A firearm question for you LeftiesFollow

I thought I'd been following this issue pretty closely, but I've not heard a thing about gun free zones and conceal carry laws being expanded federally.

Maybe you're hearing about local policy stuff gbaji and confusing it with federal policy debate. Then again, maybe you're just making stuff up.

You realize there are come legitimate reasons for using gun deaths? Should I link Mr. Chinese guy who stabbed 22 kindergarteners but didn't manage to kill any of them again?

It's certainly not the end-all, but guns are just better at killing things than anything else your average person can wield easily. There's a reason we give them to soldiers. If they could do just as well with a switchblade or a broadsword we wouldn't waste our money with the guns. That money is better spent carpeting offices anyway, so I'm told.

An assault weapons ban isn't really addressing the big problems certainly, but anything that turns a gun crime into knife crime is going to lower the fatality rate. You can go the route of trying to keep guns out of the hand of criminals here if that's more palatable, it's probably going to be more effective anyway.

Where do you get these ideas?

The conservative echo chamber. The same place you get the idea that Obama's Birth Certificate is a thing to be taken even vaguely seriously.

I'm pointing out cherry picking in the data used in that chart. By using "gun deaths" instead of "homicides", it creates a false perception that violence is correlated to gun ownership by concealing the fact that these nations have higher homicide rates despite having much lower gun ownership rates.

The data doesn't conflict with my ideology at all. It supports my position

That frequently happens when you start with the ideology and go looking for data to support it. Odd, that.

Gun free zones are already federal. That's the point. And concealed carry issues are what conservatives care about. This is another case of liberals not knowing what conservatives actually think or want, because they're only hearing the liberal arguments. Conservatives honestly don't care much about background checks, or reasonable magazine size restrictions. We think they're wastes of time and often cover for more problematic regulation, but those actual things that liberals spend a ton of effort making people think this issue is about aren't really that important to conservatives.

It's just funny because when you talk to liberals about current gun issues, all they talk about is magazine sizes and background checks. When you talk to conservatives they talk about concealed carry and gun free zones. Huge disconnect on the issue. Which is part of what I'm trying to point out.


Of course, I'm sure Smash will just say "See! Conservative echo chamber". Um... It's what conservatives are talking about. Perhaps instead of assuming what we care about, you should actually listen to us for a change? It's the liberals who tend to live in an echo chamber, because conservatives know exactly what the left is arguing for, but it's shocking how few liberals know what conservative think we should be doing in the wake of a shooting like Newtown.

List some then. I can think of only one strong reason to use gun deaths as the metric to graph against gun ownership when comparing multiple nations. And that's to create a false impression that more guns equal more violent crime/death. While there might be uses for "gun death" (like if you want to look at accidents involving guns for instance), using it in preference to "homicide" when the context is whether guns make a society more or less likely to be violent is misleading at best.



For what purpose? Should we link to all the folks who were wounded but not killed in various shooting events as well? There were 58 people wounded in the Colorado Theater shooting. Do we count or not count those? We can, but we'd be talking about something completely different.



Yes. Which means that it's an equalizer. If a burly guy comes into granny's home with a knife and wants to kill her, there isn't much she can do about it even if she also has a knife. But if she's got a gun, she can protect herself from him. Hence, why homicide rates are relevant here while gun deaths are not. If she kills the intruder bent on killing her, it'll show up as a gun death but *not* as a homicide, while if she doesn't have a gun and he kills her instead, it shows up as the opposite. That's why counting gun deaths instead of homicides is the wrong metric to use. We want the gun death instead of the homicide in that case, right? Obviously, we'd prefer if neither died, but concealing the death of granny by a knife wielding killer in the stats because it's not a gun death is misleading and circular. It assumes all we care about is whether someone died by a gun, and not whether they died, or whether their death was a homicide or justifiable self defense.


Those differences are important, right?




Maybe. But it'll increase the victimization rate, everything else staying the same. Because in the process of making the criminal use a knife instead of a gun, you'll also make the victims less able to defend themselves. I just think you're chasing the wrong end of the issue here.

That's a general crime assessment, if we're talking just about attempted mass killings, it wont have any effect at all. We can't limit gun ownership to the point where someone can't obtain sufficient firepower to kill a whole bunch of unarmed victims. We just can't. The criminal will always have the advantage in that situation. The VT shooter used a pair of pistols (with 10 and 15 round magazines respectively), killed 32 people and wounded 17. Clearly, restricting him to just 10 round magazines would not have made much or any difference. People planning these sorts of attacks will bring whatever they need with them, and plan the attack based on what they have.

We can't turn those into knife crimes. So short of that, it makes more sense to try to minimize the number of fatalities when such things happen and perhaps even deter them in the first place. That requires more firearms in the hands of civilians, not fewer. One person with a gun might have been able to save many lives that day. Speculation? Sure. But it's a reasonable speculation.

Again, we're arguing the wrong side of the issue and going in the wrong direction.



Sure. No harm in trying. I have no issues at all with tightening up background checks on firearms to make sure that felons and folks already declared mentally unstable can't buy them. My problem is that the VT case is somewhat of an exception (and the laws were already in place anyway, just not implemented properly). Most shootings like this are not committed by people who would be blocked by such things (not already felons, nor already declared mentally unstable). Thus, my concern isn't with closing the loopholes, but the idea that there will be an attempt expand the criteria for being denied purchase of a weapon in the first place. I don't think that's a great idea. There are very few cases of folks using weapons purchased at a gun show to commit a mass shooting, for example (actually, I'm not aware of any). It's a myth that doesn't really happen, so while the general value of closing the "small sales vendor" loophole in terms of gun crime in general is legitimate, it really has no bearing at all on the kinds of shooting that is prompting the change.

I just think it's usually a bad idea to use the anger over one thing to push for laws that don't affect that thing, but do affect something else. It becomes about someone using that emotion to push an agenda instead of looking for actual solutions to the problem.

Edited, Feb 7th 2013 3:37pm by gbaji

Remember when I said you were making points irrelevant to the argument? You're doing it again. That's why people are wondering where you're getting these gun-free zones/concealment laws. It's because you're bypassing the overall concerns expressed by the people and arguing your points that are irrelevant to the subject.

It does.

So is Nigeria and Afghanistan. But we're discussing developed, industrialized nations for a reason. You need to keep trying to cherry-pick because your "data" can't stand without it.

For OECD nations besides the US (the ones represented in the chart) the average homicide rate is 2.15 (1.5 without Mexico included) per 100k and the average firearms per 100 people is 17. For the US, the homicide rate per 100k is 4.8 with 88 firearms per 100 people. I'd think there's a strong argument for excluding Mexico since they're an outlier due to a protracted drug war but to avoid you crying about it, I'll say fuck it and keep them in... and we still have over twice the average homicide rate as everyone else. Without Mexico, it's three times as many homicides as the average.

But yeah, "circular logic!" and we should be comparing the US to Russia and Cuba and Nigeria!


Wanting less deaths isn't reason enough? Bizarre.

[edit: Originally said four times the average rather than three. Math is hard, let's go shopping]

Edited, Feb 7th 2013 7:05pm by Jophiel

Sure it does. You don't like it buty denying it doesn't make it less true.


It's averaged because, frankly, trying to chart is creates thirty dots virtually on top of one another and the US sitting off on its own. As for what it "means", you already know.

Look, I get that you don't like this. That's fine. You're likely on the losing end of this debate in that some form of enhanced gun control legislation will make its way through. Given your inability to see clear trends in things like climate change, election polling, support for SSM, etc I'm not honestly going to sit here and debate "data" with you over and over while you insist that only the data you say is true is true.

Or, hey, maybe President Romney will show us how no state will ever vote to legalize SSM due to global cooling, right? The data proves it! I'm just too brainwashed and liberal to notice!

Law-makers have always used the momentum of the populace to entice an unwieldy bureaucracy into action. This is our history.

I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve, but I think over-all most of the politicians simply want fewer people dead. Dead people can't vote ya know.

Gun Show guns aren't used in mass school shootings, but they've been implicated in numerous drug deaths on both sides of the Mexican border. The gun show 'exemption', in my opinion, is one of the stupidest things ever allowed into a piece of federal legislation. This is as good a time as any to attempt to fix that pandering blunder.

Sure. No harm in trying. I have no issues at all with tightening up background checks on firearms to make sure that felons and folks already declared mentally unstable can't buy them. My problem is that the VT case is somewhat of an exception (and the laws were already in place anyway, just not implemented properly). Most shootings like this are not committed by people who would be blocked by such things (not already felons, nor already declared mentally unstable). Thus, my concern isn't with closing the loopholes, but the idea that there will be an attempt expand the criteria for being denied purchase of a weapon in the first place. I don't think that's a great idea. There are very few cases of folks using weapons purchased at a gun show to commit a mass shooting, for example

The hundreds of thousands used in "non mass" homicides are unimportant, clearly.