A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S
economist.com
economist.com
Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms 11,068
Accidental discharge of firearms 591
Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent 248
Motor vehicle accidents 35,303
Unless you're taking your own life: Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms 19,990
It says "suicides, accidents or domestic violence." These are all vital statistics in determining the deadliness of guns.
Gun advocates have been arguing here that suicides shouldn't be counted, which doesn't make sense. Access to an effective suicide method is one more consequence of a gun-owning society. It should be acknowledged, analyzed, and discussed.
It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly. That's nonsense. This is a comparison of deadliness; a gun death is a gun death. Despite a decline in gun ownership, gun deaths are trending upward, and the NRA opposes smart-unlock features like thumbprint identification that contrast with the myriad safety controls placed on vehicles.
The reason for determining the deadliness of guns is to know whether they should be banned or not. And we're arguing that since suicides don't justify prohibition, it's not fair to include them in "deadliness". Suicides don't justify prohibition because I as a person should have the right to choose to own a gun at the small risk that I may commit suicide with it. It is not the governments place to protect me from that small risk.
It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should
be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly.
gun deaths are trending upward
About half of American households have access to a gun while about half of suicides are done via gun. The US is within 10% of most other first world countries in terms of suicide rate. The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method.
What does "real world" evidence mean? Because real world evidence from England (paracetamol pack sizes; switch to natural gas from coal gas; removing coproxamol from general use) shows that many people do not find another method.
1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate.
2. The fact that the US is within about 10% of most other first-world countries in terms of suicide rate. Unless you want to argue that something especially good about the US's mental health system such that only Luxembourg ought be in front of it.
If the US turned into Canada (meaning: essentially no guns and a suicide rate 0.92 of the US) then more than 80% of gun suicides would find another way.
Don't think that an attempted suicide by gun is the same as an attempt using another method. Guns are a very lethal method of suicide. Other methods of suicide are not as sure. This might explain the differences in completed suicide numbers for men and women (more men die to suicide) and rates of self harm (very many more women self harm) -- men might be using more lethal methods.
Some members of the "want to use a gun as a method of suicide group" would use a different method and would complete suicide. But certainly not all that group. Some would use a less fatal method and attempt suicide but not die. Others would find help before attempting suicide.
For a tiny US example: look at the Taft and Ellington Bridges in Washington State. They were both used by people to complete suicide, although more people used Ellington. After a number of people dying to suicide in a short number of days a suicide barrier was put up. People did not switch to the other bridge, even though it was close.
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/
Again: look at the rates of completed suicide in England after switching gas supplies; after removing coproxamol from general use; and after reducing the amount of paracetamol. All of these resulted in permanent drops in the suicide rate.
I think you might be misreading me. The reason it's important that gun-suicide and non-gun-suicide are about the same size is that about equal number of households have guns and don't have guns.
If about 10% of households had access to a gun, and about 10% of suicides were done via gun, I'd say the same thing: access to guns isn't the significant driver of suicide completion.
> But certainly not all that group
Sure, certainly not all. I agree some people would stop. My guess is that around 10% or so.
The problem I have with the thesis that "most people won't switch to another method" is that it leads to a world where the United States is supposed to have an amazingly low suicide rate compared to most other first-world countries. And the thing that is stopping the US is a hot-button political issue, especially because most of the people who are inclined to try and get rid of the guns would disagree that the United States has an especially good mental health system compared to Canada, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, France, and Finland.
You can point to a bunch of small effects, but you want to apply them to the big picture. Well, why isn't the big picture a lot different? If the US had twice the suicide rate of most other countries, I think you'd be right.
You are wrong when you say that people get creative. Suicide is often an impulsive act and so making people work even a little bit harder does reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
England changed the domestic gas supply from coal gas to natural gas. It's now not possible to use a home even to complete suicide. This led to a permanent reduction in suicide numbers.
England made it very much harder for people to get coproxamol. That led to a small permanent drop in completed suicide.
England changed the amount of paracetamol that people could buy. This led to a reduction in suicide deaths from paracetamol. http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html
Restricting access to means and methods of suicide is a useful and important suicide prevention measure.
> By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.
Can someone explain the NRA to me? At this point they come across as cartoon villains, senselessly evil for no apparent purpose. Why can car companies be persuaded to invest in safety features but somehow the NRA works against its own interests to make guns as dangerous as possible? I feel like I must be missing some side of the story, because from the stuff I read, they're literally twirling their mustachios while cackling right now.
If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns).
Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a government permit, which can then be used, explicitly or implicitly - imagine a "no fly list" for guns, with the same opacity - to prevent large groups of people to own guns (well, specifically, to fire them).
Further not-very-fantastical "enhancements" could include remote-disabling of guns, initially for law enforcement use, but quickly extended to much broader use.
All this, of course, while the criminals (who are already obtaining guns illegally) keep using "dumb" guns and aren't affected by this.
These are the simple, practical reasons - there's also the ideological reason founded on the historical reason for the 2nd amendment: A government can't turn on it's own people if said people is armed. If the government can effectively control the guns of the people, that stops being a factor.
I wish the public at large could understand these are largely parallel to the arguments FSF makes (at least to me, they are)
edit: to make this comment more than just a dumb throw-away joke, I'll add that sometimes the consequences of an argument are as important as its assumptions/logical soundness.
If they don't, they should (I'm not a gun owner or an NRA member). If you look at history, it is exceptionally rare to find a 100 year stretch where governments and militaries didn't kill more civilians than any amount of murderers. Not always domestic governments, but that only adds to the point.
> if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?
I'm not going to speculate, but it might not be as one sided as you'd think. Put all the hunters in the U.S. together and you have the largest army in the world by a factor of five.
Regardless it doesn't have to be that bad. Government apathy or corruption can be enough to justify retaining the right to self defense. Consider the police work slowdown in NYC turning into a thinly veiled version of protection money. Local LEOs that ask for more money every year or 'gee I guess we will have to just let everyone out of jail'. Or consider something like that judge that sold children into private prisons. Imagine that despite protests and uproar, they sweep it under the rug and continue? History is rife with examples of people being exploited simply because they were dependent or defenseless.
Someone who has your best interests in mind won't demand that you be defenseless or dependent upon them.
Since then it seems like federal law enforcement has taken a softer touch with their sieges. This could be simply a change in doctrine to avoid bad press but enough people believe it's more than that.
Also, these days it isn't so much about guys with guns from Wal-Mart as it is country boys that did a couple tours in IQ/AF as a 11something and their friends. <digression> That's also why the NRA is touchy about funding for studies on things--there's a perception that "the powers that be" want to diagnose everyone who served with PTSD and then use that as a reason to take away their guns. This is compounded by some despair over disarming IQ villagers so they are easy pickings for ISIS and the perception that "they were training us to do it back home". </digression>
So, yes, I believe it. Because I'm seeing it happen.
Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary. A domestic rebellion wouldn't win by shooting enough people, it'd win when the tactics necessary to stop it were beyond what the government and/or military were willing to do.
Guns are much more useful when:
1) the enemy is foreign (killing enough people actually might make them go away), and/or
2) your position doesn't actually have popular support so other means are unavailable to you, and/or
3) foreign powers have the will and capacity to bomb the shit out of your country if the government goes too far in its attempts to suppress your uprising (this, or loss of military support for the government, are basically the only reasons authoritarian states fail to stop revolutions in the modern world)
Actually, having closely studied the dissolution of a modern European country (the former Yugoslavia) and seen the fallout from up close, it's not that simple (at least not always).
What happened in that case was that although the Yugoslav government [1] retained control of most of the heavy weaponry (artillery, tanks), and although the succeeding republics (Croatia and Bosnia) were initially limited to small arms belonging to local militia and hunters, the republics did have an abundance of active and retired officers with loyalty to their ethnic homelands who were quick to raise and lead battalions of troops into the field [2].
Those troops then went on to capture some heavy arms from the Yugoslav army, and scored lots of small arms, and eventually heavy arms and aircraft, from overseas allies.
Eventually, after lots of brutal warfare, ethnic cleansing, and in Bosnia, genocide, the republics did gain their independence from Yugoslavia (with significant help from the U.S. and other countries).
What was key in this case were the experienced military leaders who quickly assumed charge in the succeeding republics.
I suspect a worst-case, nightmare U.S. scenario would look much the same, with experienced military leaders taking control of ad hoc forces in their respective states and/or regions, and then fighting with small arms until they were able to capture heavy arms, receive outside help, or were defeated/captured.
1. Essentially, Serbia and Montenegro, plus ethnic Serbs elsewhere
2. Slovenia's succession was a different story than that of Bosnia and Croatia, for a variety of geographical, cultural, and historical reasons.
The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.
As for "guys with guns from Wal-Mart" in the US, let's not forget that we have tens of thousands of experienced returned officers and NCOs, who are very knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and who identify very strongly with that rural population base here in the US.
Also, look at the Nazi invasion of the Island of Crete. A ton of local farmers with gun took a huge toll on the Nazi paratroopers.
In the city, where most people are anti-gun, the police are often very close by, and rhetoric often talks about how guns are not needed because of the police.
In the country, where most people are pro-gun, the police can easily be very far away. I have co-workers who live at least an hour from the closest police station. Naturally, rhetoric covers the fact that the police very likely cannot help you.
I don't see how a libertarian, as many gun advocates but certainly not all, can make a rational argument for preventing a private company from selling smart-guns to individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_...
It is also not generally the case that guns are always "bad"; guns are also significantly used in self-defense, usually without even being fired. Those who present "oh, just remove the guns" as a cost-free move are being disingenuous; again, people can reasonably disagree about the relative nature of the costs and benefits but those who present this as a zero-cost transaction are trying to pull one over on people.
It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down, and crime has significantly dropped in the past couple of decades. This is not exactly a set of circumstances that leads a rational person to leap to the conclusion that the presence and ownership of guns is an obvious root cause... and, yes, again, there may be confounding variables at play, but it still provides a bound on what you could even hope for if guns were entirely removed.
When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
> It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down
That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."
> When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
I agree. That was the premise of my question. Unfortunately, I haven't seen too much clarification yet :(
They don't give a source, but their own graph [1] shows that, aside from a tick on 2006, gun deaths have been trending down, almost indistinguishable from flat in recent years.
I couldn't find a nice graph, but googling gave me these two years (that I did not cherry pick): here's an anti-gun site giving the numbers for 1998 as 30K [2] and another anti-gun "just the facts" editorial in 2013 saying it's 31K. [3] Using normal per-population numbers, the US increased in population over 13% over that time.
The US in the 21st century is a very safe place to be. Foreign news may distort the picture, but middle-class Americans don't worry about being killed by guns.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
[2] http://college.cengage.com/english/resources/research_guide/...
[3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/16/16547690-just-the...
> Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
The cost at issue here is generally not monetary. Most safety features are designed to prevent the weapon from firing, which gives rise to the expression "loaded club."
Consider, e.g., the magazine safety, which prevents a semi-automatic weapon from firing without a magazine, even if a round is already chambered. If I owned a handgun, which I do not, I would absolutely want this feature. The likelihood that it would prevent a potentially fatal negligent discharge is much higher than the likelihood that it would be the decisive factor in me losing a gunfight. However, there are combat techniques that depend on the weapon firing without a magazine, and competitions in which it would be difficult or impossible to participate without that ability. There is also the risk that the safety would otherwise interfere with the operation of the weapon.
Therefore, the only conclusion available is that the theory is incorrect.
You may be able to salvage pieces of the result your are trying to obtain by a more careful analysis, but the facts do not permit "guns = gun crime" to be sustained at such a simplistic level. By the time one is done examining what the facts do sustain the result is far, far weaker.
That there is easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms in the US has not, to my knowledge, changed in the past 10 years, so a lack of change in the gun crime statistics indicates pretty much nothing.
As someone from a country with no easy access to firearms (and generally unarmed police), and knowing the gun crime statistics, I am continually amazed that people can argue that guns are uncorrelated with gun crime and keep a straight face.
Guns also have safety features that protect against accidental discharge, namely the trigger safety. Some guns have an additional trigger safety that triggers if the gun is pressed against something (or someone). Since these features don't reduce the reliability of a gun when it is intended to be used, the NRA doesn't have any problem with them, and at least the trigger safety is standard on all guns.
The NRA also does a lot of work to teach firearms safety to children (which basically boils down to "don't touch it and tell an adult if you find an unexpected gun somewhere"). For those who do shoot, the NRA is also good with basic safety principles.
No implementation of a TouchID-like system for guns would be perfect and so the gun owner must weigh the potential benefits and risks. I don't think the NRA's members want to take that choice away from the gun owner, but even having a commercial solution come to market means some states will require it's use. IIRC one state has laws on the books to mandate the use of the technology once it's commercially available.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections...
Politicians fear them, because they have money and get out the vote power. There is some thought that the NRA cost Al Gore his presidential run.
Its complex, because a lot of the US (The more rural parts mostly) have a much stronger gun culture. There is some distrust of government and any regulations.
Within 50 years quality 3-d printed guns will make a lot of regulations moot anyway.
As a side note, it's funny to see that parts of the media still mechanically repeat LaPierre calling the ATF "jack booted government thugs" in 1995 like it was a bad thing, after the full-on liberal awakening over police militarization via the Boston Marathon Bombing and Ferguson, MO. The NRA was 20 years ahead of the curve on that.
After '68 there was a huge split in the organization between hardline types who wanted to focus on politics and lobbying and traditionalists who wanted to focus on shooting sports. At one point the NRA was even going to move from the DC area to Colorado and essentially give up politics altogether. In 1977, the political types took over the organization and purged the organization of sportsmen types.
Interestingly, the new head of the NRA was a former chief of the US Border Patrol who had shot and killed someone when he was a teenager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlon_Carter
The organization grew exponentially in membership, budget and political influence. Interestingly, they went through a few cycles of purging people who were even more hardline than their leadership.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...
Effectively, allowing smart gun technology would cause a bunch of other guns to get banned, so based on their values system it was logical for the NRA to oppose the tech. There have also been complaints that the tech is not reliable. I looked into this myself and frankly, I would not trust my life with it. Also, in most cases it's using passive RFID technology which is a joke for "security" (there is one company that's using a challenge response system though.) I can think of half a dozen ways to disable or clone most of these systems, but they are sold like they are a panacea.
The gun control side claims they "don't want to take away your guns" or they "don't want to take away all guns" but when you look at DC and Chicago, where they have the most power, they completely banned private ownership of handguns. This demonstrates their goal, and this is what the NRA is fighting against.
It is much harder to repeal a gun control law than to pass it (if you look at things on the scale of decades and/or centuries), partly because this is a demographic issue and the pro-gun demographic is smaller and shrinking.
So the NRA has absolutely no incentive to concede ground in the battle for private gun ownership. I've never heard a gun control proponent suggest "OK if you give us background checks, registration and capacity limits, we will loosen gun laws in states where they are more strict and promise never ever to go further." That would be compromise. I've never heard it, neither has the NRA.
That is why they are absolutists, because ultimately so is the other side. (Their leadership anyway, which is what counts, not the moderate "let's split the difference" voter who only cares about the issue when its a major news item.)
Also keep in mind that a lot of NRA folks are rural. They have almost no local gun crime and have (what they feel) are legitimate reasons for owning a gun (self-defense, hunting, etc). Their opinion is why should they give up their guns because the city folks have a problem?
(I don't count myself in either of those camps but I listen to them enough to be able to explain their arguments.)
Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?
Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?
As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?
It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.
Unlocked by owner's thumbprint? Tough luck, police officer wearing gloves. Unlucky, dear soldier with muddy hands.
Unlocked by radio-frequency? Rob a bank after installing a radio-frequency jammer.
I guess unlimited "Gun Admins" would be an okay compromise.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...
Essentially, once a smart gun becomes available for sale in the US, all guns sold in New Jersey must be "smart" within 30 months. I wouldn't be surprised if other jurisdictions had similar laws in place. This dramatically increases the cost of legal firearms while doing very little to impact firearm murder or suicide rates.
Such a law already exists in New Jersey and was proposed at the federal level by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
The other reason people oppose them is because it would reduce the gun-owner's ability to re-sell the gun to criminals with no difficulty or government intervention. It would remove some control from the gun owners.
One man's safety feature is another man's oppressive inconvenience.
Furthermore, most gun owners have firearms at least in part because of the criminal element. I find the argument that a significant number of gun owners want to be able to resell their firearms to criminals to be patently absurd.
I disagree with your comparison. If a gun owner wanted the simplest thing that would work, then their guns would not be so fancy / complicated. There would not be a market for non-restrictive but non-essential gun enhancements.
Sorry my joke wasn't clear to you and that you missed the point that it's conservatives that fear government control over ownership/reselling who have issue here.
In an ideal world, cars are designed to be as safe as possible, as they are transports and getting people home safely is their most important aspect.
In an ideal world, guns are designed to be a dangerous and murderous as possible, as they are killing devices and efficiently turning people into corpses is their most important aspect.
The NRA does exactly what it should: advocate for murder device efficiency and access.
Of course, whether easy access to highly efficient murder devices should be allowed is a public policy question, but in the US, the answer is yes, and the NRA's strategies are a rational move based on that policy. The problem here is that advocating for easy access and efficiency of murder machines kinda looks bad.
More info: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/business/the-ar-15-the-mos...
Over half of all quoted gun deaths are suicides. [edit: removed mention of suicide survivability as I don't have a reference handy. But remember: The most likely person to shoot you is yourself.]
Let's remove suicide from the discussion and talk about violence. The primary driver for violence is socioeconomic. The US has a huge wealth and education disparity problem, exacerbated by a drug war which focuses primarily on the lower economic classes. Most political rhetoric surrounding gun violence focuses on denying lower-class individuals access to firearms and is inexorably linked to institutionalized racism [ cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special#Economic... ]
What these stats don't show is the EXTREME socioeconomic skew involved in violent crime. If we look at gun deaths by wealth quadrile we find that the upper 40% have very, very few gun deaths -- on par with the nicer areas in Europe. Our inflated gun death statistics come almost entirely from the lower 40%. That is, gun deaths are emblematic of America's class divide.
The right to self defense is a convenient target for politicians to score easy wins. Constructively addressing the USA's violence problem is a very different issue and frankly is almost entirely unrelated to firearm legislation.
Source? This study gives a 'case fatality rate' of 85% for firearms, 69% for suffocation, and 2% for poisoning:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-f...
I disagree. Most suicides are impulse decisions. Making suicides difficult dramatically reduces suicide rates. cf suicide barriers on bridges.
There's also the fact that suicide by firearm can be done impulsively, without much preparation, in contrast to asphyxiation or falls. When there's more requirement for preparation there are more opportunities for someone to change their mind or for some intervention to take place.
The use of guns might be the reason why more women attempt suicide than men, but more men actually die of suicide. It may be that women are more likely to prefer a method that doesn't result in disfigurement (pills) and, because that method is less likely to be successful, women are less likely to die of suicide.
If guns were banned, it is at least plausible that deaths by suicide would go down because the alternatives might be less accessible to those making an impulsive decision and more survivable.
Why? This is the second time I've seen that suggestion in these comments, and I don't understand why suicides should not be counted as gun deaths.
"Gun death" weren't selected at random to compare to "car deaths" by some antiseptic algorithm. It's done, pretty obviously, to drive a narrative, i.e., "guns should be more regulated."
When discussing that narrative, there is a big gap between "you shouldn't have a gun because you might hurt your neighbor" and "you shouldn't have a gun because your neighbor might use a gun to hurt himself."
In determining the deadliness of drugs to a society, should suicides be ruled out? Accidental overdoses? Drug-related shootings? Where do you draw the line in filtering the statistics so that they're more comfortable for a given political position?
When I intentionally shoot someone and they die, they would likely be alive if I hadn't had the gun.
When I intentionally shoot myself and I die, I would likely have found another effective suicide method and died anyway without the gun.
Killing someone with a pill is not something you do in a fit of rage. Killing someone with your car could be, but only if you're driving and they're in the road (ideally not in a car of their own).
Killing yourself is quite easy to do using non-gun methods, without any additional planning or prep time.
In short, take my gun away, and I can still commit suicide, but it's much harder for me to kill others or accidentally kill myself.
This isn't true. You certainly could find another method, but you wouldn't likely do it. Most suicides are not well-planned, they are spur-of-the-moment decisions, and removing easy methods actually reduces the number of suicides substantially.
This is not intuitive, but it is supported by facts.
It might be based on what some sociologist said, but if you compare suicide rates by country, these is nothing suggesting access to guns is a strong driver of suicide rate.
If you assume the US turns into Canada, then of every 50 people who kill themselves via gun, about 42 would find another method.
(Unless you want to argue that, because of the superiority of the US's health system over Canada, that the US should have a way lower rate than Canada. I'm not making that argument, but let's just say it wouldn't be popular among those who want to ban guns.)
Internationally respected psychiatrists at a respected high quality academic institution.
You dismiss the research but demonstrate your ignorance of who conducts the research. You haven't yet provided any specific refutation to any bit of research.
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/
Note that the director is a consultant psychiatrist working within the NHS as well as an academic. ("Consultant" is the rough equivalent to a US attending physician.)
Nope. I'm assuming it's fine.
I get that you want to make the fight over those studies. That's fine, but I won't.
Instead, I'm assuming that all those studies are fine, but I'm still trying to figure out things that actually exist in the world around me:
1. why does the UK, with all its "permanent drops" in suicide, still have a rate within 10% of the US, which has so many guns?
2. why is the suicide rate for young people in the UK higher than it was 50 years ago? http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/msui6811.html NB: this especially points to the fact that cultures adapt in the long term to availability of suicide methods; young people who've never seen a coal gas stove don't even try.[1]
3. if half of homes have access to a guns, and assuming gun owners are as sane as non-gun owners[2], and if access to a gun is a major major factor, how come only slightly more than half of suicides are done via gun? (NB There is some factor, and I haven't denied that.)
4. instead of being in the same cluster as most modern countries, is the US really "supposed" to have a rate of suicide that places it about a factor of two lower than that bump? Why is the US so exceptionally awesome this way?
There's something in the macro-picture that isn't adding up to what all the micro-studies are asserting. All those micro-studies can be completely right and still not add up to the right picture.
[1] this suggests that you could reduce suicide rates by promulgating a widespread story that a great way to kill yourself is to do something that is plausible enough to cause self-harm but actually doesn't; then when people try it and it doesn't work, maybe they give up
[2] you could argue that gun people are crazy, because guns, but it would work against your position
About increasing rates: coroners are much more likely to report a death as suicide now than they used to. It doesn't have the same levels of social stigma. Suicide needs a different level of proof ("beyond reasonable doubt", not "balance of probabilities") - these two factors led to under-recording of suicide in national statistics. National statistics started using reports of "death by misadventure" and open verdicts.
Here's a link about English coroner verdicts: http://www.inquest.org.uk/help/handbook/section-4-3-verdicts
Socio-economic factors are also important. We know that when unemployment rises the number of attempted and completed suicides rise. Rates of unemployment for young men are very much high now than they were 45 years ago.
And while some medication has got more restrictive others have got more permissive. It's easier to get opiate style pain relief now.
Point 3:
People have a preferred method of suicide. A person who considers death by overdose may not want to die by gun. People's thinking about suicide is distorted. People might think they want a "serene" death, or they might want a certain death, or a very quick death. So removing access to guns will see some people transferring to other methods. At the moment we seem to disagree about the numbers.
I'm saying that the people who say that the US's suicide rate should be half what it is now are those least likely to believe that the US's mental health care system is superior.
England changed gas supplies from coal gas to natural gas. Nothing else changed. Rates of completed suicide dropped.
England changed the way that coproxamol was prescribed. Again suicide rates dropped.
England changed the way that paracetamol is sold and again there has been a permanent drop in completed suicide.
You keep saying that people who use guns would just use a different method. You are wrong, most of them would not. Research shows the people have preferred methods and that reducing access to those methods reduces the rates of attempted and completed suicide.
I am curious, though: Are carbon monoxide suicides-by-car counted in the car deaths for this gun-vs-car deaths comparison?
If we're talking about "gun sales to criminals," we are way way less likely to be caring about gun suicides.
Even though most gun deaths are suicide [1], your odds of killing yourself via suicide are still low. There's slightly less than 1% chance of your life ending via suicide. Taking away guns to stop suicides is a pretty big NNT.
===
[1]
Accidental discharge: 591
Suicide by firearm: 19,990
Assault by firearm: 11,068
Unknown involving firearms: 248
The claim regarding suicide vs homicide is easy to confirm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...). It is not possible to predict every suicide, the best we can do is make an approximation using obvious risk factors like hospitalization for mental illness. There are millions of gun owners in the US, so yes the chance of a suicide is small.
> The U.S. Department of Justice reports that approximately 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Stat...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
I don't have any information on the suicide rates by gun in each country, though it would be useful information from a public health standpoint (especially if, as you pointed out, the accessibility could be reduced).
But this is a tough thing to compare, as you note. Suicide rate is encompassing a whole bunch of things. I'm tempted to compare against Canada, where the suicide rate is only less by 1 per 100,000 people per year, but I have no idea if I'm picking that out fairly.
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/9/07-043489.pdf suggests that the US is the only country where firearm is the preferred method of suicide. A bit morbid to read but there you go.
Why?
By contrast, 53,000 die from the flu, 27,000 from falls, 36,000 from accidental poisoning, and 600,000 from heart disease.
Table 10: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf
Gun ownership is an important civil liberty in the USA, but one that comes with danger.
The Economist is recommending a technological approach to mitigating that danger. Research and development has been done in this department, and many technologies have been applied to modern firearms. Better safeties that prevent accidental discharge, better safes, ammunition that prevents over-penetration, etc.
We have yet to see a simple and trustworthy technology that limits who can fire a gun. When we do, it will start to be used.
For such a technology to work, the user needs to feel in complete control of it. There can be zero risk that an authorized user won't be able to fire the gun due to system failure or low battery.
Ultimately, though, no technological solution will prevent suicide. For that, a different approach will be necessary, and I don't have an answer for that.
Ironically, many gun control advocates still argue against civilian ownership of ammunition that doesn't overpenetrate. In some California cities hollow point ammunition is illegal to buy. In New Jersey it is illegal to carry hollow point ammunition outside the home. The Brady Campaign still to this day calls hollow points "cop killer bullets" despite the fact that every law enforcement department in the country uses them.
I find that incredibly encouraging. Nothing about guns or gun ownership has changed dramatically in the United States over this period. Perhaps this signals that the bizarre, and often fetishized, culture of violence in the United States is on the wane. I hope so.
As a publisher myself, I'd be interested in hearing if there are any other ways to monetize my website and content other than paywalls and advertisements which people seem to dislike so much?
Another suggestion is that, for sites that I regularly visit and like the content, I will (and do) happily pay a subscription fee in exchange for guilt-free ad-free content.
Death is a possible unintended side effect of riding in an automobile. Death is the explicit primary purpose of discharging a gunpowder weapon.
Thus, this is far more laudable accomplishment for automotive safety than it is a deplorable statistic for gun owners. Cars now cause less deaths by accident than a consumer product that is actually designed to kill things when used correctly. Yay.
I don't ever have an absolute need to own or use a gun, but it is practically impossible to earn a profitable living without spending at least 40 minutes per day driving in my car, or riding in any other form of on-road transportation.
I don't particularly feel like the jerkass riding on the hard shoulder at 50 mph to bypass a rush-hour jam is in any way comparable to someone who plinks beer bottles--the ones they just emptied--off their back fence without stopping to consider if there are neighbors living in that general direction. They could even be the same guy. If so, I meet him far more often on the road.
Neither guns nor cars kill without an operator--not yet, anyway. If I am now less at risk from an idiot behind a wheel than an idiot with his finger on the trigger, that is unequivocally good news, because I encounter far more of the former. But the article doesn't exactly break the statistics down by intent. I suspect that rates of deaths by gun due to accident or operator negligence are still less than deaths by vehicle due to accident or operator negligence.
So I still feel like guns are safer for me than the average person, because I don't particularly feel like anyone has an actual desire to kill me specifically, especially given my own disinclination toward suicide.
The article doesn't tell me anything meaningful. It seems to be presenting the statistics in a very narrowly interpreted way to advance a particular editorial point of view. The Economist might as well tell me how likely I am to die from falling off a ladder while cleaning my gutters, and compare that to deaths by food poisoning, except that there are far fewer passionate advocates for pasteurization and ladder stabilization bars.
That isn't true for any target rifle, target pistol, or shotgun intended to be used for skeet or trap.
There's nothing "dramatic" about reducing your chance of dying via suicide by being in the second half. I don't want to say it's zero, because I'm sure someone's life is spared by not having a gun around when the urge to suicide pops up.
And of course, even if someone disagrees with that, getting rid of the gun is more likely to change the method than the result.
Would you be justified in entering a time machine, traveling 40 years into the future, and murdering your future self? If not, how could you be justified in murdering your future self without the use of the time machine?
Or imagine a person with multiple personalities. Each has a theoretically equal claim of ownership of the body. While one is in control of the body, it commits suicide. Is that ethical? Now consider that your personality now is not the same as it was 10 years ago, nor will it be the same 10 years from now. Your personality may also change permanently or temporarily under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
If you have nothing left to lose but your own life, and no longer care about losing that, would it not be preferable to gamble it in a bid to gains something that you would like to keep, rather than merely throwing it away for no gain?
If you outlaw suicide, who would you ever be able to prosecute for the crime?
The statistics do show guns more effective than, for instance, overdose. However:
1) it is still the case that the method is more likely to change than the result; and
2) it is likely that means is not assigned randomly, and those more intent on ending their life pick more lethal means - absent guns, some comparably lethal means remain readily available.