Originally published at: MAGA man actually believes 2.6 million lives saved by "blow Joe" gun owners — until Google chimes in | Boing Boing
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MAGA man actually believes 2.6 million lives saved by "blow Joe" gun owners — until Google chimes in
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“Blow Joe”!?
Yeah… I’m not dirtying up my browser history by googling that.
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you’ve heard of Cocaine Bear
and Cocaine Shark,
now get ready for…
Blow Joe, the super low-budget finale to the trilogy!
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yeah i don’t ‘get’ that one. Thus being foolish as compared with some i went ahead and ‘googled it’ (ok duckduckgo’ed it) and it’s 100% male on male fellatio. So add a gun jammed in sideways and that is what this fine gentlemen meant - hnh??
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I found a pretty decent article breaking down the “research” behind the oft-cited “1.5 million lives saved” stat. And of course, it’s self reported responses to broad questions about any gun use “for protection” and uses some WILD extrapolation.
The department’s research was based on a 1994 national telephone survey on gun ownership. If someone said they owned a gun, they were asked, “Within the past 12 months, have you yourself used a gun, even if it was not fired, to protect yourself or someone else, or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere?”
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Out of about 2,500 people reached, 45 people said they had used a gun for protection. After filtering out those who could not name the specific criminal threat they faced or had not seen the person they thought was a threat, 19 responses remained. Applying that fraction to the entire U.S. adult population, researchers estimated that guns were used defensively 1.5 million times a year.
The follow-up stories are revealing. The whole thing should really be titled “A qualitative study of how men perceive and lie about gun use”
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I’m fairly certain that the video cut before he responded with something like “Well, you have your opinions and I have mine.” This is one of the most mystifying aspects of this ostrich-head-in-sand mentality and, frankly, what makes me not even bother listening to these fools (sorry, NY Times! I looked for your economic uncertainty and just found bigotry and ignorance!). That BS stat was clearly pulled from an authoritative source like the Dept. of Justice, which was then laundered through the right wing funhouse reality mirror, but when confronted with the reality of those stats, they’re more than willing to dismiss them as “partisan” or “deep state” or some generic, Jewish-sponsored conspiracy. Years ago a “friend” posted that idiotic meme saying that violent crime was just as bad in the UK, but it was all knives because they have strict gun control. It was soooooo easy to debunk, but the conversation would either end at that point or shift to violence in Chicago or some other crap.
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I do still think all this debunking is critical, even if not immediately satisfying and devastating.
Centrists and independents, or even “I want to be fair…” Democrats, like my dad up in Maine, who, while pretty progressive, was still beating the drum somewhat recently (haven’t checked in post Roe destruction) that people like Susan Collins represent the best of politics because “she considers all sides of things.” Reminding them regularly that Republicans are full of shit and that they are falling prey to concern driving trollies is unfortunately also a Sisyphean task.
Also, Republicans are a spectrum, and continued hole-poking generally eats away at the credibility of the MAGA movement, and might move the needle for some on the fringe.
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If there’s any doubt about how dumb someone has to be to be a MAGAt…
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That is a very Mainer mentality in my experience. If everyone in the nation took that approach, we’d probably be in pretty decent shape, but I know a lot of folks from the Northeast are pretty shocked when they get out into the guts of America. They think New Hampshire is radical!
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I’m pretty sure those who answered affirmative included people like these:
Who may remain convinced that their unprovoked threat of gunplay was the only thing that saved their lives.
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And I’m sure they would count one for every person who walked by.
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Yeah and I’ve heard so many big fish stories from guys about the time they brandished their gun etc. It’s the kind of thing some people think makes them cool or interesting and so memory tends to favor a certain self-perception.
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oh man, I got into this one the other day. The thing that drives me up the wall is that they never compare it against the number of times a person’s life is threatened by a gun. Like, put aside the nebulous nature of what it means to “defend” yourself with a gun, which is left very nebulous in the surveys that end up estimating millions of defensive incidents a year. The gun advocates like to count instances of intimidation done by “good guys” (assumes they are reasonably defending themself and not just pulling out a gun the moment they feel upset) while they ignore the intimidation done by bad guys. There’s not a lot to go on, but one of the better papers I found, using random phone surveys, was this https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263
They get a slightly higher ratio of “defensive gun use” to “hostile gun use” compared to the National Crime Victimization Survey, but both find it’s much more common for a gun to be used in victimizing a person than it is to defend a person, like at least three times as common. Which probably has something to do with how more guns are stolen every year than are used defensively; but hey, maybe all the stolen guns end up in the hands of do-gooders, hard to measure that.
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I’m pretty sure he mean “Joe Blow,” which is a pretty common term for an “everyman” in many parts of the country. He just malapropped it around. (this probably isn’t technically an example of malapropism, but I don’t know a term for just saying a two word term backwards)
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I agree that was what he was going for, but I wonder if it’s accidental. “Blow him away Joe” seems like an appropriation they would do.
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That is some phenomenally shitty use of statistics. You can’t just apply a ratio like that to the entire population without something to justify that kind of extrapolation. Jesus.
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“Well.”
I’ll have to remember that one and try to use it in my next debate.
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Not to mention the people who shot anyone who rang their doorbell or tried to turn around by pulling into their driveway. Because taking lives is saving lives in MAGAland.
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Maybe he was talking about the Old Testament prophet ‘Job’ there.
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Not to mention the “study” this was based on is now almost 30 years old.
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