Summations Only

Nobody. Regardless, the man did not accidentally punch Houdini. But you did say that: And the answer is yes, I do have evidence that fists can kill, and the evidence is Harry Houdini, who was killed by a fist. But they do take this stance. If you attack a police officer with your fists and you won't stop, you'll be fired on. If you attack a police officer with a knife, they won't counterattack with their own knives. They don't even carry knives. They'll fire on you with handguns because the notion that you have to respond to lethal attack with a weapon no more lethal than the one you're being attacked with is lunacy. If you throw rocks at a soldier, they're fight back with guns, because the goal of any fight is to end the fight. Period. I guess if you know in advance that it's going to be a fist fight, you shouldn't bring or use your gun. The problem is that a guy suddenly punching you can either be a fist fight, or it can be the start of you being beat to death by a guy's fists. And you don't know which it is until you've died, at which point it's too late to do anything.So anybody who starts hitting you and won't stop when you ask needs to be treated like their intent is to beat you to death. And the way you respond to someone who intends to kill you with their fists is with intent to kill of your own. They either stop, or you stop them. And again, that's where you're completely and stupidly wrong. Mike Tyson knows how to punch someone so that the risk of death is minimized; he's wearing protective clothing and padded gloves to minimize the injuries; the people he punches are trained to take blows so that the risk of death is minimized; when Mike Tyson is there punching someone, it's in a situation with two referees, a panel of judges to determine when the fight is over, and a full emergency medical team ready to treat someone who becomes unintentionally seriously hurt.And people still die under those circumstances. With all of that preparation, training, and work it's still incredibly dangerous to hit someone with your fists. Now, on the street, no training, no warning? Of course a fist fight is a lethal matter. It's stupid to say it's not.

If you do not know what "cherry-picking" means, I suggest that you look it up. Until you have done so, you could save yourself some embarrassment by not using the phrase.

How is this relevant to the discussion? Yes, i did say that. Obviously, though, there was a misunderstanding and I thought I made it clear that one example was not sufficient, nor was I merely looking for evidence that it is possible that fists can kill. This is even a deviation from what I said just prior in Message 1129 I was talking about how guns are designed to kill and fists are not (meant to kill).My fault, apparently, for not being absolutely explicit. I wasn't aware of this being procedure. Do you happen to have it handy? I was always under the impression that Police Officers, when adhering to policy, don't shoot unarmed people no matter the circumstances. Remember, upthread, where I mentioned the Geneva Convention? Do you recognize my user handle? That's right crash, "hooah" because I am an Army veteran so I had to actually adhere to the Geneva Convention so you are absolutely WRONG about this. US Soldiers can ONLY fire when being fired upon and ONLY if they are certain they can identify the target. Someone throwing rocks is not a target that can be fired upon. Guess what? Little Iraqi kids actually DID throw rocks at US soldiers. Do you actually think they lit them up? Even Iraqi nationals (civilians) threw rocks at them. Guess what? They didn't shoot them. Why? Because it is uncalled for to shoot people who aren't shooting at you. Can this third time of me asking you be the one where you finally divulge you source?How frequently do people get beat to death by fists that warrants people shooting an unarmed assailant?Secondly: where do you live that it is so frequent an occurance for people to just come up and start punching you to death? Does that happen? Why not???? Don't you want to win the fight? I mean, it is acceptable to shoot someone when they are fighting you, so why not? I am reallly interested in these statistics you have that show there is such a large number of people that are getting beaten to death (by fists alone) that validates the right to shoot unarmed people just because they want to fight you.

Researchers at Harvard have found a clear link between gun prevalence and homicide rates internationally as well as at the region, state, city and home level.

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1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review).

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Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

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Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal. 2004; 9:417-40.

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2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.

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We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.

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Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries. Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49:985-88.

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3. Across states, more guns = more homicide

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Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997).

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After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

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Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.

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4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)

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Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.

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Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64.

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LinkDo you dispute these findings? How is using data from OECD countries rather than comparing the US with Bahrain and Kuwait etc. "cherry picking"....? These are the countries used for all sorts of meaningful social comparisons. Well I guess being the mysterious, isolated, unique, unstudied, unknown and wholly inaccessible place that the US is no "outsider" could possibly draw a valid conclusion about anything that goes on there....Oh wait.... Trust me dude - When a few days after a horrific gun massacre we see on our TV screens a report from the US of the NRA proclaiming that everything except guns is the problem and that more guns in schools is the solution most of us look on in bemusement and think "Only in America.....". At a national psyche level you guys do have a thing about guns that many outside just find weird.BBC North America correspondent: "Only hours before, I had been explaining to British friends that most people in the UK just did not get the American attitude towards guns, with many regarding it as a sort of crazy aberration."

Can you link to your source or data for this conclusion? If you repeatedly recite the mantra "correlation is not causation" whilst you yourself are simultaneously inferring a causal relationship (albeit one that is the reverse of those you are arguing with) between the two factors you should expect to cause confusion. Because it's kinda contradictory....

crashfrog writes: Geez. The simple answer here is GET A TASER & PEPPER SPRAY. Forget about getting a gun. You can't use a gun if you don't have a gun, either. Go non-Lethal when you are choosing what you will be using.Also get your house compartmentalized with electric locks to trap the invader, then call 911. Or sleeping gas. Bright stroboscopic lighting with loud Barry Manilow music. I don't know. Anything but lethal force. There should be ways to defend that are far more effective at stopping the intruder than a gun.There should be a huge industry with economy of scale on their side furiously working night & day to provide our citizens with non-lethal ways to stop an intruder - even an intruder who is armed with a fully blown Thompson machine gun. Now stopping an intruder with a tank crashing through your walls is probably beyond what a normal citizen could be expected to resist. Or a missile attack.But this still doesn't address the elephant in the room - the inner city shootings that are not home invasions, that are not mental wingnuts going crazy, that are not the government ATF/FBI taking issue with you....

crashfrog says: No you won't. These days you'll be TASED, bro'.

If you can. In many jurisdictions, both are against the law.Isn't that a funny thing? In the UK it's easier to own a handgun than to own a taser or pepper spray.If you're in a jurisdiction where either or both are legal, then they should definitely be considered in your self-defense toolkit, provided you understand their limitations. A taser can't be used against anybody already in contact with your body. Pepper spray can't be used in the rain and used against a close attacker, may blind you. Neither is particularly effective as a tool for defensive intimidation. Both of which are illegal. And the fact that there's not should make you question if you're talking about something that is physically possible. This isn't Star Trek, you can't set "phasers to stun" and have it reliably take out someone larger than you expect, or on drugs that allow them to ignore pain, or prepared with the simple expedient of an anti-taser vest and a bandanna soaked in vinegar. The elephant in the room is that those are driven almost entirely by the trade in illegal drugs. And yet many here want to open a new front in the useless War On Drugs by treating guns almost entirely the same.You want to reduce the American homicide rate? Start legalizing drugs. A thousand posts since I proposed it and still nobody's bothered to respond.

This is selective memory - several people have pointed out that it's not a case of either or - just as it's not a case of doing nothing because the something that can be done in not a perfect answer.There are many things that can be done to reduce gun crime and crime generally, many of them involve tackling social inequalities - poverty, education, health care, housing - and one major issue is drug abuse.Legalising the use of drugs is, in my opinion, a good way to start actually controlling them, but the same people who are vehemently against gun control are just as vehemently against any liberalisation of drugs too.So politicians will continue with their art of the possible and do what they can, not what they should.

It gets tiresome constantly having to interrupt meaningful discussion to correct things you make up, but anyway...No, crash, my data does not support your belief that the US is inherently more homicidal than the rest of the world. No data supports this.Your conclusion is actually wrong for two reasons. First there's the data, and I think non-firearm homicides are most relevant here. There's a table at the Wikipedia article on Gun Violence titled Intential homicides by country, take a look at the column titled Non-firearm homicide rate per 100,000 pop. For your edification here's a sorted selection of western-style countries from the table, (naturally if this were just a random selection you'd see that some countries have not just a higher rate than the US, but a far higher rate): So clearly the US doesn't have the highest non-firearm homicide rate in the world, not even among western style countries, but moving on to the second reason you're wrong, homicide rate statistics cannot validly be used as a proxy for the inherent homicidal tendencies of entire nations (which is a psychological assessment anyway, and psychology is a notoriously soft science). Economic, environmental and other factors play significant roles.So your conclusion that in the absence of guns that all gun deaths would have occurred anyway but by other means has no support. Obviously some deaths would still occur, some wouldn't. Gun deaths occur for a wide variety of reasons, from the spur-of-the-moment murder of passion which would never have happened had a gun not been available, to the contract murder which would happen no matter what. Statistics about actual homicides encompass these situations and the entire range in between. That's why we use statistics to build our understandings of reality. Well, no, except that I haven't been. This is just you being you again, distracting attention from a losing argument by making things up. For you it's a debate technique that yanks discussion into rat holes having little or nothing to do with the topic as people attempt to defend themselves against false accusations that you just never give up pursuing.If I'm right about this then in your reply you will again charge me with confusing "homicides" with "all homicides". I hope it doesn't pan out this way, but given your history I'm not too optimistic. You'll probably sift through my old replies looking for the inevitable ambiguous references that are part of everyone's contributions in discussions like this, including your own. I mentioned rape at one point, and in another place I used the term "coercion" as encompassing of rape. Or was I required to explicitly mention rape in every sentence, else I'm violating the rules of Crash? No, Crash, I don't think that self-defense fits into the narrow scenarios you keep arguing about with others. I have been and continue to argue statistically. I have been and continue to point out the wide variety of situations involving gun deaths. When you leave the house with your gun (this is the impersonal you, of course), one of the possibilities is that you'll run into someone who keeps hitting you and won't stop and (for whatever reason) flight is not a possibility and so you need your gun. And one can imagine many, many other situations where a gun is at least worthy of consideration, but these are just a fraction of all situations that could result in gun deaths. Statistics encompass all these situations, and statistics say that overall you are in more danger of gun death if you own a gun than if you don't.Now I know that you and CS and many gun owners feel you're all special, that you're actually safer with a gun than without, but statistics say you're more likely wrong than right. Probably 95% of gun owners feel they're above average in matters ranging from gun handling to judgment in complex rapidly evolving situations, but obviously a great many of them must be wrong. Most people's personal assessments of their own abilities are overestimated. The fact that many gun owners don't understand or acknowledge the danger they're putting themselves in doesn't change the fact that they *are* placing themselves at greater risk of gun death.--Percy

Over and over again in this thread it has been said by the gun rights side that we refuse to acknowledge that guns can be used effectively for self-defense, and over and over again we have answered that of course we accept this possibility.But when rolled up statistically into all gun deaths it turns out that one is at less risk of gun death when one doesn't own a gun. Of course it include "justifiable self-defense homicides," but the mere fact that you raise this point indicates you're missing the important implications. Stand-your-ground laws change the nature of what is considered a "justifiable self-defense homicide." For example, it isn't uncommon for both parties to claim they were standing their ground (obviously these cases of gun use didn't result in death). And courts are finding that increasing numbers of accused murderers are using the stand-your-ground laws by simply claiming that they felt threatened (George Zimmerman in the Florida case is of course the famous recent example). An obvious side-effect of any perceived success for such claims will be an even greater decrease in reticence to resort to lethal force. Again, if no statistics for this exist then you cannot argue that they would support you if they did. The Wikipedia article on Gun Violence in the United States has a discussion about attempts to study this statistically, see the section on Self-protection. Now you can cite Kleck to support your position, and the other side can cite McDowall and Hemenway.Tangle and NoNukes already noted the similarities of the gun lobby to the tobacco lobby (see Message 734 and Message 738). In a very similar way the gun lobby is creating confusion in people's minds by casting doubt on the statistics and by building a mythology about the effectiveness of guns for self-defense. But the fact that the mere presence of guns increases the likelihood of gun death is inescapable. It doesn't matter whether you* believe it or not, you're at greater risk of gun death if you own a gun.--Percy*You = the impersonal you.

I'm simply refuting the contention that Houdini being punched and then dying from it was a "freak accident." There was nothing accidental about it. The man attacked Houdini with the intent of causing grievous bodily harm, grievous bodily harm was inflicted, and Houdini likely died from it. A perfect chain of completely intentional events and their expected consequences. Nothing "freak accident" about it. If you accept, then, that it's possible for someone to kill you with their fists, then you have to admit that someone who attacks you with their fists and gives no indication that they will stop until you're dead, then it's clearly reasonable to defend yourself as though they're going to kill you. That's just flat-out reasonable. Identically to how you're not required to treat someone attacking you with a knife as though they're a surgeon about to perform a necessary medical procedure to your benefit, but rather an assailant who means to maim or kill you. You would be completely wrong. Officers will fire upon the unarmed - and will be legally and morally in the right to do so - when it's necessary to defend their own lives or the lives of others. That's because police officers understand that you can be beat to death, like 800 people were in 2009 alone (Bureau of Justice Statistics.) And if you're fired on with pistols you'll respond with rifles, correct? The doctrine of proportionality doesn't require constructing a hierarchy of weapon lethality, so that you spend entire minutes sitting there determining whether the guy with a tire iron means you have to use your bare hands because you don't have anything on you whose lethality is between bare hands and tactical knife.No. Lethal force is lethal force. It doesn't come in flavors, stupid. I live in Washington DC, which has the highest rate of homicides in the nation (and until recently a complete ban on handguns.) Just this past year a man died during an altercation in which only a single punch was thrown.If you don't think that a man beating on you with his fists constitutes a threat to your life, then you just don't know what you're talking about. Almost a thousand people are murdered that way every year - far more than are killed by assault rifles, incidentally.I'm sure that if someone started firing on you with an assault rifle, you'd have no problem justifying return fire, despite the fact that almost nobody in the US is killed by assault rifles in any given year. The number of people who die that way every year is irrelevant. What justifies the armed response is that it's necessary to save your life. Period.

Is it the gun ownership that is causing the homicide rates or is it the homicide rates that are causing the gun ownership? Um, here's the section of my post that you stripped that quote from:

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The OECD countries in Dr A's graph are the ones that would be used for most social comparisons.

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Dr. A's graph was of countries with a high HDI. Message 663

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Doesn't having a high homicide rate reduce a country's HDI regardless of how many guns are there? I don't see how cherry-picking the data points helps establish a causal relationship between gun ownership and gun murder.

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Not only did I point out that it wasn't OECD countries, the question I asked implies my reasoning. How did you not see those parts? Or did you purposefully avoid them?

It wasn't a handwave, and that you put any effort into your post other than the typing wasn't evident. It was predominately one-line dismissals, sometimes a little longer. Really? Just like that you're going to accept that mathematically we know that 0 guns must correspond to 0 gun deaths? Even after all your objections? And you're also going to accept that as the number of guns in a population increases that the number of gun deaths must also increase and that the incidence rate of deterrence must necessarily be negligible until gun prevalence reaches some level? After all your arguments about how invalid this position is?So please pardon my skepticism about your newfound openness, but you were dismissing everything I said, and in such an environment it didn't seem likely there was any possibility of finding common ground. I find it hard to believe you're going to change your approach. We're not going to get anywhere if I, for example, state that I'm trying to vary a single variable at a time, and you respond with: And that's all you say. What am I supposed to do with that? At another point you say: Asymptote? What asymptote? There's no asymptote. And that's all you say. What am I supposed to do with that? And then there's the ridiculous: In response to the assertion that criminals will try to catch you unawares you say that people can't sneak up behind you, but sometimes they can, but so what? What am I supposed to say to that?Or how about this: You're seriously offering anecdotal stories like this to question a criminal's ability to catch you unawares? Really? Are you serious? What am I supposed to say to this?These examples are typical of your post and that's why I demurred. If you want to make a second attempt at a reply to my Message 1112 then feel free, but don't do it for my sake, and I make no promise to respond if it's just more nonsense and brief dismissals. I wasn't questioning the NRA's gun safety rules or gun training. I'm sure it's all excellent. I was stating my concern that, despite everyone's best efforts, putting guns in the hands of people makes everyone around them less safe.I agree gun ranges are very safe, but since you mention them, check this out: Death at the Gun Range: Five Firearm Deaths in Firearm-Friendly Environments. The accident involving Christopher Bizilj is particularly sad, since if he had never been on a gun range he would still be alive. I'm not arguing that it is. I'm arguing that despite the best efforts for the development of effective safety rules and the development and offering of effective training programs, the presence of a gun makes everyone in the vicinity less safe, not more safe. It wasn't just Memphis. It was Memphis, Seattle and Galveston. And I'm not trying to convince you that you would be better off without a gun. That *would* be the ecological fallacy that Crash keeps accusing me of. What I'm arguing is that if you believe you're safer with a gun that the statistics say you're more likely wrong than right.You and Crash and the gun advocates are correct that this *is* an issue of individual rights, but in any society individuals always make sacrifices for the greater good. We as a society make these decisions by voting for our representatives who carry out our will. The statistics tell us that if we reduce gun prevalence in the US that we'll also reduce gun deaths. If we do reduce gun prevalence then it is undeniable that some will die who would otherwise live (this is the gun rights concern), but it is equally undeniable that even more, potentially many, many more proportional to the degree of reduction, will live who would otherwise die.--Percy

No, that is the Ecological fallacy.