(Gun rights discussion post relating to a Facebook discussion.
Apparently my post was too long for FB, and thus I had to drop it here,
to be linked to within FB.)
Sorry about the long delay. I am not always in the mood to tackle these topics (and I was on vacation for a bit).
1) Nope. Not referring to NEA study. Using U.N. crime data, as accessed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Then using 'per capita private guns' data from gunpolicy.org, as accessed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
I then collated and graphed the data myself, in the interest of assessing whether there were any seeming correlations. I did this in the interest of getting past the misleading claims about gun death rates with respect to private gun ownership, since as noted previously, the real salient point is not whether there are more murders committed by guns in a gun-laden society, but whether or not more murder (regardless of method) is being committed in a gun-laden society. We are trying to minimize murder, not gun murder specifically.
This number crunching is in part a response to the idea that citizen gun ownership is a method by which to reduce crime, especially violent crime.
I wanted to see for myself what an actual analysis of data would suggest.
I will endeavor to update my data tables and graphs, then post them online somewhere so that I can link them into this thread. But it will probably take a week or two. I have many other activities in addition to debating gun rights on FB. :-)
I promise you, I am not dodging this. I have indeed collated and graphed this data previously, and seen that the highest murder rates in the world are always in countries with very low private gun ownership rates. Correlation is not causation. But it is any interesting fact. Updated tables & graphs to come.
Causation:
I did quite well in my science & stats classes, and thus am quite in agreement with you that correlation does not equal causation. :-)
I also agree strongly that socioeconomic factors play a major role in violence. In particular, I believe that poverty incites violence.
Britain:
Britain's gun-related crime rate went up ~50% over ~6 years, rather than a mere 14%.
http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN01940
This is not proof that gun bans cause murder, in the same way that the presence of guns is not proof that guns cause murder.
But the 50% increase after the handgun ban is an indication that gun bans may not reduce gun crime very effectively. ..it suggests that taking away a person's natural right to protect themselves, may not lead to more safety.
I did some quick searching to try to find the BBC article on the non-gun-ban relevant factors correlated to the post-ban increase in gun crime rates, per your suggestion. However, I did find such an article in my brief search.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/1440764.stm
Unfortunately for the point you are making, the thing I found suggests that lower gun rates are somewhat correlated to higher gun crime rates..more in line with the suggestion of my previous graphing (but not yet shared here) of per capita gun ownership vs murder rates by country.
2) Unfounded fears:
You misjudge my fear level. I believe my day-to-day risk of being attacked to be rather low.
Your risk of being shot is also very low.
Using data I crunched previously, your lifetime risk of being injured by a gun in the U.S. is ~2.1%.
Your lifetime risk of being a gun homicide victim in the U.S. is ~0.28%.
For comparison, your lifetime risk of dying from falling down is about 0.7%.
And your risk of dying in a traffic accident is about 4 times the risk of gun-related homicide.
Many people are mis-evaluating risks because they focus on the news drama and learned qualitative judgements, rather than data. I am sure you can appreciate that flaw of the human mind. :-)
3) Gun ban:
My apologies for misunderstanding your point/position.
Your sentence " I do not believe nor do I trust the average Joe to be able to do that." gave me the impression that your idea of common sense gun laws was to prevent the average Joe from being able to possess a gun.
Hopefully, your common sense gun laws ideas include such things as universal background checks and mandatory firearms training, rather than gun bans.
:-)
4) I am part libertarian, for sure.
I believe strongly in maximizing the freedom AND welfare for all.
I believe that the greater good comes from allowing as much freedom of thought and action as possible, as long as that freedom maximizes the mean welfare of society.
Societies that take rights without creating an actual (empirically based) improvement to the mean welfare of society from the taking of that right, are doing society a disservice. Taking of rights without a real improvement to mean well-being leads to the taking of more rights without societal improvement...which ultimately leads to an oppressed society with less freedom and less welfare than it could have had.
5) Natural rights:
I am pleased to have brought you a chuckle. :-)
We each come out of the womb with the right to maximize our potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment.
This means that I do not have the right to take your rights without being damned sure that I have improved your opportunity to maximize your potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment. (This is a humanistic type of thing, to my mind.)
Thus, even though few of us exit the womb with an AK-47, each of us has the natural right to work towards being able to purchase an AK-47, if we so choose.
That right should only be taken from me, in a society designed to maximize the welfare of all, if it can be empirically shown that taking that right from me maximizes the mean potential for all of us to maximize our potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment.
We should be loath to block another person's access to tools (physical or mental) that they suspect will improve their chances of having a happy life, unless we know for a reasonable certainty that force-ably blocking that access will in fact increase the mean likelihood of achieving that happy life for all.
6) 2nd Amendment:
I am familiar with the debate over the intended meaning of the 2nd Amendment.
The intent of the Founders was to protect individual rights, not collective rights.
As stated in the Declaration of Independence,
" all men ...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men".
Governments are instituted, in the minds of the Founders, to secure individual rights.
For further insight into the history of thinking on the 2nd Amendment, consider reading this UCLA Law Review publication, "A Modern Historiography of the Second Amendment"
http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/56-5-5.pdf
It cites many sources, discussing the history of interpretations of the 2nd Amendment.
As noted in this document, even anti-gun legal scholars will note that this Amendment was based on individual rights, not collective rights.
Also noted is that the 'collective rights' interpretation was created in the 20th century.
A cherry picked quote, in case you opt not to spend the time to read the whole document,
" as Stephen Halbrook put it:
'In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the “collective” right of states to maintain militias, while it
does not protect the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. If
anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains
one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for
no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791
states such a thesis.'"
7) Fighting government:
- "Militia": Please read the above points I made in (strong?) defense of the idea that American gun rights are individual rights, not collective rights. The people have the right to have firearms, that they can then use in a militia if they so choose.
- Taking on the U.S. military:
Your point is in part, a valid one. However, allow me to point out that the colonists were out-firepowered initially by the British military that they were attempting to defeat.
The colonists in many cases used their privately owned firearms to seize British armories, which then gave the colonists possession of even more firearms, cannons, etc.
They used the firearms they had to take possession of the more advanced firearms of the oppressive government they were initially 'out-gunned' by.
And after they held off the British long enough, using their previously owned private weapons and the newly acquired seized weapons, they were able to negotiate an arrangement with the French to gain access to further weaponry that would put the colonists on par with the British military.
8) Rural voters:
As long as by 'common sense' you don't mean gun bans, you are safe.
However, many Democrats talk openly about wanting to ban all (or at least most) private gun ownership.
My earlier point was that the Dems should consider ceasing to have a platform that includes gun bans, because that is especially likely to hurt prospects with rural voters, in that rural voters are more likely to believe in private gun ownership as a right, and that rural voters lean toward conservative voting trends.
Thus, gaining 'crossover' support from rural voters would be aided by (to be crude about it) shutting up about gun ban ideas.
From Pew Research Center:
" rural residents ...are disproportionately more likely than other Americans to have a gun at home"
And I think we can agree that rural voters lean conservative. I can cite sources on that too if I must.
9) Disagreement:
Again, my apologies for misjudging you. :-)
- As for the sacred cow of gun rights..
rational thought (per my long ago reading of social psychology, and my daily non-scientific contemplation of the people around me) is not the primary way by which people make decisions.
People are far more inclined, I believe, to make decisions based on irrational qualitative notions than on data.
Thus, it is nearly useless to try to win over gun-loving folks with data, even if the data were to be in the favor of anti-gun ideals.
Gun rights is a sacred cow to some (perhaps including me). Therefore, the Dem party should stop promoting gun bans, firstly because it tends to alienate rural voters; and secondly, because the actual data does not tend to support the idea that guns are the problem; nor does the data support the idea that the 2nd Amendment is a 'collective right' rather than an individual one.
And one last extra point.. every time the Dems spoke of the idea of banning 'assault rifles' following a mass shooting, during the Obama era, gun sales went up dramatically.
If the goal is to minimize private gun ownership, talking about banning guns is one of the last things the Dems should do. Gun sales data show that Democrat chatter of banning guns actually increases the number of guns in private possession.
The Democratic party should stop 'shooting itself in the foot'.
Haha. I couldn't resist that one. :-)
Thank you for your thoughts.
Cheers
Apparently my post was too long for FB, and thus I had to drop it here,
to be linked to within FB.)
Sorry about the long delay. I am not always in the mood to tackle these topics (and I was on vacation for a bit).
1) Nope. Not referring to NEA study. Using U.N. crime data, as accessed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Then using 'per capita private guns' data from gunpolicy.org, as accessed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
I then collated and graphed the data myself, in the interest of assessing whether there were any seeming correlations. I did this in the interest of getting past the misleading claims about gun death rates with respect to private gun ownership, since as noted previously, the real salient point is not whether there are more murders committed by guns in a gun-laden society, but whether or not more murder (regardless of method) is being committed in a gun-laden society. We are trying to minimize murder, not gun murder specifically.
This number crunching is in part a response to the idea that citizen gun ownership is a method by which to reduce crime, especially violent crime.
I wanted to see for myself what an actual analysis of data would suggest.
I will endeavor to update my data tables and graphs, then post them online somewhere so that I can link them into this thread. But it will probably take a week or two. I have many other activities in addition to debating gun rights on FB. :-)
I promise you, I am not dodging this. I have indeed collated and graphed this data previously, and seen that the highest murder rates in the world are always in countries with very low private gun ownership rates. Correlation is not causation. But it is any interesting fact. Updated tables & graphs to come.
Causation:
I did quite well in my science & stats classes, and thus am quite in agreement with you that correlation does not equal causation. :-)
I also agree strongly that socioeconomic factors play a major role in violence. In particular, I believe that poverty incites violence.
Britain:
Britain's gun-related crime rate went up ~50% over ~6 years, rather than a mere 14%.
http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN01940
This is not proof that gun bans cause murder, in the same way that the presence of guns is not proof that guns cause murder.
But the 50% increase after the handgun ban is an indication that gun bans may not reduce gun crime very effectively. ..it suggests that taking away a person's natural right to protect themselves, may not lead to more safety.
I did some quick searching to try to find the BBC article on the non-gun-ban relevant factors correlated to the post-ban increase in gun crime rates, per your suggestion. However, I did find such an article in my brief search.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/1440764.stm
Unfortunately for the point you are making, the thing I found suggests that lower gun rates are somewhat correlated to higher gun crime rates..more in line with the suggestion of my previous graphing (but not yet shared here) of per capita gun ownership vs murder rates by country.
2) Unfounded fears:
You misjudge my fear level. I believe my day-to-day risk of being attacked to be rather low.
Your risk of being shot is also very low.
Using data I crunched previously, your lifetime risk of being injured by a gun in the U.S. is ~2.1%.
Your lifetime risk of being a gun homicide victim in the U.S. is ~0.28%.
For comparison, your lifetime risk of dying from falling down is about 0.7%.
And your risk of dying in a traffic accident is about 4 times the risk of gun-related homicide.
Many people are mis-evaluating risks because they focus on the news drama and learned qualitative judgements, rather than data. I am sure you can appreciate that flaw of the human mind. :-)
3) Gun ban:
My apologies for misunderstanding your point/position.
Your sentence " I do not believe nor do I trust the average Joe to be able to do that." gave me the impression that your idea of common sense gun laws was to prevent the average Joe from being able to possess a gun.
Hopefully, your common sense gun laws ideas include such things as universal background checks and mandatory firearms training, rather than gun bans.
:-)
4) I am part libertarian, for sure.
I believe strongly in maximizing the freedom AND welfare for all.
I believe that the greater good comes from allowing as much freedom of thought and action as possible, as long as that freedom maximizes the mean welfare of society.
Societies that take rights without creating an actual (empirically based) improvement to the mean welfare of society from the taking of that right, are doing society a disservice. Taking of rights without a real improvement to mean well-being leads to the taking of more rights without societal improvement...which ultimately leads to an oppressed society with less freedom and less welfare than it could have had.
5) Natural rights:
I am pleased to have brought you a chuckle. :-)
We each come out of the womb with the right to maximize our potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment.
This means that I do not have the right to take your rights without being damned sure that I have improved your opportunity to maximize your potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment. (This is a humanistic type of thing, to my mind.)
Thus, even though few of us exit the womb with an AK-47, each of us has the natural right to work towards being able to purchase an AK-47, if we so choose.
That right should only be taken from me, in a society designed to maximize the welfare of all, if it can be empirically shown that taking that right from me maximizes the mean potential for all of us to maximize our potential for life, love, and emotional fulfillment.
We should be loath to block another person's access to tools (physical or mental) that they suspect will improve their chances of having a happy life, unless we know for a reasonable certainty that force-ably blocking that access will in fact increase the mean likelihood of achieving that happy life for all.
6) 2nd Amendment:
I am familiar with the debate over the intended meaning of the 2nd Amendment.
The intent of the Founders was to protect individual rights, not collective rights.
As stated in the Declaration of Independence,
" all men ...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men".
Governments are instituted, in the minds of the Founders, to secure individual rights.
For further insight into the history of thinking on the 2nd Amendment, consider reading this UCLA Law Review publication, "A Modern Historiography of the Second Amendment"
http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/56-5-5.pdf
It cites many sources, discussing the history of interpretations of the 2nd Amendment.
As noted in this document, even anti-gun legal scholars will note that this Amendment was based on individual rights, not collective rights.
Also noted is that the 'collective rights' interpretation was created in the 20th century.
A cherry picked quote, in case you opt not to spend the time to read the whole document,
" as Stephen Halbrook put it:
'In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the “collective” right of states to maintain militias, while it
does not protect the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. If
anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains
one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for
no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791
states such a thesis.'"
7) Fighting government:
- "Militia": Please read the above points I made in (strong?) defense of the idea that American gun rights are individual rights, not collective rights. The people have the right to have firearms, that they can then use in a militia if they so choose.
- Taking on the U.S. military:
Your point is in part, a valid one. However, allow me to point out that the colonists were out-firepowered initially by the British military that they were attempting to defeat.
The colonists in many cases used their privately owned firearms to seize British armories, which then gave the colonists possession of even more firearms, cannons, etc.
They used the firearms they had to take possession of the more advanced firearms of the oppressive government they were initially 'out-gunned' by.
And after they held off the British long enough, using their previously owned private weapons and the newly acquired seized weapons, they were able to negotiate an arrangement with the French to gain access to further weaponry that would put the colonists on par with the British military.
8) Rural voters:
As long as by 'common sense' you don't mean gun bans, you are safe.
However, many Democrats talk openly about wanting to ban all (or at least most) private gun ownership.
My earlier point was that the Dems should consider ceasing to have a platform that includes gun bans, because that is especially likely to hurt prospects with rural voters, in that rural voters are more likely to believe in private gun ownership as a right, and that rural voters lean toward conservative voting trends.
Thus, gaining 'crossover' support from rural voters would be aided by (to be crude about it) shutting up about gun ban ideas.
From Pew Research Center:
" rural residents ...are disproportionately more likely than other Americans to have a gun at home"
And I think we can agree that rural voters lean conservative. I can cite sources on that too if I must.
9) Disagreement:
Again, my apologies for misjudging you. :-)
- As for the sacred cow of gun rights..
rational thought (per my long ago reading of social psychology, and my daily non-scientific contemplation of the people around me) is not the primary way by which people make decisions.
People are far more inclined, I believe, to make decisions based on irrational qualitative notions than on data.
Thus, it is nearly useless to try to win over gun-loving folks with data, even if the data were to be in the favor of anti-gun ideals.
Gun rights is a sacred cow to some (perhaps including me). Therefore, the Dem party should stop promoting gun bans, firstly because it tends to alienate rural voters; and secondly, because the actual data does not tend to support the idea that guns are the problem; nor does the data support the idea that the 2nd Amendment is a 'collective right' rather than an individual one.
And one last extra point.. every time the Dems spoke of the idea of banning 'assault rifles' following a mass shooting, during the Obama era, gun sales went up dramatically.
If the goal is to minimize private gun ownership, talking about banning guns is one of the last things the Dems should do. Gun sales data show that Democrat chatter of banning guns actually increases the number of guns in private possession.
The Democratic party should stop 'shooting itself in the foot'.
Haha. I couldn't resist that one. :-)
Thank you for your thoughts.
Cheers
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