Summations Only

If so, then why has murder rates over the long run of 800 years actually gone down, DRAMATICALLY Edited by kofh2u, : No reason given.

This is amazing to me, I guess. Rahvin, I know - I know - you've argued for a military withdrawal from our involvement in those countries specifically on the basis of our inability to use military force to pacify the population. In fact, here's something interesting you said about our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan:

quote:

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Our actions have served as propaganda for new terrorist recruitment, and the lives we've destroyed have bred resentment that will continue the cycle.

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That's the part I don't understand, here. When the US military is facing down the residents of Iraq or Afghanistan, it's a useless waste of human life because there's no way that our military mission there can succeed - we can't round up every "insurgent", and even if we tried to, the very act of rounding them up so inflames bystanders that they stop being bystanders and join the insurgency.But simply by virtue of nothing but a context shift - i.e. now we're talking about gun control, which liberals are in favor of, and not wars of invasion, which liberals oppose - now your position is that our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were successful, the insurgencies all failed, and there's no stopping the US military when they decide they want to oppress a population, because it's easy to round up every "insurgent" and it's not likely that anyone will even look up from their Xbox or their Twitter as they do so.I don't get that. I know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a mediocre mind - and I'm nothing if not mediocre, I'm widely informed - but I always wonder why people assume that Middle East insurgents are somehow light-years ahead of our own hypothetical "insurgents". Look at videos of al-Qaeda training camps, sometime - I see basically equal levels of asshattery to our own "cold, dead fingers" redneck asshats.

So I looked into reducing murder rates, thanks to the links from T12C in Message 685: List of Countries by intentional HomicidesNumber of guns per capitaI grabbed the top 20 countries by number of guns per capita, and then looked up their intentional homicide rate: Here's the plot: Doesn't look like any correlation to speak of to me. The linear trend line had an R² value of 0.2.I don't think that gun control can be predicted to reduce the murder rate.

There are many reasons that the stats are not crystal clear. Simply the fact that each nation tracks each classification of crime differently is enough to obfuscate much of the data we're looking for. The fact is, there is no simple chart that can easily show us a direct relationships between firearms legislation and deaths. Hell, we'll even disagree on what deaths should be counted as desirably preventable - I count the "stand your ground" killings and even the unnecessary killing of a home invader as things to be avoided, while you'll at minimum say that the thief's death is A-Okay.The countries with "harsh gun control" don;t even have a standard basis for what that gun control is.All we can really say is that the US, when compared to other 1st World nations, shows a strong correlation between easy availability of guns and an increase in the murder rate. There's no real way to tell if the relationship is causal. It's a certainty that the availability of guns is not the only factor in determining the murder rate of a nation.So here's the deal: I don;t feel safer when I or my neighbor have a gun. I feel less safe. I believe that I am objectively less safe, because if my neighbor tries to shoot a thief, the bullet may pass into my apartment and strike me or my family. If the thief also has a gun and shoots back, there are now multiple bullets flying and possibly hitting other people. If I have a gun and confront a thief, I force him to either run away or to escalate to my own threat level by using his own gun. I'd rather just have a taser, and not confront the thief at all unless he intends to rape my girlfriend or something. I'd rather not be responsible for killing a person, whether that be the thief or an innocent bystander caught in a crossfire...and I'm less likely to be shot regardless of whether the thief has a gun if I just hide and let him take what he wants. That's what homeowners insurance is for.Since I don;t feel any safer with a gun in my or my neighbors house, it's extremely easy for me to notice the correlation between easy gun availability and increased homicides and conclude "Why bother having the guns? Can't have a school shooting or an armed thief or any of those scenarios if there are no guns."Even if there is no causal relationship between gun legislation and death (which I am not conceding; this is simply an expansion of my position), I still see no positive reason to allow guns beyond "some people like them." I see lots of reasons to get rid of them - because they're designed exclusively to kill, and my ethical system strongly requires minimizing the amount of killing, including criminals (if I don't believe it's ethical to execute a murderer, why would I believe it's ethical to kill a thief, unless the thief is actively trying to kill you first?). I don't think anyone is saying that. I think that we are saying that the availability of weapons increases the efficiency with which a killer can kill. Again - if a murderer is going to commit murder, I'd rather have him restricted to knives and bludgeons and other less easy means of killing than a semi-auto rifle with a few hundred rounds of ammo...or even a handgun with less than ten rounds. Certainly a contributing factor. I wonder if you and I would more largely agree on drug policy as opposed to firearms legislation. I'd say "inner-city impoverished youth" rather than calling out a specific race, but I can agree with this.You know, despite kofh2u's insanity, he did touch upon some real data when he mentioned Freakanomics and the author's conclusion that legalized abortion was responsible for a large portion of the decline in crime in the 90s and beyond. The hypothesis is that unwanted children, and children born to parents who were neither emotionally nor financially prepared to become parents, carry a significantly stronger risk factor to become tomorrow's criminals. The hypothesis was that the availability of abortion didn't necessarily stop those kids from being born, but it delayed their birth until their parents were more prepared - mothers wouldn't need to drop out of school to have a baby, for example, allowing them to graduate High School or even college and provide a more prosperous life for their children when they had them a decade or so later. It had nothing to do with his nonsense about single mothers or matriarchy, of course.I just want fewer people to die when they don't have to, crash. I don't particularly care beyond the standard ethical caveats as to the method we use to achieve that goal. I don't want random guys "standing their ground" and emptying a pistol into a car full of unarmed teens; I don't want fathers accidentally shooting their own sons mistaking them for home invaders; I don't want school shootings or kids finding guns and accidentally shooting themselves or gang wars or any of it (and I'm sure you don't want any of those either). I see eliminating guns as one way to reduce those things without losing anything of significance, and I realize that we disagree and because of the lack of clarity in statistics that we'll probably never convince each other on this particular subject.But I'd be very interested in hearing what you think would be alternative options for saving some lives, such as your position on the "War on Drugs" or income disparity and poverty, in another thread if it's too off-topic here.

First thoughts: Looks like someone hit it with a shotgun. I wonder what the R² value is? I count 37 or 38 dots on there.From this linkList of countries by Human Development Index - WikipediaI see there are 47 countries in the Very High category. And then if I look down to where it goes below 73%, i find that to be country number 77.What's up with that? Who are "they"? Where'd you get the image from?

I see the insurgency as largely ineffectual in the sense that the US and its allies were able to establish regime change without significant difficulty. We "succeeded" in that respect; stamping out all resistance is not a requirement for achieving that goal.I see the problem of the "War on Terror" to be the fact that it will never end. Our stated goal was never to simply establish regime change, but rather to destroy Al Qaeda and "the terrorists." We did not and cannot succeed in this. If we continue to prosecute the "War on Terror," we'll be sending drones and soldiers to kill people forever - every time we kill a kid or shot a missile at a wedding, we get more people murderously (and righteously) angry at us.And, you know...it's really easy to get guns and explosives in Afghanistan and Iraq.I don't see the disparity that you do. The military steamrolls over any real engagement, and the US-supported regimes are in place, if weakly. Resistance was and is futile, but will continue nevertheless and just result in more and more death. I oppose the occupation and the "War on Terror" as inherently immoral and pointless (except possibly for the initial invasion of Afghanistan, if the focus had remained there), yet also recognize that there was nothing the insurgents could do to stop us.Let's put this another way. If the US had tried to round up all of the Shiite Muslims and put them into camps in Iraq, would the insurgents have been able to stop us? No. Not at all. They just would have gotten themselves and others killed and wouldn't have stopped the process. Their guns and explosives would have done nothing to stop the tyranny.In fact, they had those guns and some of the explosives before the US entered the picture...and they were never able to stop Saddam's own tyranny in Iraq. Iraq was a powder keg, ethnic cleansing waiting to happen, and Saddam was able to keep control even though the populace was very well armed and many hated him.Guns won't stop tyranny. Not any more.And I oppose the continuing cycle of killing insurgents and accidentally killing innocents whose friends and family become more insurgents because the killing of all those people is unnecessary and utterly immoral - not because they might be able to actually resist a modern military.Again...I don't see any contradiction.

You've proven time and time again your logic means nothing. Face it Faith, you've got nothing. Gun owners still get robbed. It hasn't stopped the criminals. It seems like the criminals just get bigger guns. No, what I am saying is that crimes like car theft inevitably happen. YOU are the one who said if threatened with being shot they would stop. But they don't stop. Sometimes they shoot back. Sometimes they do it when you are asleep. Guns don't necessarily help there, do they? It's YOUR ridiculous argument, and now that you've been called out on it you are trying to backpedal somewhere... ANYWHERE that you can be correct, even if that means acting like the things you've said were never said.Ever done anything wrong Faith? Because lot's of parents teach their children right from wrong. Lot's of people put the fear of God in their children. Those same exact children STILL break the law sometimes.

I think the trend is fairly clear. That's how many points the guy said were on the graph. I'll see if I can find out what happened to the rest.ETA: It must be because WP doesn't provide figures for some countries, e.g. Lichtenstein is in the Very High category of the HDI, but WP has no figures for guns per capita. It must be that .73 was a typo for .793. Wikipedia. Some guy. A biologist, I think. It hardly matters if he's using figures from Wikipedia.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

What do you think the R² value is? Its probably due to overlap. For example, Latvia and Chile both have values of (0.805, 0.003), Luxembor and the EU are both at (0.867, 0.002). Yeah, I think that's probably right.

Also see the edit to my post. I don't. R² values are high on the list of things I don't think about, just below the fact that cigarettes are bad for me and just above Newt Gingrich naked.

Murder in a fascist State or Islamic Theocracy is not even comparable either way to what happens in a Free Society. The cost of Freedom is in part ignoring some potential problem people and entertaining aggressive differences of opinion.ARGUMENTS are the most common motivation for a shooting: The most commonly cited reason for homicide is argument (including arguments about money & property under the influence of alcohol or narcotics).

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One third of all homicides in 1997 were triggered by arguments.Felony (rape, theft, narcotics, etc. ) accounted for a fifth of homicides and gang killings accounted for one twentieth.
About a third were of unknown motive and the other 10% were miscellaneous motives.If we consider arguments as the motivation, then we must count things like the Arab Spring in our Stats for murdering people.
When people oppose a dictator, murders of 40,000 people in Syria happen.Edited by kofh2u, : No reason given.

True. The few school murders are wagging the tail of this discussion as if the real problem of murder in America is the five inidences that happened since Columbine years ago.The foolish discussion, here, of the wrong solutions for a problem that is not caused by the gun, but by the Welfare System and culture of fatherless teens would prefer I shut up so politicians can enact legislation that is dangerous to Freedom and unimportant in regard to the growing barbarism in our inter cities.

Sure, and for that reason I think we should be suspicious when it is claimed that if we only ban guns, why, that'll be the end to the nation's hugely disproportionate homicide rate. The truth is, there has never been a country that reduced its homicide rate with gun control. Or if there was, nobody has been able to demonstrate it. No country has ever gone from over 80 guns per 100 citizens down to 30 or 15 without invasion, warfare, and bloodshed. Without total destruction of the government. I don't think it's A-OK, but when a private citizen uses force to ensure that the criminal, and not the victim, bears the physical burden of his choice to commit a crime I don't think that's something to be ashamed of.Rahvin, would you kill to stop a rape? Or rather would you accept it as moral to do so? Over there on your side you all have been pretty glib about a force response to theft, but robbery isn't the only crime people use guns to defend themselves with. Would you accept it as moral to use a handgun to end a physical assault by an unarmed man? Or do you believe that one has a moral obligation to meet force with only equal force - to meet knives with knives, fists with only fists - and, if one is not physically able to do so, one must sit there and take the beating? Or the raping?I'm sure you'd consider the world where criminals attack with nothing but their fists, or their knives, or their baseball bats to be one preferable to the prospect of facing a criminal with a gun. But this is the world where criminals attack with their fists and are nevertheless a threat to those physically smaller and weaker. And a firearm is the absolutely most effective way to overcome that inherent advantage. Disarming Americans doesn't just mean disarming criminals and redneck NRA members. It means disarming women and it means disarming the disabled. And I think it's asking quite a bit of a woman, for instance, to expect her to surrender her sole advantage against her future assailant - who needs no weapon at all, merely an advantage in physical size and aggressiveness, in order to victimize her - all for the sake of a statistical experiment. For what it's worth, tasers are banned under the UK weapons law. But you wouldn't be responsible. He'd be responsible. When a death occurs during the commission of a felony, it's the felon who is responsible. Well, I can trivially prove that false - according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the crime with the lowest rate of recidivism - i.e. the lowest rate of repetition - is homicide. The overwhelming majority of murderers kill only a single person, and that's true in the US and in the UK and everywhere else. If the "efficiency of murder" was the limiting factor on the homicide rate, all murders would be serial murders, stopped only during the commission of their last murder.But that's not the case. Murders happen overwhelmingly because one individual wants another individual dead, and once that guy is dead, they're done murdering. And whether a gun is around, or a knife or a necktie or a pair of bare hands, is really very immaterial to that. Murderers are going to use what's at hand - including their hands. They're not going to stand there, twitching an empty trigger finger at their victim, saying "huh, why isn't this working? Oh, right - because I don't have a gun! Well, never mind on the whole 'murder' thing, I guess.' But I don't see any way to so restrict him, without also restricting his victim, and I very much want his victim armed with a handgun and ten rounds. Because even if a death is fated to occur in that situation, one death is not the moral equivalent of another. It's better when murderers are killed instead of victims. That's just unambiguously better. It's better when a rapist is killed instead of his victim being raped. And yes, I think it's better when a burglar is killed instead of a home full of people being menaced. Better still for none of any of that to happen, but when it does, it's unambiguously better for criminals to be the ones who bear the physical risk of their crimes, not their victims. I want the right people to die instead of the wrong ones, Rahvin. Maybe that's the difference we can't bridge, here.

Interesting stats.How long do people take to pass a driving test against obtaining a fire arm, I wonder.

"Change" is trivially easy to achieve. Did we achieve the change we wanted? Did we install a government pliant to American wishes, or did the insurgency succeed in forcing the Iraqi government to be receptive to their wishes but not to ours?I think that's the basic scenario being talked about in any "Red Dawn"-type situation. Not that American "patriots" will use privately-owned firearms to protect the government of the United States, but that they'll protect the self-determination of the United States. And I think you have to Iraq and conclude that, yes, irregular militias and insurgencies can drive out a foreign power. Frequently you have to make a "deal with the devil", as Iraq did with Iran, but Iran didn't send soldiers or armies, they sent rifles and detonators. Don't you think the fact that doing so would have been much, much more trouble than it was worth is what stopped us? As much as there's a moral argument not to do that, there's a practical one, too - it would have unleashed a tidal wave of insurgent violence. A tidal wave I'm sure we could have eventually controlled - perhaps by glassing the entire country - but at such stupendous cost that what would have been the point?Sure, I don't think any amount of arms permissible under the Second Amendment would protect Americans from a Federal government turned suicidally insane. But that's not the point. It's to protect us from a Federal government, or an invading power, that isn't insane. Because a sane invader might very well think that vast resources held by an unarmed populace was worth the inconvenience, while the resources held by a highly armed one would not be. The prospect of holding territory against a dug-in insurgency changes the calculus. The strategy is called "defense in depth." Guns are stopping tyranny, all over the world.