Another shooting in the USA. Remind me about the reason for having guns again.

SubJeff on 6/9/2012 at 22:21

Quote Posted by dethtoll

How dense are you? My entire point here is that you are treating living in the US as living in some kind of backwater hellhole where thieves, rapists and murderers lurk in every bush -- This is absolutely not the case.

And I never said it was.

I see now this is your projection. You're saying it's okay to have a "few" guns. When have I suggested anything else?

You bowled in here accusing me of making assumptions before I'd said anything about Africa. You're the one who mentioned 20 guns itt, not me. And who said we had an "arsenal"? We had a few things that could be used as weapons. I include kitchen knifes, a panga in the pantry, spears and axes on the wall in the front room, a sjambok by the fireplace, and a knobkerrie in 2 of the bedrooms. This isn't an arsenal, it's a selection of tools and artefacts that also double as weapons, and is no different to anything you'd find in most houses in Southern Africa.

Who is the real asshole here?

june gloom on 6/9/2012 at 22:25

You are.

Azaran on 6/9/2012 at 22:33

A fair argument for gun restriction is that, let's say, an individual with anger issues gets fired from his job. If he doesn't own a gun, the worst he might do is go and kick his boss's ass. If he has a gun he might just decide to go back and start shooting, which would obviously be much worse.
You might say that in countries with gun restrictions, stabbings are more common, but the fact remains that knives are not as dangerous as guns - you rarely hear about mass stabbings killing dozens of people. It's much easier to kill (and kill in large numbers) with guns.

LarryG on 6/9/2012 at 22:40

I'm just grateful that dethtoll and Subjective Effect don't live on the same continent otherwise one or the other or both might go seriously postal. Though if this keeps up a few thousand miles of ocean between them might not be enough.

Neither of them is a postal worker, right? That could explain a lot if they were. :tsktsk:

Now I don't know about relative crime statistics, but here are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate) relative firearm stats. The US didn't even make it into the top 10. But Swaziland did!!?? We clearly need to try harder. Columbia gets the Gold, El Salvidor the Silver, and Jamaica the Bronze. Come on America! Are we going to let those 3rd world countries beat us at this??

june gloom on 6/9/2012 at 22:44

If SubJeff is so intent on being proven right, then he can come over here to this anarchic backwater and I'll pay CCCToad to shoot him in his stupid face. It's very clear that SubJeff needs validation and who am I to deny him that?

Phatose on 6/9/2012 at 23:02

Quote Posted by jay pettitt

Can't say I do.

I'd be mighty sceptical of any that might show up though. Generally speaking it's always best to go with the largest sample size possible. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to assert anything safely just by looking at data for two countries - especially when the 2 countries in question are the 2 with the greatest number of social malladies in the developed world and the greatest number of special interest groups trying to pin any given malady to their cause celebre. I'm no statistician, but I do know that good stats are hard to do.

Also, stats around violence to women are especially prone to things like social pressure not to report. You'd have to be very, very careful to get good useful stats out of any data.

That said...

(http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/index.html) Last I heard 1 in 5 US women had experienced rape, so if you think US style gun ownership might be doing a good job at protecting women, think again.

An unfortunate statistic - but one that's not really pro or anti gun control. It would be far more useful to see statistics of relative violence vs women with guns (say, females with concealed carry licenses) versus unarmed women in a gunless society. I can see distinct possibility where a unarmed women in an unarmed society are less likely to be assaulted then an unarmed woman in an armed society, but more likely to be assaulted then an armed woman in an armed society. Such a situation would imply that our best course would not be gun control, but rather programs to increase gun ownership and training.

The last statistics I can find have 43% of women in the US owning a gun, and presumably far less reliably carrying it. Very hard to get a clear picture.

LarryG on 6/9/2012 at 23:47

A little data analysis using the data from (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list#data) Gun homicides and gun ownership listed by country. "The world's crime figures are collected by the UNODC through its annual crime survey. It has a special section of data on firearm homicides - and provides detailed information by size of population and compared to other crimes. It is not a perfect dataset - some key nations are missing from the data, including Russia, China and Afghanistan. But it does include the US, UK and many other developed nations."

I'll let the data speak for itself.

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I suspect that the significant data is who holds the guns, not how many are held.

SubJeff on 7/9/2012 at 00:55

Going to need some axis labels there fella.

LarryG on 7/9/2012 at 01:12

I think the folk at this forum are smart enough to figure out that no country has close to 90,000 firearm homicides per 100,000 in population, so that axis must be firearms per 100,000, and the other is homicides.

Guess which country does have close to 90K firearms per 100K people, though. Un huh. Starts with a "U".

What is interesting is that according to these statistics, Brazil is the most efficient in the use of it's guns in killing people with 4.33475 homicides per gun. Now that's efficient! By comparison, the US is woefully inefficient with only 0.102995495 homicides per gun. On average. Odds are that some of those guns that do kill people kill multiple people

Jason Moyer on 7/9/2012 at 01:14

In areas where the rate of legal firearm possession is highest, people don't fucking shoot each other. This is, in a nutshell, why 99% of gun control arguments are complete bullshit.

Earlier in the thread someone speculated that the reason the firearm homicide rate in cities is higher is population density, which is also bullshit. I've spent 10 years of my life living in a city; the places where there are high homicide rates in cities are the fucking ghettos (and before someone views that as a racial thing, I'm referring to white trash ghettos as much as the standard Boyz N Tha Hood perception of a ghetto). That's due to poverty and prohibition (which leads to things like gang violence), and happens in areas that are high-crime with or without firearms. Even in situations of high-profile urban firearm related violence it's nearly always because the perps and victims are emulating goddamn gangster culture.