Comparing deaths per people and owners per state seems a little off-kilter. I would think owners per people, or even better guns per capita, might be more informative.
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Handguns are 80% of all murders by firearms, handgun owners are 7 times more likely to die from a firearm, and states with background checks on all handgun sales have 47% fewer suicides from firearms. About 2/3 of all gun deaths are suicides, suicide by firearm is succeeds 90% of the time (versus 10% of the time using other methods), and:
That map is a map of suicides, basically. 34,000 deaths; 2/3 suicides, 1/3 murders, and a negligible amount for accidents and whatever else. Handguns account for a massive majority of suicides and murders.
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I regularly interact with CDC employees at multiple levels and for those who are willing to take the risk of talking about it at all the consensus is, the organization, as a whole is under a “gag order” with regards to anything related to guns. Those brave enough there to confront the bureaucracy have managed to not leave the organization totally divorced from reality, but the issue here is regulatory capture through legislative lobby. There was no “attitude of the time” which justified the stifling of the study of injury from firearms and absolutely no reason for continuing to keep the professionals at the CDC from doing their work.
It’s clear the gun industry isn’t going to make the same mistake tobacco and alcohol did by allowing public discussion of the realities of the impacts of their marketing to possibly curtail their profits. Good on you for taking the time to think about why we have so many mass shootings but arguing the law, whether explicitly written to the effect or not, doesn’t have the actual impact of shutting down any serious study of the issues from a public health perspective at the CDC, isn’t the reality.
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-An old rifle probably has worn rifling in its barrel, which makes it inaccurate ie useless and/or dangerous.
-A ruger model 77, for example, can not do an easy barrel &optic swap. The AR is an open source design. Most gun manufacturers, on the other hand, have proprietary designs. There aren’t 50 companies building different barrels and bolts for old rifles. Also, that old rifle probably doesn’t have a mount for a modern scope.
You’re going to side with a bolt action? They’re bar none the most accurate kind of rifle. A bolt action 30-06, which would be a good representative of the common deer hunting rifle in the USA, in the hands of a good marksman is deadly at 1400 yards and probably more.
-It makes sense to shoot pop cans at 25 yards with a 22LR. it does not make sense to do that with a 5.56mm.
-It makes sense to protect yourself in bear country with a .450 bushmaster. It does not make sense to do that with a 5.56 or 22lr.
-It makes sense to shoot a 500yd target with a 6.5mm grendel. it does not make sense to do that with a 22lr
I’m currently in Minnesota.
You sound like you really don’t know much about firearms at all, and your ad hominem is undercutting your credibility as well. Now, tell me about your hobbies so I can shit on them and belittle you for liking them.
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Unsurprising that it starts looking more like the gun ownership rate map.
The handgun/rifle ratio is different, of course. And they make up for it in suicides and gun accidents, though.
What a law says and how it’s interpreted are two different things. Also, that’s not what it says. (That’s also not just what the law did - it literally cut the CDC budget by exactly the amount previously being spent to study gun violence. So let’s not pretend there wasn’t a very clear agenda of censorship on the part of the lawmakers on this one.) The law prevents those collecting data from “advocating” for “gun control.” It was so vaguely written that if the data itself indicates that gun control would result in fewer deaths, that’s treated as violating the law - by the NRA and their elected puppets, at least. So no one who relies on federal grants will touch such research for fear of running afoul of the law (which is exactly what the NRA intended). That’s the unarguable effect of the law.
Also, it wasn’t the only law impacting record-keeping and research. Other laws simply prohibit the federal government from tracking and storing information about gun ownership, etc. Basic records are, by law, kept only as poorly-stored paper records as a result. This not only prevents certain types of research into guns, it also prevents the federal government from being able to enforce existing laws, too.
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Tolerance to all hobbies is a dangerous game to play. Would you speak so passionately in favor of cock fights or unregulated gambling? What about drag racing?
Many, many hobbies are shit on and made illegal. Many of them have a long traditions and deep ties to American culture.
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Quite a few people have lots of guns. It would make sense to compare the rate of people who have access to a gun vs gun violence rate,
A person with 20 guns is not 20 times as dangerous as a person with one gun, as long as they are properly secured.
The gun ownership chart seems to be from a survey of 4000 people chosen as nationally representative. Of course that eliminates people who are hesitant to answer questions about gun ownership posed by strangers.
Also, the conclusions included the following statement: “Insofar as social gun cultures may contribute to these prevailing social values, their co-occurrence with gun ownership suggests that social gun culture must be considered by potential public health intervention in the area.”
Sort of an odd statement.
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I wonder if the need to resort to a voluntary survey has anything to do with the atrocious state of gun research at the CDC thanks to Republicans and the NRA.
Nah.
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Part of what I was hoping to highlight is that “owners per state” is a bit different - 10% of California is almost 4 million people - which is more than all of neighbor Nevada. (pop 2.9 mil)
(edit: for actual neighbor - sorry.)
The questions you ask to design a ML system like that are: how likely is a shooting event in a place that there has been one before? What are the conditions in which one occurs? What are the towns like? What are the schools and localities like? You’re building a probabilistic model and trying to establish good priors.
My gut feeling is that there is NOT enough raw data to build a geographic prediction model. Regionally, maybe, but not specific time and place.
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This graph just makes me wish we had a legal, physician assisted suicide process. The horror of sitting there with a handgun in your mouth on top of whatever depression, health, or criminal guilt issues you’re facing…
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I’m disagreeing with you about the CDC having an agenda outside of public health. That is their agenda.
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It’s a misconception to think that most gun suicides would align with physician-assisted suicides. The research indicates that most “spontaneous” suicides are preventable and not associated with the same triggers and motivations as physician-assisted suicides. For example, physician-assisted suicide is almost uniformly for people who are already facing death (stage 4 cancer, heart failure, COPD, organ failure) and are in constant, extreme pain. Spontaneous suicide is most often caused by transient conditions and ANY delay between the impulse towards suicide and the act decreases the chance of death. The longer the delay, the less likely the death, such that even 5 minutes delay from impulse to act decreases the odds of death by well over 90%. Guns are by far the most common cause of death in spontaneous suicide because they are immediately available, there is no delay between the impulse and the act and they are more effective at killing than other means.
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A quick search on this turned up two Psychology Today articles that suggest guns are used (in the US) because they are so quick, but substitution in other countries make takes up the slack.
I not-too-cynically say after murder-suicides, why not just cut out the middleman and go straight to suicide.
If we reduce or slow the suicide availability, is there a chance that homicide rates go up as people decide to take others with them?
I ask this seriously. Just a few weeks ago a non-blood relation killed his spouse, as she tried to flee, before taking his own life.
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Nope. I’m not defending them, and I’m not falling for a straw man.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I think that is partially because of how physician assisted suicides are “marketed”. Instead of a “Let’s welcome everybody considering suicide, and give them a painfree option”, it is “Oh, old guy has cancer and hurts too much”. Obviously there needs to be a pipeline to the mental health community at some step in the process, but at least having the door open is a first step. I bet you catch more of the curable cases than Suicide Hotlines.
First off, I would suggest looking at resources with better scientific credibility than the People! magazine of the medical-scientific community.
Second, the first link is an editorial, not even a meta-analysis. At least the second article has some citations.
A quick search on both authors yields skepticism on my part:
Dale Archer, MD is associated with Bill O’Reilly. Not a good sign of impartiality.
R. Douglas Field’s article was cited by Liberty Press hours after it was published. Could be that they are just avid readers of Psychology Today, or that the article was written to spec.
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Perhaps we can use data about the areas where they’ve happened to compile the priors. White supremacist group presence, racial makeup of the area, economic factors, reported gun ownership, etc…
I really wish that I’d paid more attention in statistics. I do find the field fascinating though.
edit: Thanks for the reply, Forceblink!
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I didn’t say you did defend them, I’m saying it makes no sense to say people have to be knowledgeable of or tolerant of a hobby people have. It’s as much a logical fallacy as the strawman fallacy that you inaccurately applied to my post.
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Right? Everyone has an agenda. EPA, CDC, NSA, FBI, etc. It’s how that agenda turns into expression which turns into influence and eventually policy and law. I didn’t really get what @Mister44 was saying. Every government agency has an agenda! And at any given time, that agency is composed of employees who span the spectrum. They didn’t all suddenly become Trumpers the moment he was elected. Nor were they all Obamites for the previous 8 years.
More specifically:
"In United States politics, the Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 federal government omnibus spending bill which mandated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” [souce: wikifuku]
So, are their hands tied? Yes and no. They can research all they want. But who wants to do research that ultimately has no teeth?
“You may research Influenza all you want, but you may not use your results to advocate for disease control.”
WTF?
The solution here, while it may seem rational, is not. It is political. Right now, the ammosexuals have control. It’s deteriorating. To have a real change, the sane, non-ammosexuals will need to regain power and change the way this issue is treated.
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