Posted on 05/29/2014 6:23:56 PM PDT by servo1969
I’m in a very polite discussion with someone about gun safety. I’ve managed to use data to convince this person that America is not home to exceptional gun rampages, that they occur in other countries, and that those denied guns go on rampages with other things. I’ve also shown that gun control laws in England have seen increased violent crime in, while gun control laws in Australia did nothing to affect gun crime statistics, which were dropping anyway. The next line of discussion is whether guns in the home are so dangerous to family members that they have no merit for self-defense purposes.
The obvious argument is that you cannot insulate yourself entirely from risk. If you banish guns, you get crime; you have guns, you get self-defense with an increased risk to family. But what I’m wondering about is the credibility of the data she politely offered. Do any of you know whether the following is correct and, if it’s not, do you know what accurate information is about gun-safety in the home. (And I wonder, off hand, whether it’s greater or less than pool safety, or falling out of window safety, or eating poison safety, or getting beaten to death safety, etc.).
This, from a “firearms tutorial” out of Utah:
"The issue of “home defense” or protection against intruders or assailants may well be misrepresented. A study of 626 shootings in or around a residence in three U.S. cities revealed that, for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides (Kellermann et al, 1998). Over 50% of all households in the U.S. admit to having firearms (Nelson et al, 1987). In another study, regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home (Dahlberg, Ikeda and Kresnow, 2004). Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner. (Rothman et al, 2005). Individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession (Branas et al, 2009). It would appear that, rather than being used for defense, most of these weapons inflict injuries on the owners and their families."
and this, from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence:
"Of the 13,636 Americans who were murdered in 2009, only 215 were killed by firearms (165 by handguns) in homicides by private citizens that law enforcement determined were justifiable."
/johnny
Many gun rampages occurred in Europe from 1939-1945. After that, Eastern Europe primarily.
The definitive work: “More Guns=Less Crime” by John Lott. It ended the debate for 35 years. Now, with most people ignorant of this work, the debate is starting again.
The strength of the work revolves around analyzing THE SAME POPULATIONS prior to and after gun control.
there is a high correlation of suicide by firearm and the presence of a firearm.
isn’t science great? anyone can do it really.
IOW people that don’t have guns rarely shoot themselves?
Wow..........
Some people believe that whipping up a credit card to pay for the gun is all that it takes to be an expert. It's a matter of education, and the USA is not necessarily a shining beacon in this department. For comparison, USSR had a 100% rifle training of high school students (both .22LR and 7.62x39,) and universities had pistol training as well. Do we have the same in the USA? (a rhetorical question.)
seven criminal assaults or homicides
Cause and effect are backward here. People own guns because criminals are out there. If there are no criminals, some people wouldn't own guns (and some still would own them for sporting purposes.)
and 11 attempted or completed suicides (Kellermann et al, 1998)
What suicides have to do with anything? In Japan teenagers jump from roofs of buildings. Is it any better? Suicides are caused by problems; very few healthy, sane people see a gun and suddenly decide to shoot themselves with it. Life is finite, and not every natural way to die is nice and pleasant. A free man has a right to depart this world on his own terms.
having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home
Same as above. People who live in bad neighborhoods buy guns. Old people who are looking at their cancer treatment bills buy guns. It's not a usable metric.
Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner.
Such people will use everything at their disposal to threaten or hurt others. Is it better if such abuser uses a knife?
Individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession
This is not very informative unless we know the overall survival rate. For example:
One hundred assaults were taken as a data set. Fifty victims had a gun, and fifty other victims did not have it. Out of the fifty victims without a gun only one was shot; the rest were beaten to death. Out of the fifty victims with a gun five were shot; the rest shot the criminals and were unharmed.
You see the importance of complete data? In my example (which contains just imaginary source numbers) not having a gun is a certain death, and having a gun is a 90% chance of survival; however indeed in this example if you own a gun you are 5 times more likely to get shot. This is an example of what statistics is capable of.
See how easy science is? now you are doing it too !!
“Of the 13,636 Americans who were murdered in 2009,”
“A study of 626 shootings in or around a residence in three U.S. cities revealed that, for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”
Most confrontations with attackers are ended at the sight of a gun, even with mass shooters - though in that case they tend to either run off and hide, or to off themselves.
In regard accidents, be careful with stats involving children...which often include those up to their mid twenties, and teens including 18-19 year olds involved in gang shootings.
http://hsx.sagepub.com/content/5/1/64.short
Abstract
Using a case-control design comparing homicide victims with matched nonvictims, Kellermann et al. (1993) concluded that keeping a gun in one’s home increased the risk of being murdered by a factor of 2.7. The authors’ underlying assumption was that a significant elevation in homicide risk derived from the risk of being murdered with a gun kept in the victim’s home. This article shows that homicides are rarely committed with guns belonging to members of the victim’s home and that such killings could be responsible for no more than a 2.4% increase in the relative risk of being murdered. Guns in one’s own home have little to do with homicide risk. Scholars need to attend more closely to the mechanisms by which an alleged causal effect is supposed to operate and to consider their plausibility before concluding that an association reflects a causal effect.
and the corollary, BAN ALL KNIVES, CARS, BASEBALL BATS, & on & on & on...
Ann Coulter had some interesting things to say today on the 'Virgin Killer' re 'mental health' & gun violence, particularly how libs are keen to say "we can't stigmatize the mentally ill" yet the other side of their mouth is slobbering about new laws that control normal people.
In addition, the moron Roger wrote in his '137-page rant' how he considered going to a large gathering to kill people but made other plans as he lucidly postulated that he was more likely to be killed by police due to the security presence.
IMHO, it's not a fair comparison to lump the idiot Elliot Roger into gun violence as he was almost equally deadly with both the knife and his car.
If there were no guns, crazy-person (he was a schizo that wasn't taking his meds) Elliot Roger would have just armed himself with something else.
If there were no guns, knives, swords, explosives or "purpose-built weapons" of any type in some utopia, humans would still use other objects for their mayhem. The big difference is "the equalizer".
In the case of the US, it cannot be denied that the statistics show "the equalizer" is the privately-held/owned/carried gun. Not the police, not gun bans. Wherever gun laws have resulted in increased per-capita gun possession/carrying by lawful citizens reduced violent crime rates follow.
Check out this Harvard study if you missed it...
Certainly homeowners do not wish to be killed. Just as certainly, it is usually a better outcome if they can prevent crime *without* killing someone.
Therefore to only look at justified homicides in comparison to murders and suicides is to severely skew the data. Similarily Kellerman, as I recall, considers it a "death in the home" if the person killed is a domestic abuser attempting to kill the defending partner.
The best sources that we have indicate that there are somewhere between 500,000 to 3,000,000 defensive uses of firearms a year in the United States. From the CDC study:
Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defen- sive 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 (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 vio- lent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
Link to article about the study
Gary Kleck shows that between 5.6 and 13% of reported homicides are justifiable homicides by citizens who are not police. The rarest, but most serious form of self-defense with a gun is a defensive killing. The FBI does not publish statistics on self-defense killings per se, but it did start publishing counts of civilian justifiable homicides gathered through their Supplementary Homicides Reports program in their 1991 issue. For a variety of reasons, the FBI counts of civilian justifiable homicides represent only a minority of all civilian legal defensive homicides.
I have not found any work that refutes these findings. Those who cling to the Progressive Elite model simply state the FBI numbers as fact.
Here is an article that explains why the FBI UCR numbers are so low on justified homicides:
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/homicide.html
“Of the 13,636 murder victims in 2009 for which supplemental data were received, most (77.0 percent) were male. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 1.)”
“Of the homicides for which the FBI received weapons data, most (71.8 percent) involved the use of firearms. Handguns comprised 70.5 percent of all firearms used in murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2009. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 8.)”
“Law enforcement reported 667 justifiable homicides in 2009. Of those, law enforcement officers justifiably killed 406 felons, and private citizens justifiably killed 261 people during the commission of a crime. (See Expanded Homicide Data Tables 14 and 15.)”
Despite the below, for “justifiable homicides” , understand that many times that they are determined to likely be, they are not officially reported as such. This varies from district to district and state to state. Also note the limited definitions.
The killing of a felon by a peace officer in the line of duty.
The killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen.
Because these killings are determined through law enforcement investigation to be justifiable, they are tabulated separately from murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. Justifiable homicide information is included in this section and in Expanded Homicide Data Table 14, “Justifiable Homicide, by Weapon, Law Enforcement, 2005–2009” and Expanded Homicide Data Table 15, “Justifiable Homicide, by Weapon, Private Citizen, 2005–2009.”
One has to note that there are over 11 million concealed-handgun permits in the U.S. right now. With an annual number of deaths of 90, that means 0.00083 percent of concealed-carry permit holders were responsible for a shooting death each year. Removing suicides from the total reduces the rate even more, to 0.00058 percent.
kellerman is a big anti, who made a career of doing research papers that show firearms are bad.
however, a few simple things will show that a firearm does not cause mayhem, death and destruction.
first, nics checks background checks done before a firearm is sold, to make ensure a criminal (felon) is not sold a firearm. some states have their own sytems, so their numbers will not show up in an nics check. also, a nics check may not necessarily represent a new firearm sale, it could be for a used firearm, or even some are things as government/police employment checks, I have heard.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/1998_2014_monthly_yearly_totals-040514.pdf
in 2013, 21 Million nics checks were done. if you say only 1/3 were new firearms, that is 7 million more firearms on the streets in 1 year.
From 2004-2113, 137,148,000 (roughly) nics checks were done. if 1/3 were new firearms, that is 45,259,000 new firearms “on the streets”.
From the fbi uniform crime report summary for 2012, on murder, we have
“In 2012, an estimated 14,827 persons were murdered in the United States. This was a 1.1 percent increase from the 2011 estimate, but a 9.9 percent decrease from the 2008 figure, and a 10.3 percent drop from the number in 2003.”
45 million more guns, and less murders...
also, the definition of children applies to teens, up to age 18 or 19,
of 1101 victims under age 18, 563 were killed by firearms. 193 were beat to death by hands, feet, etc.
that 720 were involved in juvenile gang killings.
the myth of if you have a firearm, you will be morelikely killed by a family member or someone you know - definition of someone you know is an acquaintance, like, you know that kid that always hangs around the corner, acquainted with, as opposed to stranger.
see this table relationship between offender and victim.
of 12765 murders, 749 were by blood/family relations, 2714 acquaitances, 1004 by friend/significant other. 1557 complete stranger, 5757 unknown.
adding acquaitance significantly makes it seem more intimate, even if it was the drug dealer down the street
facts and statistics make it hard to argue, but for anti firearms people, “feelings” trump all sense or logic
edit note - the last part about relationship between murder victim and offender was off - it isn’t broken down by firearms only. you have to also look at this table
to get an idea of the percentage of each circumstance was related to firearms
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