What good reasons do people have for owning firearms in urban environments? (Serious)
If you were genuinely curious, violent crime is easily 2x more prevalent in urban areas. Firearms provide defense for shopkeeps and senior citizens alike.
Guns also become a more important means of self-defense the physically weaker the person, so the need, and observed statistics are weighted towards older people, and the US is rapidly graying with the demographic Baby Boom.
Hunting is also a popular pastime in the US, and is in fact a critical resource in controlling various prey populations after we wiped out the apex predators that used to keep them in check. As it is, deer are now the most deadly animals in the US due to collisions with cars.
That's the good reason for most things that I own. It's something I wanted and I'm allowed to have it therefore I got it.
Statistically, it's far more likely that one of your children will kill themselves, or a friend, or each other, with your gun than it is that it will be helpful for self-defense. This is going to be a bigger deal as your kids get older.
And no, I'm not here to advocate taking your guns away. Just trying to suggest that there are certain downsides to always carrying a lethal weapon, and that given our mostly secure society, people might view it as antisocial.
That can't be true, for the number of fatal gun "accidents" per year is ~600 (scare quotes because some number of those are whitewashed murders or negligent homicides), the number of non-suicide homicides is ~11,000, and the number of suicides using a gun ~19,000.
It's very easy to see that the number of self-defense incidents using a gun is substantially larger than those numbers, from anecdotes, to the very lowest formal estimate of 108,000 (see the CDC funded 2013 monograph at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18319/priorities-for-research-to-... pages 15-6). The highest estimates range to 2.5 million, but that was a while ago, and crime rates have continued to decrease.
The risk is far greater when there's a gun around, especially for children. Also it's a bit disingenuous to compare death figures with self-defense incidents where the outcome may have been simple property theft. Injury would be more appropriate, and even that fails as a comparison.
Texas is the only state in the nation that allows the use of lethal force to protect property, so your other point fails, while, I grant, it's informally allowed to some extent elsewhere.
If you've been in the field of science long enough, you learn the smell of bad studies, and this one is patently obvious. But I can look more closely at it if you insist.
As for viewing "my" study, note the "Download Free PDF" button to the upper middle right, all you have to do is supply an email address to do it as a guest. Or ask and I'll put a copy up.
And since your point was couched as a warning to others, another counter is that it's relatively easy to keep your family from joining the bad statistics by gun proofing your kids (which you should do anyway, since you can't control when they might come into contact with one outside your home), and storing your guns responsibly.
1. I'm not a TV watcher. The last movie I saw was "Frozen", and before that I can't remember. I'm certainly not motivated to live-out some TV action-hero fantasy. Moreover, your comment has a strong expectation that egocentrism undergirds one's actions. My obligation as a father is think of my family before myself. If you're a parent, I hope share this ethos; if not, I hope you develop it before having children.
2. Even if I were motivated by TV, I'm not sure which action film you're referring to. I missed the one where the dad is leaving the store with the wife and kids, pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, is accosted by "violent criminals out for blood", shoots and possibly kills the criminals in front of the children, then makes their epic retreat to safety in the minivan, with the wife on talking to the 911 operator in between sobs and episodes of panic-induced vomiting. No doubt this happy tale ends with permanent hearing damage for all involved, years of court appearances, legal fees, and a possible prison sentence, and the kids in therapy after witnessing human bloodshed by the time their 4th birthday rolls around. Doesn't sound like a movie I'd like to see.
3. I'm not sure why you've assumed that violent criminals don't exist, or exist to such a limited degree that their presence should be referenced mockingly. In the United States in 2014, "[t]here were an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes (murder and non-negligent homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults) reported by law enforcement." [1] Surely this ought to at least make one pause to consider how to protect one's family.
4. I also don't understand why you think the presence of witnesses or general availability of law enforcement is indefeasible deterrent to violent crime, especially in light of the recent events in Orlando. [2] Finally, the Supreme Court has even ruled that police, et al., are not obligated to protect you. [3] Even if the police appeared on the scene the very moment a crime were committed, they would still be reacting to violent crime that has already occurred, and have no legal duty to intervene.
Source:
1. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2015/september/latest-crime...
2. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting/
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...
No reason to take it to the macho fantasy of the hunter -- that armed with a 21st century high-tech shotgun kills some deer that never had a chance.
Besides, it's not about the chicken having more chances or less. It's that it's a more substantial lesson in "killing one's own food" -- as we eat chicken, beef etc tons of times a year, whereas hunting is 100% hobby and 0% substantial "killing own food".
So make that at worst 50-50. And there's a lot of poorer people out there for whom the annual deer is a significant and cheap source of high quality meat.
And that doesn't count veggies (we did garden) plus the cereals that probably accounted for probably over half the calories we consumed.
The former is like saying "I won't wear seatbelts so I can get out of the car quickly in case of fire". The latter is saying "I'll buy a fire extinguisher for my car, but I'll keep it locked up under the hood."
Simply not true: https://www.google.com/#q=push+button+gun+safe (Americans are problem solvers, after all; you can also use one with a key and keep that on your person, say, on a string around your neck; this is also what hardening your entrances etc. is about, to give you time to react).
And "appropriately" is really situation specific; I haven't lived in a situation where there was danger of another abusing one of my guns for decades. There's also the pattern of keeping it in your safe until you get home (and if you're really hard core, carrying it until you go to bed). And you're completely ignoring concealed carry, which covers 42+ of the states and ~72% of the US population, 12+ million licensees, and 10 states without a license requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980298
And that's before we even get into the "much more likely", which simply isn't supported by the facts, starting with a 25% drop in the number of fatal gun accidents per year in the period 1980 to now, while both the population and number of guns owned by it roughly increased by 50%.
Note that if you're depending on e.g. Kellerman's studies, they score only fatal outcomes for home intruders as successful defensive gun uses, when the majority don't involve any shots being fired, the vast majority don't involve anyone getting hit by a round, and pistol torso hits resulting in fatality only about 1/4 of the time. Even the biased CDC admits to the utility of guns: https://www.google.com/#q=%E2%80%9CSelf-defense+can+be+an+im...
Historian Joyce Lee Malcom has pointed out that a steady trend of declining interpersonal violence starting in the 13th Century reversed in a few decades. Others point out that "burglaries" in the U.K. much more frequently take place when dwellings are occupied than in the US. See the British Crime Survey, which as of 2009 said:
There were 284,427 burglaries.
20% of those were face to face.
In 59% of those cases, violence was threatened or used.
In 40% of those face to face encounters, violence was actually used against the householder, a rising number since such statistics were first collected in 2002-3.
If the subjects of the U.K. don't feel a need for guns for self-defense; maybe they aren't getting killed in large numbers, but they're getting brutalized, and that's very bad in a zillion ways.
The very definition of citizen, vs. subject or slave, is one who bears arms in defense of his polity.... (Although that's not something that Black Armband History mentions....)
Your "orders of magnitude" claim about school shootings is flatly WRT to Europe, especially Western Europe (which is significantly larger than the US in population), compare, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Europe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... This is especially true about the ones of larger magnitude.
UK robbery incidences: 76,179 (THOSB – CEW page 61, paragraph 2.)
76,179 / 561 = 135.72
US robbery incidences: 354,396 (FBI – CUS)
354,396 / 3116 = 113.7
You are thus 1.1x (135.7 / 113.7) more likely to suffer robbery in the UK than in the US.
Now, robberies in the context of home invasions I don't know, and I didn't see it on that page. Nor did I see where you then got a 4x more likely to be killed if in a house invasion robbery in the US, although I'm quite willing to believe it. But I'll seriously look at that page, the author's inclusion of BCS and NCVS statistics means he's serious (as, e.g., a posting in the current "Dial 911 and get Wall Street" topic notes, US robbery statistics are understated by cities where they don't even bother with them if there's no injury).