Posted on 01/30/2013 7:28:34 AM PST by I still care
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about how the gun-death data showed a very weak correlation with gun-law strictness. I used data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) to derive a gun-homicide rate.
In the comments section, a reader pointed me toward more-detailed data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which captures death-certificate data from all the states. Despite interference by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the CDC has kept up the basic data, if not research into the details of who, how, and why.
But what we can see from this data is astonishing. First off, the national data — as depicted in this chart done up by Kaiser Family Foundation-backed statehealthfacts.org — looks like an electoral map, with red states (blue on this map) having high gun death rates, and blue states (orange in this case) having low ones.
Without even looking into the detail of gun-law strictness by state, we know that the strict states correlate highly with the (politically) blue states like New York and Massachusetts, and the open-gun-law states match up pretty well with the (politically) red ones.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
He has a nice chart about how suicide by gun is more common in the red states - does he have one showing how suicide rates are less in blue states also? Bet the opposite is true. My guess is the alienation caused by the destruction of the family and devastation of moral compasses would show suicide is actually higher in blue states. They just find other ways to off themselves, even slo-mo ways that don't count officially as suicide, like drug abuse.
More painful? Attempts with guns can miss the mark. Jumping from a certain height onto certain surfaces is pretty foolproof, and you due instantly, too. There are the relatively painless options of slitting wrists or sleeping pills. I would go with C-4, which blows you up faster than you can feel pain.
GLORIA: Do you know that sixty percent of all deaths in America are caused by guns?
ARCHIE: Would it make you feel any better if they was pushed out of windows?
Well he can’t be much of a liberal, he wants to take away peoples right to choose!
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=113&cat=2
Rereading the article, this man is an idiot, for someone that has a column and can find a chart and put a sentence together. The NRA kept his from finding statistical info about the number of people that commit suicide by gun? He can't find a chart about suicide rates NOT by gun? He can't find a chart on suicide rates in blue states? He really, really thinks that not having guns will cut the suicide rate?
The opposite is true - people kill themselves when they feel they have lost control over their lives. And for seizing control over people's lives, and tying them up in a neat little unescapable box, there's nothing better than the left.
Yeah, you be due, way overdue........
If the ‘suicide by gun’ statistics are subtracted from the overall ‘gun deaths’ totals, I bet the picture changes drastically to more in blue states than red.............
Real life isn't like the movies. It is messy and imprecise.
Why are unintentional falls and unintentional injuries in seperate categories? Doesn’t a fall injur you to death?
The trick is to hit the brain stem. Which can be problematic, as it’s hard to shoot yourself from behind, and going in from the front isn’t easy to line up, even if you are in your right mind and know what you’re doing. Fortunately, people in their right minds with the patience to plan and follow through aren’t apt to kill themselves.
Maybe better to pay a Marine sniper to do it. Or post seditious “right wing extremist” chatter on the internet and wait for Obama to dispatch a drone.
The reference the author uses is Kaiser Family Foundation. It states that Wyoming 18.1 gun deaths per 100,000 people.
The states population for 2011 was 568,158. I checked the number of all murders for 2011, and it was reported at 18. So already, there is something wrong with the Kaiser data.
My math is that the murder rate is then 3.17 per 100,000. I used a division rate 5.68.
The Author has no understanding of Human Ingenuity. The old saying is as true today as it was generations ago, ‘Where there is a will, there is a way”.
He only has an agenda.
As long as Gravity exists, so will Suicide. If I am not mistaken, committing Suicide is against the Law in many States. Obviously, Suicide Control is not working.
WOULD BANNING FIREARMS REDUCE MURDER AND SUICIDE?, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2007 (pp. 649-694)
People who focus on guns rather than the criminals who harm with the gun are immature and childish in their reasoning. It is faulty reasoning. It is retarded reasoning.
The trick is to hit the brain stem. Which can be problematic, as it’s hard to shoot yourself from behind, and going in from the front isn’t easy to line up, even if you are in your right mind and know what you’re doing. Fortunately, people in their right minds with the patience to plan and follow through aren’t apt to kill themselves.
Just market a helmet that the user straps on and there is tube through which the barrel is put into that assures the correct angle....
Pretty sure that would get taken off of the market...
“gun deaths” is a propaganda metric. It is designed to misinform and channel the debate.
To illustrate this, consider “hospital deaths”.
In developed countries, there are millions of hospital deaths. The more hospitals in a country, the more hospital deaths. We must ban hospitals, as that will stop all hospital deaths.
Japan has extreme gun control, and they have a higher rate of suicide than the U.S. Instead of guns, they use subways, knives and cars to kill themselves. The tool used is irrelevant.
i heard that shooting in mouth would kill you
The left isn't concerned about suicides. At some level most of them support suicide. They are concerned about guns.
You are righter than you know. This is the proper "angle" of retort. It leverages the Culture of Death's confected "Right to Die" against them.
Only if you hit your target. That is not a sure bet under the kind of circumstances that you would be attempting the shot in. A water pistol is harmlessly and soberingly demonstrative of the difficulty.
I did.
Suicide is high because hate-filled radicals like Obama and his pals create a depressing economy and broken spirits.
“Who Knew?
I did.”
Hey! You beat me to it!
While suicide is terrible, and my family has been affected by it, to blame a gun for someone ending their own life is kinda....crazy, don’t you think. But suicides are called homicides and lumped in with all the rest of the “gun crimes”. Wonder why???
Oh, BTW. Most of the folks around here that kill themselves by gun do so with a shotgun. Does away with the “you have to hit the brain stem” nonsense and such. Makes a helluva mess tho. Just plain ole birdshot does a great job from 2 inches. Friend of mine off’ed himself inside the family motorhome. Took 2 cleaning ladies 2 full days to clean up most of the mess. And they still didn’t get the pieces of brain out of the vents to the AC. It is hard to find good help these days.....
If you believe the DC morgue, Vince Foster shot himslef behind the ear with a .22 and had to then use a 38 special through the mouth to finish the deed.
To be fair that isn’t exactly apples to apples, as there isn’t traditionally so strong a taboo against suicide in Japanese culture. Not that there’s any country that promotes suicide, exactly, given the strong natural human resistance to death. Maybe the old Soviet Union had a culture of death, though half on purpose and half not.
“Does away with the ‘you have to hit the brain stem nonsense”
For the record I wouldn’t say you *have* to hit the brain stem. That’s merely the best way for it to be instant and painless. Shotgun wounds to the melon are survivable, by the way. Jumping from a sufficient height onto a proper surface is more foolproof, except that it’s possible for something beyond your control to intervene. Like I said, I’d go with C-4, which if it goes wrong can’t really go wrong in a way that leaves you alive and in pain. If it ignites it blows you up, period, and there’s no way you feel it.
It is possible to believe, as I do, in the political right to kill yourself (not right to die, which implies others can help), while simultaneously believing in absolute moral prohibtion of suicide. This is so because we have property rights over ourselves, which includes the right to destroy.
Some confusion may apply here, considering property rights are legitimately prone to various restrictions, one of them being for instance that though property implies right of sale or transfer, we cannot legally sell ourselves into bondage. This is so because it would be to abrogate our right to liberty, which is inalienable; that is, nontransferable. The similar right to life is also inalienable, and seems to be threatened by suicide in the same way slavery threatens liberty. Ah, but though we end life by killing ourselves we do not sacrifice the right to life. For how can that right be alienated when it is I who kills me? It can’t be.
I consider anti-suicide laws a moral transgression even though suicide itself is perhaps the gravest of all sins. Certainly it is the only inherently unforgivable sin. But that is no concern of the law, in the same way it is none of their beeswax what spirits I put in my body, even though being a drunkard is a moral lapse.
To clear up any possible confusion, I must clarify that of course suicide is not a natural right. But it is wrong in a realm beyond manmade law, and this is so, I think, inevitably from the logic of property rights, which are natural rights. I read a nook recently which half-jokingly came up with a few examples of practices which in comparison to their view of birth control Victorian Englishmen would find so diabolical that they wouldn’t bother mentioning, let alone condemning. One of them was collecting pictures of your daughter and poking her eyes out with pins. Which practice never has been illegal, to my knowledge, and is your politic right to do, assuming the picture is your property.
Obviously you have no natural right to score representations of your daughter’s eyes. I don’t know if it’s a sin, exactly, but seems like one. This in no way, however, affects your right of property over the picture, which includes the right of defacement. There’s our relationship to pictures and ourselves within the larger concept of natural rights, and there is the moral law restricting what we may do with our property beyond what the law can or cannot touch. Suicide is like that. It’s like poking your daughter’s eyes out by proxy, only much, much worse.
There is no right, but there is a freedom? Merely because you can’t go back and punish dead people? But what about prior to the attempt, and why assume the attempt is successful? The significance of suicide law is not only what happens after you attempt it.
Suicide being illegal grants authorities wide preventive discretion, so that cops can lay siege to your house if someone so much as thinks you’re at risk. Probability of it happening also opens up unlimited tertiary possibilities. There’s the obvious immediate concerns of psychiatric holds and commitments. But there’s so much more.
Think of the publication of supposedly confidential medical information promised under Obamacare. Let’s say you blab about suicidal thoughts to your therapist, or even hint at it with general practitioners. The state can find out, and that’s a crime you were contemplating. Is that sufficient grounds to deny a gun permit? Why not, if they can ban guns for looking scary.
This is all not to mention what becomes of unsuccessful suicides. There are all sorts of consequences emanating from the central insinuation of government into property ownership of yourself. It derives from the decent instinct to protect people from bad “forever choice”s. But as with everything the state does there are manifold unintended consequences.
The better thing would simply be for the state to leave it alone. But alas! they leave nothing alone.
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