You fight terrorists a lot? That sounds interesting. Tell us all about your exploits.
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The assertion that âIf you remove the illegal guns from the statistics, the US has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world.â is extraordinary and no one has put forward any evidence to support it. Your link doesnât support it.
My assertion is easy to prove and fairly widely know. Using your link, 5464 murders out of 12,664 in 2011 were committed by people the victim knew - family members, friends, boyfriends, etc. Gang killings are far less frequent. Like rape, murder is as often as not committed by someone the victim knows.
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CDC data isnât particularly trustworthy on that topic. The questions asked are part of a survey that has optional sections which states can use or reject. Many reject those sections entirely. So, when some epidemiologist later wants to compare their data against other crime stats, thereâs a serious mismatch. Partly, this has happened because the survey design sucks in many instances. Partly, because the whole biz was set off by a local anti-gun physician with an agenda. Partly, because limited data on hand to compare, which canât necessarily be cleanly extrapolated cleanly into any kind of national stats. Before you start quoting a source like that one, best to go read the actual studies first. There are reasons why there are debates that have continued for decades now - and not all of that has to do only with agendas trumping actual knowledge,
In any case, ganking debate points from abstracts wonât gain you the credibility you seek.
But my son will always have the freedom to walk down the street in the knowledge that he wonât be killed at random by some bored young shit with a pistol. Your kids will never have that freedom.
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Meh. The article made its points. Nice the author could speak with Bell. Nice of Bell tried to straighten out a little of Hollywood Cowboy Mythology. Super-annoying that he characterizes names like Earp as âlaw enforcementâ. Like, he didnât know that while holding various LEO positions, the Earps would completely fail to enforce open carry laws against their non-LEO bros and friends. Or, that they bailed because there were warrants out on them once their political cronies left office, and committed more murder as they went? Câmon. These are documented facts, not supposition.
The various wars and feuds went much, much farther than described, but the simplistic notion that it was all about Yankee vs. Southerner is patently ridiculous, and makes cartoons out of those people, just as Hollywood (and Bell himself) made cartoons out of Old West characters. We can only hope Bell knows better, explained better, and merely got edited poorly? Oddly (and timely) the larger problem wasnât the range wars themselves, nor even regionalism. It was government intrusion into peoplesâ private lives and property.
The very worst of it was the abuses of the Reconstruction abuses heaped on the locals by various officials in the name of âlaw and orderâ, right up to, and including, murdering innocent family members of those who spoke out. (And not a bit of it had anything to with race relations at that point.) It wasnât just a local thing, and wasnât always determined by where somebody came from originally. Some of the most violent âUnionistsâ were Texans themselves. Those guerrilla wars continued in some places for decades after that war had ended. Not all vigilantes were deputized, and not all deputies were vigilantes.
Bell seems to use the word âcowboyâ in its modern meaning. In those days, to call somebody a âCow Boyâ was to say they were an outlaw gangsters, and it was offensive. Those were fightinâ words often employed to denigrate political opponents. Surely Bell knows that? It would have made a great entry point for explaining Hollywoodâs strange mythologies that we grew up on, where they completely redefined a word and virtually everything and everyone it referred to, just to sell movie tickets.
The author had a point, kinda. But not a great one, and not the best examination of that point.
Anyway - yeah. Guns. Guns, nice. Doing bad things with guns, not nice. Arguing about other peoplesâ guns, also not nice. Blamng guns on either Hollywood or Texas alone? Also not nice.
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The attached document examining bear related injuries in Alberta determines that 58% of Black Bear attacks were predatory and 18% of Brown Bear attacks were so. Bears DO ambush people, frequently.
http://www.macecanada.com/downloads/AB_injuries.pdf
I always found they stuck to my teeth too much, and I never could learn to blow bubbles.
Oh, guns? Never mindâŚ
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Did you read the article that you linked? Having grown up in Alberta Iâd like to provide some counterbalancing context.
So a total of 42 serious attacks, all of 12 of which were fatal, in a province of 3 million people, over a 38 year period. Sure, 58% of those attacks were predatory (a more complex behaviour than you are supposing), which totals all of 7 fatal âpredatoryâ attacks (as opposed to panic or some other reason). One every 5 years or so, in a context of 6.5 million visitors to the wild spaces (like Parks) per year. So, to do the cocktail napkin math, that makes for a risk of being attacked by a bear on a particular back-country trip of approximately 1:32,500,000.
This with estimated populations of 1000 Grizzlies and about 37,000 black bears. So if you do actually run into a bear, and it is in fact that single deranged predatory bear, you have just won the bad luck lottery.
Incidentally, bears donât generally ambush people. In the vanishingly rare instance that they attack, it is usually because the humans did something stupid, like leave food around their campsite, feed the bear, approach a bear that is defending a kill (usually for a picture). I have had literally hundreds of bear encounters and only ever felt nervous on about 2 occasions - both of which amounted to nothing.
Again, by the numbers, the microscopic risk of a predatory bear attack is NOT AT ALL justification for packing hear in the forest. Bear mace is entirely adequate. Carrying a bell is also more effective, though then you donât get to see any bears.
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Okay, we get it. Youâre that guy. âI donât like and I donât understand why people like it. So ban it.â Everything you say about guns can be said for alcohol. I would even guess the nationâs death toll due to alcohol use/abluse (vs. firearms) is orders of magnitude higher. Wanna save lives? Battle demon gin.
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ââŚthereâs no connection, and youâd be a fool and a communist to make one. Thereâs no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone.â
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No, I understand why people like guns, even if I donât share that passion. I just donât buy a lot of the RATIONALE for allowing uninhibited access to all manner of firearms.
. . . just like the number of Terrorists caught by the TSA and the NSA . . . (evil grin)
I love guns in video games. Like I⌠really love them love them. Total obsession with gun nuttery in Battlefield 1942, 2, 3, and now 4, just as an example.
Mmmm. Sexy times.
I might go to a gun range and fire all the various gun models Iâve memorized in every game Iâve played since 2000 for fun at some point, maybe, but I have zero desire to own a real world gun of any kind. To me, theyâre like alien plasma blasters in an epic sci-fi extravaganza, or the idea that if I hadnât married my wife Iâd be an international jetsetting playboy with a model on each arm. Just pure fantasy, and safer as fantasy.
If you honestly feel you need to pull out a pistol, rifle, shotgun, or alien plasma blaster at any point in the real world to accomplish something or achieve some goal, you have already failed.
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Michael - I donât know where you live, but if you think guns being outlawed will prevent you or your kids from having to experience gun violence⌠well, go look at this:
(I am going to make the inaccurate assumption here that homicides in general are firearm related. I suspect itâs a fair approximation. If you have better data - feel free to share.)
The US shows 4.5 (average, yearly, per 100,000 people) homicides yearly - while Europe as a whole is 3.5. Thatâs not a giant margin. if youâre in Canada, thatâs 1.6 - youâre about 1/3rd as likely to die of violence. But - non-zero. If you go dig into the US (further down the page), youâll see the rates vary dramatically by state - yet gun ownership is legal (with variances) in all of them.
Gun ownership and legality is a really, really lousy predictor of your likelihood of death by violence. The real cause of violent death isnât guns, or availability of them - itâs poverty, and education, and social blight. Worldwide, you could add things like government instability into the mix.
I strongly suspect that if you controlled for things like poverty and education in the statistics, youâd find that homicide is the same most places with a stable society - very rare. If you donât have a gun, youâll use a knife, or poison, or your car in your fit of passion. But in general, for the most part people donât kill other people in a society where their basic needs are taken care of, guns or not.
California, where I live, shows 6.1 violent deaths (per 100k people yearly) - but the vast, vast majority of that is a fairly small chunk of Los Angeles. My kids walk down the street where I live (a good hour or so drive from LA), and are about as likely to be random victims of violence as your kids are, despite it being legal to own guns. Iâm not afraid of terrorism, either, despite shrill warnings from my government.
The reality is that the number of fatalities daily from things like traffic accidents and lung cancer so far outweigh things like gun violence, to worry about it unless youâre putting yourself in harmâs way is just silly. (To those who live in blighted neighborhoods - leave. Now. yes, thatâs easy to say, not so easy to do - do it anyway.)
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Well, I was addressing your assertion that âthe simple fact is bears do NOT ambush people, everâ; not so. I do agree with you this does not justify carrying a gun while hiking; I never have. As with your experience, any bears I have seen, not that many, took off. The only animal encounters I have had in the bush that concerned me were moose and coyote and only the latter was aggressive. I agree with you, bear spray if you feel the need for protection. The UofA has a page that addresses bear safety (and the questionable âbear bellâ ) at:
http://safety.eas.ualberta.ca/node/13
Itâs best to have a rich gun nut friend. Or the occasionally really well stocked range that has stuff to rent. Guns, especially the newer and more exotic stuff in games, are pretty expensive. Like the average person would buy a long barreled PS90. But if they really wanted to get their Stargate on, they would have to wait 9mo and pay an extra $200 tax to get the short barreled P90. If you would just like try it out once or twice a year itâs not really worth the investment. Same goes for things like boats. My dad fishes all the time, and has two. If I go once a year maybe. No point in my owning one.
Well, as George W said, and Obama certainly is reading from his handbook, âFighting terror is hard workâ.
I liked it when Bill Maher said that gun control advocates need to stop being complete dicks. This was September 20th.
Why does Obama want to keep the American people from owning an effective defense against Jaffa? Oh. My. God. Heâs a Goaâuld! This explains everything!
[Citation Needed]
