You Know Less Than You Think About Guns
reason.com
reason.com
https://hackpad.com/Gun-Rights-Statistics-UBI1bkaNgG6#:h=No-...
Raw data and interactive charts here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N5JsB-_kTxFSW-14f7Bv...
I think it is interesting that, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the lowest murder-rate states are northern, mostly rural, and overwhelmingly white. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that, aside from the general trend that these aren't states where there is a lot of ethnic gang violence.
If that's accurate, it's a vicious, massively destructive cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
[2] e.g. outlier city "Baltimore’s City Police Commissioner Anthony Batts says that 80 percent are drug-related." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/01/the-year-in...
"Eighty percent of the homicides were gang-related, [Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy] said" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/chicago-homicide-ra...
New Orleans Police Department: "29% of all murders in #NOLA this year involved a gang member. That's down from 42% this same time last year." https://twitter.com/nopdnews/status/618864980364898305
And in some California cities "gang homicides only accounted for 29 percent of the total for the period under consideration (2003-2008)" I question the use of "only" here. :P http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-g...
On the other hand, The National Gang Center says (based on survey data): "These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually." https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring...
https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c...
Do you know of a similar analysis of crime?
"the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) [in violence] and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation." https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem...
"Despite a large difference in mean levels of family disruption between black and white communities, the percentage of white families headed by a female also had a significant effect on white juvenile and white adult violence."
"The combination of urban poverty and family disruption concentrated by race is particularly severe. Whereas the majority of poor blacks live in communities characterized by high rates of family disruption, most poor whites, even those from "broken homes," live in areas of relative family stability" https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...
"Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate." http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...
[1] I have a hard time imagining a productive line of thought that leads from saying that high black murder rates result from something inherent to blackness
The first source you cited (the rand study) shows that being African American is a strong predictor of engaging in violence, even after accounting for other factors. See table 2.
The second study doesn't address the question.
The third study (see table 2) shows that, among other factors, percentage of a city that is black is a strong predictor of violent crime even after accounting for other factors.
One productive line of thought which leads from "something inherent to blackness causes crime" is "since this problem is intractible with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things."
Personally, I wouldn't call this[1] a productive thought, rather a fatalistic one.
[1] "since this problem is intractable with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things"
In major cities a frightening number of homicides go unsolved. Though I can't say I'm a fan of the drug war, there is value in locking up criminals that just haven't been caught doing their most violent acts. Any time somebody brings up the non-violent drug imprisonment, and the socio-econmic downward spiral, yes it's true there are a small number of people who have been railroaded who could be raising their sons and daughters, but we also need the clear image of the killer who lucky for us got pinched because he made a different mistake. All the cops in the room know he killed his cousin but everyone in the project last year was too scared to rat him out. The prosecutor is going to push the longest sentence they can get for the laws broken just so that guy can't victimize somebody else's kid.
you're making judgments before proof or evidence aka prejudice.
I'll probably draw criticism from what I'm about to say, but perhaps part of this is due to cultural differences in what constitutes murder between different states. An obvious example would be the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. I would classify that as a murder, but I don't think it would be counted as such in this data.
I think about these things a lot, as a minority who grew up in the most urban part of the country. It's very common for statistics to be misleading in what actually goes on in these areas for a number of reasons. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a dangerous area with high murder rates, just that it's not always as simple as looking at some numbers.
I should also point out that while many high-crime areas have a high minority population, I would consider most of them rural or suburban. Milwaukee and Detroit for example, are not exactly "urban" cities.
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Generally, the number used is homicides with a gun -- that encompasses self-defense, manslaughter, police shootings, etc.
Obviously having more justifiable homicides with guns is better than gun murders, because it's good people protecting themselves from violent people. I don't think a criminal who died from trying to kill me deserves to be added to a statistic to further an idea that "less guns are better"
Speaking of Trayvon Martin, we'll never really know what went down because we can't get in those two's heads, but I can tell you if I was armed and found myself getting my face beaten into the concrete, not knowing what the person would do next, I think I'd certainly feel justified in using a projectile weapon. If somebody is beating you senseless on a dark night, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't assume they'll just leave you after you black out. They may curb stomp you to death, they may take your gun and kill you, they may take your gun and kill somebody else.
I'd like to see charting of both, because justifiable homicide is an indicator of danger in an area too. Unsuccessful attempts at violent crime resulting in justifiable homicide by firearm.
That's one obvious problem is you know that any partisan journalist can take justifiable homicides, lump them into the same bucket under gun deaths by murder and use it to reinforce a message of guns = violence. It's disingenuous.
Same thing with other crime. An area could say rapes decreased, even if attempted rapes went up. So it seems successful self-defense literally and figuratively means you won't become a statistic. Which is bad when you want an accurate picture of the safeness of an area.
No buyers agent can say, "Oh yeah this area is really safe, hardly any crime happens to people here, so long as you're open carrying a glock 19 and are an expert in Krav Maga."
So, anybody who claims to support data-driven decision making--you know, the A/B testing so in vogue right now--should find themselves having to say "Yeah, well, okay, this is really a non-issue".
Instead, we see continued political sniping and popular manipulation and twisting of the very idea of certain inalienable rights, all done for political and not numerically-proven policy reasons.
Sigh. :(
Between that and the way we select politicians for it, it's a wonder there hasn't been a second civil war yet.
The real comparison is not among states with pours borders, but from the US to other western nations with outright bans. Chicago for example is in a strict gun law state but is right next to Indian with lax laws. There is no border enforcement at the state level so it seams dubious that the Illinois laws have any effect. Our rate is about 3.8 times the rate of the UK and its hard to see at a macro level what other than the ubiquity of firearms is the difference.
You do have a point re: arms races between the police and the rest of the country, but I'd argue that letting the police up the ante is a mistake. It's better for both sides to be armed equally, as this discourages officers from abusing their power (and vice versa).
As for lumping states together, there's a reason you don't do that, and it's codified in something called the Scientific Method. If you want to measure the effects of a certain well on iklness, you must count the users of that well separately from users of other wells, even if the wells are right next to each other. If you lump two wells together, then you don't know which well actually caused the illness.
My point is that the measure should be how far a city is from a state with lax laws not just which state it is in.
As for how far a city is from a state with lax laws: Wouldn't the laws in the city itself have an effect as well? Some citizens follow the law, after all. One of the major arguments for free access to weaponry in general is that those who rob and kill and rape are usually willing to risk extended jail time in exchange for being able to use a gun to keep others from fighting back. The thing about threatening someone with a weapon is this: if they have a weapon, or a random bystander has a weapon and decides to interfere, then instead of forcing someone to cooperate, you've made the situation more dangerous for yourself (and everyone else).
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/gunsnosa.jpg
How about a useful state stat:
http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-vs-gun-deaths...
From this I find it dangerous that any politician would seek to override or 'reinterpret' the constitution without the peoples mandate to do so. This seems ot be happening at an increasingly accelerated rate e.g. government eavesdropping and civil forfeiture.
Firearm ownership should be taken to the vote. If the nations decides to leave firearm availability as a citizen right that's democracy and the inevitable shooting are the price. Potentially more dangerous is a government that feels they can bend a nations constitution away from its spirit to their personal agenda.
Not trying to be petty but I do think details like that are important. There is a massive difference between the two forms of government.
The framers were strongly against democracy and the term "constitutional republic" has only recently been wrongly attributed as the form of government.
The representatives and president are chosen by votes, but that does not make it a democracy or a democratic republic.The actual legal founding document is clear, it is only a republic.
I think the gun provisions have not. For starters it's crazy to think that a militia equipped with a stock pile of firearms can overtake a intrusive government with tanks, choppers etc. It's just not realistic.
Guns were much more important for protection back then. There were parts of the country that were the frontier with no policing ability. Nowadays places around the world when gun ownership is substantially restricted are generally safer places. Just google Australasia before and after.
Gun ownership as touted by constitutional nuts is an idea that had it's time come. Sadly, I think give the political climate a amendment that could fix this (put in wording that lets the government legislate gun ownership) is untenable.
Sidestepping the Constitution, or ignoring its enumerated rights and restrictions, however, is unacceptable, and should not be tolerated by We the People.
Furthermore, I don't understand why the ease (or lack thereof) of a militia (the present day equivalent for which may be a State Guard) to overtake or resist the (exponentially larger) Federal government has any bearing on our rights. You wouldn't use this sort of argument anywhere else.
Just in case you didn't know, the "a slave is 3/5 of a person" that is so oft-decried today was an anti-slavery measure. For the purposes of Congressional representation, if a slave was counted as a full person, then the slave-owning states would get expanded numbers in Congress for all the non-voters being kept in slavery. Three-fifths, as opposed to full representation, at least kept them from gaining as much power as they would have otherwise. These things generally aren't as simple as one is often told.
I wouldn't call it an anti-slavery measure but one of a long series of compromises on the issue of slavery. Considering 3/5 > ((0 + 1)/2) it seems to be a compromise tilted towards the pro slavery side.
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... by amending it via formal, open process; not by selectively ignoring it.
You mean like every single insurgent force in the middle east in the past few decades?
I disagree. As Tolstoy pointed out, the winner of a war is usually who wants to win more.
Look no further than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. They humiliated us. Granted, Iraq has no winner yet, but the country with choppers lost badly to a bunch of irregulars with AKs
1. Licensing guns and their sales, including required training. I liken this to license required around cars / alcohol sales.
2. Closing background check / re-scale & licensing loopholes.
3. Requiring additional insurance from gun owners.
4. Local control over the remaining aspects (can cancel out above mandates).
I don't think you entirely get rid of guns even if all of them are illegal. And the US is a big country that encompasses many diverse areas with competing interests. This scenario accounts for the country / NYC divide. It admin that it does require more from the folks in the country (licensing / training). But that's always a bit of tit-for-tat like the folks in NYC where a big chunk of their tax dollars goes out of state / upstate NY, or utility bills in the city that have taxes for building out access out in further to reach places.
However, doing this would also re-open the production and importation of new automatic weapons for civilian use, and so is a non-starter for the gun-control crowd - in spite of the fact that that legal regime actually worked very well for around 50 years. Instead, it appears we will stick to the same ineffective bullshit we've been doing for the past twenty years, restricting ownership based on meaningless distinctions like magazine capacity, forward pistol grips, etc. etc., which accomplish little else than to piss off gun owners (which I suspect, for much of the gun control crowd, is considered a feature rather than a bug).
That might be a bit too optimistic about the NFA. The NFA likely did reduce the possession and use of machine guns, but one reason for that is that people could just buy semi-automatics instead without dealing with the NFA-related headache, which suited most people just fine. Also, a lot of the crimes committed with NFA-regulated weapons prior to passage of the NFA were related to Prohibition, weren't they?
There has been essentially zero gun crime committed with legally-owned and possessed NFA weapons.
District of Columbia v. Heller will be one of my sources from now on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
It's a shame that the transcripts are not great. They contain, at times, the complete opposite of what is said.
I've never understood this argument. It strikes me (and, apparently, every court that's ever ruled on the matter) as legalistic sophistry of the worst kind.
If the First Amendment read "A well educated legislature, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed." you would argue, what... that only the legislature had the right to read books? That only well educated people had the right to read books?
No, you would not, and neither would anyone else, because that would be a nonsensical interpretation.
You are trying to make words mean what you want them to mean, rather than what they actually do mean.
A personal right to own weapons is a very recent interpretation, originally advocated by a small group of activists a few decades ago, and then gaining momentum with the growing power of the pro-gun movement, who claimed it as a central justification for their agenda. It was finally settled as the law of the land by the US Supreme Court 5–4 (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy in the majority) in the DC v. Heller case in 2008.
However, a shift in the Court (if e.g. Scalia or Kennedy resigned and was replaced by a Hillary Clinton appointee) could easily throw the details of this interpretation back into question.
If people writing those constitutions didn't believe such personal right exists and is important, why would they write so?
There are known examples of prominent lawyers supporting such understanding in 19th century. [2]
It is also hard to believe if you read historical reviews about various gun laws in 19th century [3], where while the public carry of guns was often restricted, nobody doubted the right of people to actually own them, and nobody referred to "collective right" as the reason.
I can appreciate the difference in approaches, but the claim that "individual rights" approach did not exist until recently - and not as a crazy idea in minds of a small bunch of "activists", but as widely recognized and adopted concept - seems to contradict all evidence. NRA was founded in 1871, not exactly "a few decades ago", but "individual rights" interpretation existed and was widely accepted way before that.
[1] http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/19thcentury.htm#N_191_ [2] http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/19thcentury.htm#St. George Tucker [2] http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/01/24/guns-wild-west-48208/
So has all violent crime [1]. I don't want to see a chart of per-capita gun murders, but per-capita gun violence as a fraction of all violent crime. Even if crime is decreasing, if those who do commit violent crimes increasingly turn to guns in places where there is more access to guns, then this is evidence in favor of gun control. The hypothesis here (which would need further study) is that the decrease in violent crime would be sharper with gun control laws than without them.
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-weisser/violent-crime-cit...
Unwanted opinion time: slap ammunition with a $250/ round tariff. Track sales more tightly than we currently do for sudafed. Let people load their own - and go back to my original point, but more likely blindness. (Of course there are competent home gunsmiths for whom neither would apply.
Track sales more tightly than we currently do for sudafed
Most likely they have numerous times and buried the results as it would not aline well with their agenda.
That's fatuous and shows your bias.
For one simple reason: if so, the pro-gun lobbies with deep pockets would be screaming the same findings from the rooftops.
Also, given the number of guns, how does that relate to say cars, and car deaths. Nobody is suggesting banning cars, or heavily restricting licensing.
What this comes down to is a fundamental, natural right... Yes, it means that people can do bad things, and can be dangerous... people are/were dangerous and did bad things before guns, and still do. In a free society bad things will happen. I find the entire discussion fairly irritating because most people seem to be in favor of some polar extremes... And though, I'd lean towards freedom, I can understand the idea of registration. For that matter, you were once supposed to register for and train with your local militia, and provide your own firearm as a matter of law in this country.
Studying gun control in the US also requires some care: because of the population configuration, you need to take into account the fact that people can bring guns from one jurisdiction to the next, especially in some Eastern cities, like Washington, DC (right next to Virginia) or Baltimore (~50 miles from Virginia).
Violent crime and homicides have been going down all over the richer countries, but the US rate is still much higher than that of say, Canada or the UK.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/...
It has an obvious bias - it purports to talk about gun violence, but then only talks about murders.
When talking about the dangers of having a gun in the home it does not attempt to tally injuries - which would be a sentinel event indicating imminent risk of death.
> Public health scholars have continued to research from a place of hostility to firearms.
Public health scholars are also hostile to viruses and bacteria. Public health scholars are also interested in promoting health of prostitutes and prison inmates. Guns don't make people healthier
To be clear, I don't think guns can be outlawed in America, so I don't think working towards that is a good use of political capital.
According to Table 1, firearm homicides dropped to 10,828 in 1999 and have actually gone up since. Which demonstrates that you can get statistics to say what ever you want. I have another simple point, that it is harder to kill someone with your bare hands that with a gun.
Australia has no freedom of speech for instance, is bringing in (additional) internet censorship, personal data (like telephone records) is given out without warrants to non government departments.
This is often left out of this comparison about restricting one of the freedoms.
Americans believe in freedoms of individuals, under this belief how do some more restrictive gun laws apply, is what this article is asking.
Mass killings in the US are very common.
If you include:
> More than four people shot and killed (not including the perpetrator)
> At one time
> In one place
> By one person
> In a public place
> Not including gang violence, armed robbery, or domestic violence
You get over 70 incidents in 30 years. That's more than 2 a year. Compare that to the whole of Europe, where you have maybe one per decade.
If you change the definition to include at least 4 people shot and injured, but not killed, you get over 250 per year in the US.
The US is extraordinarily violent among first world countries, even though violent crime has dropped.
Really? There are a couple Wikipedia entries you should read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(Europ...
There have been two mass murderers in Switzerland alone in the last 15 years, and it's basically the size of Dallas/Fortworth. Not to mention, y'know, recent events in Paris.
I would say they are relevent, as one of the arguments for the 2nd amendment is to keep government from killing the citizenry.
http://tijuana.usconsulate.gov/tijuana/warning.html
It doesn't seem like they've been able to keep a lid on them in that country though.
Personally, I'm not against new, strict gun control laws. As far as I'm concerned, they could require a twelve year waiting period to buy a water pistol. I don't care.
But, what surprises me is that people believe, after witnessing the US's long term attempt to control drugs, that it would actually be able to control guns.
It just does not seem plausible to me.
What am I missing here? How could stricter gun control laws be successfully enforced in the US? Wouldn't people defy the laws and obtain guns just like they do illegal drugs?
I wonder how much of it is cultural though - when the big gun buyback happened after Port Arthur, it was mostly taking guns from farmers - not people who think they could rise up against the Government or that they should be able to personally kill people in self-defense...
Whereas in the US every now and then you hear about people firing at what they think is an intruder, but it turns out to be a family member and stuff like that. It's just really strange to me that shooting would be the first thing you would do, but from the news we hear, it seems that's what a non-insignificant number of people in the US do.
Well, no, but there weren't many before Hobart, either. But do take a look at your other crimes' rates since the confiscations, especially home invasion.
Hunting type weapons (bolt actions and shotguns) only require a simple firearm safety test plus the requirement firearms must be kept in a safe. Handguns are available but you must be a regular shooter (6 times a year I believe), plus member of a club and you cant take a handgun home for the first year of your licence/club membership. Semi-autos are available if you have a professional need for them such as a farmer who has problems with feral animals, or a farmer hire you as someone that supports their pest eradication.
None of this difficult if you want a gun, but it seems to do the trick in keeping firearms out of the hands of crazies thus far.
Yes you wouldn't think this change would be enough - because if you want to get a gun you can but for some reason it has.
1 & 2: Licencing and checks stops people with a violent history purchasing/owning guns legally. If that personality decides they need a firearm to hurt people there is a month+ between their desire to do harm and actually owning a firearm.
3: Compulsory safes (and the police check each owner has an appropriate one) reduce the likelihood of a person accessing anothers firearm.
4: More dangerous firearms like handguns and semi-auto are harder to get yet again thus less prevalent stopping what might be a small shooting from becoming significantly larger. A significant shooting becomes much harder with a double barrel shotgun than an AR-15.
Another benefit I imagine is restrictions would stop police feeling there is a potential firearm around every corner and may help calm down ongoing US cop shootings/mentality too.
It's a great way to risk your job, isolate yourself from friends/family who find out you've been seeking help, further depression, become addicted to antidepressants, or financially ruin yourself. Sometimes all of the above.
Far too many stories of people who sought help and ended up losing their jobs, being placed on 51/50 holds, or worse.
I found out the hard way. If I ever regress, I'll never call the suicide hotline again. I wasn't yet set on acting upon it but called to have someone to talk to. Fucked myself for 2 years and for most of those 2 years my thoughts of suicide and level of depression were multitudes worse than before I had called.
I don't think it is always a bad decision, either -- if someone is 55 and finds out there's a solid diagnosis of a painful fatal illness, there might be a point where it's a reasonable choice (I'd personally Alcor, but...). And I'd certainly prefer if spree killers just killed themselves privately.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/struck-living/201012/ca...
Edit: If a lot of people are committing suicide by train guard rails and similar measures might help.
I think there's been some research showing that ease of suicide can affect suicide rates. And guns are more effective at actually killing yourself.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC478945/
this talks about a fall in suicides due to a switch from coal gas ovens to natural gas in Hreat Britain.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21034205
> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents' access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a relatively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
by adolescents I think they mean 18,19 (possibly 20,21) year olds in the Army.
Drugs/alcohol + depression + guns seem like a particularly bad combination, so one thing I've been thinking about is a gun safe which let the user voluntarily set a time-lock in the future before drinking or whatever.
And then they throw their arms up and say "what more could we do?!?"
You're setting up a false dichotomy. Outlawing guns, and complete unlimited rights to fire arms aren't the only choices available. To say their is a spectrum of possible choices is simplifying it, there is a high dimensional landscape of possible policies and they lead to many outcomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...
I highly doubt you'd be in favor of such a policy.
As a counter data point, the police chief of Detroit recently advised the city's residents to carry guns for their protection. The reaction on right-wing blogs which covered this was applause.