Summations Only

I didn't lie the first time, so it isn't a matter of honesty.And who says I SUMMARIZED anything? I pointed out his reason for opposing that research WHICH WAS THE POINT AT ISSUE.And yes I saw that he changed his position. He's an idiot. If the research was politically motivated then you don't go back on your opposition to it, you propose better research.And I'm glad this thread is going to close. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

So he's an idiot for a different reason. I've come to the conclusion recently that the entire US government needs to be impeached. All of it. He's just another reason for it. But who says it WAS valuable work?You're just another gameplayer here, trying to find some way to trip me up. I'm not going to read all of a Wikipedia article, I even suspect somebody added the bit about valuable work, just as Dr. A once did between my pasting something and reading it again.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But I don't know why that chart keeps coming up. I think I've said I accept that it's useless, and accepted that the site itself is useless too. But then I also said I don't trust statistical discussions anyway because there are too many ways the numbers can be misconstrued. Not that theoretically there couldn't exist a really good statistical study that does take the important things into account, but for now I'm sticking to the philosophical style arguments.It's unfortunate that this topic always comes up in reaction to a horrific tragedy. The first take always comes from what sound to me like hysterical unthinking gun control fanatics who can't analyze anything coolly but just react and lash out and have no sense of responsibility for what they are saying. They are loudly and ignorantly and self-righteously contemptuous of people who defend guns.The effect on me is fear they'll be influential enough to get the government to confiscate guns altogether and completely do away with the Second Amendment which is meant to protect us from the government above all, and the government has not inspired any trust in me for years anyway. It's not that I'm a big gun fan in general, although I do know lots of responsible gun owners. I don't have guns myself and am in fact not really comfortable around them despite my family experience with them. But this rhetoric is alarming so I join the battle against what seem to me to be truly unthinking people who are reacting hysterically from their own personal fear of guns and don't know one thing about the realities involved. They push laws through that do nothing for the problem they're supposed to address and just make life more difficult for gun owners. Yes I know there are some people who are for gun control who are familiar with guns, but I'd bet the vast majority haven't a clue, but they want to tell those who know guns how to run their lives. The equation you keep making between prevalence of guns and gun deaths just hits me as simpleminded, and I really don't mean to be insulting with that, I just don't see it as relevant. Even if the statistics did prove it, that is not a reasonable way to approach this issue.I don't know why I'm saying all this. I think I need a break. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I meant to get to a different point in that post. What happens is that the loud anti-gun rhetoric does scare the gun people and that's why there is always a run on the gun stores in the wake of these tragedies. And instead of getting a sensible approach to how gun safety might be improved, (even if guns aren't really THE problem the rhetoric makes them out to be), the result is an escalation of gun ownership and pro-gun rhetoric and a digging-in of the gun people against the push for gun control. If you really want to promote gun safety, screaming about guns after a gun tragedy is NOT the way to go about it.

To respond to a few points you've made in different posts:First, the fifteen year old girl SAID Harvard offers shooting scholarships, along with other colleges she's interested in. Do you know more than she does? She says that in THIS INTERVIEW starting at about 1:35. And here she is testifying about PROPOSED GUN LAWS, and she refers to statistics.Second, you claim that the distinction between good guys and bad guys is useless because we can't tell who is who. But you are completely missing the point by making it a matter of identifying individuals as the one or the other. The point is a statistical point. If you lump high crime areas with low crime areas to get a picture of gun deaths in the entire nation you are getting a false picture, and if you propose gun reforms based on such statistics you will be penalizing the good guys for the crimes of the bad guys. If you need a definition, a bad guy is one who has committed a crime that has gotten into the statistics, that's all, and a good guy has simply not committed a crime. It really doesn't matter if either could change roles, the point is the statistics. Allowing crime statistics to skew the definition of the safety of gun ownership across the nation is a misuse of statistics. If you want to talk about accidents, that's another subject though it may also break down by geographical area or culture, which is also not reflected in your statistics, different groups of people being more or less educated on gun safety and that sort of thing -- in which case the solution could be educating the people in those areas about gun safety. But I'm only commenting on crime here.Third, related to this, you accuse me of avoiding statistics because they don't say what I want them to say, but the problem for me is that the statistical analyses you've provided here don't distinguish between relevant categories, such as between high crime and low crime areas, or in other words "the good guys and the bad guys." When you say there is such and such a correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths for the entire nation you are lumping all the different kinds of incidents and all the different areas with their different causes of gun deaths together and that makes your statistics untrustworthy for the purpose of assessing the safety of gun ownership in the nation as a whole. And any laws based on such statistics penalize the good guys and do nothing whatever to restrain the bad guys.Fourth, you then suppose that defending gun rights by making such distinctions shows a lack of caring about people dying from guns, and HBD adds particularly those in the high crime areas. But if restricting guns on the basis of such false statistics only restricts the good guys -- gun owners with a clean criminal record -- and doesn't affect the bad guys who possess guns illegally, or gun crimes in the high crime areas, what lives are you saving with your statistics and laws? Zip. And you may be enabling some murders too by keeping the good guys out of public areas. The bad guys can go freely into those supposedly gun-safe areas.Fifth, you insist that I need to produce statistics to support my arguments. If the available data doesn't make the necessary distinctions I'm talking about here, where am I going to get such statistics? Also, if I get into analyzing statistics, which I've said I don't want to do, all I'm going to be doing is showing where they lump all the wrong things together. Save me the trouble and admit this is the case.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Taking a different tack:
Trying to understand your reasoning, I get that you are concerned about the deaths, period. The fact that the vast majority of gun owners commit no crimes, have not had accidents, have killed nobody, doesn't interest you as long as guns do get used to kill people, by anybody anywhere for any reason.You aren't interested in comparing gun deaths to say automobile deaths or other causes of death because guns are a weapon and have no other use than killing or harming people or other living things. Apart from recreational purposes of course. This is why guns as such are the focus of efforts to deal with the shooting tragedies.You don't really get the distinction between good guys and bad guys because a death is a death to you irrespective of the person who causes it, the motivation behind it, etc. etc. etc. Guns are simply going to cause deaths because that's what guns do, and the job of analyzing their safety is really aimed only at discovering how many gun deaths occur for whatever reason.So the mass shootings are caused by the availability of guns and wouldn't have happened without that, and the suggestion that laws that have deprived gun owners of carrying them into schools and other public places might have been the real cause is actually outrageous to you.Would I be wrong to suppose that you would really like to see ALL guns taken out of the hands of the average American? The fact that crimes would continue with illegal guns doesn't bother you for some reason, maybe because those good guys that turn into bad guys wouldn't have them at least and that would cut down on that statistic? Or, certainly, the accidents with guns would stop. I can appreciate that.I think it also has to be factored in here that people who support gun control do for the most part feel safe in America, more or less safe from crime though that depends on where you live* and safe from anything like the government turning into a replica of Nazi Germany. The loss of gun rights seems trivial in such a context.Or, in a nutshell, you're used to living without guns and don't see any truly rational reason for anyone to own one.Am I close?===============-
*I did see another You Tube video I think I'll mention. A New York girl goes to Alabama and is freaked out by the gun culture there, but after some months there begins to understand it and feel safe around guns and even learns to shoot, so that when she returns to New York she now wants to own a gun herself. New York being fairly high crime she's educated herself in martial arts types of self defense, but now she wants to use a gun for that purpose.I was going to delete the above because I just spent the last half hour trying to find that video again and couldn't. But I think I'll leave the information up anyway.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If the girl had lied somebody would have pointed it out by now. She's been on too many high profile TV shows for it to have been ignored. I did find one person mentioning that Harvard doesn't give a shooting scholarship so that confirms your point. She must have misspoken or been confused about something. She may have lumped together a number of different schools she was interested in. Harvard has a shooting club and that is one thing she mentioned. If I could ask her what she meant I would.I would make a big effort to read those articles if I had any reason to think it would be worth it, but my eyes suffer from that much reading of a white sheet, and I'm too low tech to figure out how to turn down the brightness on my fancy monitor. I spent hours getting it to a tolerable level and I'm not touching it again. It was a gift but even the giver took a long time to figure it out and his explanations are gobbledygook to me. WAY too many functions, buttons. Sorry, I'm very low tech.HOWEVER, I did look at the graphs in both papers and guess what, just as I keep saying your statistics are applied to the entire nation and do not discriminate between high crime and low crime areas. I would guess that the US has a lot more crime in a lot more densely populated high crime areas than the countries we are being compared with. Most countries are more and more diverse these days but America has always been most diverse, with big differences between high and low income areas, ethnic differences, the works, and by contrast many other countries still look tribal. This should be taken into account but it's not.If by comparison with the other countries we have an enormous number of homicides per hundred thousand population, wouldn't it be important to know if some places are contributing a much bigger part of that statistic than others? If where I live the number is 5 in a hundred thousand but it's 100 in some other parts of the country, why should their number affect my gun rights? It IS relevant that different areas have different crime rates. It's relevant to how and where you apply gun control laws. Again, if your effort is to stop crime, laws don't work in high crime areas, and again, all you do is penalize the people who are not committing the crimes.As for my fantasies, I KNOW that being armed makes us safer in the sense that the founders had in mind, and as long as you keep lumping the statistics from high and low crime areas together how could we ever find out if they make us safer in the sense you have in mind?

Those laws look fine, I don't know of any gun owner who should object to them.But there are laws that cause problems, such as the kind of laws that restrict where a person can go with a legal gun. Those are unnecessary restrictions and don't do anything about crime. Perhaps there are exceptions but we're talking legal guns here that nobody is trying to hide. Can't take them into schools, no matter whether concealed or totally safe, can't take them into the caf or the theater in some areas and so on, places where there have been shootings and hostage situations. Percy keeps saying it's a fantasy that being armed in such places would make a difference. Since I usually jump into these discussions on some particular point and then get dragged into areas I don't know a lot about, I don't have the information available about where guns have made a difference, and how could I possibly know for sure if they would anyway? It just seems like it would be a lot better if someone had a gun and could confront a criminal. No fantasy, just logical.
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Anyway, some laws are worse than useless. Truck drivers for instance are not allowed to have a gun in the truck, at least in some places. Why not? Who's protected by such a law? Trucks could be robbed and the driver have no means of protecting himself or the cargo. What sense does that kind of law make? But that IS one kind of law we get from gun control mindedness. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I checked out that website and it is very interesting. I have no idea why more states haven't enacted such laws. Seems to me they should. That kind of law does address the criminality problem which is what is needed as far as I can judge. I'll have to talk to my "expert" on the subject, my brother, when I can.

YES. This is the kind of problem that needs addressing, thanks for this. Laws that restrict criminals and not the good guys. That's what we need.Instead we get too much of the other kind, laws that restrict what kind of gun you can have, how much ammunition, where you can have guns and so on. Those are the useless kinds of laws that benefit nobody and don't stop crime.But this kind of law that has to do with keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and shouldn't be a problem for the good guys looks to me like what we need.

You know, Percy, both Cat Sci and I are making the same point but it doesn't seem to be getting through to you. You just keep repeating your argument and we keep repeating ours. I think you are misusing statistics to make a totally bogus point. If I think of a better way of answering you I'll try later.

This is a kind of backward way of describing the situation. "Giving more citizens more opportunities to kill a bad guy" is a very odd way of thinking about this. The problem is that gun laws have prohibited people from carrying guns there for no good reason. It's not that gun owners seek to carry guns in those places particularly but why should they be prohibited from it? Does the Second Amendment mean anything or not? If we have a right to be armed then why should there be prohibitions on where we can be armed? It just happens to turn out that the prohibitions enable the criminals, who presumably are the reason for such prohibitions in the first place. Again, it's not that gun owners would necessarily be carrying guns into schools and so on, but why should they be prohibited from it, especially now that these shootings have occurred and it might have helped if one or two had been there. This is also a very odd way of thinking about the situation. Nobody has asked us to think about the problems in the urban areas, what has been happening is that a tragedy occurs and a bunch of laws are proposed or even passed to deal with the tragedy that don't deal with it at all but put unnecessary restrictions on the good guy gun owners. This is rationalized by the overall homicide statistics. If we point out that the noncriminals are being penalized for the crimes of the criminals then you accuse us of not caring about all the deaths THEY are creating, when that has nothing to do with the problem as it has arisen. The measures proposed usually do absolutely nothing about the crime ridden areas anyway.Now you've given a list of laws that it seems to me might make a difference though I'm not really sure about it. As I've considered them I realize the main problems good guy gun owners would have with them is that they get the government too involved in our personal affairs. The point of the Constitution was to limit government, now it's breathing down our necks in every area of life. There is also the fact that gun owners do have in mind -- although it would get us called paranoid loonies by the likes of Dr. A., but who cares about that anyway --, the fact is that Hitler required guns to be registered and then when he knew who had guns, when the time came he went and confiscated them from those who had obeyed the law and that allowed him to herd them off to concentration camps without a fight.This is why we have the Second Amendment, to protect us from our government. The Germans saw nothing to fear until it started happening. So this is why American gun owners would object to anyting that requires them to be identified by the federal government as possessing guns. And most of those provisions do require that. Might as well just get rid of the Second Amendment altogether.SO. I think I understand why such laws are opposed, although at first glance it just looks like a necessary means of restricting the routes that allow guns to get into the hands of the criminals. Which of course I'm for as a matter of principle.SO. Is it possible to have laws that could cut down on the gun traffic that supplies criminals without putting noncriminal gun owners at the mercy of the government? Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Cat Sci said some things that were identical to points I'd made, plus a few things he seemed to think were the same kind of argument though I didn't see how they were. Overall that post was agreeing with mine and answering your argument more guns more deaths. We've both answered you, I've answered hyou many times. You don't get it but so what else is new. I have to take a break for now.

Oh NONSENSE! How hard can it be to get this simple point? When you lump together the statistics from both the high crime and low crime areas, which gives you a completely bogus average death rate for the country as a whole, you get the gaspingly high numbers that brand America a nation of homicidal maniacs when it's only a few densely populated crime-ridden areas that are making the numbers so high. And any laws you propose based on that bogus average restrict the good guys and DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the crime in the high crime areas BECAUSE CRIMINALS DO NOT OBEY LAWS WHILE THE GOOD GUYS DO.If your interest is in saving lives you are going to have to address this situation some other way. The DC authorities have tried for decades to reduce gun crimes there and have failed. Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the country and continues to have an enormously high homicide rate. You think by reducing guns in the rest of the country you are going to reduce them there? Speaking of fantasy worlds, it's you and Percy who live there, not I. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Back in Message 2805 petrophysics gave some statistics that show that gun prevalence is NOT so straightforwardly related to gun homicides, starting with Wyoming with 59% gun ownership and less than 1 in 100,000 gun homicide rate. Everybody answered him with statistical studies that said he's wrong, but what he said is obviously correct. We are still arguing exactly the same points. He proved there is no correlation, but YOUR studies insist otherwise. One of these statistical claims is wrong. What's the problem here?ABE: Here, his post is crystal clear. I'm going to copy it. ABE: And as a matter of fact, the statistics shown in Percy's own Message 3018 prove there is no correlation between gun ownership and gun murders. He managed to misread the meaning of the high homicide cities versus low, though, not grasping what faceman pointed out, that there is a huge cultural or ethnic difference between those cities, the enormous gun homicide rate in DC for instance being due to the 50% black population.But all we keep getting in spite of the facts is this mindless and erroneous equation "gun prevalence = gun deaths."Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.