Summations Only

Hi, Hyroglyphx.I don't really intend to participate much in this debate, but I am curious about one comment you made: Where did you get this number from? I can't find numbers for "self-defense by gun" at the website you cited. The closest thing I saw was "justifiable gun homicides," which hovered between 473 and 686 during the years reported. That's only something like 4-7% of total homicides.

As Tangle noted, the firearm homicide rate in the US is still an order of magnitude higher than in other western countries, and they all declined pretty much in tandem, indicating broader forces at work. What might be going on here is that the percentage of gun-owning households is declining, certainly here in the US, and that might explain the decline in the rest of the western world, too: Since the number of guns in the US continues to rise, obviously the number of households owning multiple guns must be increasing: Are you sure that's the right link? The word "defense" doesn't even appear on that page, let alone "self-defense".As a society we seem to we wounding and murdering a great many friends and relatives just so we can be prepared to wound and murder actual criminals who are often unarmed. Take a look at this link that Cat Sci once provided: https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu (see Message 4043). The headlines on the current first page describe a wide variety of shooting victims: home intruders, burglars, robbers, armed robbers, carjackers, girlfriends, sons and fiances. We should all be in favor of approaches that reduce the number of injured and killed due to guns, because our own loved ones will be among those saved.--Percy

Not when you're trading loved ones' injuries and lives for the ones for armed robbers and home intruders that got shot. Especially when you have to assume that those people are willing to kill the victims.The law should lean heavily against the ones perpetrating the crimes and away from the victims, so if that means lumping the robbers, burglars and carjackers in there then that should be acceptable.It would take a significant amount of reduction in the total killed due to guns, for me to get on an approach that just aims to reduce all killed due to guns, in general. Especially when I see the approaches that have already been offered from that side, and how blindly draped they are and how insignificant the effects are that they produce.As your article ultimately exposes, this is an urban culture problem rather than a gun law problem.As per the OP, here is a list of selected quotes from your article:

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Jean Peters Baker, the county prosecutor here, stood at her desk poring over Facebook photographs of young men posing with guns. One wore a grinning mask and pointed his gun at the camera. Another clasped guns in each hand. A third was laughing uproariously, his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle.

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This is our reality, Ms. Peters Baker said, gesturing toward the pictures from recent investigations. I’m not talking about my uncle who still lives on a farm in central Missouri and uses a gun for hunting.

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The changes tapped into profound differences between rural and urban Americans about guns.The state legislature is predominantly white, rural and suburban, but the effects of the laws it makes are felt largely in Missouri’s cities, where gun homicides are one of the biggest causes of death for young black men.

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Valerie Dent, 62, a retired factory worker in St. Louis, helps make those calls in her city. Her sons, James and Steven, were shot and killed one morning last fall after coming home from working the night shift at a talcum powder factory. Gun violence, she said, has done more to grind up black families, like hers, than any kind of aggressive policing. As with Ms. Temple’s son’s case, her sons’ murders are unsolved.

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It becomes a way of life to hear gunshots and close the door, Ms. Dent said. We get all in an uproar when the police kill someone. If we had that get-up-and-go on the black-on-black crimes, maybe we could stop some of this.

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The big thing used to be having a fancy car and driving it around, Chief Dotson said. Now, it’s having a pistol with extended magazine and posting pictures of it on Facebook.

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Jennifer M. Joyce, the top prosecutor in St. Louis, keeps a framed picture of a teenager from one of her recent cases posing with a gun.

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It has reached the point in St. Louis where this guy can get a gun really easily, she said. He believes that gun is going to allow him to avenge the death of his buddy. But what we all know is that gun will either be the death of him or cause him to end up in prison.

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The article spawned from one in the Journal of Urban Health.I'd love to see their data n'stuff, but it's $40.00 In the abstract is says that the study:

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controls for changes in poverty, unemployment, crime, incarceration, policing levels, and other policies that could potentially affect homicides.

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Given that this is an urban culture problem, wouldn't those be the things that would have a big impact on the gun deaths? You know, the poverty, unemployment, crime, incarceration, and policing levels? Aren't those the things that are having a bigger impact on the gun deaths in the urban culture? If the culture isn't even aware of the laws that are in place, then can they even be having an actual impact?So, if you control for those things, regardless, then you can find that there was:

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an increase in annual firearm homicides rates of 1.09 per 100,000 (+23 %)

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Since an increase of one is about a fifth, then you went from 5 per 100,000 to 6 per 100,000. How far outside the standard deviation is that? Given that Missouri has ~6 million people, 1 in 100,000 does add up to 60 people. That's not a whole lot, if it was put into perspective.If you consider that you're looking at Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law, then the causation is way too hard to pin this correlation on. From your same article:

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A lot of people didn’t even know there was a permit system, said Kevin L. Jamison, a lawyer in Missouri who concentrates on weapons cases.

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Professor Webster said there was no way to tell for sure that the old system worked, because there was no central repository for permits, but that the rise in crime guns originally purchased in Missouri suggests that the previous law was effective.

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Not only did the old system fail to show that worked, the urban culture problem wasn't even aware of the permit system that was in place. And given that the repeal of the permit system still meant that it was illegal to carry a firearm within the city limits of St. Louis, the urban culture still wasn't following the law anyways.So it makes even less sense to try to get that legislative side that is predominantly white, rural and suburban to agree with blanket restrictions that they are going to end up obeying anyways, despite that the problem wasn't even aware of them in the first place. On top of the fact, this isn't even their problem, specifically, to begin with; it's an black urban cultural one, not uncle farmer-hunter's! If these young black men are being raised in a culture that is anti-law, then blanket laws are not going to solve the problem. This is not an issue with gun laws, this is an urban culture problem. State-wide blanket laws will not solve it.Despite your good intentions, you are not helping.. Are you still standing by the claim that dgu is a myth that never happens?

That's nice. For a supposedly Christian nation, we're not keeping enough atheist corpse-shrines on our sofas.

Or because (a) it's complete bollocks (b) if it was true it would be dividing apples by oranges.Annually there are about 68,000 instances of people trying to defend their persons or property with guns. (I say "trying" because the statistics I have don't say how often this is successful. We may suppose however that it works quite often.) You can see immediately that this makes nonsense of "80 times higher". That would be two or three times higher.But is that even the right thing to be dividing by? How about instead we look at how often guns are used to commit crimes rather than prevent them? Turns out guns are used to commit crimes 467,000 times per year. (Note that this statistic is based on victims who actually saw a gun; it does not and indeed cannot include (for example) burglaries carried out by armed burglars, where the householder saw neither the burglar nor the gun.)Some references:http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable.pdf
Archived | Gun Violence in America | National Institute of JusticeAlso, IIRC, you're four times more likely to have your gun stolen from you than you are to use it in self-defense.

I found this study on the internet, Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home - PubMed . It is from 1998, but I suspect that human nature has not changed enormously in the past 17 years or so. The principal finding is 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."When you say "self-defence by gun is 80 times higher than that of homicide, suicide and accidental shooting combined", how do you tally that with this study's figures, which show that it's 22 times lower ?

We need to work cooperatively to find ways to reduce gun deaths. As your quotes from the NYT article I provided make clear, guns as toys or status symbols exacerbate the problem, but I don't see any reason that should affect our resolve to reduce gun deaths.Reducing the number of households with guns obviously helps. This graph I showed earlier shows household gun ownership declining: And this graph shows the homicide rate dropping roughly in tandem with that decline: Statistics show that a gun is more likely to be used on friends or family than in thwarting a crime. Reducing the prevalence of guns reduces gun deaths. Making guns safer would do the same. That's not the argument I made. You were in the middle of making a somewhat daffy claim of superhuman alertness to threats, that no one could ever get the drop on you when you had your gun. In Message 1508 I replied: What I was actually talking about in the message you replied to was not the effectiveness of guns against a criminal bent on murder. That's much more rare than a friend or family member coming after you with a gun. For people who are being targeted by criminal murderers, I guess a gun might be very useful. For everyone else, the likelihood is that the gun will be used against you or someone you know.--Percy

It should affect where we focus our resolve, not the strength behind our blind charge.For Missouri, we need to work cooperatively to find ways to reduce the urban cultural problem that is causing gun deaths. Attack that exacerbation. We do not need state-wide blanket restrictions that are only going to be followed by the rural and suburban cultures. The urban culture not only does not follow the laws, they are not even aware of their existence, according to your article.A big part of the problem I have with your side's approach, is that you are zoomed too far out and are not focusing on the actual problem, but instead just want to pass sweeping legislation. That will only hurt people who are not a part of the problem and will do nothing to help the people that are. Not only that, it's legislation that probably won't get passed.But hey, statistics never lie and they say what they say - so you just cannot be wrong. And since your heart is in the right place, then you cannot be mislead. I realize this is a fruitless endeavor on my part, but you need to think about focused laws that address that real problem, not feel-good laws that don't help.That article just didn't get it. They talked about the repeal of the permit system, and how easy it is for young men to get guns, but what they failed to account for was that those men weren't following the law to begin with. So whether or not the law existed couldn't have had much of an affect on whether or not those men could get a gun. I'm talking about:

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A gun-packing good guy getting the jump on a criminal is a myth. It's so rare that it's considered amazing every time it happens. Even in your neck of the "woods," it's a pipe dream that almost never comes true.

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From Message 4021.Full context:

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Me writes:

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But I'm definitely willing to trade the lives of a handful of felony gang members fighting turf wars in the city to prevent the rape of my neighbor who writes children's' books.

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What's the win/loss record on average citizens taking on gang members in your neighborhood? You know what's much more common? Innocent civilians being caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between gangs, or hit by a stray shot. You and the gangs need to lose your guns.

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A gun-packing good guy getting the jump on a criminal is a myth. It's so rare that it's considered amazing every time it happens. Even in your neck of the "woods," it's a pipe dream that almost never comes true.

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What does come true with a regular drumbeat is children and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and family and friends dying who didn't have to, just because gun nuts love their guns.

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Your picture is totally skewed. Most of the gun deaths are black men shooting other black men in the city. It is not more common for people to get caught in the crossfire.Until you get the picture right and offer legislation that addresses the real problem, you're never going to make any progress.And I stand by what I said:I'm willing to trade the lives of a handful of felony gang members fighting turf wars in the city to prevent the injury of my neighbors out here in the sticks.Reducing all of the guns from both of those groups, in an effort to reduce all gun deaths, is not an approach that I am willing to support. In fact, I think it is the wrong way to do it.

When I began that paragraph with, "A gun-packing good guy getting the jump on a criminal is a myth," I was back to addressing your claim that no armed criminal intent on murdering you could ever get the jump on you while you were walking around in public with your gun, because you were ever vigilant. The "gun-packing" phrase (as opposed to "households with guns") was intended to make clear that that's what that paragraph was about, and that argument for concealed carry is still absurd. Actually, I'm willing to consider any reasonable approach that would reduce gun deaths. You oppose approaches that would make guns less available (gun control) or less fun (making guns safer). I guess when the hard data is against you, all you can do is dis it. The real world isn't offering that trade. That's just your fantasy. What is true is that the presence of a gun in a household makes gun injury or death more likely. Studies show this, and the national statistics show gun deaths and the number of households with guns declining roughly in tandem.--Percy

Your picture is totally skewed. Most of the gun deaths are Americans shooting other Americans in America.America - Where the prevalence and ease of access to guns is notorious.I wonder what the connection could possibly be here........

"hard data"You've got a loose correlation and a fallacy of division. Except that's exactly what your article talked about...The repeal of the PTP somehow caused black men to shoot each other

Why stop there? Most of the gun deaths are Earthlings shooting other Earthlings on Earth. The UK should disarm its military so that young black men in St. Louis will stop shooting each other.If you want to reduce guns deaths, then we need to reduce the total number of guns on Earth. There's a statistical correlation between the number of guns on Earth and the number of gun deaths on Earth, so if you care about reducing the number of gun deaths, then you will start reducing the number of guns in your military.

You're talking about 3000 posts ago from 3 years back?I explicitly said that a person could get a jump on me. You were saying that I could never see a criminal coming, and that's still bullshit.

I am all for reducing the total number of guns in the world.But if anyone at all is going to have guns surely it should be those professionally trained to use them properly and whose job it is to to keep the civilian population safe.I would not, as you suggest, start with the military. I'd start with the dangerous civilian idiots who think that a prevalence of guns in society somehow makes them safer.

But there is a clear correlation between the number of guns on Earth and the number of Earthlings that are killed by guns. So if you really want to reduce the number of Earthlings that are killed by guns, then you would support getting as many guns out of the UK military as possible.We should expect that the number of urban Missourians who are killed by guns should drop as well, because the statistics clearly show that the number of Earthlings killed guns correlates with the number of guns that are on Earth and reducing the number of guns in the UK military will reduce the number of guns on Earth.Makes perfect sense, right? I don't know what I was thinking arguing against such clear rational logic. When can I expect you to start petitioning for your military to get rid of its guns? We got people dying over here, be quick.