Due To Gun Control
By Mitch Berg
Plenty of bloggers fisked the bejeebers out of Nick Coleman’s column from a week ago Sunday (April 13); KAR lit it up pretty well, among several others.
But it’s still sitting out there, taunting me. And so while I’ve been trying to hand off the Nick-fisking duties to the crop of newer bloggers, and have been gratified to see many new Minnesota blogs standing on that wall guarding the Second Amendment, there are some siren calls that can’t be resisted.
Because the fact is that for all of Coleman’s agenda-flogging, he actually makes a few brief nods to something related to fairness.
I went to a die-in at the State Capitol on Wednesday, marking the anniversary of last year’s slaughter at Virginia Tech, where a deranged kid killed 32.I brought my Glock.I didn’t really. It would have been weird and crazy to take a gun to an event marking a massacre, especially the very kind of gun used in the massacre.
Actually, it’s…well, I won’t say “weird and crazy”, but it’s a little odd to lead off with a joke about it.
But then again, this country is weird and crazy about guns.
I went to a local gun store Wednesday (I have a permit) and found I could get a nifty Glock 19 — the 9-millimeter semiautomatic model that Cho Seung-Hui used on April 16, 2007 [not to mention an awful lot of policemen and, let it be noted, tens of thousands of honest citizens – Ed.] — for less than what Cho spent.
He bought his Glock for $571 at a Roanoke, Va., gun store. I could have purchased one Wednesday for $550.
It was on sale! Who says Americans don’t celebrate history?
“So what?” is the first thing to jump to mind. The ebbs and flows of the handgun market have what to do with the story? What’s the connection?
“More expensive handguns equal mass murder?”
The die-in (it was called a lie-in, actually) [then why change the name for your column? – Ed.] was organized by Protect Minnesota, an umbrella group representing five gun-control organizations pushing for tighter rules on sales and universal background checks on buyers. Thirty-two people wore black T-shirts that said, “Minnesotans Against Being Shot” as well as ribbons of maroon and orange (Virginia Tech’s colors) made by families of the victims. One by one, to the solemn beat of a drum, they went down on the Capitol steps and remained motionless, as if asleep.
It was like the state Senate, but without the pompous speeches.
Or the Strib newsroom
OK, it was one of those media events that is easy to mock and, indeed, it was mocked by a few underemployed members of the gun-rights lobby who couldn’t resist the temptation to spoil a somber moment by holding up frat boy signs to the effect that a teacher or student packing heat could have stopped the carnage, which is the kind of thing I wonder about when a cop gets shot.
Leaving aside Coleman’s failed attempt at clairvoyance (he asked the pro-liberty guys what they did for a living?) or the ad-hominem attack (frat boy signs?), or the complete illogic of comparing the “teacher or student packing heat” with a cop, who is paid (inadequately) to go where danger is…
…well, if you leave all of that aside, there’s nothing left to talk about.
Never mind.
Next, Coleman skirts perilously close to fairness…
Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people. And sometimes people with guns kill other people with guns.
…without quite getting there:
It’s as complicated as our feelings, and nobody’s come up with a convincing response to slaughters such as Virginia Tech, especially proposals to let college kids carry guns on campus. Rep. Tony Cornish, a Republican from Good Thunder, introduced one such obscenely timed proposal Wednesday.
Neither Nick Coleman nor I can define obscenity. But like most people, I know it when I see it.
Do you wonder how many guns were sold in the week after Virginia Tech, or Columbine, or Red Lake (hint: plenty). Do you wonder how many people started carrying, with or without a permit, after massacres like those? (Lots). How many NRA memberships are applied for after events like this? (A big surge, usually).
It’s from people who know the real obscenity; that while there is no guarantee that an armed student or teacher could have ended Cho Seung-Hui’s killing spree, having a gun increases your odds of walking away when the next Cho – or mugger, or abusive ex-spouse, or rapist or thug in the street – commits his or her next obscene act.
Still, Coleman does note both sides of one key fact:
The Virginia Tech killer shouldn’t have gotten a gun, because he should have been in a psychiatric ward. Virginia closed that loophole two weeks after the 32 died.
All the more reason, of course, not to assume government will take care of you.
But there remain many loopholes to shut, including in Minnesota, where some unlicensed sellers can still sell guns to unknown buyers without background checks. To tighten those laws is not anti-gun. It is pro-safety.
“It’s harder to transfer title to my fishing boat than a gun,” said St. Paul City Council Member Lee Helgen…
Then perhaps Minnesota’s boat control laws are almost as dumb as our gun control laws?
…who was displaying a gun shot map showing that the area north of the Capitol was well-sprayed with gunfire last month.
I’m confused: Does Mr. Helgen – member of Dave “No puking Republicans!” Thune’s ultraliberal “Gang of Five” bloc on the Saint Paulitburo City Council – think that the “Well-sprayed” North End is being shot up by college professors and 21-or-older students with carry permits?
“I don’t know why everybody has to shoot somebody every time there’s a misunderstanding,” said 70-year-old bus driver Barb Sjerven, who was drawn to the steps by all the commotion while waiting for her Osakis, Minn., sixth-graders to finish touring the Capitol. “I mean, it’s OK to have guns,” Sjerven said. “But it seems like everybody has guns. So I can’t blame [the die-in people] for being concerned. There’s way too much shooting going on. And there’s something wrong with us. There really is.”
You don’t have to be on the side of anything more than common sense to agree with Barb Sjerven from Osakis.
There’s too much shooting.
And none of it is coming from people who give a rat’s ass about gun transfer laws, Lee Helgen’s map, or the “die-in’s” objectives.
It’s coming from criminals; the people who don’t care what the law is; the people who are too addled, impaired or defective to care about laws, morality, symbolic protests or Lee Helgen’s little maps. The people that are drawn to our city by the policies of people like Lee Helgen!
It’s not coming from college students, professors, office workers, bricklayers, bus drivers or even Metro columnists who are over 21, have clean criminal records, training, and the motivation to avoid being the next statistic for someone to mourn on the Capitol steps, under the watchful eye of a media who has the story about the significance of their death already written.
Glocks are on sale all month.
Keep ’em. I hate the trigger pull.
Wait – is that “obscene?”
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:37 am
That was well written, Mitch. Personally, I like the idea that you don’t know if I’m packing. Like I said before, I want that thought in the back of the bad guy’s mind.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:43 am
“in Minnesota, where some unlicensed sellers can still sell guns to unknown buyers without background checks”
Minn. Stat. 624.7132 Subd. 14. Transfer to unknown party. (a) No person shall transfer a pistol or semiautomatic military-style assault weapon to another who is not personally known to the transferor unless the proposed transferee presents evidence of identity to the transferor.
Minn. Stat 609.66 Subd. 1f. Gross misdemeanor; transferring a firearm without background check. A person, other than a federally licensed firearms dealer, who transfers a pistol or semiautomatic military-style assault weapon to another without complying with the transfer requirements of section 624.7132, is guilty of a gross misdemeanor if the transferee possesses or uses the weapon within one year after the transfer in furtherance of a felony crime of violence
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
One of the things that the antis pretend not to understand is that every push for “gun control” laws sells guns. I know lots of folks who are making sure to make lots of purchases before the election; if it’s either Hillary or Obama winning in November, sales will go through the roof for the next six months, at least.
Of course, Coleman, being Coleman, missed the best part of the “lie in”, which one of the posters on the Forum reported:
“They had about 32 ‘lie-ers’, and not many more. One was an infiltrator,who pulled out a sign reading ‘I’d be alive if I had my gun!'”
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
“They had about 32 ‘lie-ers’, and not many more. One was an infiltrator,who pulled out a sign reading ‘I’d be alive if I had my gun!’”
There’s got to be a picture of this. Do you know who this guy is?
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:29 am
No, I don’t. Wish I did; I’d love to buy him a beer.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Me too, and I’m not a gun owner.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Mitch wrote:
“having a gun increases your odds of walking away when the next Cho – or mugger, or abusive ex-spouse, or rapist or thug in the street – commits his or her next obscene act”
It also increases the risk you or someone in your house will beat the next Cho to the punch:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/review_summer_02/comment.html
“The risk of suicide associated with the presence of a firearm in the home is large (an increase of two- to five-fold in most studies), especially when the gun is a handgun or is stored loaded or unlocked.”
It also make it far more likely that you will wind up as the proverbial abusive ex:
“In 1997, the presence of a gun in the home made it 3.4 times more likely a woman would become a homicide victim and 7.2 times as likely she would be a victim of homicide by a spouse, intimate or close relative.”
James E. Bailey et. al., “Risk Factors for Violence Death of Women in the Home,” Archives of Internal Medicine 157, no. 7, 777-782.(1997)
So place your bets and takes your chances.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
That’s right… the gun has that kind of influence on people. Its mind-control waves are actually much stronger than those of the Rove-o-Matic Tele-Control 3000.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm
RickDFL said:
“It also increases the risk you or someone in your house will beat the next Cho to the punch”
Maybe this is the case in the RickDFL household. *shrug*
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I think we also need knife and fist control. It only makes sense.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Rick,
I haven’t had time to go over the Harvard link in great detail – for example, to pick apart the sample studies – but the study you cite doesn’t control for households in which someone has a criminal record, drug, drinking or mental illness problem. And that has a HUGE impact on the numbers. Households without such issues have vastly different records that those with.
In addition, suicide rates don’t drop one iota when guns are banned.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I wonder what the studies would show regarding the presence of a fellon in the home.
How much more likely is it for a woman to become a homicide victim? What if she or another person living in the home is a drunk driver, has a criminal record, or a baby-daddy?
Will those rates drop for the woman if she owns the gun? If the owner of the gun takes lessons? Has a permit? Goes practice shooting? Is a strict parent? Is unemployed? Is on wellfare? Bought the gun legally? “Found the gun”? Uses drugs? Sells drugs? Votes Democrat?
Maybe those factors are not important though… or at least they are not important to DFL Rick.
And Peev. He hates liberty and he hates specifics.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
What’s more, why are MORE people who simply have a gun or guns in the house not victims of gun violence*?
Gun violence may include carelessness, accidents, suicides, inconsistent dosages of medicine, and other factors the general public are not made aware of when these studies are trotted out.
😀
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I seem to remember someone who went through Kellerman’s data set – the one he used to proved that households that contained guns were 2.7 times more likely to be victims of crimes that those that did not – and was able to use that very data to prove that houses that had deadbolt locks were 5.5 times more likely to be burgled than houses that did not.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Mitch writes:
“but the study you cite doesn’t control for households in which someone has a criminal record, drug, drinking or mental illness problem”
Which one? it looks like you meant the second (Bailey). In which case you are wrong.
archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/7/777
The study did factor for “illicit drug use by any member of the household . . .prior domestic violence . . . 1 or more guns in the home . . . and previous arrest of any member of the household”. Each was “independent risk factor” for homicide by a spouse, relative, or close acquaintance. It also looks like they factored in mental illness too, but it was only a risk factor for suicide, not homicide.
But lets put that aside. Are you suggesting stronger laws to prevent gun ownership by those with “a criminal record, drug, drinking or mental illness problem[s]”?
“In addition, suicide rates don’t drop one iota when guns are banned”
Has any society ever had gun-ownership rates comparable to the U.S. and then rapidly banned firearms? If not how can you know this.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:29 pm
When Canada rapidly banned handguns, the gun suicide rate dropped dramatically — as did the men who, instead of committing suicide with handguns, started jumping off high places to kill themselves, instead. (Some, of course, substituted driving at high speeds on the highways and smashed into things.)
The suicide rate didn’t change; the means did.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:44 pm
joelr:
Please look stuff up. Canada never “rapidly banned handguns”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Canada
“the 1970s gradually increased the controls on firearms, while in the late 1970s and 1990s significant increases in controls occurred. A 1996 study showed that Canada was in the mid-range of firearm ownership when compared with eight other western nations. Nearly 22% of Canadian households had at least one firearm” No firearm ban, just some moderate restrictions.
From the same source “The suicide rate in Canada peaked at 15.2 in 1978 and reached a low of 11.3 in 2004”
Do any of you people ever get tired of just making stuff up and calling it facts?
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Do any of you look any further than wikipedia?
April 24th, 2008 at 6:34 am
RickDFL didn’t. If he did, he’d have found the CDC study that shows that there’s no evidence that any “gun control” laws reduce violence or suicide. And, for that matter, he would have found Kleck.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:03 am
I grew up in a house with guns (my mother hunted as well as my dad), we have guns, all of both my husband’s and my extended families have guns (hundreds of people all told) and not once has there been an “act of violence” or an accident (God forbid). My son wears a weapon every day (law enforcement) and locks it (them) up at night since they have toddlers. Brains is what all this is called. And non-pathological lifestyles (fighting, drinking, drugging, etc).
Oh wait…to be honest, I had a great-uncle years ago who shot himself when he was direly sick with lung cancer. Couldn’t breathe and didn’t want to be a burden to his wife. That was terrible (it was in Oregon), but I kind of think leftists are usually all in favor of those that are “burdens” getting out of the way anyhow…
April 24th, 2008 at 8:17 am
I think RickDFL looks as far as he needs to find something that supports his preconceived notions on a topic, then spits it back up into a comment here and proceeds to “speak authoritatively” on said topic.
If you actually read some of the stuff he links, you get to know exactly how low RickDFLs standards are with regard to citation.
Reading this:
“We are none of us always good or evil, completely rational or irrational, immutably condemned to despair or protected from destructive impulse.”
followed by this:
“t is precisely because our lives have dimension and our actions range, that the mantra ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ is properly seen as a reason to thoughtfully reduce, not reflexively ease, ready access to guns, especially for those who are at particularly high risk to use a gun to harm themselves or others.”
tells me this: health professionals have preconceived notions too. Matthew Miller thinks nobody is responsible enough to own a firearm, so he wrote this “comment” RickDFL cites. Wow. Another “Health Professional Constructs Study To Support Personal Opinion” story, fighting against the “epidemic” of gun violence. Lame.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Yossarian:
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
joelr:
If you have a CDC or Kleck study showing that a handgun in the home is not an independent risk factor for suicide or killing a member of the household, please let us know.
Colleen:
Your personal experience does not change the fact that a firearm in the home is a risk factor for homicide and suicide.
Troy:
The neat thing about science is that the truth of it’s conclusions are independent of the motives of particular scientists. If you think there is some scientific flaw in the studies Miller cites, feel free to point it out.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
“…a firearm in the home is a risk factor for homicide and suicide.”
So are sleeping pills and other medication. And neightbors who sell crack.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Badda:
The latter is illegal, as for the former, do you have some evidence for this?
April 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
The neat thing about science is that the truth of it’s conclusions are independent of the motives of particular scientists.
Stuff and nonsense.
Conclusions can be – and routinely are – biased based on *what* is studied (the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study that claimed a gun in the home was “43 times as likely to kill the owner or family member/acquaintance as an intruder” studied only King County Washington), *how* the “conclusions” are portrayed among non-scientists (the “43:1” conclusion in the NEJM study was itself portrayed grossly out of context in the media, lumping suicides in with self-defense and calling shootings among criminals who knew each other or justified shootings of abusive spouses “shooting someone you know” and scope (the NEJM study focused on killings and ignored deterrences).
For for sake of your comment, let’s assume that a *scientist* acting under absolutely pure motives *is* above politics. You are no scientist! You’re a comment-section polemicist who cherry-picks things that fit his point of view. No more!
Here’s your flaw, Rick – or, more accurately, the disconnect that makes communication with you so very difficult as long as you’re using the “data” you’re using, which is tends to be either fundamentally unscientific (like the Miller study, which is, in fact, entirely agenda-based; Harvard Public Health allied itself with Sarah Brady in the ’90s, and has acted as a de facto research arm ever since then) or, at the very least, presented with the scientific context carefully truncated for rhetorical and political purposes. You mix agenda-enabling conclusions up with “science” pretty promiscously, Rick.
Miller’s study is no more germane to a realistic appraisal of the issue than, say, citing infant mortality stats as a justification for stalinizing healthcare, in this case because it completely ignored the countervailing benefits of civilian gun use.
Let’s go back to the NEJM “study” that was the bulwark of so many anti-gun screeds for so many years. Steve Kao, a Second Amendment activist from Seattle (where the “study” took place) noted that of the “43” in the 43:1 ratio, 37 were suicides. Of the remaining shootings, the vast majority were, indeed, among acquaintances – but the study counted drug dealers shooting customers or other dealers known to them, and people shooting their abusive significant others (in cases that were ruled justifiable!), or burglars or attackers or rapists they knew from one place or another, as acquaintance shootings!
Kao took this data, factored for criminal record/drug/alcohol/mental illness in the house, and pro-rated the most conservative estimate of deterrences (the FBI’s, which at that time figured 80,000 deterrrences a year in the entire US) and came up with the following:
A gun in a house where someone – anyone – has a crime record, mental illness, or drug/booze problem is about equally likely to kill someone the owner knows as to prevent a crime or shoot an attacker.
A gun in a house where nobody has such a problem is 400 times as likely to deter a crime than kill someone the owner knows. And that’s using the FBI’s numbers; Kleck (a liberal writing to some extent against interest – like a scientist should!) has estimates of deterrence that are much higher than the FBI’s, the ratio is even better.
The *real* conclusions, rather than “guns are bad”, is that “impaired people shouldn’t have guns”.
As long as you want to gesticulate toward Europe, let’s talk ill effects for a moment. Great Britain banned guns very quickly – and their violent crime rate skyrocketed. Their rates of violent, aggravated assault quickly topped US rates. Worse, the “hot” burglary (burglaries where someone is home) rate in the UK is over 50% now; in the US, given the likelihood of encountering armed homeowners, it’s more like 13%, and that tends to be concentrated in places like Chicago and DC, where the law-abiding are disarmed.
Finally – nobody argues that guns in the wrong hands aren’t dangerous. And I generally don’t gnosh around with suicide stats much, since the problem really has nothing to do with guns (as Joel and the CDC both noted). The NRA supports measure that keep guns out of the wrong hands (the left’s gun control measure universally punish the law-abiding and do nothing to keep guns out of the wrong hands whatsoever, as we’ve found in DC and Chicago).
There is no reasonable discussion about this issue without considering the benefit side of the equation. And it – if you read Kleck (hahaha) is pretty overwhelming.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Yup. The NRA, in my strongly-held opinion, is wrong on some of this; I think that when a felon’s sentence expires (I include probation/parole as part of the sentence), all of his rights should be restored, including both his franchise and RKBA. If he’s too dangerous to be allowed the tools to defend himself, he’s too dangerous to be let out in public without supervision.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
RickDFL said:
“The neat thing about science…”
So you admit you know very little about science, and instead wrap around yourself a dogmatic faith in selected “scientists” who happen to support your preconceived notions. Bravo!
“The neat thing about Santa Claus…”
April 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
DFL Rick,
Sleeping pills are not illegal, and neither is medication. You’re doctor gives you a perscription… voila. Sometimes folks know people who have medication.
Crack dealers usually live in neighborhoods… and thus have neighbors. You can read that in the newspapers. Even fishwrapers admit this. What’s more, it isn’t illegal to live next door to a crack dealer… but it is not desireable.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Mitch wrote:
“You’re a comment-section polemicist who cherry-picks things that fit his point of view.”
Then, instead of five paragraphs of hyperventilating, it should not be too hard to point out some scientific flaw in the Bailey study or in the studies Miller refers to like this one
http://www.jtrauma.com/pt/re/jtrauma/abstract.00005373-200202000-00011.htm;jsessionid=LRBFgCJ7jrdyWN9K4SxBwbWKhfh9RS59pJVK7BpJqrpjVLnX8tHh!553210824!181195629!8091!-1
Or you could produce another study contradicting the claim that gun ownership is risk factor for homicide and suicide.
“Miller’s study . . . completely ignored the countervailing benefits of civilian gun use”. There may be such benefits, as my first post indicated. But to weigh the costs and benefits you need to accurately measure both. I simply pointed to some scientific studies that measured the costs. If you want to accept those studies as accurate measures of the costs, we can move on to study the benefits.
Re: Kao and the NEJM, could you provide a link to the study, I can not find it.
Re: “Great Britain banned guns very quickly” When? What bill?
“And I generally don’t gnosh around with suicide stats much, since the problem really has nothing to do with guns (as Joel and the CDC both noted)”
Well neither you nor Joel can produce this study. Here is what I found from the CDC on guns and suicide:
http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm
“The suicide rate for children in the United States was two times higher than that in the other 25 countries combined (0.55 compared with 0.27) . . .[N]onfirearm-related suicide rates were similar in the United States and in all of the other countries combined (0.23 compared with 0.24).” Ergo the excess U.S. child suicide rate comes almost entirely from gun-suicides.
“There is no reasonable discussion about this issue without considering the benefit side of the equation.” Agreed. And when you present evidence for the benefits, I hope my response will be more judicious than your reaction above.
I would be happy to start with Kleck who wrote: “there is little or no need for a gun for self-protection because there’s so little risk of crime. People don’t believe it, but it’s true. You just can’t convince most Americans they’re not at serious risk”
April 24th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Badda:
“Sleeping pills are not illegal”. Please tell me you understand the verbal construction ‘the latter . . . the former”.
“it isn’t illegal to live next door to a crack dealer” But it is illegal to be a crack dealer, which is about as far as you can go towards making it illegal for them to live next to anyone.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
RickDFL said:
“scientific”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Troy:
“I do not think it means what you think it means” Well anything is possible, after all you remembered to breathe today. So, pray tell, are the Miller, Bailey, and CDC studies I cited examples of science? If not what is wrong with them from a scientific point of view?
April 24th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
RickDFL:
I’m sure they are about as scientific as the given “scientist” decides they will be. They choose what to study, they choose their bounds, and they choose whatever amount of SAS/SPSS jockeying they will do to bring about a conclusion to their study. And then they choose their words.
Millers “comment” made it quite clear where he stood, and the grounds for his standing were less than “scientific”.
It is fitting the you cited him, but less than convincing.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Mitch said:
“citing infant mortality stats as a justification for stalinizing healthcare”
Typical RickDFL, the “junk scientist”.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Troy:
“I’m sure they are about as scientific as the given “scientist” decides they will be” So does scientific knowledge exist at all? If so, what is the difference between that and the studies I cited.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:22 am
RickDFL:
Knowledge exists, RickDFL, rest assured. However, adding “scientific” to it does not make it magically irrefutable.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:12 am
DFL Rick:
Please tell me you understand the verbal construction ‘the latter . . . the former”.
Absolutely not, I’m much more familiar with you snarking like a rabid vole. Please rephrase, Snotty.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Rick, I’m having trouble understanding your point.
I assume the studies you’ve cited say exactly what you say they say – that homes where guns are present are more likely to experience suicides – and I’ll assume there are no contrary studies at all. Okay we’re assuming that’s all true, but so what?
Do guns cause suicides? So we should ban guns to save lives? Is that the point?
How do you know the guns cause the suicides? Maybe suicidal people are just more likely to buy guns. If we ban guns, would that save their lives or would they just resort to other means?
And how did you determine the trade-off between the number of people whose lives will be saved by taking away their guns so they can’t commit suicide with them, reduced by the number who switch to other means, versus the number of non-suicidal former gun owners who get killed by intruders because they’re now disarmed?
I get that you’re being scientific and all, but I am having trouble following the math to get to gun bans being the best answer.
Consider it another way: supposedly dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession (I don’t know if that’s true or merely an urban myth but assume it’s true just as we assumed your studies were true).
Is there something in the schooling to become a dentist that drives people suicidal? Or are suicidal people more likely to seek out dentist jobs?
Either way, should we ban dentistry to prevent dentist suicides? At what cost in terms of the oral health in the rest of the population?
I guess the real question isn’t whether your use of gun suicide studies is a legitimate basis for a public policy discussion about private ownership of firearms, or merely an example of the post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy, but whether the studies matter at all if they fail to consider the consequences on the non-suicidal of banning guns.
.
April 26th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Nate:
Interesting questions.
“If we ban guns, would that save their lives or would they just resort to other means?”
This seems unlikely. The U.S. has extra suicide deaths. If our higher firearm suicide rate was simply Americans substituting a firearm for another lethal method, then our overall suicide rate should be similar to other countries. The number of extra deaths corresponds very closely with the number of firearm suicides. In the U.S., the rate of extra firearm suicides seems to vary from state to state directly with the rate of firearm ownership. So unless you can come up with some reason to explain why Americans kill themselves at higher rates, then it seems likely that reducing the number of firearms in homes would reduce the suicide rate.
“So we should ban guns to save lives? Is that the point?”
The first point is simply that it does not seem that for the average person owning a gun will make you safer. The added risk of suicide or homicide seems to outweigh any crime protection benefits. As a matter of personal choice most people are probably better off not owning a firearm. As for public policy, I don’t know. Maybe all these extra deaths are just the price we have to pay for having a society with high rates of firearm ownership. But any debate about the policy should start with an honest view of the facts.
“should we ban dentistry to prevent dentist suicides”
Given the overwhelming benefits of dentistry, no. Given the very small numbers of extra dental suicides, those guys just have to take one for the team.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010420.html
April 26th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Troy:
With every post you mine new levels of obscurity. At this point, I really have no idea what point you are trying to make. Since you can not point to any defect in the studies I mentioned, there is not point to our discussion
April 27th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
RickDFL said:
“there is not point to our discussion”
I’m sorry RickDFL, but I already knew that. I also explained why, whether you comprehended it or not. I would say it is a shame that it took you so long to figure it out, but judging from your reply to nate, I guess it was a major accomplishment for you. Your density truly inspires awe, RickDFL.