Study Finds 3 Laws Could Reduce Firearm Deaths By 90% (meta.com) 819
An anonymous reader writes: The study, published in The Lancet, used a cross-sectional, state-level dataset relating to a host of topics associated with firearm mortality including gun ownership and even unemployment from across the U.S. to examine the relationship between recorded gun deaths and gun-control legislation. The study found that some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly. According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000. If the federal government implemented all three laws, the scholars predict that the overall national rate of firearm deaths would drop by over 90% to 0.16 per 100,000.
Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Informative)
'Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, told the Washington Post, “Briefly, this is not a credible study and no cause and effect inferences should be made from it.” Webster is later quoted, stating, “What I find both puzzling and troubling is this very flawed piece of research is published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals around Something went awry here, and it harms public trust.”'
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Informative)
Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source
I was interested too and I found it with DuckDuckGo [duckduckgo.com]. You can read the quote on an NRA website [nraila.org] and in the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com].
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Informative)
Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.
And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... [annals.org] this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...
As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs [jhsph.edu] the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems! Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com].
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
In completely unrelated news, some people don't trust the government to make good decisions.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Certainly if someone trusts the government to make good decisions on who does/does not "need" guns, they should trust the government to have a backdoor to every encryption scheme. If you need a gun to defend yourself and you don't have one, you may end up dead. It's rare for someone to wrongfully die because the government had access to more information during the course of either preventing terrorist acts or apprehending terrorists.
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Well people do die because the government was good at linking them to some terrorist activities, the issue is : who defines what is terrorism, and how to you make the difference between dying and dying wrongfully ?
Even without the obvious goodwin point generating reference, many people died for "links to terrorism" in Latin American under Western friendly governments.
And if backdoring is possible, it is obvious that the US corporations will offer the technology to "allied government" like for instance the f
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research
How is gun control "anti-gun"? More realistically it is anti-allowing-crazies-access-to-guns.
Or political opponents.
Or disenfranchised citizens.
Or colonists rebelling against the crown.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research
How is gun control "anti-gun"? More realistically it is anti-allowing-crazies-access-to-guns.
Or political opponents.
Or disenfranchised citizens.
Or colonists rebelling against the crown.
All of whom have access to other methods to address their concerns besides buying and using a gun.
Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
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Basically there's a significant number of people who believe that gun ownership is a vital part of their culture. They equate restrictions on gun ownership akin to government regulations about what sorts of apples can go into Mom's apple pie. It doesn't help that the NRA has moved from being a safety and enthusiast organization into a political one that encourages paranoia that the government is trying to ban guns outright. Because a guns are a part of culture this is all a part of what they think is the
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Well the government is very clearly regulating what kind of apples are going in mom's apple pie, ...
To sell apples you need to make sure the variety is "registered", etc,
So instead of having 1000s of varieties 100 years ago, we have now about 20, 5 of which represent 75% of the market.
The sad thing is that most people do not give a S*t
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't help that the NRA has moved from being a safety and enthusiast organization into a political one that encourages paranoia that the government is trying to ban guns outright.
Don't forget that the NRA has historically been in favour of gun control if it meant taking guns from unpopular people [wikipedia.org]. If the NRA launched a campaign encouraging Muslim-Americans to own guns for personal defence (given that this group is disproportionately the target of hate crime these days), I'd believe they were actually in favour of protecting the second amendment.
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the NRA was one of the first groups to help black folks get guns.... so im not so sure...
Wish I had mod points! YES. The NRA fought against the Dixiecrats (southern democrats) to allow black citizens to own guns in teh Jim Crow days. Also, we have the NRA to thank for the background check system presently used by the ATF to screen gun purchasers. The Clinton administration wanted a 30 day waiting period and the NRA suggested that an instant background check system be created.... which is why we have a 3 day waiting period OR the instant background check of today. Now what we need is for th
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The NRA also assisted Otis McDonald (a Black American) in his lawsuit against the City of Chicago and their unconstitutional handgun ordinance which infringed an individual's Second Amendment rights.
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It doesn't help that the NRA has moved from being a safety and enthusiast organization into a political one that encourages paranoia that the government is trying to ban guns outright.
Don't forget that the NRA has historically been in favour of gun control if it meant taking guns from unpopular people [wikipedia.org]. If the NRA launched a campaign encouraging Muslim-Americans to own guns for personal defence (given that this group is disproportionately the target of hate crime these days), I'd believe they were actually in favour of protecting the second amendment.
Given that the Mulford Act was passed before the NRA really got into politics I'm not sure how you can say they were in favor of it. The NRA didn't get political until the 1970s. Of course, before the passage of such things as the Gun Control Act of 1968 the only significant gun control in the US was such things as the Mulford Act and the Sullivan Act in New York (passed much earlier, but still) there wasn't much of a need to be politically active as the federal assault on gun rights hadn't really begun. On
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> I'm all for starting a campaign to allow non-violent, convicted felons to own a gun and even some violent, convicted felons to own guns.
I am uncomfortable with the idea that the state can disenfranchise you at all. I don't care what the excuse is. The populace is far too eager to go along with such measures as long as they employ the right bogeyman.
That's what guns really are, the canary in the coalmine. They are the first indicator that government has lost a proper fear of the citizenry. They are allo
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Restricting felons from gun ownership certainly puts the lie to the claim of prison being "rehabilitation", don't it? Cuz if they were "rehabilitated" they should once again have the same rights as everyone else.
"That's what guns really are, the canary in the coalmine. They are the first indicator that government has lost a proper fear of the citizenry. They are allowing their open contempt to show."
Good insight.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Sure there are lots of other solutions... until the day those break down. Hopefully that will never happen. Hopefully.
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How is a need to fend off the Gestapo not a political grievance?
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
You have noticed that those other methods are currently not at all effective, right?
Soap box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box.
The soap box has failed and if you think the ballot box has any hope in hell of being useful you haven't noticed this years election cycle, and the SCOTUS has been fucking us more and more recently with bullshit like Citizens United.
Jimmy Cricket, this is the 21st century with massive amounts of global communication and you're not able to see how important this is to preventing tyranny? Did you study American history at all in school?
Fighting is a last resort, but stop being retarded and pretending people are acting like its the only choice. Some people understand history and don't like the idea of it repeating itself. I suggest a good high school course on what drove the colonization of america. Which unfortunately includes all the evil shit we did in the process which was a lot of horrible stuff don't get me wrong, but theres a DAMN GOOD REASON why American's love their guns and all you have to do is look at a history book long enough to understand it and how we're rapidly moving in that direction again.
Not there yet, but it won't be too much longer unless something changes. People are tired of the bullshit politicians.
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Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Interesting)
Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Don't you realise there's no other functioning democracy other than the USA? The existence of guns is the only thing that keeps the country in check! /sarcasm.
That is really funny! You have a great career as a comedian ahead of you (or as a politician, but I sincerely hope you will choose the former)
The one thing I'll grant you is that at the time of founding, the US did pretty well on the democratic front - although it was nowhere near as exceptional as a lot of people might think: the vast majority of the population had no voting rights (excluding in no particular order slaves, indians, women, and people without property), which makes the system less radically different from (proto-)parliaments such as the British Parliament, the French Estates-General, or the institutions of the 17th century Dutch republic. All of these systems ranged somewhere between monarchy, aristocracy, and "real" democracy. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Currently, there are plenty of "real" democracies, with political processes that are each flawed in their own way but that more or less succeed in translating popular preferences into policy and protecting the rights of its citizens. On the Economist's democracy index, the US has 20th place (after most of northwestern Europe) and is only just above the level of "flawed democracy", scoring especially bad on functioning of government and political participation. http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/i... [eiu.com]
Freedom house similarly places the US on a downward trajectory and below almost all (north)Western European countries. (https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf). From their report: "[American] elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests. Racial and ethnic divisions have seemingly widened, and the past year brought greater attention to police violence and impunity, de facto residential and school segregation, and economic inequality, adding to fears that class mobility, a linchpin of America’s self-image and global reputation, is in jeopardy."
A nation without a functioning political process, but where everybody has guns - I believe we call that a "failed state". See also Somalia, Iraq, or South Sudan.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
No -- Webster and Bloomberg are very much into restricting anybody's access to guns. Unless you subscribe to the theory that by making all firearms expensive and difficult to obtain or own (unless you are rich or politically connected) is worthwhile because it also happens to deny access for "crazies", then that is not Daniel Webster's goal.
For example, under Giuliani/Bloomberg very few people obtained handgun carry permits in New York City, primarily the rich and famous. Favored people included Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, but few if any of the "little people" who might actually need to protect themselves. Like his billionaire patron Michael R. Bloomberg, Daniel Webster is a strong proponent of "permit to purchase" and may issue carry laws, both of which have a disparate impact on minorities and serve more to ensure that only the "right people" (the rich, famous, and other political contributors) are able to exercise their rights.
Going back to the original story, Bindu Kalesan herself has stated "the laws would result in fewer guns",the study wasn't designed to distinguish how policy contributions to suicide or homicide deaths. She also says her study does not account for how restricting firearms possession by the law-abiding changes the rate of assault, rape, or other violent crimes by the non-law-abiding, only looks at the impact of changes to state gun laws on overall firearms deaths.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:4, Interesting)
Gun laws in general are racist. I had someone tell me that one day, and I asked myself, "This guy IS full of shit, isn't he? I have to obey the same gun laws that he does, don't I?" So, I googled, "Are gun laws racist?" Holy shit, my eyes were opened. Try it yourself. The very first "gun control" laws on this continent were unabashedly aimed at preventing black people from accessing weapons. Maybe the best link is this one: https://www.firearmsandliberty... [firearmsandliberty.com]
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
By that standard pretty much everything the US has ever done is racist, because almost everything the US has ever done was specifically designed in such a way as to make slavery possible. So voting (blacks couldn't), the existence of state governments (which regulated slavery), state's rights (which meant Lincoln could not have freed the slaves until after a dozen or so slave states had left), etc.
Moreover, by that standard gun rights are also racist. You remember that time the black Majorities of South Carolina and Mississippi somehow managed to lose elections with universal suffrage to pro-Jim Crow white minorities? Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War.
Re:Yeah, um, not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
One VERY important thing to keep in mind: Not all firearms related deaths are wrongful. If you shoot the serial killer on your porch, it's a firearms related death.
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This is very much SOP by our corporate masters. Dianne Feinstein long carried a purse gun, and we have only her word that she has stopped (and her word is worth precisely fuck-all) while she still campaigns against gun rights for Californian citizens. In addition, she is protected by men with guns who have time and again demonstrated their lack of responsibility to carry them without incident, which is to say, the police of California. It's the same everywhere. The privileged elite not only don't feel the r
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The ones screaming and frothing at the mouth, claiming "Obama's gonna take yer guns!" are the ones who probably should not have access to crayons and a pencil sharpener
Bigoted folks like the author of the above comment making Ad-Hominem attacks against large groups of people because of their lawful expression of well-reasoned fears are the reason gun control must never be allowed in a free society founded on the principle of limited government such as the US.
What gun control really means is "Centraliz
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The meaning of the phrase "well-reg [constitution.org]
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Whilst I realise Slashdots taken somewhat of an anti-intellectual nose-dive lately (as evidenced by a preponderance of anti climate science crackpottery), I believe the term you are looking for is "gun research", not "anti-gun research". Its a university research lab. It looks at the numbers and deduces what the statistics say.
Sure, that is how it works when you have honest academic researchers. Meanwhile, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthâ(TM)s Center for Gun Policy and Research, they start with their desired conclusion and then devise approaches to reach the desired conclusion which will best please their primary sources of funding, Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation.
For example, in the Connecticut study [taleoftwostates.com], the authors choose a ten year span from 1995-2005, carefully cutting off their data to avoid the
Who was it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who was it that said we don't need gun control, we need bullet-control. If a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no innocent bystanders. Was it Chris Rock?
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Only a small percentage of gun owners have the patience to hand-load. I've done it, and it's slow going.
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Re:I guess I'll re-iterate about Jeffries (Score:5, Informative)
only 5 of which were killed by a gun.
nearly every spree killing before 1996 was a shooting.
only one after involved a gun. the rest were arson, or knives.
and each individual incident before 1996 had more fatalities than the incidents that followed 1996
seems like an improvement to me.
nice try.
Re:I guess I'll re-iterate about Jeffries (Score:5, Insightful)
And incidentally the population of australia almost doubled in the same time frame
so the numbers should be re normalized as % of death by massacre to really compare.
One law could eliminate traffic accidents entirely (Score:2)
So the question is what wiil happen? (Score:2)
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Slipery slope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slipery slope (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of your position on this, if the Second Amendment can be restricted so can all the others. They are necessary controls on government power (sans Prohibition), be careful what you wish for.
The 2nd was restricted from the beginning. No prisoners allowed guns. Use the amendment itself as the restriction. Allow it to MILITIA members without restriction. Not a member you get restrictions.
Re:Slipery slope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slipery slope (Score:4, Insightful)
But the second amendment can be restricted. For a start it is an amendment to the original document. There is nothing constitutionally stopping the government from removing that amendment, there is however no political will or capacity to. These are not the same thing.
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The government can't, the people can; and the people won't.
At one time, the US Constitution said it was legal for one human being to own another.
As far as amendments are concerned, the government can, the people can, and the people have in the past.
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hold a constitutional convention
get 3/4ths of the states to agree to change it
until than, lets stop pushing unconstitutional laws and executive actions
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Regardless of your position on this, if the Second Amendment can be restricted so can all the others.
FWIW they all can be restricted (although there's never been a court case on quartering troops AFAIK)
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FWIW they all can be restricted (although there's never been a court case on quartering troops AFAIK)
There is a case right now on just that subject. The police kicked a family out of their own home so they could spy on a neighbor. Unfortunately, I don't have a link handy but I'm sure google would help if you are interested enough.
Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly."
Really, no shit. Allowing people to defend themselves with guns leads to gun-related deaths. Shooting people dead that are invading your house trying to harm you is a bad thing? I suppose they want the homeowners/renters dead instead. Way to cherry pick facts. I have no problem with stand-your-ground as long as it is a justified shooting. Conversely those that not justified stand-your-ground should be an immediate firing squad (see what I did there).
Bullshit facts such as the above are not going to help those who are trying to convince people that all-guns-are-bad.
"By the way, I hear giving people driving licenses leads to an increase in vehicular deaths. We should ban it immediately." I await the all-guns-are-bad people picking apart that statement (while completely missing the point).
Re:Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fallacious headline (Score:2)
The Three Laws (Score:5, Funny)
Laws don't work, so let's have more laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Of 25 firearm laws, nine were associated with reduced firearm mortality, nine were associated with increased firearm mortality, and seven had an inconclusive association....Very few of the existing state-specific firearm laws are associated with reduced firearm mortality
Not enough information in the Lancet summary to draw any conclusions, but expecting a drop of 90% doesn't sound realistic.
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Expanded BG checks impractical (Score:5, Insightful)
This "make background checks mandatory for private sales" thing sounds good, but won't work. It won't work for the same reason that no one pays sales tax at a garage sale: you're supposed to do so, but there's no way for the government to enforce the sales tax laws on people who don't hold a business license.
The existing background check system works because it's tied to firearm dealers' licenses: they've got to do it to keep their business license.
Ironically, during the Clinton administration the feds went on a "too many people have FFLs, let's make them much more expensive and hard to get!" spree. Which now means that many fewer people participate in the background check system, as a result of another initiative that sounded good to people who have a tenuous connection to reality.
For what it's worth, if you do go buy a firearm on the internet, odds are really good that you're getting a background check anyway. Why? Because to ship a firearm, it's got to go from FFL to FFL. And the FFL in your town handling your shipment is required to do a background check.
But, it sure does sounds good to propose such a law: to people who have no clue how things actually work. Which, it turns out, is true of most of the "feel good!" solutions non-gun owners concoct to impose on gun owners. Comes of trying to legislate to match what they see in movies and in cop shows rather than what actually happens in reality. So, I wonder how this study came up with their numbers. Did they just say "hmm, X% of people buying their guns person to person commit a crime, a BG check would magically change that number to 0%"? I suppose it might, if 100% of the people followed the new, easily ignorable law. Considering that they're going and ignoring other, stricter laws to commit their crimes (like, "killing people is illegal"), that sounds rather optimistic.
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So, I wonder how this study came up with their numbers.
If you read the article, mainly by looking at the results of passing various laws at the state level. Which is kind of how it should be: we see what works at the state level and (maybe) implement it at the national level.
(Seriously, is it too much to ask you to read the article before going off on speculated criticism?)
Won't work in all cases but it'll help (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk to some gun owners sometime. You'll find many of them rather uneasy about the idea of selling to someone without a BG check. Thing is, there's nothing you can do other than to sell the gun to a dealer and have them resell it, which of course eats up money you might get. People do what they can to CYA, you can find forms online they'll print and have the other person fill out (none of which they are required to do). Some will just decide to do it through a shop anyways.
I'm one of those people. I'm not super in to firearms, but I like them, own 3 of them, and have a reasonably good working knowledge about them. Some time ago I decided to sell off one of my pistols. I had gotten a second one that I liked much better and didn't want the old one. It was a Glock 17, they sell pretty easy. However I was just uncomfortable selling it with no way of checking on the buyer, so I decided to eat the cost and sold it to a dealer. They offered me about half of what I'd get from an individual, no surprise since they were going to sell it for about what I would get (standard retail markup is about 100%).
I'd love the ability to have a good private BG check system, and you can be damn sure I'd use it.
How much would such a thing help? I'm not sure but I have trouble believing it would hurt.
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Most FFL licensees will conduct a transfer between buyer and seller for a minimal fee. I've seen anywhere from $0 for regular customers up to about $50 with most in the $20-$30 range.
However, the concern about universal background checks had nothing to do with background checks. The legislation that was introduced at the federal level removed significant protections for gun owners; protections that were created in 1986 in exchange for not allowing any more machine guns to be placed on the NFA register.
Unive
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After the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, tough gun controls were bought in requiring gun safety courses, safes, annual licensing, and restriction of semi automatic type weapons and most handguns. One interesting side effect of this, is I never hear about accidental shootings by children anymore. I live in a large Australian city and have never seen a firearm I public except for police and security guards. A handgun on the black market now costs over $5k.
This has been a big cultural change for Australia
Those guys that predict the end of the world (Score:2)
Also call themselves scholars.
It's A Feature (Score:5, Insightful)
while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly
I'm pretty sure that part is a designed feature, where a homeowner can kill a rapist or a burglar.
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You could spend more on mental heath programs (Score:2)
And already published rebuttals... (Score:4, Informative)
Already the objections are being raised in print [sciencemag.org], so it's not like others are overlooking this study.
Of course, the eventual corrections or retraction won't get anywhere near the press the original study did. It never does.
Given 2/3 of deaths by firearms are suicides (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you want to achieve exactly? You want to reduce mass murders? The are spectacular, however they are marginal in the stats. You want to reduce the homicids? Target criminal groups, they are not very likely to respect any legislation about firearms in first place. And to simplify, two thirds of the deaths are suicide and the other is homicids. Accidents and mass murders are marginals.
Okay (Score:4, Insightful)
such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly.
Yeah, and who are the dead people? Because if it's a bunch of criminals that are being killed then - and I hate to say this - I don't care. They had a choice, after all.
I really can't imagine why anyone would think that another person has no right to defend himself, up to and including the use of deadly force where necessary. But, as others have pointed out, this "research" is really anti-gun loonery from the usual suspects.
How it's "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters", I don't know.
No middle ground (Score:4, Interesting)
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Perhaps you should start with watermelons and work your way down to beans. :-)
As usual. (Score:3)
Once again they focus on the guns and not the issues that cause the violence in the first place; poverty, lack of education, unemployment and lack of opportunities to escape poverty.
Sweden has about the same gun ownership rate as the USA but less than half the gun related homicides. Why? It sure as hell isn't the number of people who own guns. Maybe its the culture and the rational and reasonable gun laws they have.
Why arm robots (Score:5, Funny)
Even if they are 3 laws safe it seems dicey to arm them.
Alternately... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simple, we lock every American in their own jail cell 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Gun deaths will plummet.
Alternately, shut down Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland, and Baltimore, and the U.S. drops from #10 out of 44 countries for which there are statistics, to #41.
Which would put it lower than Germany, Sweden, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and Spain, but still higher than Japan or the UK (just like all those other countries are higher than Japan and the UK).
http://www.nationmaster.com/co... [nationmaster.com]
Re:Alternately... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm decidedly pro-gun, but I think we have to be careful with that line of argument. What happens if you cherry-pick the most violent regions of those other countries and shut them down? I don't actually know, but I suspect that the bulk of their violence (including gun violence) also happens in a few bad areas and that their statistics would drop, putting the US back toward the top of the list.
It should also be noted, though, that statistics measuring rates of firearms homicides are inherently biased from the outset. What we should be measuring is rates of homicides (and attempted homicides) with any weapon. Draconian gun control laws do actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of the populace, and therefore do reduce gun deaths... but that really doesn't matter at all to everyone who gets stabbed or beaten to death instead of shot. Now, there's an argument that the presence of guns increases the total homicide rate, and that's an argument worthy of discussion. (However, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's correct, and if you plot the nations of the world on a graph of gun ownership rates against homicide rates [google.com], you'll find no correlation.)
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People were less likely to die from gunshot wounds on the western frontier in the 1800s than they are in modern-day Detroit, Chicago, or Washington DC (all cities with idiotic and unconstitutional victim-disarmament statutes).
You're going to have to support this with some references, because I'm finding contradictory information that appears to be more credible than your assertions:
Rick Santorum’s misguided view of gun control in the Wild West [washingtonpost.com]
“Carrying of guns within the city limits of a frontier town was generally prohibited. Laws barring people from carrying weapons were commonplace, from Dodge City to Tombstone,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “When Dodge City residents first formed their municipal government, one of the very first laws enacted was a ban on concealed carry. The ban was soon after expanded to open carry, too.”
The result was that, by contemporary standards, gun homicides were relatively rare. In cattle towns such as Tombstone or Dodge City, the average number of homicides was only 1.5 or 2 a year, according to path-breaking research by Robert R. Dykstra of SUNY-Albany. The murder rate was much higher in mining towns, such as Bodie, Calif. During its boom years, the town had 29 murders a year...
White noted that the violence was restricted to narrow social milieus, such as armed and drunk young men. “The towns such as the cattle towns that disarmed young men lowered the rates of personal violence considerably,” White wrote. “Those towns such as Bodie and Aurora that did not disarm men tended to bury significantly more of them.”
Homicide Rates in the American West [osu.edu]
For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year...
This is interesting, because Dodge City, with its very strict gun control according to the previous article, had an incredibly high homicide rate. And yet... the towns without gun control were apparently even more violent, also according to the pr
Re:I know how to reduce firearm deaths by 99.9% (Score:4, Informative)
There are a couple of dozen gunfighters' graves on Boot Hill - in about 40 years. Gunfights were a rare occurrence; that's what made them stand out in history.
Re:I know how to reduce firearm deaths by 99.9% (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you'd like to click some of these links - https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Authors of trash fiction and Hollywood have instilled the belief that homicide rates were extremely high in the "wild, wild west". Facts are, there have been hundreds of gunfights in Hollywood, for every real-life gunfight in the American west.
In modern day Hollywood, there have been billions of deaths in space by violence. In reality, how many humans have died in space? And, none by violence.
http://libertarianstandard.com... [libertarianstandard.com]
In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.
In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.
Zooming forward over a century to 2007, a quick look at Uniform Crime Report statistics shows us the following regarding the aforementioned gun control “paradise” cities of the east:
DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
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Re:this is why there is almost no research (Score:5, Insightful)
The CDC isn't allowed to research gun violence because they produced a "scientific" paper that was nothing but a political wish list to ban guns. It was so completely debunked that the fallout was them losing the right to do that research in the future. Basically, they lied so blatantly that they can't be trusted.
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You're making the (sadly typical, in this sort of debate) incorrect assumption that the goal is to prevent everything everywhere. Everyone knows that's impossible. If the US could reduce its gun death rate to the rate of other developed countries, then we'd be getting somewhere.
This, of course, makes the 0.16 per 100,000 figure completely unbelievable. The largest contributor to the firearm death rate, in every country that isn't a warzone, is suicide. It could be possible to reduce the homicide-plus-accide
And STILL even that wouldn't prevent the deaths (Score:5, Informative)
As a very clear example why this (and most) anti-gun "studies" are silly, one large category is suicides. They measured suicides that used guns before a ban/law to how many suicides used guns afterwards. They found that people who kill themselves are less likely to use a gun if guns are less available. What they didn't find was a drastic change in the number of suicides. Still the same number of people dead. They pretend that if someone dies jumping off a bridge, that's fine, suicide is only bad if they use a gun.
This same fundamental error (trick?) is used in most anti-gun studies, they say "gun deaths" and "gun crime". Comparing murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime for the ten years before the UK gun ban vs the ten years after, we find that murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime all doubled immediately after the ban. The kooks publish studies saying it's great that there were fewer "gun murders". According to their reasoning, it's better to have two people stabbed to death than one person shot.
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The Lancet may be a prestigious Medical Journal, but they are morons when it comes to guns.
You know that old line about how you are morel likely to kill a family member? Guess who the lumped in as "family"? Neighbors, acquaintances, husbands with restraints files against them, etc.
They are the dumbest smart people you've ever seen.
Ps: what DOES work (Score:5, Interesting)
I noted above that most gun control laws completely fail to reduce crime, to reduce murders, etc, and they tend to INCREASE rape and sexual assault. There are a couple of things that work, though, in the right combination.
Texas had success with combining a mandatory sentence for make use of a deadly weapon in commission of a crime along with heavy promotion/ advertising of it. On city busses, billboards, etc you'd see ads like this:
Robbery: Two to five years in prison
Using a weapon in a robbery: Ten more years
After the ads were run, fewer robbers used weapons, resulting in fewer deaths. Interviews with convicts confirm that word got around the "thug" community: don't bring a gun if you're thinking of committing a crime.
Similar promotion of the concealed handgun law was also effective. Ads targeting high-crime communities reminded potential bad guys that the good guys now have guns, and may shoot back.
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Oh. Have you?
In sources for that or was it your that ass noted it?
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What the fuck does this have to do with fucking tech? Fucking Slashdot is becoming very, very non-relevant....
Be patient, buddy, we've started a gofundme page to purchase another adjective or two for you!
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Re:correlation != causation (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that even presumes that reducing gun deaths should be a direct policy goal of federal policy at all, something many people disagree with.
That may sound weird but you are spot on. How the hell can these researchers simply lump together all "gun related deaths"? A guy who gets shot while committing a robbery, a woman shooting a guy attempting to rape her, a child finding his dad's gun and shooting his brother by accident, some idiot cleaning a loaded weapon and killing his neighbour, a guy committing suicide by firearm, a cop shooting a fleeing suspect, a wife mistaking her husband for a burglar and shooting him... All of these cases are different and should be counted differently. If a guy gets shot while committing a serious crime, that may not be the sentence that the law prescribes but I call it justice. Screw them, that's the risk of committing violent crimes. That's not a point against gun ownership, but for it, if it means that a violent crime has been prevented. The other examples are points against gun ownership, or at least against letting idiots have guns. But talking about "gun related deaths" is pointless if you fail to distinguish the circumstances under which these events took place.
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Not live in a paranoid fantasy world where criminal hoards are seaking to storm our homes at any moment?
Most of America is incredibly safe. We dont need laws that only encourage people to shoot each other.
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That's from yet another bogus "study" by the Lancet.
As for the Self part. That's just Darwin in action.
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U.S. Department of Justice [bjs.gov] says guns are used over 200 times a day for self-defense.
I've used a gun for self-defense. I was sitting in a BBQ joint minding my own business when someone decided to start beating the hell out of the woman who was with him. He didn't take kindly to me telling someone to call 911 and turned his attention to me. I never had to fire a shot but I did need to be prepared to do so.
I wasn't in a bad part of the country, or state or city. I was with a number of other people in a nice li
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Most of the world got by just fine yesterday without fire extinguishers, paramedics, police officers, safety belts, etc. Do you actually have a cogent point? Should people be reduced to being victimized by those physically stronger? Should people just take their beat-downs and accept it?
Do you just assume that you'll never have to defend yourself and, therefore, no on should have the option to do so?
Or, do you believe that you are physically capable of defending yourself against any threats and too bad for
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So you are trying to say that the reduction in gun deaths in a location RESULTED in a law being passed requiring background checks?
That's not what they said at all. "Correlation does not imply causation" is not at all like "causation in the opposite direction". How could you confuse the two?
the law was obviously causative to the change in deaths
Ah, so your reading comprehension problem was caused by a preexisting bias. Don't worry - with time, that's fixable.
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Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.
-- Edward Tufte
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"Being somewhere they are not supposed to be..." Not what's happening so your argument is worthless.
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Nope. The exact opposite. We are at an all time low for gun accidents. You believe the opposite because the media has been pushing that lie.