young man goes to rob old man who has gun. Sees the old man pulling his gun, so quickly takes out his own gun to shoot him, since as you said he is faster and better trained in combat. Kills old man, takes his things, and leaves. 1 person ends up dead.

or

Young man goes to rob old man who has gun. Old man pulls out gun and kills young man. 1 person ends up dead.

Good thing he had a gun for protection!

[mike777]

jdonn, on Apr 18 2007, 03:23 PM, said:

Yes I'm astonished there can be that many suicides by shooting every year. Live and learn.

"1) Gun deaths in the USA are about 10-13,000 per year."

That's what Mike said. I suppose he was just careless in his wording if all he meant was homicides.

Fair enough but I did have 3 other points of discussion.

Also while I have no research quotes I do believe there have been more mass killings with guns in Europe, Africa and South America compared to North America in my lifetime.

If so this all contributes to the Mythology in America of guns to protect us from something or other.

Also a belief in evil, true evil that I think many scoff at in nonchurch going Europe today and by the far left in America.



All of the above points add up to more of an obsession with guns in the USA compared to most of the rest of the world. As I said we have 200 million private guns in the USA.

I should add that fighting Indians well into the 1800's created a gun culture in our country. Call it genocide, wrong or whatever but expanding the country from ocean to ocean was seen as a divine right by arriving Europeans and their children.

[cherdano]

mike777, on Apr 18 2007, 04:42 PM, said:

jdonn, on Apr 18 2007, 03:23 PM, said:

Yes I'm astonished there can be that many suicides by shooting every year. Live and learn.

"1) Gun deaths in the USA are about 10-13,000 per year."

That's what Mike said. I suppose he was just careless in his wording if all he meant was homicides.

Fair enough but I did have 3 other points of discussion.

Also while I have no research quotes I do believe there have been more mass killings with guns in Europe, Africa and South America compared to North America in my lifetime.

If so this all contributes to the Mythology in America of guns to protect us from something or other.

Mike, the gun homicide rate in the US is at least 3-4 times as high than in other industrialized nations. What is so hard to understand about that?

If you are proud that the US has less gun mass killings than Brazil or Ruanda - don't you think as an industrialized democracy this country could aim for a little more?

[mike777]

"Mike, the gun homicide rate in the US is at least 3-4 times as high than in other industrialized nations. What is so hard to understand about that?

If you are proud that the US has less gun mass killings than Brazil or Ruanda - don't you think as an industrialized democracy this country could aim for a little more? "


Excellent question, so far the answer for decades seems to be no.

Perhaps technology will reduce/improve this issue the next 50 years.

We have reduced lynchings and scalpings which we had much more of than the other industrialized countries. I do have faith we can reduce homicides by guns perhaps with the help of immigrants such as yourself.

[the hog]

"As a footnote, anyone who fears concealed weapons more than a madman with nukes is completely off their rocker."

Well Phil, then I guess I am off my rocker as well. Concealed weapons can pose an immediate threat and there is nothing you can do about it. There is always the chance of putting pressure on the madman.

[jdonn]

mike777, on Apr 18 2007, 05:42 PM, said:

I should add that fighting Indians well into the 1800's created a gun culture in our country.

That is so false! Is there a 'gun culture' in Germany? England? Tons of countries have eras of historical bloodshed on their hands and yet don't have nearly the gun shootings the US has.

You should watch Bowling for Columbine and pay very careful attention.

[pbleighton]

"We have reduced lynchings and scalpings which we had much more of than the other industrialized countries. I do have faith we can reduce homicides by guns perhaps with the help of immigrants such as yourself."

And laws too, Mike

Our homicide rate is astronomical compared to other industrialized countries. Guns are a significant part of it, but less than half IMO.

I agree with you that both guns and homicide rates are driven by culture. They also reinforce each other. We're in Iraq for the same reason.

I love Dirty Harry movies, but they're a bad model for life, and for foreign policy.

Peter

[cherdano]

pbleighton, on Apr 18 2007, 05:40 PM, said:

Our homicide rate is astronomical compared to other industrialized countries. Guns are a significant part of it, but less than half IMO.

The FBI counted some 14,000 homicides in 2005, around 11,000 of them by guns.
Astronomical is a bit of an overstatement I would think.

[mike777]

jdonn, on Apr 18 2007, 06:18 PM, said:

mike777, on Apr 18 2007, 05:42 PM, said:

I should add that fighting Indians well into the 1800's created a gun culture in our country.

That is so false! Is there a 'gun culture' in Germany? England? Tons of countries have eras of historical bloodshed on their hands and yet don't have nearly the gun shootings the US has.

You should watch Bowling for Columbine and pay very careful attention.

Because in Victorian England every household or almost every household did not have a gun as in the USA frontierland(think west of the Applachian mountains) as well as many east of them.

Why else do you think we have 200 million private guns and UK/Germany have a bit less? We very much have a private gun culture in this country. To protect us from all threats real and imagined. More than half of Europe and Asia lived behind barbed wire for most of my lifetime. AFrica is the seen of mass murder after mass murder. In the USA we have chased away more than 500,000 house attacks annually.

Sure private guns may or may not matter in these issues but they do in figure in our Myths of America.

Homicide rates have dropped a bit but I think that is more a function of fewer teenage boys than gun control. Democrats are running away from the issue of gun control in the Pres. race as fast as they can. I doubt we will see this Congress do anything.

I do have faith in improving technology and very smart/hard working immigrants coming to our country and making better lives for all of us.

[pbleighton]

"Astronomical is a bit of an overstatement I would think"

A 9/11 every 3 months? Versus one every year?

Astronomical? I guess it depends on your telescope. It looks huge in mine.

Peter

[Winstonm]

cherdano, on Apr 18 2007, 04:51 PM, said:

The fact that 85% of gun owners are men is enough to show that the argument "Weapons level the playing field" has almost no intersection with reality.
Winston, what would you guess: how often are handguns used as a self-defense, compared to how often they are used to attack someone (murder, armed robbery, etc.)?

A good friend on mine who happens to be Sicilian told me his mother used to tell him, "Pete, there's what is real and there is what is right. You have to deal with what is real."

My arguments for gun-ownership rights have to do with what is right, not what is real, i.e., the argument is on a philosophical level only.

I recognize that what is right, though, is not nedessarily reality. I have no idea of the rightness or wrongness of gun ownership or banning. Myself, I have lived many more years without a gun that with a gun; at the same time, I have also been robbed at knifepoint when I had no gun, and I can tell you from personal experience that to be in that situation where the choices are acquiesence or serious injury or perhaps both makes you very aware of the power of weaponry for harm or for good. In this case, the knife left me virtually powerless - had I had my own knife, I would have had a decision to make - not a good one but still the choice would have been there.

Criminals by nature are mostly cowards. Burglars like to break in when no one is home. It would be hard to say how many crimes guns have halted as criminals are loathe to put themselves in jeapordy for boddily harm or arrest. So any attempt to quantify gun-crimes/crime-prevention-due-to-gun-ownership will be skewed in that criminals try hard not to place themselves in these situations. If a burglar has the choice to peak into the windows of two homes and in one sees the lights are on, and the resident is sitting in a rocking chair with a shotgun on his lap while the other house is dark, and no one appears to be at home, which one will he enter?
Duh.

I can only tell you that looking back I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have thought about that night when I was robbed and thought to myself, I wish I had had a gun.

I can understand the concern about gun control. I only make the argument that once again it is not so black and white as we seem to think. Another area of gray in a world made up of shades of grays.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Young man goes to rob old man who has no gun. He punches old man a number of times who has to spend a month in the hospital, takes his things, and leaves.

You have just described the law of the jungle. I do not understand your preoccupation with death. Does injury not matter? In your scenrio, the old man must suffer theft of his belongings, the pain of the beatings and the recovery, the expense of hospitalization, as well as the expense of time missed from work plus the emotional expenses associtated with trauma, but because no one died we should defend the right of the strong to victimize the weak by eliminating the weak's only avenue of equality of strength?

Gun deaths are quantifiable - there are bodies and ballistics as proof. It is not possible to quantify the dissuasive effect of gun ownership, but we can take a guess. Take the total of all crimes commited against persons, and in each instance place a loaded shotgun in the hands of the victim, pointed at the chest of the perpetrator. O deaths occur as the gun is not fired.
But how many of those crimes would still have occured?

[jdonn]

Winstonm, on Apr 18 2007, 07:23 PM, said:

Quote

Young man goes to rob old man who has no gun. He punches old man a number of times who has to spend a month in the hospital, takes his things, and leaves.

You have just described the law of the jungle. So you are suggesting that civilization should be based on the strong overpowering the weak whenever they so desire and the weak have no recourse?

Gun deaths are quantifiable - there are bodies and ballistics as proof. It is not possible to quantify the dissuasive effect of gun ownership, but we can take a guess. Take the total of all crimes commited against persons, and in each instance place a loaded shotgun in the hands of the victim, pointed at the chest of the perpetrator.
How many of those crimes would still have occured?

You are not listening at all. A robber doesn't know if there is a gun in a house when he enters. There is no one sitting there with a shotgun on his lap all day. If there were a gunowner, he doesn't have the gun pointed at the chest of every stranger on his property. If there is any disuading effect at all, it is spread relatively equally among households, not to any gunholder's household.

I didn't say a robber should do that, or get away with it. He may well be caught. I am saying that no matter what happens, the likelihood of a death occuring from it is much much much lower if there aren't guns. And that concern so supercedes any other that this whole discussion has always baffled me, and I'm sure always will.

Forget how many robberies occur or don't. How many of those loaded guns you say were pointed at someone's chest went off and killed the person?

[mike777]

I am befuddled. If we cannot catch and stop this mass killer given his history ahead of time I think we cannot stop anyone. Willing to listen and learn and stop this evil.

God Bless to the families.

edit btw I just heard on tv we have 250 million guns in America, not 200 million.

My guess this is more than the Dutch, French and UK combined just in case they are thinking of reclaiming something here.