It was essentially entirely made up, many of the questions were based around whether people felt safer having a gun on them, and if they felt confident defending themselves from a shady person IF that person had done anything, and they counted these instances as incidents thwarted by having a gun.

It was asinine.

To my pro gun friends who say "but what if", I always ask "how many times have you felt so unsafe you had to use it?" I believe the answer is 0. Obviously doesn't mean there aren't times a gun hasn't been helpful but the situation is so rare it (especially in middle class suburbia) it's such a joke for these people to act like they are getting home invaded every couple of years.

Do you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen?

Statistics dont say Im more likely to murder my children than put out a fire with that extinguisher

A+

Don't forget about the one in Toronto too. Or are we just focusing this thread on countries with tight gun laws?

By the way, how many people were shot by that lunatic in dallas?

I'm not sure "we" are doing anything. I posted a picture because I found it compelling. YMMV

I will answer a rhetorical question by noting that the answer is the reason why I said we would probably forget about this one quickly.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but the reason I said it was because it doesn't fit even the most liberal definition of mass shooting. I agree that the photo you posted would be iconic in the unfortunate circumstances that the nut case was actually successful.

Your complaint about my posting a picture of an attempted (but unsuccessful) mass shooter is noted.

But the other half of the thread title is just "gun control", and the OP is an article about "gun culture". Seemed relevant to me. Also maybe what I find so compelling is just that he looks like an unfortunate player created character in one of those call of duty games :P

“On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and fired upon a group of police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five officers and injuring nine others. Two civilians were also wounded.”

Obvious oversimplifications, but:

You're basically never getting robbed or assaulted.

You're also basically never going to harm yourself or someone else by accident owning a gun.

But the latter % chance is higher than the former.

People are dumb and don't realize they actually become less safe by the presence of a gun. There's also the additional risk of anyone getting access and committing suicide. Unfortunately, psychology plays a big part in that along with the influence of politics and ignorance. Once you have that ****ed up experience of thinking you could die today and the idea that a gun might have prevented it, it's very easy to see why people insist on ownership of a gun, despite the clear cut data and odds of outcomes already known.

The biggest problem the US has regarding guns right now is the NRA. Their sole interest is to sell more guns. It's the blind libertarian avenue taken that ignores the drawback of human greed and the subsequent corruption it inevitably breeds without any countermeasure. The NRA is corrupt and there's really not much else to discuss. Nothing can change until either that changes or a greater power muscles it into change, after which reasonable and practical policy can be implemented. Right now, the NRA just fights everything and they have the most leverage...For now

Fail. The presence of a fire extinguisher makes the home MORE safe.

The presence of a gun makes the home LESS safe.

Obviously there are circumstances where the home becomes more safe, but only in certain circumstances, and the gun owner must always know what he or she is doing. Therein lies the problem. You in particular or others who know their way around a gun or are clearly not idiots are less likely to have an accident, but the average person simply isn't as unlikely to have a lethal ****up. And the non idiots aren't infallible either...

The current state of gun policy in the US effectively refuses to remedy or at least attempt to improve on that.

You and anyone else who insists on white knighting the status quo cannot be taken seriously, ever, until that attitude changes

Can unsupervised children kill themselves with a fire extinguisher?

I do not know my way around a gun (although I have shot friends guns including once when a shot an AR15 in each hand once) and I am not "white knighting the status quo". I do think we should have stricter laws on who can purchase a gun and would also like to see us add a required hour long class every 4 or 5 years where a gun owner demonstrates they can still handle the gun safely.

I also think we should require those with drivers licenses to pass a driving test every 4-5 years as well. It is ludicrous that we allow someone to pass one 20 minutes test when they are 16 and they are good for the next 100 years. Even if we can't get the mandatory drivers test every so often passed I'd still support the occasionally gun handling test.

Yes, there have been a few reported cases of kids and even adults killing themselves/others with a fire extinguisher. I haven't seen any studies, but they seem to be even more rare than accidental gun deaths.

Late to the party, but graphs can say whatever you like depending on the data you feed into them.



Get your **** together, Venezuela.

Well over half of America's gun related deaths are suicide. Do you believe those suicides are to be blamed on access to guns, or would those people find another way? Take those off the list and adjust other countries accordingly and suddenly USA isn't such an outlier.

The number of people in the US that die in random acts of gun violence or domestic terrorism is such a small number as to be largely meaningless in the overall statistics. The criminals won't stop killing each other if you take guns away from law abiding citizens, and law abiding citizens won't stop killing themselves if you take away their guns, either.

"If it saves just ONE life!" is all you've got left to hang your hat on at that point, and I can think of about 20 different topics off the top of my head that would be better to place your anger toward and would make a bigger difference if that's all we're relying on. The most notable one would probably be the existence and free accessibility of alcohol. How many of those suicides began with a few drinks?

Mass shootings would certainly go down in a world without guns. But that ship has sailed. Cigarettes have led to more premature deaths than guns, but I don't see that thread, either. That's because every once in a while we get stories that are clear examples of innocent bystanders being killed by deranged lunatics and the gun is their weapon of choice. People who smoke are mostly just killing themselves, so **** em, right?

I guarantee you more people are killed each year by repeat offense drunk drivers than mass shootings. We can't ban cars and we won't lock people away for drunk driving, so I guess we just ignore that problem because it's inconvenient. Much easier to latch on to a few examples of unjust gun deaths and attack the gun-loving party for being *******s. The outrage is all so empty and contrived.


I am not a gun owner, btw. The owner of our company is a gun enthusiast and offered to buy everyone in the company a firearm for Christmas last year. I turned it down because I didn't want one in the house. That's my choice, but I have no right to make it for anyone else.

"NRA just wants to sell more guns" is definitely the hottest take ITT.

Urgghh...absolutely the US is a outlier in the Western World if you remove suicides. It's not just guns but the first place to look, for example, if you want to explain why the US murder rate is way higher than just about every comparable country (4.5 x higher, or thereabouts, than the UK for example). Pretty much every Western country looks at the US gun laws with amazement and scoffs at the "good guy with a gun" bull****.

I looked at the US suicide rate in the US a while back and it was a little higher than I'd expect, by comparison with elsewhere, but not massively so. But it's surely the case that guns do have some impact, though of course it's hard to measure.

Not all suicides but some portion of successful suicides occur because of the easy access to a very lethal tool. If some portions of suicides are impulsive, that is the suicidal intent spikes up at certain times and subsides later, removing a way to fulfill that impulse would mean less suicides or changing the action from something with a high lethality, guns, to something with a lower lethality, like pills, would save lives.




I can't tell if I should call this the lump of violence fallacy or the final destination fallacy. I think I'd go with final destination fallacy because imagines that some portion of people have to die every year and there's nothing that can be done about it.

People are violent the world around, people get in fights, but elsewhere when people get angry they might punch or maybe grab a knife instead of a gun. The end result is that someone might get bruised or maybe stabbed but they'll live. In the US they grab a gun and the other person dies.

"but if you take away the law abiding citizens gun only the outlaws will have them!". Which is true, but it'll take work to get a gun and most criminals don't want to put in a lot of work. There are criminals in England that have guns, but there are far fewer of them resulting in less gun deaths.

What I take away from the version you posted is not significantly different from what I take away from the version I posted. I will grant that other socio-political issues can contribute to gun violence, hence Brazil and Venezuela are outliers for reasons unrelated to gun control, but the presence of a couple of outliers doesn't alter the point of the graph at all.

It's well known that suicide-by-gun is far more effective than other means, so it's reasonable to conclude that if we had fewer guns we'd have fewer suicides as well, and yes I think that is also a legitimate reason to have fewer guns. People suffering from suicidal ideation who do not have access to such lethal means of carrying out their ideas are more likely to find the help they need and recover.

The data directly contradicts your last two sentences, which also do not follow from your first (true) statement. If there are fewer guns there will be fewer deaths. I agree that gun violence and suicide are not the biggest contributors to mortality overall, but I think you misconstrue the argument.

The calculation being made is not purely one of magnitude, it's about costs and benefits. I would also love to see fewer people die of heart disease, and if there was some clear low-hanging fruit policy change that would help accomplish this in a relatively low-cost way then I would absolutely prioritize that policy change, even over gun control. I'm not sure there is, but of course I also support healthcare reform, just as an example. But part of the argument for gun control is simply that -- regardless of the relative contribution of gun violence/suicide to overall mortality -- many of those deaths are needless and could be relatively easily prevented. It doesn't follow from the fact that there are other social problems that we shouldn't try to address this one.

I think there's also some point to be made about mass shootings having a psychological toll that is relevant in a way that doesn't reduce entirely to just statistics, but even if you don't accept that argument I don't think "guns aren't the single biggest problem therefore we should do nothing about them" is a good argument.

How has that ship sailed? It's not impossible to change our gun laws.

Also, the funny thing about the example you picked here is that I would be quite happy if we pursued gun control as aggressively as we pursued regulation related to smoking over the last 30 years. One reason there is no thread on cigarettes is probably that most of us feel that we've already taken pretty reasonable steps in relation to regulating them, again in the context of some cost/benefit analysis.

But, I think a thread about regulating vaping would be interesting too... :P

There are 200ish countries in the world. Why am I only seeing 40ish on that chart? I am sure more than 40 keep those statistics.

I believe the original creator of the chart was intentionally favoring other developed western countries.

It looks like you could get data to build your own, larger, version from here:

https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/c..._of_gun_deaths
https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/c...arm_possession

Thanks for posting. Very interesting although it would take a lot of work to really compare more countries as I don't think those links are spitting out per capita numbers.

Total homicides instead of just gun deaths would also make it more interesting.

Derp. One link I posted is rates of firearm posession per 100 people, but the one for deaths is total. But, there are stats that are rates per 100 people for other death/injury stats too, which should be used instead of what I linked.

https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

You have a fire extinguisher in your house because you have a fire producing device in your house... The presence of your kitchen makes the house more dangerous, not the fire extinguisher. And yet, the fire extinguisher itself is a dangerous tool, which can be mishandled, or suffer from defective manufacturing.

Many kids have seriously injured or killed themselves and/or their families by being allowed unsupervised access to the kitchen. Sometimes the fire extinguisher prevents those deaths, sometimes not.

(As an aside, have you ever practiced putting out a fire with a consumer fire extinguisher? Do you even know how one works, how to check to see if it will work, or whether it might be out of it's service life? Have you ever sought training for the use of fire prevention equipment? Have you assured that your family and kids know where the fire extinguishers are, and when and how to use it? You do have a couple fire extinguishers, right?)

Many people have burned down apartment buildings by failing to safely use their kitchen. It is fresh in my mind as it happened in the town near to mine just recently.

~~~

Statistics in the USA show us that the counties with the most restrictions on gun rights tend to have the worst homicide and violent crime rates.

Statistics also show that violent crime in the USA is on a multi decade low, and that gun ownership and guns in circulation is at an all-time high.

Probably you will therefore agree that statistics are poor help with this issue.

~~~

I insist on following the Constitution, and the laws that have been collectively agreed upon.

The process for changing the Constitution is clear, it is easy to follow, it has been done before so you don't even have to figure it out on your own. All you have to do is convince 75% of the people in flyover country to agree with you.

For the moment, tho, you don't have even a majority, let alone 75% of the states. (This is the reason why the NRA has the power it has -- it has the membership to back them up. I get it though, while it's clear many here are filled with hate of the NRA, the reality is that hate is of the NRA's members. The NRA's mission is, and goals are, btw, not "selling guns". There is an "about" page on its website which can update you if you're interested.) The People mentioned in the 2nd Amendment, are the same People mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution.

I don't take you seriously. I don't expect you to take me seriously.

The biggest social issue of widespread gun ownership is probably impulse suicide. Then again gun control measures probably rarely touches on weapons that relates to that (hunting rifles, shotguns and perhaps even small-calibre handguns if you like the odds of being in a vegetative state), being more focused on the weapons we see used in mass murders. And no, they won't always just go out and find another way to off themselves. Some will, but far less.

Mass murders, the chief issue brought up in the gun control debate, make up a small, but significant, amount of gun violence in the US (1-3% depending on how you define gun violence). That is not a small number, but it is small enough that even if you reduce it by 50%... you're not really making that much a difference to the over-all problem. Obviously you could argue that there are other reasons to target mass murder specifically, it's cultural impact is enormous and it probably reduces trust between citizens on a far broader scale than its impact on murder rates imply. Still, going after specific guns which are effective at mass murder probably wouldn't impact that, the trust issues and cultural issues of mass murders would probably remain even if the death tolls are lowered.

The most effective way to target gun violence would be to relate gun control to behaviors we know are greatly linked to likelihood of homicide or attempted homicide. The primary two here would be violent behavior and severe crime, especially spousal abuse.

Targeting mental health problems in general would be a huge miss. People with mental-health issues that increase odds of homicide or attempted homicide will be much better targeted by using gun control aimed at predictors like violent behavior. If you exclude those, the population with mental health issues are more likely to be targets of gun violence, their chance at being perpetrators are not different from the general population.

(tl;dr version: If you want effective gun control, stop easy access to guns for people who have displayed violent behavior, especially spousal abuse)

Your cherry picking is showing bro. You know why you chose the words violent crime and not gun violence in the above? Because whole violent crime is at a multi-decade low, gun violence has not decreased AT ALL since the late 90s. Which means a higher share of violent crime is gun based, which is exactly what we expect with an increase in gun circulation and ownership.

So gun ownership and guns in circulation has increased dramatically, at the same time violent crime has dropped, and gun crimes has stayed constant?

Please confirm this is what you are arguing.