Thanks for that. Have not heard this in ages.
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He’s outgrown his toys.
I hope the rest of the country will eventually mature too.
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“Your handful of anecdotes”
They’re not a handful of anecdotes. They are a total refutation of the claim that was made.
" don’t stand up to the statistics which show that if you own a gun or live around people with guns, your likelihood of dying by getting shot skyrockets in comparison to living in places where there aren’t guns, and when you don’t own a gun."
Your chances of getting migraines skyrocket if you have a bottle of Imitrex in your medicine cabinet. In tomorrow’s class, we will learn the difference between correlation and causation.
54% of US counties didn’t have a single murder in 2014. If you overlay those counties with a map of legal gun ownership, you will find something interesting.
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“But you get to claim your opinion trumps science, I suppose”
Opinion? Do you deny the objective reality I presented? I gave actual citations to actual events where a good guy with a gun actually stopped a rampage killer. It’s not “science” to ignore that objective fact and persist in the illusion that that is a “myth.”
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The question isn’t whether there are a situation where a “good guy with a gun” stops the bad guy, the question is whether a situation where there are “good guys with guns” is better than the situation where we have fewer bad guys. That’s what the study was looking at, and it found the following: non-lethal crime went down without the good guys. The only crime which did not go down was murder, which didn’t change.
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You are wrong about your point #4, https://www.ammoland.com/2017/06/bella-twin-the-22-used-to-take-the-1953-world-record-grizzly-and-more/
.22 is quite lethal enough, it is not a toy
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Look, there’s no doubt that “good guys with guns” have been successful a handful of times in the past decade or two… but a quick Google search shows there’s on average 33,000 gun deaths a year in the US. Your argument is not so solid.
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Oh it certainly isn’t a toy. Shot placement is everything. Destroy enough of the brain, the brain stem, or hit the central nervous system and bear or bunny it is going to turn off. And this lady knew just where to aim and was close enough to hit where she needed to. But no one hunt bear on purpose with a .22lr.
Criminals use pocket pistols some in .22lr. I remember this wanna be tough guy bragging he had a “J22” in the dorm and it was this tiny little “Saturday night special”. But the rifle in the article is mostly playing dress up - it isn’t anywhere near the same league as an actual ‘tactical’ ‘assault’ rifle.
Way more than that, and often with out shots fired. In the magazine I used to get they list about a half a dozen cases per month. If you read the local paper or follow the police blotter you will see more. John Lott gave a rather large estimate in his book, but I don’t think he could really back that statement up. The problem is it isn’t a data point tracked and many times the incident isn’t even reported. Honestly I have been wanting to build a site that starts to catalog at least incidents that are in the paper or police reports.
So no, we don’t have hard data to support the claim but no one has hard data to refute it either. Though as a note your 33000 figure should not only `15000 is from homicides. Most deaths are suicides.
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Uh, these would be low population rural counties representing a tiny % of the US population, right?
Please post your map overlays.
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Reminds me of a thing I saw forever ago about how if you look at crimes per capita urban places actually fare better than the country except the very worst cases.
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RTFA
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FYI
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Fixed it, thanks.
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Ok, so 6 good guys a month times 12 months is 72 incidents possibly averted by the presence of another gun. In the mean time 15,000 people were murdered. Still doesn’t make me feel very warm and fuzzy.
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That’s just the articles I read, they are by no means all of the events. You know that so don’t try to pass of those numbers as ‘real’. At any rate, if you want real numbers the vast majority of 80 million + lawful gun owners hurt no one with their firearms. So we are looking at 0.01875% of them that do. Actually less than that as ~80% of them are found with guns they were not the lawful owners of (stolen or borrowed guns).
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Here’s the thing. There is a very weak barrier that keeps a gun from being a legal piece of property to an illegal item in the hands of the populace. People get angry really easily really fast, and a gun makes that situation go deadly really quick. Even here you mention how many guns are stolen, because the range of gun owners will include the less responsible who add to this statistic.
Our low bar for gun ownership is really low at this point, and our high bar is not that high. When defensive gun use outnumbers illegal gun use, then it’s more feasible to talk about individual gun ownership.
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Yeah, if only there was an organization that could study and analyze the epidemiology of gun fatalities cough CDC cough too bad cough Dickey Amendment cough.
Sorry about that. So much gun smoke it’s hard to breathe.
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This is true as in it happens, but looking at the annual reports from large cities who have dozens to hundreds of murders per year, it is clear the vast majority are people involved in illicit activities killing others they know and are also involved in said activities.
With your logic we should have a lot more assaults and stabbings as every one is just one angry event from hurting others.
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Blaming people on getting guns stolen is victim blaming.
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Even those with secured weapons can be victims, locks and safes keep honest people out.
Again we don’t know the numbers. But we do have a good idea of the numbers for “neutral” - used in neither defense or offense - and it YUGE.
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Guns make violent criminals much more effective at doing violent crime, that’s just a fact. They also make some people marginally more effective at stopping violent crime. A violent criminal is at the job 24/7 until he gets captured or killed, while a “good guy” with a gun might wait his entire life to play hero and still not come out on top. So who benefits more from easy access to guns, the criminal or the good guy? This is why the notion that gun proliferation results in a net increase in the personal safety of the average person is a myth.
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