Right to bear arms vs. right to fire

[IOWA]

LOL...too many forums...for too many years I guess. Same name on all of them...

I Googled my username once and was amazed at what it returned.

Try that with my name

 

[Ridgerunner665]

Corn...lots of corn

 

[iowabowtech]

Corn...lots of corn

Hey!!!


















True statement.

 

[batgeek]

nothing wrong with corn. i love corn!

i think Nebraska has you Iowans(?) beat though.

 

[OstrichSaK]

nothing wrong with corn. i love corn!

i think Nebraska has you Iowans(?) beat though.

I grew up there. Lots of corn. Lots of fat asses too.

 

[Ridgerunner665]

Where there is corn...there is AWESOME deer hunting...I'm in Iowa and Nebraska both a lot (been through both this week, spent the night in Clear Lake, IA last night)...and some of the deer I see along the roads are amazing.

I live in TN and we have some good deer hunting too, but the deer are nothing like the size of them corn fed monsters up there...

My other favorite hobby....deer hunting!

Also...I make my living off of that corn too...a large part of my living anyway...I haul the combines, sprayers, tractors, etc for Case and John Deere....thats 90% of my loads (got a sprayer on here now)

 

[batgeek]

I grew up there. Lots of corn. Lots of fat asses too.

fat bottomed girls make the rockin' world go 'round.

 

[OstrichSaK]

Yeah, this is the most two people have read what the other one posted, thought about what they were saying and then intelligently remarked to those points they made in this entire thread.

 

[OutofDate1980]

Well I realize that some posters just take the opposite side of the argument for entertainment purposes, and that's okay...I used to do it myself when I was younger.

I don't mind, I like the mental exercise and hey, who knows maybe one person will read this thread and gain something positive from it

We agree, there are at least to sides to an argument. What I'm trying to accomplish, from the OP is there are pro/con to both sides. Here's another wrinkle. Violence in men caused by unequal wealth and competition, study suggests

"In their twenties, men are more likely to report themselves as high in physical aggression, and to be arrested for engaging in assaults and the use of weapons, than at any other age."

 

[mike114]

correlation does not imply causation. it is IMPOSSIBLE to prove that more firearms in citizens hands has led to lower crime rates.

I'm not really trying to argue correlation. What I am saying is that as more people are getting armed, violent crime has lowered. That is just a statement of fact as compared to the horror stories that were being told by anti-gunners that violence would skyrocket as more people carried firearms. This has simply not happened.

 

[batgeek]

it's not a fact if it can not be proven. it is fallacy spouted by 2A advocates.

you are argueing corellation by stating, "AS more people are getting armed, crime HAS lowered."

there is no CONCRETE data/evidence that proves that crime drops due to more people being armed. thus it is not a fact in any way shape or form.

you do know that violent crime has been on the decline since the mid 90's? did you also know that firearm purchase increases have just been a recent phenomenon?

but let's not let facts and statistics sully our arguement.

 

[mike114]

it's not a fact if it can not be proven. it is fallacy spouted by 2A advocates.

you are argueing corellation by stating, "AS more people are getting armed, crime HAS lowered."

there is no CONCRETE data/evidence that proves that crime drops due to more people being armed. thus it is not a fact in any way shape or form.

you do know that violent crime has been on the decline since the mid 90's? did you also know that firearm purchase increases have just been a recent phenomenon?

but let's not let facts and statistics sully our arguement.

I'm not understanding where I have been proven incorrect. Let me try and put it another way.

As more Americans have been aquiring more firearms, has violent crime increased or decreased? That's the only point I'm trying to make which is the complete opposite argument that groups like the Brady campaign told us would happen.

Again, I never said that A led to B.

 

[batgeek]

once again. violent crime has been on the decline since the mid 90's. this is with periods of high and low firearms purchases since then and now.

the Brady Campaign are a bunch of idiots. they hope and wish for bad just to try and rid our citizens of the RKBA.

 

[FJR1300]

I'm not understanding where I have been proven incorrect. Let me try and put it another way.

As more Americans have been aquiring more firearms, has violent crime increased or decreased? That's the only point I'm trying to make which is the complete opposite argument that groups like the Brady campaign told us would happen.

Again, I never said that A led to B.

I understand your point.

Maybe we can just say that gun ownership has had no provable impact on crime rates up or down. Each group can point to studies that back their claim, but as always the method of data collection and analysis can be brought into question.

Although I'd bet that pro-gun advocates started making the case for crime going down, soon after ant-gun advocates stated that crime went up. RKBA proponents have had no reason to say anything about crime rates or anti-gun laws until pressured by groups to take away our rights.


I'd love to be able to get everyone to read Unintended Consequences for a great history lesson on the how and why of gun laws from their inception. But that's 800 pages of pro-gun literature that no self-respecting ant-gun person is going to give the time of day, shame.

 

[FJR1300]

Corn...lots of corn

I'm resisting the urge to start a separate thread about Monsanto

 

[OstrichSaK]

once again. violent crime has been on the decline since the mid 90's. this is with periods of high and low firearms purchases since then and now.

the Brady Campaign are a bunch of idiots. they hope and wish for bad just to try and rid our citizens of the RKBA.

Did violent crime increase with the dramatic rise in firearm sales & ownership the last several years?

Rhetorical question, obviously. The answer is no w/o any semantics debate. This was the dooms day fear mongering the anti-2A crowd was spewing so I think we can say their official statements and 'facts' are incorrect based on the last several years. They're quickly running out of boogey men to scare ignorant & naive people with. I think that's the point being made.

 

[A.Nonymous]

Did violent crime increase with the dramatic rise in firearm sales & ownership the last several years?

Rhetorical question, obviously. The answer is no w/o any semantics debate. This was the dooms day fear mongering the anti-2A crowd was spewing so I think we can say their official statements and 'facts' are incorrect based on the last several years. They're quickly running out of boogey men to scare ignorant & naive people with. I think that's the point being made.

Arguing that firearm sales and ownership are great because crime hasn't increased seems like an either-or fallacy to me. There's no evidence that firearms ownership has any impact on crime at all.

 

[IOWA]

Arguing that firearm sales and ownership are great because crime hasn't increased seems like an either-or fallacy to me. There's no evidence that firearms ownership has any impact on crime at all.

I'm sorry, but Harvard law would disagree with you here.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

 

[A.Nonymous]

I'm sorry, but Harvard law would disagree with you here.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

I disagree with their conclusion and their methodology. They start by looking at other countries. I don't think that's a good place to start either as there are a lot of cultural factors that come into play. As has been pointed out earlier, crime rates in the US have been dropping for decades and that's a good thing. Concealed carry laws have only recently come along. Violent crimes and crime rates in general were dropping long before concealed carry laws came along. It's also examining the hypothesis that more guns are linked to more murder. I don't know that anyone here made that claim.

 

[IOWA]

I disagree with their conclusion and their methodology. They start by looking at other countries. I don't think that's a good place to start either as there are a lot of cultural factors that come into play. As has been pointed out earlier, crime rates in the US have been dropping for decades and that's a good thing. Concealed carry laws have only recently come along. Violent crimes and crime rates in general were dropping long before concealed carry laws came along. It's also examining the hypothesis that more guns are linked to more murder. I don't know that anyone here made that claim.

Before concealed carry was constitutional carry, people didn't need permits. I'm sorry, but you'd have to offer up a pretty fantastic explanation to counter a Harvard law argument IMO.

 

[Loota]

The better question is who supports the right to arm bears...

 

[FJR1300]

I disagree with their conclusion and their methodology. They start by looking at other countries. I don't think that's a good place to start either as there are a lot of cultural factors that come into play. As has been pointed out earlier, crime rates in the US have been dropping for decades and that's a good thing. Concealed carry laws have only recently come along. Violent crimes and crime rates in general were dropping long before concealed carry laws came along. It's also examining the hypothesis that more guns are linked to more murder. I don't know that anyone here made that claim.

There were 34 states that issued concealed carry permits in 1986, or would 26 years be considered recent? Were violent crimes and crime rates dropping long before 1986?

Why have you, in this thread, made so many statements represented as fact when they are really just your opinion?

 

[FJR1300]

Why can't they think?

Why do they turn off their minds?

Why do gun-control advocates lose all capacity for critical thinking when exposed to gun-control propaganda?

We've all seen it. Some otherwise rational person, who wouldn't dream of buying a used car without taking it to a mechanic to have it checked out, will accept the most outlandish claims, without the slightest question or hesitation, so long as it reinforces their anti-gun prejudices.

Some time back, I was involved in a conversation in which someone claimed that:

teens in homes with guns are 75 times more likely to kill themselves than teens in homes without guns.
I didn't know where this factoid came from, but I didn't need to to understand that it was absurd. It was so far beyond the range of possibility that only the most critically inumerate could consider it as even remotely plausible.

I've since researched the claim a bit, and it had much the background I'd expected. David Kopel has a write-up on it in his 1993 opinion piece "Children and Guns: Sensible Solutions":
KOPEL: "CHILDREN AND GUNS: SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS"

The original article in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) compared homes where teens committed suicides to teens who had attempted suicide or been admitted to psychiatric hospitals. It didn't address the general population. And it found the homes of teen suicides were committed were twice as likely to contain guns as those of teens who had merely attempted it.

That's worth repeating: the study addressed only teens who had attempted suicide, not teens in general. And that's "twice as likely", not "seventy-five times". The "seventy-five times" claim came from an accompanying editorial by three CDC employees.

JAMA later printed a retraction, but that doesn't keep the writers of the anti-gun literature from repeating the original claim. In the Washington Post column by Richard Reeves that inspired Kopel's response, for example, or on the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles web page:
http://www.psrla.org/guns-suicide.htm

Or more recently, in James LeMesurier, MD's article "Children Without Guns: An Idea Whose Time Has Come", in "Sonoma Medicine":
http://www.scma.org/magazine/scp/scp_newformat/scp980506/lemesurier.html

But in some ways, that's all beside the point. It doesn't matter that we can track down the history of the "75-times" claim, and demonstrate how it was based on lies and misconceptions. The claim is absurd on the face of it, and no rational person should accept it, regardless of its source. All it takes is a little back-of-the-envelope math to demonstrate it's lack of correspondence to reality.

The trick, when faced with a new piece of information, is to compare it to what you already know, and see if there are any inconsistencies. It's something most educated do as a matter of course. In many ways, it's the primary purpose of an education.

Warning! Mathematics ahead!

The assertion is that teens in a home with guns are seventy-five times as likely to commit suicide as teens in homes without guns.

What do we know?

In 1998, there were 2510 teen suicides involving firearms.
There were 1,625 teen suicides that did not involve firearms.
http://www.iusb.edu/~jmcintos/USA98Summary.htm
35% of households own guns.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/pressreleases/1997/GUNSRIB.HTM
From the numbers above, we know that if we have p teenagers at risk of suicide. 0.35*p live in a home with a gun, 0.65*p live in homes without. The claim is that if the likelihood that a teen at risk of suicide in a home without a gun is 1*r, the likelihood that a teen at risk of suicide in a home with a gun is 75*r. This gives us:

0.35*p*75*r + 0.65*p*1*r = 4135
I won't bore you with the algebra, but that means:

0.65*p*r = 99.92
That is, if the 75-times risk were correct, given that there are guns in 35% of homes, then with 4135 teen suicides, only 100 would have occurred in homes that did not have guns. It's a direct consequence of the claimed increased risk. If households with guns were 75 times as risky, finding that 40 times as many suicides occurred in them as in households without guns should surprise no one.

The problem with this result should be obvious. In 1998, we had 1625 teen suicides that did not involve guns. Which meant that 1525 of these non-gun suicides would have been in households with guns.

So let's compare the risk of committing suicide without a gun between gun-owning and non-gun-owning households:

0.35*p*x*r = 1525
0.65*p*1*r = 100
Again a bit of algebra, and we find:

x = 28.32
In other words, the claim that kids in home with guns are 75 times more likely to commit suicide as kids in homes without guns is equivalent to claiming that kids in homes with guns are 28 times more likely to commit suicide using something other than a gun than are kids who live in homes without guns.

Can anyone even start to hypothesize some mechanism that would cause this to be true? Yes, you could assume that kids in households with guns are more likely to kill themselves with a gun, simply because they have easier access. But why would a kid in a household with a gun be more likely to kill himself by hanging, poison, or by jumping off a bridge?

Maybe it's those evil mind-control rays that guns emit.

Now, some of the numbers we started with were estimates. Maybe 50% of households own guns, or only 25%. Or maybe the percentage is different for households with teens than for the general population. And maybe some of the kids who lived in households without guns committed suicides with guns. It doesn't matter.

You can, if you like, rerun the calculations using any reasonable numbers for percentages of households with guns, or of the number of teen gun and non-gun suicides. The result will differ a bit, but it will always be absurd. Because the initial claim is absurd.

In truth, you shouldn't need to run through the numbers. The 75-times claim is so obviously absurd that it should raise immediate flags in any educated person who heard it. It's the equivalent of claiming that the Mississippi River could be redirected to Mexico through a garden hose.

Yet we continue to see the anti-gun people quoting numbers such as this.

Why?

They can't really be that stupid, can they? After all, a great many of them have medical degrees, and I'd like to think that they learned at least the rudiments of rational thought.

But they show precious little evidence of it.

It's a puzzlement.

Original author: http://www.gun-nuttery.com/why.php

 

[batgeek]

Did violent crime increase with the dramatic rise in firearm sales & ownership the last several years?

Rhetorical question, obviously. The answer is no w/o any semantics debate. This was the dooms day fear mongering the anti-2A crowd was spewing so I think we can say their official statements and 'facts' are incorrect based on the last several years. They're quickly running out of boogey men to scare ignorant & naive people with. I think that's the point being made.

what they think may happen, and what is actually happening, are two entirely different things.

can not claim facts when it was just wishfull thinking by the antis.