Summations Only

One might ask Faith what the car to human life exchange rate is. We could calculate the dollar amount of a human life that way. I mean, is it okay to kill someone over a Ford Fiesta, or is it only okay to kill someone over a brand new Mercedes? How much does someone have to try to steal before it's okay to kill them for it?

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.

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.

Are paraplegics particularly good at using firearms?Do paraplegics make up a statistically significant percentage of gun-related deaths or even crime in general, whether as the aggressors or the victims?Or is this as pointless a tangent as it appears to be?

Half-measure gun control does not appear to work, no.State-limited gun control is meaningless when state lines can be crossed on a whim. Limiting only specific types of guns is meaningless when other guns can just as easily be used.Nationwide gun bans, however, as exist in most of Europe and the UK, do seem to work.And, of course, a raw incident count number is rather meaningless. You need per-capita numbers to make comparisons. Simply saying "Look, this happened x times" is nothing more than an emotional appeal and doesn't do much for the debate.

Congratulations. You've just argued against every use of statistics, and all rational, evidence-based methods for risk assessment.I mean, why bother trying to argue against you when, according to you, we don;t need to compare any claims against reality?You know what, since I haven;t ever won the lottery, and since I play the lottery as an individual rather than statistically, I guess nobody has ever won the lottery!I suppose I should just ignore all of those other statistics about things like getting cancer from smoking. I mean, I'm an individual, not a statistic, right?Thank you for clearing this all up. Now I know that my personal, individual, subjective perceptions are actually the best way to assess risk and determine policy! I'll never need to look at a study ever again! Wheeee!

Essencially you're asserting that statistics you disagree with are bullshit and "naive and irrational." You are not, however, showing why Percy's relevant point that households which contain a gun are statistically more likely to be victims of gun-related death is somehow invalid. ...You just did it, again. Measuring the statistical distribution of a given target is how we compare our predictions against reality in the first place.Let's try something similar. It's claimed that smoking causes cancer. Is the most rational way to investigate that claim to take a sample of a few thousand smokers and determine the percentage that gets cancer, and compare that to another sample group who does not smoke? I mean (and I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here for the sake of the point, please don;t bother with your usual tactic of nitpicking irrelevant details to derail the argument), if statistically 100 out of 50,000 smokers get cancer, and only 30 out of every 100,000 non-smokers get cancer, isn't that a fairly strong correlation? Isn't that the very first, most basic step we use to determine whether the claim that cigarettes cause cancer is true? Of course there is no "average person," with 2.5 kids. The "average person" is what we call an abstract concept. In the case of statistics, we use abstractions like the average risk of gun death of non-gun-owners and the average risk of gun death of gun-owners and compare them. These abstractions are calculated by aggregating many real, individual occurrences to get an idea of how frequently a given event, like gun death, actually occurs in reality.Banning handguns actually says "if I posses this handgun, I'm significantly more likely to die a gun-related death than if I do not posses this handgun. Therefore, if I ban handguns, the sum total of gun deaths will be reduced, because fewer people will have guns, reducing that statistical risk. The abstract, average person will be safer."But, of course, you prefer to ignore evidence like that because you have to "defend yourself individually, not statistically." That's a curious interpretation of statistics, crash. Rather I would have thought that the statistically incredibly low chance of winning anything in the lottery, regardless of the jackpot value, means that it's foolish to ever assume any rate of return at all, and that since I cannot afford to purchase tickets representative of a significant amount of the probability space for a lotto drawing, I'd be much better served to just pay my mortgage.You're making this very curious usage of an abstraction, whereby you're using an average to make a rate-of-return prediction for an individual despite the fact that the data distribution is the exact opposite of an even spread, and the typical individual simply loses his money.That's not the same with gun-related deaths. Yes, it's a binary all-or-nothing live-or-die event, but the distribution is far more even than winning the lottery...and nobody is suggesting that the "average person" will die 0.04 times or any such nonsense.We're simply stating that the risk, as in the statistical likelihood of a negative outcome, increases with gun ownership as opposed to the lack of gun ownership. They help in predicting the future. Nothing is certain, everything is probability.I can't look at Jim and Tom and tell whether either of them will be shot to death.But if Jim owns a gun, and Tom does not, I can say that Jim is more likely to be shot to death than Tom. And because I can make that factual statement, if Jim then defends his gun ownership saying that he's "safer" by owning a gun, I can also saying that he's delusional and the raw data proves him to be utterly wrong.You know. Like you.Edited by Admin, : Fix quote.

I'm curious. If "your own judgement" is not based upon a numerical abstraction of previous experience used to extrapolate trends and thereby predict the course of action that will be most beneficial (you know, using statistics)......what exactly is this mysterious "judgement" of yours based upon? If you're not using the only comparison to reality we have, what's your pattern of thought, other than just a subjective "feeling" that the numbers consistently show to be flat false?Edited by Admin, : Fix quote.

On New Years Eve in Old Sacramento, a bar fight moved from fists to guns and ended up a double homicide with 4 more injured. And they cancelled the midnight fireworks show.Guns are especially great as self-defense weapons in crowds of people. And when you're in a bar fight. I mean, you have to defend yourself from the guy who wants to punch you. By killing him.

While hooah doesn't tend to use the words I would, he did illustrate (colorfully) the attitude of "defending" oneself with utterly imbalanced force, and the casual disregard for justice and human life that makes a special exception for an individual to act as judge, jury, and executioner.I understand your opinion on making a criminal bear the burden of physical risk in the commission of their crimes, instead of their victims.But that argument, to me, is utterly overwhelmed by the value of a human life. If a burglar wishes to rob me, I do not wish to kill him to save my television, and yet that is exactly what you are supporting here. If an invader wants to harm me or my loved ones as opposed to simply stealing insured material goods, I'll be happy to fight back as appropriate with the least-lethal means at my disposal (I have a bat; I'm considering a stun gun - both, like knives, are actually more effective in close quarters than a handgun and are less likely to kill someone).In the case of a fight...the escalation of arms from fists to knives to guns is an escalation in the risk of death, both to the combatants and anyone in the vicinity as was shown just a few blocks from my home on New Years Eve. No, (to borrow hooah's movie reference) Marty does not deserve to be bullied and beaten by Biff, but neither does Biff deserve to die.You don't merely suggest that criminals should bear the physical risk inherent in their crimes - you insist that their risk should be elevated. That elevation simply results in an escalation of arms - now a thief must prepare to face an armed homeowner, and may take his own gun and shoot first.I've had a home invasion experience. Twice, in fact. Once was a man who casually walked into my apartment late at night when I had forgotten to lock the door. He was in my home. Under many state laws, I would have been within my rights to kill him (and possibly a neighbor with a stray round). As it turns out...he mistook the apartment and had only meant to enter my neighbor's home. If I had fired on him, I would have shot an innocent man making an innocent mistake.Your attitude is indeed a uniquely American combination of Wild West cowboy, comic antihero Judge Dredd, and the bully victims of Columbine escalating the level of violence. It's an attitude I, and apparently others, find to be ethically reprehensible. You believe that a criminal forfeits his right to live as soon as he commits a crime.I disagree.

Lethality is not binary. Firearms are more lethal than fists, in the same way that a tazer is less lethal than a handgun.If a handgun were not a larger threat than a fist, you wouldn't be waxing poetic on the virtues of firearms. You'd just say you should punch home invaders, and we wouldn't be in disagreement.I mean really crash, which is it? Are guns a good defense because they're just as lethal as fists, or are they actually far more lethal than taking a punch in the face? You can't have it both ways. And yet you advocate using a gun, which is in effect a form of execution. You say that, if Biff comes at Marty, Marty should pull a gun to stop the fight, and that if Biff calls the bluff, Marty should kill Biff. Not run. Not yell for help. Not use a taser, or pepper spray, or his own fists, or anything less lethal than a gun.You are saying that Marty should be willing to kill Biff. Because you escalate the violence. What happens when Biff pulls his own gun? Now you have a shootout. What if Marty misses Biff and hits a bystander? What if the bystander is his father or mother in 1955, and Marty is never born? (Sorry...couldn't resist)The ethical objection is that there are many ways to stop a fight without immediately jumping to the most deadly force available. You can try talking Biff down. You can yell for someone to call the police. You can use pepper spray, or a tazer, or your own fists, or a nearby chair. Any of those things can be lethal, but they are less likely to kill than a handgun, and several of them are more effective in close quarters than a gun would be. In punching range, a gun is almost as much a risk to the person holding it, as the opponent can easily grapple for control of the gun.Why escalate the force immediately to the highest level possible? The cops don't do that. When faced with an unarmed man, they don't pull their guns - they pull tazers or batons first. Why is taht, do you think? You seem to think that, when a fight breaks out, the only option is that the combatants duke it out.Marty is only "forced" to face any risk if he steps up and fights Biff. He could try to talk. He could ask for help. He could run. None of those require an actual fight. All of those reduce Marty's risk...and Biffs, as well. If none of those are possible, a stun gun, a chair leg, pepper spray, even some booze thrown in Biff's face would all help Marty to escape unscathed, without also escalating Biff's risk to the point of near-certain death.The risk doesn't belong on Biff - the risk should be eliminated. Just stop the damned fight. That doesn;t require killing Biff. I did respond to that. I said I have a bat. I said I was considering the purchase of a stun gun. I mentioned that melee weapons are more useful in close quarters than a handgun, anyway, and that I would fight back as much as required (but not with unnecessary force) to defend my life or the lives of others.But none of that requires me to use a gun.That's certainly the best choice - but guns don't seem to provide a deterrent. Thieves always exist. Just like the death penalty doesn't seem to work as a deterrent for murder, gun ownership doesn't deter theft. What you've done is escalated the risk for a thief - and that typically just means that a thief has to be more careful. THat can include trying to find out if his target has a gun, it can mean trying to invade when the target is not home, and it can include arming himself in case he is threatened with a gun.Do you remember what happened when theft was a capitol offense? The thieves just killed their victims as a matter of course - no witnesses, and the penalty if caught was the same either way. Thieves (now murderers as well) still continued their "trade."If a thief risks death anyway, what incentive does he have not to escalate, himself? He's already made the choice to be a thief, a choice that seems to have no relevance to this debate - and so, given that the thief is there, would you rather face an unarmed thief who just wants your TV, or an armed thief who will try to shoot you if you go for a gun? He would likely have been able to rush me before I could aim and fire - that's why cops are trained that at ranges less than around 10 meters or so, your gun is not an advantage in an altercation. A gun would not have helped me. My bat might have. I have a novelty dull sword that would work as a bludgeon, that might have helped me. My then-girlfriend calling 911 might have helped me. A stun gun might have helped me. But a gun...I get maybe 1 shot, and if I miss, or if Im too slow, he's on me, and then we're grappling, and who knows where the bullets will fly? Will he be shot? Will I? Would my girlfriend? My neighbor? In the Sacramento NYE gunfight, two were killed and four were injured. Was the risk only escalated for the assailant?Or are you imagining gun violence to exist in a closed system where only the criminal is at increased risk? Because that would only be in a remote area, or your imagination. Because you're making the choice between life and death when it doesn't have to be. It's a simple false dilemma, crash - you don't need a gun, there are less lethal methods at your disposal. Not according to the scenarios you describe, in which you support shooting to death an unarmed man because he was going to punch you. If the risk of death by punching or by gunshot is the same, then why bother with the gun? If the risk is overwhelmingly different, then why is it justified to use overwhelmingly superior force when it's not necessary to stop the threat?

Right. Instead, we should shoot each other to death....

You can't use less lethal options if you don't have them, but you can use a gun. Because apparently you have that and no other option....What?

I also disagree with xong on the effectiveness of gun control.I agree, however, that another avenue toward reducing gun-related deaths (and with greater implications beyond) is to attack the root causes of crime in general, such as poverty and the "war on drugs."I'd love to see some real proposals aimed at addressing disenfranchised inner-city youth and other high-risk demographics. Legalizing or at least decriminalizing drugs (though I'd much prefer government regulation and standardization with hefty taxes, much like has been done with alcohol and tobacco) seems to be one powerful vector toward reducing violent crime by essentially gutting the profit potential of the cartels and various gangs...as well as all of the benefits of avoiding accidental overdose and spending money currently spent on prisons on free voluntary rehab, instead.

He should have chosen Jesus, since he likes to play the martyr so much.