bjack on 16/6/2016 at 16:40
Home invasions are pretty standard fare in So. CA. This is especially true for immigrants that have a learned distrust of banks. Many Vietnamese keep all their savings at home. Criminals know this. Almost weekly you can read about how some family was pistol whipped, tied up, maybe the mom got raped, and sometimes dad gets shot. They attack because they know the family has zero protection. The police, even if called, do not respond for at least 20 minutes. What if Daddy had a nice shot gun ready for these invaders? Drop one and the rest would run. It seems that some of you would prefer them to just quietly take the robbery in stride and maybe get slaughtered or raped in the process. Much better for that to happen than to be able to protect oneself.
5 thugs are no match to a 5 foot high grandma with a 12 gauge. Gun are equalizers. We live in a nasty world. Maybe some of you don’t have these issues, but some places in the USA are pretty rough. If you are weak, you WILL get preyed upon. As long as others have guns, it is prudent to have one at home.
heywood on 16/6/2016 at 16:44
Quote Posted by Vivian
No, where on earth did you get that from? Are YOU suggesting that we should just give heroin to everyone who owns a gun?
Sorry, I had just argued over the weekend with a mate whole believed that hard drugs should be legalized too, including heroin, but who also believed that only the police and military should be allowed to have guns. That set my head spinning. I jumped on your post thinking you might be implying the same.
froghawk on 16/6/2016 at 17:04
Relevant statistics: (
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-guns-self-defense-charleston-20150619-story.html)
In 2012 in the U.S. there were 259 "justifiable homicides," meaning a gun was used in self defense to prevent a potentially violent crime (and there were 548 fatal unintentional shootings). In 67,740 cases, the presence of guns was enough to dissuade an attacker.
In the same year, 172,000 guns were stolen from homes during burglaries. So... for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, 896 guns were put in the hands of criminals. And for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, more than 2 people were killed by accident. And more than twice as many guns are stolen than prevent attacks through their presence.
No matter how you look at these stats, owning guns doesn't make society safer. Not to mention that only one mass shooting has ever been stopped by an armed civilian iirc.
Home defense? Keeping a gun under your pillow or on your nightstand leads to numerous accidental deaths, but how are you going to extract guns from a gun safe fast enough for it to be effective?
And staying armed against the government? Don't make me laugh. You've got guns, but they've got tanks and drones. There's no winning that one.
Your perception that having a gun makes you safer simply isn't supported by statistics.
catbarf on 16/6/2016 at 17:09
Quote Posted by faetal
Catbarf - one thing I'll say in response to what Dema suggested is that it rests on where the onus should lie. Should society be set up to allow ultimate freedom to allow some to succeed with detriment to society as a whole or set up to try to maximise the benefit to society as a whole, with the cost being that some don't succeed?
Yeah, that's the age-old question of liberty vs security, but that's not what I was getting at. Wherever we decide the responsibility lies, we have to be consistent. If we're going to say that manufacturers ought to be held liable for criminal misuse of products for purposes they were never intended by design, well, why stop at guns? If it's Holland & Holland's fault when their fancy grouse hunting shotgun gets misused to commit murder, I don't see why Orkin should be off the hook if their rat poison is used to the same purpose. I'm not saying rat poison ownership is equivalent to shotgun ownership in all respects but 'strictly liable for all non-justified (product)-caused harms, all accidental, negligent, and criminal use' is a standard that could justifiably be applied to a lot of things besides guns.
catbarf on 16/6/2016 at 18:04
I'm not sure where Violence Policy Center is getting their stats, as the site won't load for me, but the (
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_14_justifiable_homicide_by_weapon_law_enforcement_2009-2013.xls) FBI reported 426 justifiable homicides in 2012. That's not a big difference, but I'm curious as to where they draw their data.
In any case, the 67,740 figure reported by the National Crime Victimization Survey is by far the lowest reported number of defensive gun uses, with other surveys going as high as 3 million. Common criticisms of the NCVS include that it discounts some forms of violent crime, and that it asks about defensive gun use after ascertaining where the crime was committed, disincentivizing respondents to answer truthfully if they were unlawfully carrying or do not want to report their gun ownership or incident to the Department of Justice. Even if Kleck's widely cited estimate is overinflated by a factor of ten, that still means over four times as many DGU's as the DoJ's study.
I'm just saying, I think it's cherry-picking on the LA Times' part to select the one survey that reports numbers that best fit their argument when there's such huge variance in the studies. Were I to cite Kleck without disclaimer and use his 3-million-plus figure to make statistical arguments I think you'd be right to call me out on it.
Quote Posted by froghawk
In the same year, 172,000 guns were stolen from homes during burglaries. So... for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, 896 guns were put in the hands of criminals. And for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, more than 2 people were killed by accident. And more than twice as many guns are stolen than prevent attacks through their presence.
Discounting that this conclusion is dependent on the same DGU stats, yeah, there are a shitton of guns stolen during burglaries and there's no excuse for that. I'm strongly in favor of mandating storage requirements.
Quote Posted by froghawk
Not to mention that only one mass shooting has ever been stopped by an armed civilian iirc.
This is mostly because of the media and selection bias inherent in using 'mass shooting' as your criteria- it's a little like measuring the efficacy of fire extinguishers by seeing how many multiple-alarm fires they put out. You probably didn't hear about the (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clackamas_Town_Center_shooting) Clackamas Town Center shooting, (
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-driver-shoots-gunman-met-0420-20150419-story.html) Chicago Logan Square shooting, or the (
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/04/us/garland-mohammed-drawing-contest-shooting/) Garland, TX attempted mass shooting. The first two were attempted mass shootings stopped by armed civilians, while the third was stopped by a policeman providing security, and in all three cases they're not counted as 'mass shootings' because the gunman/gunmen were stopped before they could kill enough people, and received little national publicity.
Not that I mean to imply that arming everyone is the solution to terrorism or anything like that, but the question shouldn't be whether armed citizens
end mass shootings, it should be whether or not armed citizens
prevent mass shootings. And then although we're entering the realm of pure speculation since we can't know how many people a dead extremist would have killed if not stopped, the answer is still a lot less clear- and even if no significant difference is readily visible, the fact that almost all high-profile mass shootings occur in places which are specifically disarmed gives me reason to think that at the very least, concealed carry is an effective deterrent.
Quote Posted by froghawk
Home defense? Keeping a gun under your pillow or on your nightstand leads to numerous accidental deaths, but how are you going to extract guns from a gun closet fast enough for it to be effective?
Biometric safe bolted to the floor. Takes about two seconds to access, can't be opened without an encoded fingerprint.
heywood on 16/6/2016 at 18:42
Quote Posted by faetal
Catbarf - one thing I'll say in response to what Dema suggested is that it rests on where the onus should lie. Should society be set up to allow ultimate freedom to allow some to succeed with detriment to society as a whole or set up to try to maximise the benefit to society as a whole, with the cost being that some don't succeed?
Not catbarf, but my vote would be neither. The former option results in the majority of people becoming wage slaves to an elite owner class. The latter option results in the majority of people becoming slaves to an elite bureaucrat class. We've tried both and they don't work which is why we now have social democracy.
I would like people to be free as possible, but society has to step in to make sure that the exercise of one person's liberty is not done at the expense of another persons liberty, or at least to balance the two when they are in conflict. Similarly, a person can have all the civil rights in the world but if they have no opportunity to do anything because they are trapped in economic dependency e.g. wage slavery, then they aren't really a free person. Society should provide some level of opportunity for everyone.
Quote Posted by froghawk
In the same year, 172,000 guns were stolen from homes during burglaries. So... for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, 896 guns were put in the hands of criminals. And for every 1 time a gun was used in defense, more than 2 people were killed by accident. And more than twice as many guns are stolen than prevent attacks through their presence.
In addition to laws that require safe storage, we might also consider strong penalties for people whose guns are lost or stolen because the owner failed to secure them in a proper container.
Quote:
And staying armed against the government? Don't make me laugh. You've got guns, but they've got tanks and drones. There's no winning that one.
Which explains why it was so easy for our military to get rid of the Taliban. Oh, wait. And the Viet Cong. Oh, wait...
I'll admit there is no way that small arms are going to protect a small group of Western ranchers from being taken down by the government, or religious cult holed up in a compound in Waco. But in the event of something more significant such as a widespread insurgency or civil war, the formation of a proficient civilian militia would be helpful in protecting communities from whatever side. And if our government ever got so corrupt or authoritarian that it was cause for a revolution, don't assume the military is just going to follow orders to kill their fellow Americans. At that point, the military would be as divided as the rest of the country.
Anyway, the possibility of armed revolution seems rather remote. But there are other reasons why civil society might go pear shaped, such as an epidemic, natural disaster, famine or severe resource shortage, or even nuclear war. Guns are the last resort option for protecting your family or community in these situations where civil institutions are no longer able to protect you or provide for you. That is the best argument I've heard for why owning a gun is a fundamental right. Home protection is second best. Where the gun lobby loses me is in suggesting that armed vigilantes walking the streets is a beneficial thing under "normal" conditions.
That's nuts.
catbarf on 16/6/2016 at 19:30
Quote Posted by heywood
Guns are the last resort option for protecting your family or community in these situations where civil institutions are no longer able to protect you or provide for you.
I generally agree with most of what Heywood said, but to this point in particular I'd like to reiterate that in the US there exists no civil institution with an obligation to protect you, because courts have repeatedly upheld that the duty of the police is to catch criminals, not defend the populace. This becomes readily apparent in widespread civil disturbances like the LA Riots, Katrina, or more recently Ferguson when the police are too busy dealing with rioters and looters to respond to calls, but consider for a moment that in the shooting this past weekend, the police didn't intervene until
three hours after the shooting started. In the US you can not expect the police to prevent you from being harmed, so your safety is your responsibility.
froghawk on 16/6/2016 at 20:02
Good points all around - thanks for the thoughtful intelligent responses!
It's too bad it's so difficult to get definitive statistics about this sort of thing, since ideally I do think legislation should have a statistical basis. I'd be curious to see if there's some sort of meta-analysis of all these different stats.
The one thing I take issue with is that I don't think it's fair to compare fighting insurgent groups in other countries to fighting our own civilians on our own turf. Those are two very different things and there's a definite home turf advantage, plus those insurgent groups were armed with automatic weapons that are illegal here. With that said, you have a good point about the fact that the military here would become fractured if asked to attack the populace, so that takes care of that pretty nicely.
Obviously the ideal situation is disarming absolutely everyone (governments & militaries included), but that sort of de-escalation is practically impossible to achieve. Regardless, any gun control debate DOES need to include a discussion of disarming the government as well.
Vivian on 16/6/2016 at 21:38
Quote Posted by froghawk
Regardless, any gun control debate DOES need to include a discussion of disarming the government as well.
What?
