Posted on 12/12/2014 12:38:04 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
"....The first, most important question to ask in looking at our year of data collection about guns is simple: Why is our tally of gun deaths in the year since Newtown so much lower than the likely actual number of gun deaths over a year’s time?....
....Suicides, it turns out, are this project’s enormous blind spot. Most every homicide makes the local paper,even if in large cities these stories are sometimes relegated to a mere news brief. Accidental shootings are usually reported upon, as are shootings by law enforcement and incidents in which civilians kill in self-defense. But suicides are mostly invisible. And the fact is that suicides make up 60 percent or more of all deaths by gun in America. In our interactive,misleadingly,only about 10 percent of recorded deaths were deemed suicides by our crowdsourced categorizers.
....This experiment,like all experiments,produced its share of unanticipated results. Last month we posted a second crowdsourcing initiative, inspired by the GalaxyZoo project, inviting readers to categorize the gun deaths in our interactive as murders, suicides, accidental deaths, deaths by law enforcement, or self-defense. More than 52,000 individual classifications were made, with each death getting classified as many as 11 times, and the results were illuminating—both in what they showed about our data and what they showed about the limits of crowdsourcing. It’s this effort that made it clear, for example, that suicides are drastically undercounted in our interactive. But the volume of contradictory responses—deaths labeled as both self-defense and murder, or murder and shooting by law enforcement—also makes it clear that the causes of many deaths are too complicated (or in question legally) to be classified by a crowd. And what expert could classify them? Do we wait to see how a jury answers the question of, say, murder versus self-defense? That could take years.....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
“deaths Buy Gun” is that akin to Hangings By Rope?
weve just got to round up all those neer do well rope rascals NOW
No, seriously have any of your guns ever walked up to you?
Hmmmm.....
I’m very suspicious of the spoons in my house. I am watching them.... I dont want to get FAT!
there are rogues everywhere
beware each and every Spoon, Fork,...and....knife you ...encounter.
They left out:
-Justifiable homicide
We just had an idiot 17 yo fooling around with a few of his pals. Took a revolver, put one round in, spun the cylinder, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. The media referred to it as an “accidental shooting”
Why complicate matters?
Darwin Award winner. He would be the same jerk, had he lived, wondering why he never won mega millions even though he spent $40 a paycheck on tickets. To him the odds were about the same
Maybe the “missing” gun deaths are in the deep ocean, next to the missing global warming heat.
Or maybe, just maybe, the government has been lying to us all these years.
I’d rather they do that than something like driving into oncoming traffic. Especially if I’m the oncoming traffic.
Just find it hard to believe that there have been that many gun fail catastrophically to cause the death of the user.
oh they mean people killed by other (or themselves) with a fire arm... sorry that means a PERSON killed them.
Slate should also consider health dangers of second-hand gun smoke.
Or what about the damage to the environment caused by all that carbon released into the atmosphere?
And what about all those nasty cleaning chemicals that pollute our lakes and streams used to clean up the mess.
Or how about the lost tax revenues? They can't pay taxes if they are dead, you know.
However there are positive benefits of suicide. Suicides help fight the obesity problem in the US. People who commit suicide lose 99% of their body fat within 12 months.
It would be like a giant high school yearbook, including pictures (or mug shots; whatever they can find) of every single person they can attribute to death by firearm. Underneath each picture, state the city/state location of death and whether it was homicide or suicide. Maybe a short blurb on the nature of the crime, using a legend for brevity. Let America see who is killing whom, whether their murderer was a criminal, and whether the case was solved or not. Justifiable homicides, or open cases. Put it all out there so everyone can see it, but most importantly put faces to the figures.
By humanizing the firearms death statistics in such a way with a giant yearly volume of all accountable victims of those slain by firearms, I can think of no better impactful means of getting across the message of the necessity for gun control to the American people.
Yet, they've never taken me up on it. The notion just seems to never occur to them. Why?
I'll flippin' tell you why: The vast majority of Americans would flip through that big photographic book of gun deaths and say "Gosh, I think I'm seeing a pattern here... Yep, I sure as hell am." and probably run, not walk, down to their nearest gun store to get their own gun.
Suicide figures should be left out of criminal homicide statistics, shouldn't they? Why is it OK if Dr. Kevorkian 'assists' someone's suicide but not Dr. Smith or Dr. Wesson? Liberals can't have it both ways. They're in favor of suicide, but don't like particular suicide *methods*? Wow, what humanitarians they are. I suppose this explains why I never got a single dollar off Kickstarter.com for that cottage mail-order guillotine business startup idea I had.
Without suicides being counted, the USA's annual gun deaths are below 8,000/year. In a nation of 316,000,000 people, that's what? Half of the annual death figures from hospital malpractice? A third maybe?
If Slate readers don't want to die by gunfire, I suggest they move far away from that blighted urban metro area that they're trying to gentrify into a 'funky and eclectic' hipster community in Harlem, Oakland, and the south side of Chicago. They'll also notice that their cars and renovated loft apartments won't be broken into nearly as often. They won't lost their front teeth when confronting social justice arsonists, either. In fact, all of that will probably never happen again.
Look, if someone wants to commit suicide, all they need to do is keep the garage door closed while running their car with the windows down. There's no need to drive all the way to the gun store and fill out some silly government form and wait five days to get a pistol and blow their brains out. Just get in the driver's seat and run your car in an enclosed space long enough and you'll just go to sleep forever.
Of course, this only works if they have a car that's not an electric vehicle and actually have a closeable garage, not some apartment carport.
> suicides are mostly invisible. And the fact is that suicides make up 60 percent or more of all deaths by gun in America... the volume of contradictory responses — deaths labeled as both self-defense and murder, or murder and shooting by law enforcement — also makes it clear that the causes of many deaths are too complicated (or in question legally) to be classified by a crowd.
(except in Ferguson, MO)
Obviously he had never seen “the deer hunter”.
Gun suicides are now shocking to the same people who want everyone to face death panels when they are sick, support late-term abortion, want Down’s syndrome people “euthanized,” and believe everyone should be killed when they reach 75 years of age.
And they also can’t understand why every criminal, as well as every murderous despot, supports their belief in gun control.
And then they make sure they have a gun themselves that they don’t talk about - “just in case.”
This is why I’ve come to detest liberals - I just can’t swallow their ignorance excuse anymore, nor stupidity. They aren’t ignorant, and they aren’t stupid - they’re evil.
I wouldn’t worry about the spoons....it’s the can opener you have to watch!(/LOL paranoid mode)
You pretty much summed it up, quite well in fact.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.