If you could give guns exclusively to the good guys in a mass shooter scenario I’d be willing to give it a try.
But in order to get a few guns to good guys inside that gay bar you’re going to need a LOT more guns in circulation, that includes guns in potentially volatile situations like bars and schools.
Even if a handful lives were saved in Orlando you’d lose a lot more people elsewhere. Not just murders but suicides where the evidence is pretty unequivocal that guns cause a lot of extra deaths.
Before you go trying to get guns into night clubs remember that even the NRA doesn’t think guns + booze should mix. And even if you’re sober have you even been in a nightclub? Do you really think it’s wise to carry a concealed gun around? People aren’t exactly shy with their hands.
Mass shooters respond to the culture they’re in, that’s why you don’t get many in Canada. That’s also why you tend to get mass stabbings in China, which are much less deadly.
Kleck’s and Lott’s research is not controversial anywhere except among the anti-gun “researchers”. One of Lott’s studies of every single county in the US may be the most comprehensive ever done on any subject, certainly on firearms and criminology.
Hemenway, and Wintemute if you run across citations with his name on them, are probably the two worst junk-science “researchers” out there. If he says it, you can count on it being at least misleading and at worst based on flawed - possibly deliberately - methodology (the phrase “cherry picking” comes to mind). There’s another guy in a medical research group at Harvard, whose name I can’t remember right now.
You don’t need proof of insurance at the dealership in Missouri, and you can also post a bond in lieu of having insurance when you get to the license bureau, and it isn’t required for titling, just for getting plates. They don’t ask for a SSN when I give them a check for the full amount - if they run a credit check before accepting my personal check, they don’t tell me about it.
And I’m old enough that nobody but Target wants to see ID for a liquor purchase - since they want to scan it into their database, instead of just seeing it to verify age, I don’t buy alcohol there.
And all this time I thought it was the responsibility of the person MAKING a claim to provide the evidence to back up that claim. I must be doing this “debate” thing wrong.
A SIG Sauer MCX is basically like an AR-15 except that the MCX is designed to work well with a suppressor (commonly known as a “silencer”). Its internal construction is somewhat different but it is still a member of the family, so to speak. There are loads of companies that manufacture guns which are more or less like the original AR-15 (by Armalite/Colt), which has been around for a long time.
Therefore saying that “the Orlando shooter didn’t even use an AR-15, so there” is a bit academic. If you get run over by a BMW rather than a Mercedes, the result will be largely the same.
“Your detailed official study has more problems than my small scale informal study, nyaah nyaah nyaah!”
[tl;dr edit: if a study that has been running since 1973 - over 40 years - is still going without having its methodology successfully challenged by the NRA, that suggests that the authors and researchers - who by now must be into a third generation - may have more of a clue than a random internet poster. But nowadays it’s fashionable to attack “experts”, whether it’s by Trump or the UK equivalents. Because what have experts ever done for us, how often have they been right when a section of public opinion was wrong?]
You’re basing your argument on a citation from the website “www.guncite.com” and you’re accusing the public safety and health researchers whose results contradict those of “www.guncite.com” of bias.
That is some incredible chutzpah.
Are you able to find any researchers besides Kleck and Lott who confirm their results? (Independent corroboration would help your case.) Kleck’s methodologies have been criticized – do you have rebuttals to these specifics criticisms?
Once we have sources that contradict each other and everyone has dug in and insisted no their researcher is the most important, you have to look beyond individual studies to resolve the issue.
Are we supposed to take your word on all this? What evidence do you have to convince anyone who is skeptical of what you are claiming? Or are you just preaching to the choir?
Did you forget what you are arguing against? That it’s harder to buy a car than a gun? You basically conceded as much in this statement. (That’s what happens when you argue by trying to score points instead of taking a step back and trying to determine whether the other person might actually have a good argument.) Basically, by being unwilling to concede even points where you have to twist and contort to prove that you’re right, you demonstrate that you were never reasonable or arguing in good faith in the first place.
Edit: Another issue we should discuss in terms of quality of research: Lott argues that many defensive uses of a gun are merely “brandishing” – displaying the gun to scare off a potential threat. However, the notion of “brandishing” is ambiguous – any particular incident could be the gun owner wisely letting a threat know he is armed or an intimidation tactic. More importantly, each participant in the event may see this differently – the gun owner might believe this was a lawful and rightful defensive use of a firearm whereas the “threat” may feel that they had their life threatened unprovoked.
This suggests the real possibility that Lott is counting unlawful uses of firearms for purposes of intimidation as lawful defensive uses of firearms. Has Lott ever addressed this potential shortcoming of his research?
The use of firearms for unlawful threats and intimidation is an argument for gun control and not against it. The fact that Lott’s methodology doesn’t seem capable of reliably distinguishing between the two cases makes it difficult to draw any conclusions either way from his research.
I’d also like to see you address the following citation from the defensive gun use wikipedia article:
Denton, JF; Fabricius, WV (April 2004). “Reality check: using newspapers, police reports, and court records to assess defensive gun use.”. Injury prevention : journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention 10 (2): 96–8. PMID 15066974.
That seems to me really good evidence that Kleck and Lott’s methodologies overcount by quite a bit. Here’s the summary of it from the wikipedia page:
A 2004 study surveyed the records of a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, as well as police and court records, and found a total of 3 instances of defensive gun use over a 3.5 month period. In contrast, Kleck and Gertz's study would predict that the police should have noticed more than 98 DGU killings or woundings and 236 DGU firings at adversaries during this time
Let’s assume this study undercounts by an order of magnitude. OK, then, adjusting Kleck’s figures down by one instead of two orders of magnitude we get ~200,000 incidents of DGU, right in-line with estimates from wikipedia’s “other social scientists” cited by @CarlMud above – so this is the same approximate quantity we’d get if we dismissed both the high counts from Kleck and Lott and the low counts from the NCVS as outliers.
I’ll happily ignore results from Hemenway and Wintermute if you concede that if I do so it’s only fair to ignore the most biased researchers on the other side – Kleck and Lott. That seems fair to me because otherwise we would have a situation where the pro-gun control researchers are always biased and that influences their research and anti-gun control researchers are either never biased or it doesn’t influence their research. This seems prima facie unreasonable as it seems to me both sides are equally likely to be biased.
@wysinwyg refuted your assertions about the researchers pretty well, but you also didn’t address the fact that you cited an estimate from an over 20 year old survey. Even if the 800 thousand to 2.5 million estimates were accurate for 1994, they wouldn’t be accurate for today.
Zero. The closest one you have is the death of Charles Whitman which was done by both a bystander AND several cops.
There are far more instances of people using their concealed weapons to intimidate, escalate conflicts, or commit acts of stupid mayhem than there are of people preventing crimes with them.
My opinion on this case its a terrible waste of life over using ones cellphone being on during the previews. I think it will be an interesting case to follow.
At the time of the shooting Curtis Reeve was 71, old age will be a factor the court may take into account. There is a 28 year difference in age. Also from what I could find all accounts state Chad Oulson was the first to go beyond verbal abuse. The fact that his action lead to him being shoot and killed in hindsight appears ridiculous. However we are not Mr. Reeves or there. Below was taken from after the defense enhanced video segment, reported by CNN. https://youtu.be/_2Rly-Qohu4?t=1m28s
Officer: "So what made you shoot him?"
Reeves: “Well, I guess it scared the hell out of me, I thought the guy was fixing to beat the shit out of me.”
There is also a segment after that statement where the off-duty deputy recalls the conversation between Mr. Reeves and his wife. https://youtu.be/_2Rly-Qohu4?t=2m4s Her words may actually be a deciding factor to this case.
As of now Mr. Reeves is still out on bail and waiting for his trial for second-degree murder. The last court date I could find said it was schedule for a hearing June 30.
There is also a lawsuit from Nicole Oulson against the movie theater company and a theater employee. She may win her lawsuit against them.
I believe there is no state law against going into a place where a company has prohibited weapons. The company would be within their own rights to have asked Curits Reeves to leave. They did not appear to known he had a weapon on him. If they saw or knew he had a weapon and refused to leave the theater thats when they could do something. After being ask to leave and refusing he would be trespassing and if he stayed around long enough the police would arrest him for trespassing. Unless there is some law on Florida books that make disobeying such posted signs, he would have that also tacked on to his arrest. I don’t know much about Florida gun laws.
Gun-free zones have no effect on where mass shooting take place. Ok I’ll accept that.
Obeying a gun-free zone can potentially be more dangerous.
Just hear me out for a second. Lets say I’m in my car and want to enter a gun-free zone. I am carrying a concealed pistol (nobody can see the pistol). I would have to remove the pistol before entering the gun-free zone. The act of removing the gun from its holster has now greatly increased the chances of me shooting myself or someone else by accident. (Removing the gun while still in the holster greatly depends on how the holster is constructed and worn.) I also need to secure the weapon someplace outside the gun-free zone. Most places don’t have gun rooms where you can check one in, court houses, federal buildings, and some police stations do.
No gun check room. What are my options now? I don’t want somebody watching me hide the pistol in a secure gun box or locked trunk of my car. Someone who could not pass the NICS background check might try to steal it.
Lets assume I’m sitting in my car still. Removing a holstered gun is difficult to do. Have you ever sat on a wallet and tried to pull it out of your back pocket sitting in a car seat. Now add to that a trigger that may get caught on something you can’t see or feel because you bent your hips forward or reclined the seat.
Why not do it standing outside the my car? Firstly I don’t want anyone to think I’m drawing my gun to shoot someone. I don’t want someone calling the police saying they saw a guy with a gun in the parking lot. That not only puts me at risk but the police too. The dispatcher may only relay partial information to the responding officers. I may be quickly surrounded by a SWAT team or just asked to talk to the officers. Either way if I react in a way the officer feels may be threatening I could get shot.
When I think about how we talk about these gun-free zones and how the police responded to the Orlando shooting part of me places myself into the situation. The responding two officers engaged the Orlando shooter and then waited for SWAT and believed they had a hostage situation. Do you think they waited to long to enter? I think they did.
In Washington state gun-free zones includes bars and a few other places. If I was in a nightclub sober and someone came in shooting what could I do. Not much. I can either run, hide or attack. If I see a way to attack I will have no advantage. I will have a very limited possibility of defending myself.
I live right in the heart of Capitol Hill and this week is the big Pride weekend, http://seattlepride.org/ The block party is just a few doors away. The police will be out in force and that will hopefully be enough of a deterrent to anyone.
[quote=“EntropyWorks, post:120, topic:80156”]
Obeying a gun-free zone can potentially be more dangerous. Lets say I’m in my and want enter a gun-free zone. I am carrying a concealed pistol (nobody can see the pistol). I would have to remove the pistol before entering the gun-free zone. The act of removing the gun from its holster has now greatly increased the chances of me shooting myself or someone else by accident. (Removing the gun while still in the holster greatly depends on how the holster is constructed and worn.) I also need to secure the weapon someplace outside the gun-free zone. Most places don’t have gun rooms where you can check one in, court houses, federal buildings, and some police stations do. No gun check room. What are my options now? I don’t want somebody watching me hide the pistol in a secure gun box or locked trunk of my car. Someone who could not pass the NICS background check might try to steal it. Lets assume I’m sitting in my car still. Removing a holstered gun is difficult to do. Have you ever sat on a wallet and tried to pull it out of your back pocket sitting in a car seat. Now add to that a trigger that may get caught on something you can’t see or feel because you bent your hips forward or reclined the seat. Why not do it standing outside the my car? Firstly I don’t want anyone to think I’m drawing my gun to shoot someone. I don’t want someone calling the police saying[/quote]
Maybe you could try not carrying a gun, like normal people who don’t live in fear.
Your Googling skills suck. Try “mass shootings stopped by armed citizens” and you’ll find plenty of links, including a bunch of links to items claiming none of those documented cases really ever happen…
Here’s a good list, for a starter:
This one’s OK, too, but a little short, with only 10 recent cases:
There’s a database of these incidents, and I can’t find the link in my Bookmarks file right now - just off the top of my head, I remember two college campus incidents that are not listed in either of the above lists…in one of them, the national media flat-out lied about how the shooter was stopped, only the local paper reported it correctly.
