https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...FFN/story.html

I thought I was done with this thread but you gave me something else to think about well named. Poverty is a major factor of why there is so much violence and crime in major urban areas in this country.
I firmly believe this and will absolutely not apologize for it.

This is what I mean when I say the NRA has zero credibility, although they could earn some in this moment

Instead of protesting tv shows like MacGyver
Instead of protesting gun manufacturers about to introduce a "smart" gun
Instead of supporting the passing of laws like the Dickey Amendment
Instead of making every reasonable and sensible regulation DOA

With this as an inspiration, put the full weight of their power behind a national campaign to reduce gun violence dramatically in every city. Start with St. Louis, and mow them down one by one

Shrink the pool of senseless murders in every densely populated area in the country until they're small enough to drown in a bathtub

Thanks for the article WN.

The following will be from asking, not having researched it yet, so people can ignore if they don't like that perspective.

Quotes from the article WN quoted:

"But urban violence is the second biggest category, making up a majority of the 14,000 gun homicides that same year.

“Since October 2001, 410 people have died in domestic terrorist attacks and 520 have died in mass shootings,” Abt writes. “During that same period, at least one hundred thousand lost their lives to urban violence."

Is this saying that there were 14,000 gun homicides and 100,000 urban homicides, so therefore roughly 14% of homicides are gun related? That sounds like a small percentage to me, though, clearly 14,000 gun homicides is still a very high number. Just thinking this trough. I'm going to see if I can find per country homicide numbers, including gun and non-gun homicides.

Edit: easy to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._homicide_rate

U.S. is pretty bad, in the range of Argentina and Ukraine.

Changed the bolding to point out what you misread. A quick check of tables in wiki shows a homicide rate of 5.30 and a gun homicide rate of 4.46 (both per 100,000 inhabitants). I haven't checked if they are from the same year/study or whatever but that would imply ~84% of homicides are gun related.

Thanks for that. So it is pretty bad.

It's a hard issue for me since I believe in gun rights to protect us from the tyranny of our own government, not so much as protection from common violence.

I also recognize the philosophical(?) problems with the right to bear arms as against the government, because how could the government ever allow that? I recognize the tension.

Re: looking for better research on the link between gun ownership and gun violence, I stumbled upon this forthcoming article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine: Firearm Ownership and Domestic Versus Nondomestic Homicide in the U.S. (full text here)

That last statistic is interesting. It seems like you could sum this data up by saying that owning a gun increases your risk of being killed by someone you know, but (for men at least) slightly decreases your risk of being killed by someone you don't know. Maybe this makes some intuitive sense.

The NRA used to (still does?) publish articles every month or quarter showing use of firearms to defend against firearm threats - usually robbery. Like clockwork, they would publish 3-5 short blurbs combed from police reports throughout the country. I doubt this data has been consolidated.

That said, I highly doubt that there is a net benefit in this sense from gun ownership, just that a lot of the data is probably unavailable.

Consolidating the data is essentially what the report well named quoted was trying to do. It's somewhat general in that it deals with firearm ownership without considerations of things like concealed/open carry laws but it shows that the net effect of firearm ownership is that you're more likely to be the victim of homicide by firearm.

Yes, but the report does not account for "gun violence avoided/prevented because the victim had a gun."

The main example I used to read (NRA member in the nineties) was about robbery avoided, or even murder avoided. All I'm saying is examples like that would not show up. Well, I guess, in a way, murder avoided would show up as a non-homicide victim. But a lot of the benefits of gun ownership would not show up. That said, I am not saying accounting for such benefits would turn the data to a pro-gun result.

WellNamed,

So is this another of the "for households where a homicide occurred, was there a gun present" type of study? Looks to be that way.

(Makes one wonder about whether households where guns are present, but no homicide occur, ever get included in these statistics...)

No, their data is not that granular. They are just using a regression model per state to find the association between state-level gun ownership rates and state-level homicide data, e.g.

The data do not tell them specifically whether the victim's household had a gun, although I think the results suggest that it's likely a factor, i.e. because of the fact that they found a correlation for domestic but not non-domestic homicide.

It's true that they can't directly account for "violence avoided because the victim had a gun" (just like they aren't directly measuring gun ownership as a cause of gun homicide, only as a correlate), however it makes sense to think that if gun ownership helped people avoid gun violence then you would see a negative correlation between the variables, as you do in the last statistic I quoted for homicide rates involving strangers. So, indirectly, there is some accounting for that question.

I would guess the main avenue for criticism is going to involve the regression model, particularly this part:

These kinds of techniques to infer missing data can work, but 33% of cases is very large, so I'd be worried about that. I assume we'd have to find the Fox and Swatt study to see if they've empirically tested the method used to infer missing data. That's potentially a big asterisk since error introduced via this model could easily overwhelm the correlation identified, and I'm not sure to what extent they can model that error in their confidence intervals. Maybe they can, it's a bit above my pay grade and I haven't read the whole study that carefully.

That's implied by the effect it has on how likely you are to be a victim of homicide by strangers. If owning a gun had the effect of protecting yourself from murder than that would be shown by the figures because people who own firearms should be victims less frequently. And in fact specifically for males it does show a slight but statistically significant trend in that direction. However that is counteracted by an increase in the likelihood of being a victim of domestic homicide so the study implies that the net result is at best about neutral for males and definitely negative for females.

Agreed, as I said, re murders avoided. But the study cannot be accounting for robberies (or any non-homicide crime) avoided due to victim gun ownership.

Yeah sorry, I was guilty of skimming your post too quickly and missed that you did mention that murder avoided would show up.

No worries.

I know I’m just one guy with one vote, but at this point if there were a ballot measure to cut the 2A out of the Bill of Rights with a set of hedge trimmers, I’d vote for it.

I don't know what the process is but the left should go for a vote. Referenda can take on a life of their own so don't assume it will lose because of polls. Make it a huge political issue (a real one, not a name calling one) and even if it fails this time it can force the pace of change.

There is no such thing as a national referendum on enacting a specific law in the USA. Essentially repealing the 2nd Amendment would require another amendment which is how prohibition ended. The Dem candidates will not be supporting a 2nd Amendment repeal in the 2020 election cycle. They’ll roll out their usual rhetoric on banning assault weapons, stricter background checks, etc. Their opponents will point out (accurately) how this won’t do much at all to stop these events. Actually legal precedents on gun ownership are pretty well established as the 2nd Amendment has been around for a long time.

I agree they will do nothing. I think they are badly mistaken and need to start the ball rolling on repealing the 2nd.

How I don't know- part of the problem in the USA system is there's way such limited ways to change anything but they need to try and build momentum somehow.

It's why, I think, we see some on the left resorting to the name calling thingy approach to try to fix things. It's hopeless but it's all that's left once you give up on political answers.

Repealing the 2nd a is not practical and won't solve the problem.
The problem in this country is the Radicilazation of the right.

Any source for this? Percent of murders in the USA by people in the “radicalized right”? Hell even a split of murders by left/right would support your argument a bit.

I dunno. It seems Britain is going through similar cultural dynamics (with Brexit and now Boris being comparable to the Donald Trump phenomenon). However, their murder rate is much much lower than ours, and it seems the lack of guns and a gun culture is the main reason for this.

It's a start towards solving a problem.

It;'s hard to see any good solutions to the political problems at the moment, only good places to start. Even when the dems get back, will it make much difference long term unless they actually change things?

This week?

Like you said, it's a start. There are no easy, quick solutions.
The situation is sort of like climate change. The longer we do nothing about it, the worse it will get and the harder it will be to fix it.
It seems this country is truly entering a crisis.

Will we ever eradicate racism and hate? Of course not.
But extreme hate groups like neo Nazis and the kkk cannot be allowed to become mainstream and acceptable. Before it's too late!

Oh, and this whole bs about how only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns? Well, the good guys took down the Dayton shooter in one minute. In a minute! That's why he only managed to kill 9 people in one minute. In one minute!