Brightbird
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Not all dogs are brown. But I love dogs, and if brown dogs were being shot more than black dogs and grey dogs then I'd want to do something to help the brown dogs ![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Scotland says 'hi'.
I have never said accidental deaths, just deaths. I'm not sure why this is so difficult for some to understandYou must have missed where I said the article linked to by CoolJ said that.
If you want to compare accidental deaths, then compare accidental deaths. Suicides are not accidental deaths.
A few hundred accidental firearm deaths per year vs. tens of thousands of accidental motor vehicle fatalities per year.
It's not even close. Cars are much more dangerous.
I have claimed that you are mistaken. All I have to do is show that there are some places with lots of guns and low crime. Lots of guns and low murder rate. Lots of guns and low suicide rate. Or, conversely, few guns and high crime. Few guns and high murder rates. Few guns and high suicide rates. Any one of those situations proves that your thesis is incorrect.
My stats prove that your thesis is wrong. Just plain wrong. If your thesis were correct, there would not exist any place with high gun ownership and low crime rates, nor any place with low gun ownership and high crime rates.
With the exception of our Civil War, which was not a foreign war, whatever do you mean? Our casualty numbers are very low compared to other combatants in the two World Wars:
England had 7 time as many people killed in WWI as we did; France has 10.3 times as many, Germany had 10.7 to 20 times (and that's just counting combat deaths.
In WWII, Germany lost to death 1 out of every 10 citizens, military and civilian. Russia and the Slavic Countries had 26 MILLION deaths, roughly equivalent to the entire state of California today. US killed and missing totaled about 400,000 (roughly the same lost in Japan in 3 raids: Tokyo fire bombing, and A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). (In fact our entire strategy was to let the Russians do the dying while we built tanks and planes.)
Although it's difficult now to say how many Native Americans were killed in combat and how many died from epidemics inadvertently brought by Europeans, suffice it to say the death ratios are similar to that in WWII.
More recently, we've suffered what? 4,000 to 6,000 deaths in Iraq. Far too many we will all agree. But the Iraqis have suffered more than 100,000!
If we have a "deadly history", it's because we have been so ready to dish it out, not because we have suffered so much mortality.
This is not to diminish the sacrifice of any of our wounded or their loves ones. But I understood you to say the U.S. had some sort unique casualty level throughout history and that is simply not true. The Jews alone lost more people in the early 1940s than the U.S. has lost to war in its entire history.
RSBM
No, you are completely mistaken. Having taken many postgraduate courses in statistics, I can tell you quite confidently that what you are doing does not constitute any sort of statistical evidence or analysis. What you're describing is more along the lines of statistical anecdotes rather than statistical analysis. You're cherry picking outliers here. It's like saying "I can prove that smoking and drinking doesn't shorten one's lifespan because Auntie Edna is 105 and smokes and drinks every day."
Again, your hypothetical statistics do not prove anything. They aren't statistics, but specifically chosen discrete cases, whereas statistics refers to an analysis of a totality of cases (or a randomly drawn sample of them). Your purported 'statistics' (or more to the point, your attempt at analysis of such) also denies that there are many variables at play in these cases -- such as, for instance, poverty. But just because there are other variables, it does not mean that access to firearms is not a statistically significant variable.
You can't just select two numbers (e.g, Russia's 4000 gun ownership rate and 25.5 murder rate) and call it a negative correlation. That's just two numbers. You need multiple cases before you can test whether there's a correlation.
Thank goodness the clerk was able to protect himself.
http://www.ktul.com/story/27845283/store-clerk-shoots-and-kills-one-suspect-injures-another
The clerk told police that three masked men entered the store armed with handguns. Police say the clerk pulled out his semi-automatic pistol and shot two of the three suspects.
I thought my point was obvious & you did elude to it in your response--we were not invaded yet sent our boys overseas to fight.
But the bigger point is that we have a violent history....from the Genocide of the Native Americans, to the Revolution, to the Civil War, etc, etc.
I'm just trying to explain one aspect that makes Americans different in the approach to guns. Just one aspect within many others I've presented.
Moo
You really don't get the term "cherry picking" do you? This is a trend I am noticing as I look through control opinion pieces. The pro-gun folks point to these outlier situations to prove their point. The anti-gun folks point to full studies that look at the information as a whole. Yes we know you can find charts (and don't get me started on how easy it is to make a chart look the way you want) to support any view. Let me have a read through the "Harvard" study. But at a quick glance it looks to be an interpretation of previous studies. There were no new studies involved.
Seriously? I have shown you many. You dismiss them and ignore them, because you don't like what they show.
Here's one:
View attachment 67658
Russia - extremely high murder rate, very low gun ownership rate. (This is a negative correlation, BTW)
Finland - highest gun ownership rate on the chart, murder rate is a less than a tenth of Russia's. (This is a negative correlation, BTW)
Norway - second highest gun ownership rate, second lowest murder rate. (This is a negative correlation, BTW)
Here's a Harvard study - you seem to like Harvard studies:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
The authors reviewed dozens upon dozens of studies. They cite a 2004 evaluation by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that review 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, along with its own empirical research. The USNAS failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violence crime, suicide or gun accidents.
About England, they wrote:
On the one hand, despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which Englands response was ever‐more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. 22 Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed worlds most violence‐ridden nations.
About gun ownership rates and murder rates, they wrote this:
The non‐correlation between gun ownership and murder is reinforced by examination of statistics from larger numbers of nations across the developed world. Comparison of homicide and suicide mortality data for thirty‐six nations (including the United States) for the period 19901995 to gun ownership levels showed no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun ownership levels and the total homicide rate. Consistent with this is a later European study of data from 21 nations in which no significant correlations [of gun ownership levels] with total suicide or homicide rates were found.
You really should read the entire article. You might find it enlightening.
Here's a chart showing England's homicide rate since passing its 1968 and 1997 gun control laws:
View attachment 67661
Not counting certain homicide anomalies (not related to guns), the homicide rate in England and Wales has average 52% higher since the 1968 gun control law, and 15% higher since the 1997 handgun ban. That's a negative correlation, BTW.
Here's another:
View attachment 67662
After Chicago banned handguns in 1982 through 2007 when this chart was compiled, the city's murder rate average 17%. But guess what? The overall U.S. murder rate average 25% lower during that same period. IOW, for the U.S. overall, with no handgun ban, the murder rate dropped faster than it did in Chicago with its handgun ban. That is a negative correlation.
What about concealed carry? Here's what happened in Florida vs. the U.S. after Florida passed its right-to-carry law:
View attachment 67663
During the years covered by this chart, Florida's murder rate averaged 36% lower after the right-to-carry law. By comparison, the overall U.S. murder rate average 15% lower during the same period. Nationally, murder rates dropped, but Florida's murder rate dropped faster than the national rate after Florida passed its shall-issue concealed-carry law. That's a negative correlation, BTW.
Want more? I can continue.
You are using the wrong evidence to support what I believe to be your point. When it comes to military violence--at home or abroad--we lag far behind Russia, Germany, Japan, England, France or China. Yet all of those have come to their senses and realized that arming everyone is no protection.
What may be different about the U.S. is that through most of our history we have been a "frontier" nation that depended on armed, private citizens to protect the territory we had taken from its rightful owners. As such, we have a history of private armaments that has no equivalent in most countries.
Just another little tidbit about Gary Mauser (the author of the "study" cited by sonjay)
He wrote a book in 1990. The title of the book?
Manipulating Public Opinion
http://www.amazon.com/Manipulating-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421525110&sr=1-1
This guy is a beauty!