Gun violence the cost of Freedom to Bear Arms?

[Jaskalas]

Some of us wanted to ban Muslims after September 11th.

At some point you stop the knee jerk reaction and remember that people have rights. Do you think police, up to 20 minutes away, are going to save you during a home invasion? No. Only YOU can do that. With training, readiness, and a firearm. If you are not prepared, then you will be at the mercy of your assailants.

Democrats insist on forcing you to be at the mercy of others. To force you to disarm and be without protection. Without the means to protect yourself or your family. This position of theirs is a betrayal of the highest order. Against our lives, against our families, and against the Constitution which sought to ensure our rights. Which sought to ensure that WE would protect our rights, and the rights of others.

You will not protect anyone while disarmed. Do you suggest it is no longer our right to stand guard? When we the people are no longer trusted to secure our nation, then just who is in charge? Surely not us, if we have been deemed unfit and unworthy. Some Democracy that is...

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

just as hate speech is the cost of Freedom of Speech?

I'd like to point out that some countries have high rates of gun ownership without having proportionately high levels of gun deaths (e.g. Scandinavian countries). However, there are also countries with lower levels of gun ownership with higher levels of firearm violence.

You could be doing a lot worse, but you could also be doing a lot better.

 

[irishScott]

You are extrapolating from facts in the usual paranoid gun nut fashion.

Will what Cuomo offers pass Constitutional muster in light of recent rulings?

Obviously not, so Pfffttt.

All right, I know I said I was done, but this one's pretty easy.

Extrapolating what exactly? That there are those who are trying to take away our guns, and that they have substantial political clout? Not much extrapolation going on there.

While their proposals may not pass Constitutional muster, that doesn't mean they can't stick around for a while. Right now there are gun laws in several states that would likely not past Constitutional muster, but to get the Supreme Court to knock them down would require a lot of money in lawsuits and would require the Supreme Court to consent to hearing them in the first place. Basically they could stick around for years or decades before being knocked down. I'd rather not have to go through that and I know those affected by said laws don't want to, so yeah, I'll "extrapolate" and nip their efforts in the bud as much as possible.

 

[shira]

Self defense, when the police are 20 minutes away.

But do the self-defense benefits of handguns really outweigh the costs? I want to see scholarly, peer-reviewed analyses of what really happens every year. I found this article interesting:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-27/how-often-do-we-use-guns-in-self-defense

How Often Do We Use Guns in Self-Defense?

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

If you had to sum up the National Rifle Association’s response to the Newtown (Conn.) school massacre, and to any proposal for tougher gun-control laws, that one sentence from the NRA’s Dec. 21 press conference pretty much does the trick.

The gun owners’ lobby opposes restrictions on civilian acquisition and possession of firearms because, it contends, law-abiding people need guns to defend themselves. Millions of people also use guns for hunting and target-shooting. But at the core of the NRA’s argument is self-defense: the ultimate right to protect one’s ability to remain upright and breathing.

So how often do Americans use guns to defend themselves? If it almost never happens, then the NRA argument is based on a fallacy and deserves little respect in the fashioning of public policy. If, on the other hand, defensive gun use (DGU) is relatively common, then even a diehard gun-control advocate with any principles and common sense would admit that this fact must be given some weight.

Criminologists concur that the unusual prevalence of guns in America—some 300 million in private hands—makes our violent crime more lethal than that of other countries. That’s the cost of allowing widespread civilian gun ownership: In this country, when someone is inclined to commit a mugging, shoot up a movie theater, or kill their spouse (or themselves), firearms are readily available.

One reason the gun debate seems so radioactive is that gun-control proponents refer almost exclusively to the cost of widespread gun ownership, while the NRA and its allies focus on guns as instruments and symbols of self-reliance. Very few, if any, participants in the conflict acknowledge that guns are both bad and good, depending on how they’re used. Robbers use them to stick up convenience stores, and convenience store owners use them to stop armed robbers.

If guns have a countervailing benefit—that lawful firearm owners frequently or even occasionally use guns to defend themselves and their loved ones—then determining how aggressively to curb private possession becomes a more complicated proposition.

As with everything else concerning guns in this country, the DGU question prompts divergent answers. At one end of the spectrum, the NRA cites research by Gary Kleck, an accomplished criminologist at Florida State University. Based on self-reporting by survey respondents, Kleck has extrapolated that DGU occurs more than 2 million times a year. Kleck doesn’t suggest that gun owners shoot potential antagonists that often. DGU covers various scenarios, including merely brandishing a weapon and scaring off an aggressor.

At the other end of the spectrum, gun skeptics prefer to cite the work of David Hemenway, an eminent public-health scholar at Harvard University. Hemenway, who analogizes gun violence to an epidemic and guns to the contagion, argues that Kleck’s research significantly overestimates the frequency of DGU.

The carping back and forth gets pretty technical, but the brief version is that Hemenway believes Kleck includes too many “false positives”: respondents who claim they’ve chased off burglars or rapists with guns but probably are boasting or, worse, categorizing unlawful aggressive conduct as legitimate DGU. Hemenway finds more reliable an annual federal government research project, called the National Crime Victimization Survey, which yields estimates in the neighborhood of 100,000 defensive gun uses per year. Making various reasonable-sounding adjustments, other social scientists have suggested that perhaps a figure somewhere between 250,000 and 370,000 might be more accurate.

What’s the upshot?

1. We don’t know exactly how frequently defensive gun use occurs.

2. A conservative estimate of the order of magnitude is tens of thousands of times a year; 100,000 is not a wild gun-nut fantasy.

3. Many gun owners (I am not one, but I know plenty) focus not on statistical probabilities, but on a worst-case scenario: They’re in trouble, and they want a fighting chance.

4. DGU does not answer any questions in this debate, but it’s a factor that deserves attention.

A question that this article doesn't answer is: what harms are these DGU incidents preventing? That is, even if 250,000 cases of self-defense with guns occur each year, what is being defended against, and how many murders, rapes, and assaults are being prevented? How many robberies?

 

[JEDIYoda]

A question that this article doesn't answer is: what harms are these DGU incidents preventing? That is, even if 250,000 cases of self-defense with guns occur each year, what is being defended against, and how many murders, rapes, and assaults are being prevented? How many robberies?

The article does not have to answer those questions!!! Those questions are talking points of the anti-gun lobby.....nice try though....

 

[TerryMathews]

But do the self-defense benefits of handguns really outweigh the costs? I want to see scholarly, peer-reviewed analyses of what really happens every year. I found this article interesting:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-27/how-often-do-we-use-guns-in-self-defense



A question that this article doesn't answer is: what harms are these DGU incidents preventing? That is, even if 250,000 cases of self-defense with guns occur each year, what is being defended against, and how many murders, rapes, and assaults are being prevented? How many robberies?

The true problem with these statistics is that there really is no way to know. We have a number, based on reported uses. Which means the criminal actually made the attempt, a gun was drawn, the incident ended and was reported.

This does not, and really nothing can, capture incidents where a criminal was going to rob/assault/rape/shoot and stopped because he spotted someone armed. Whether open carry, or concealed carry and they spot the bulge, it's foolish to assume that criminals are unobservant and do not notice their surroundings.

Short of being able to eliminate all other variables, I don't have any idea how you would capture those sorts of incidents in these statistics.

 

[Cozarkian]

But do the self-defense benefits of handguns really outweigh the costs? I want to see scholarly, peer-reviewed analyses of what really happens every year. I found this article interesting:

We know from just the power of observation and the internet that people do in fact act like bigger assholes when they think they are untouchable. Take, for example, this little shit:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Swatting+leads+charges+against+Ottawa/9824837/story.html

Notice that kid had firearms and ammunition even in a country with stricter gun control laws. Any criminal that wants a gun is going to get one from gun runners across the U.S. Southern border. Or more accurately, he'll get a gun from someone who knows someone who knows someone who has contacts with arms smugglers.