It's time for another gun threadFollow

But on the frontier, Native Americans used bows as their primary means of both defense and offense until the white man introduced the gun. Spears and swords have been used for centuries until replaced by guns, and knives are still just as commonly used in crimes today. Is it unreasonable to suggest that in the absence of guns, these weapons might see a resurgence?

I'm just asking because it seems like guns receive a bad rep. not merely because of the nature of their existence, but because of the culture surrounding them. The one good argument I've seen for anti-gun views is that the sole purpose of a gun is to kill. The same can be said for swords and bows, yet they enjoy unrestricted popularity in most places, be it for sport, hobby, or merely to fill a collection.

Perhaps we would see a resurgance in bow ownership in the absence of guns but, consider Columbine with a bow. Can a 4-year-old kid pick up a bow and accidently shoot someone dead - not likely as they don't even have the strength to make the pull. Guns and bows are different, whether they are intended for the same purpose or not.





Edited, Apr 15th 2009 5:15pm by Elinda

Not really, just that 'prevent' isn't always that. It's not because things get heated and there's a chance of a crime happening that showing a gun has actually prevented that crime.

For instance (and yes, this is a really simplistic example I know), a guy is walking down the street and sees a couple of young kids wearing hoodies coming towards him, fearing getting mugged he pulls his gun and scares the kids off. Did he prevent a crime or not? Who knows but the guy with the gun most likely will think so.


And it's the number of times a gun is supposedly used to prevent or stop a crime that is worrying to me, 2 million times (sort off anyway) a year is equal to about 5480 times a day. Ofcourse, I just live in a small country in which any use of guns outside robberies are grounds for massive debates and parliamentary questions regarding the gun laws.

In the context of an argument where one side is insisting that guns are "only" used to kill people, pointing out the number of times they are used to defend people from being victimized would seem relevant. The entire gun control argument is predicated on the idea that guns are more dangerous to society to allow in the hands of private citizens than not. This data pretty overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.


We can speculate as to why crime and violence is so high in the US in general, but it's *not* because of gun ownership.

And here's what I'm really worried about ... In the continental United States, lightning strikes from cloud to ground an average of >22 million times each year. I'm worried. >22 million times a year! That's 60,273 per day! That's really dangerous! Lightning kills people!

Now before you go and quote statistics on deaths from lightning and try to tell me that only a tiny percentage of lightning strikes actually kill anyone, don't waste your time. I'm just talking about how much lightning is out there that might kill someone and the more lightning there is the more people will die.

And yes, I know that drunk driving kills more people every year (20 times as many as by lightning), but I'm really worried about the lightning.

We oughta do something to get rid of lightning.

gbaji, by the methodology that the studies cited used, the cranky old man that shot his shotgun in the air when my best friend and I were 10 and picking blackberries in the woods near his property "prevented" a crime.

Nevermind that we were 10 and picking blackberries; all we know is that we heard a shotgun and knew the cranky old man was around. He did this dozens of times over the summer. That's dozens of crimes prevented by that one old man and his shotgun alone!

(Once he actually caught us and saw we were two little white girls and apologized and said we could have all the blackberries we wanted; he just thought it was the rowdy teenage gang that occasionally did drugs on his property.)

Maybe. It depends on whether he reported it that way, or not. Here's the criteria used:



If he didn't see anyone, but just heard sounds in the bushes and fired his shotgun, that would not count as a DGU in this survey. Now, if he did see you, and did see you picking his berries, and fired to scare you away, that would count. You were technically stealing his property and he used his weapon to prevent that theft.

Should that *not* be included? I suppose we could play around in the gray areas here, but at some point we have to accept that if someone is being or about to be the victim of a crime (and stealing in a crime, isn't it?) and uses a firearm to scare off the perpetrator(s), then this is a use of a firearm to protect one from a crime, right?



Again. Maybe. Maybe not. Given that the survey discounted any cases in which there wasn't a direct confrontation, and we can assume given your next paragraph that he didn't actually consider your actions as a "crime" against him, then the cases where he didn't see you wouldn't count, and the ones where he did wouldn't either. We can speculate that the methodology isn't 100% perfect, but no methodology is. It's as good as a survey can be. Why discount just this one?




Which, btw would mean that all his encounters would have been ignored by the survey. Some unseen kids doing drugs on his property would have been screened out for a couple of reasons. Remember. The folks answering the questions don't know what the survey criteria are. They are just asked to relate the stories of their use of firearms in confrontations over X period of time. It's not like they are told the criteria and then asked how many times those criteria were met.

Edited, Apr 16th 2009 1:00pm by gbaji

And where did you read that those 5480 times a day did not mean actually firing that weapon?