I guess this ends the gun debate once and for allFollow

Seems the inevitable fallback these days, doesn't it? If it's not a double blind study conducted within the walls of some university, why should we put any faith in the statistic? Correlation, causation, after all.

I don't know... why should we? Isn't up the the researchers to provide reason to believe that their research is sound?

I have heard a lot of sides to gun control in the states. The most common saying is something along the lines of if guns and made illegal only criminals will have guns. I think this is 100% true. There are just too many unregistered guns running around and who do you think most of them belong to? IF gun control were to happen I figure at first it would be a nightmare. Honest people would be going to jail for defending themselves if they somehow got a hold of a gun and criminals would probably run rampat for awhile.

However I also think given some time the illegal handguns would start to get weeded out as would the criminals using them. Given a decade or two and countless innocents being robbed and killed it would eventually get better. But I think it would be a long time before it got better.

People who take the time to register their weapons and go through the requirements to get the permit are not going to go around robbing and killing people. Its the ones who got there guns on the black market, gun shows, whatever that are the threat.

I personally have no desire to get a concealed weapons permit. The only time I ever feel the need to carry a gun with me is if I am out in the middle of the woods. Honestly people who go into the woods without a gun are just asking for trouble and I don't mean from people either.

If I thought there was some magical way to make all hand guns just poof away and never return I would be ok with gun control, but that's just not ever going to happen.

Maybe if criminals had a punishment that scared them they would be less likely to commit these crimes? Person holds a drug store up and gets caught.. Right now they would throw him in jail for X amount of time. That is nothing to some people.

LEGENDARY self-inflicted /whoosh

Somewhat on topic, Tennessee has just passed a law that makes it illegal for law enforcement officials to destroy confiscated guns. They can only resell the guns to dealers (which includes the gun shows where no background check is necessary) or keep them in their own ********

The local police in my county were in the habit of destroying the guns they confiscated. The Sheriffs department was already selling them to dealers and gun shows.

I don't understand why they decided to make it a law that you cannot destroy these weapons. My husband's theory is that it's because in Tennessee everyone is afraid that Obama is going to take their guns away, so they want to make sure that they still have these weapons if that happens... or something.

Anyway, now things like this happen, and Tennessee gets blamed for the shootings.

Can they transfer them to another state that can destroy confiscated guns?

You don't get much more tamerlicious than selling it. I'd have to think that if it's no longer needed as evidence and can therefore be sold or used, you wouldn't have to treat it as evidence any more. Remove the firing pin, and OOPS. Must destroy.

Here is a link to quite a bit of data on gun injuries in children:

http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics;105/4/888

The references deal with virtually every aspect of the discussion which has taken place above, except Totem's original assertion, that concealed-carry will decrease violent crime, which I have discussed above.

That's a wonderful example of how to manipulate raw data to suit an already assumed conclusion. Thank you!

We're now labeling anyone under 20 "children"? And check out how they address the issue of the .019 percent of all of those "children" who die from all firearms, and the 7.2% of them who die from unintentional firearm injuries, and then point out that 6.5% of that group is under age 5. Um... So 6.5% of 7.2% of .019% of everyone under age 20 represents the number of children under age 5 who are accidentally shot and killed by a firearm. Look. That's a tragedy, but is this an epidemic?


What's strange is that they then point out that 24% of all children under age 5 who die from firearms die unintentionally. Wow! That's 24% of a really small number. Of course, that also means that 76 percent of children under age 5 who die from a firearm either commit suicide (hrm...), or are victims of homicide (I'm somehow betting this is most of that 76%). Maybe we should be focusing on why the hell people are trying to kill so many small children? I mean, when a child that age is shot and killed accidentally, that's a tragedy, but apparently, they're deliberately shot and killed 3 times more often? Is anyone confused over whether those deaths will go away if we take away the guns?

Could that link twist the numbers around a bit more? I'm sure it all sounds "alarming", but they're pulling the classic trick of mixing in older teenagers and younger kids to pad the stats. The mixing in homicides and suicides with the accidental deaths. And let's not forget this gem right at the top:



Really? If we take away guns, fewer people will die from guns? And someone was paid money to make this conclusion? You can say that about anything. It's not special to guns. I'm sure that a few people die from chocking on a ham sandwich each year. If we outlawed ham, we'd reduce the number of ham related deaths. Wow! I'm a freaking genius!...

Lol!

Edited, Apr 6th 2010 6:00pm by gbaji

Quoting "facts" from yet another ridiculously twisted set of data. Care to defend that claim?

My info is from peer reviewed literature. Yours from no data you can present.

Post data or go home :)

Sure. I'll simply link to the Klek study as I believe I did the last time we had this debate. His work not only debunks the data you are relying on, but does a better job of actually doing a study designed to determine how many people use guns to defend themselves rather than the completely different goal of the National Crime Victimization Survey.

This is just one of a dozen or so studies all showing radically higher rates of defensive gun use than the NCVS (which is almost certainly where you are getting your bogus stats). Not only is it certain that guns are used defensively many hundreds of times more often than they are used to kill (and many times more than that compared to gun accidents), but the number of times in which they are used in a situation where the interviewed person was certain it saved a life was nearly 200 times more often than the number of gun fatalities during the same time period. As Klek clearly states, even if we assume incredibly gross exaggeration among every single randomly sampled person in the study, the number has to be at least an order of magnitude or more higher than the total number of gun related deaths.

You're repeating the same old tired, biased, and improperly gathered statistics which gun control proponents cling to like it's their freaking bible. Even as study after study, most with better methodology, consistently generate completely different results which are consistent with eachother, but are inconsistent with yours. At some point, we have to decide whether the dozen or so studies are all wrong, or maybe the one outlier that you're counting on as fact is wrong...


I think your data is wrong. Peer reviewed or not. It's just plain wrong.