Some facts about guns in the US

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by James R, Dec 17, 2012.

  1. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    I didn't actually miss any of that, I just didn't address it in my postings.
    I am very much a steppenwolf... though I live amongst people/neighbors of the middle class, I am not one of them. I would find the tight assed Swiss regulations a bit uncomfortable. So too of the Danes.
    What works for those polities may not well transfer to our country of myriad races and ethnic ancestries.

    Personally, I would honor certain practices of the swiss, and dismiss others. Kind of like eating the orange and discarding the peel.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    It isn't. It's maybe twentieth, without taking reliability of stats into account - probably around 40th if an accurate suicide count etc were obtained for everyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

    Switzerland has a standing army of professional soldiers (as well as an air force, etc), it's small and comprised of officers and NCOs - the ranks are filled by the universal conscription of all Swiss men at need. This is not a militia - the national government provides rank, gear, training, pay, officers and command, logistics, bases, and so forth. The soldiers are not volunteers. They do not bring their own weapons or other gear.

    No it isn't. The per capita number of privately owned guns is much higher in the US, but that fails to count the government owned guns the Swiss keep in their houses, and it also fails to adjust for the smaller number of guns per owner in Switzerland - a higher percentage of households has firearms, in Switzerland, compared with the US.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    ice
    thanks for the information/clarification
    .....
    if memory serves, the Swiss are restricted to owning only 3 weapons per person/

    ..............
    ok
    no one wants to address the "slug" question/posting in # 1239 above?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    According to Wikipedia:

    A slug is a term used for a solid ballisticc projectile. It is "solid" in the sense of being composed of one piece; the shape can vary widely, including partially hollowed shapes. The term is occasionally applied to bullets (just the projectile, never the cartridge as a whole), but is most commonly applied to shotgun projectiles, to differentiate them from shotshells containing shot. Slugs are commonly fired from smoothbored barrels that are unable to impart the gyroscopic spin required for in-flight stability.​

    In other words, "slug" usually refers to a bullet, but in precise speech it also refers to ammunition for a shotgun that is a single piece rather than a container full of shot.
     
  8. river

    Messages:
    17,307
    Hmmm....

    Its the illegal gun trade thats the problem
     
  9. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    OK
    now, how about a 20 or 12 gauge rifled barrel ---if it has a rifled barrel, is it still a "gun"?

    ........................
    And that is a problem that more legal restrictions on non-criminals will solve.
     
  10. Randwolf Ignorance killed the cat Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,201
    Without making a value judgement...

    In America, where the chances of finding a gun in the home (the place where, incidentally, most suicides occur) are about as good as finding a carton of milk in the fridge, there’s no better predictor of suicide than simply having access to a firearm. In one study, 25 percent of California residents who bought a gun killed themselves with that same gun within a year of the purchase.
    I just have to say ...wow...

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...e-why-do-more-men-than-women-kill-themselves/
    http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199911183412106
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    A moment's thought would cast much doubt on that number - the total number of suicides vs firearm purchases in any given year seems to preclude any such fraction.

    And quickly checking the net: That appears to be a misreading - to be kind - of the results of this study: http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Mortality Among Recent Purchasers of Handguns.pdf

    As you can read, suicide (any means) was the cause of death for about 25% of those California handgun purchasers who died in the year following the purchase, and firearms were the most frequent means of that suicide. In total: there were about 238k handgun purchases in California in 1991, and about 200 of the purchasers committed suicide with a firearm of some kind in the year their purchase. Figuring roughly 200k were different individuals (high) and 200 of those guns were the ones involved in successful suicides of those individuals within the year (also high, keeping it roughly honest), we get a roughly estimated rate of .1% (one in a thousand), not 25% (one in four).

    The sheer volume of garbage statistics being put out by - and this is I believe unique in American political discourse - both sides, startles.

    In general, as a rule of thumb, firearm stats that include suicide are bogus either in citation or implication. Something seems to go spla in the mental gearing of the promulgators of all those numbers.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2014
  12. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    your showing your biases. there is nothing wrong with adding suicides into the gun debate. just because you'd prefer to minimize the death toll doesn't make them irrelevant or the stats bogus. the simple fact is if guns were banned the suicide rate would decrease
     
  13. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    You can cite a place and people where this has actually happened?
    Or, is this just your bias?
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Of course not. I never said there was.

    I just pointed out that as a rule of thumb it hasn't been done right in the numbers you read - there's invariably something askew, misunderstood, wrong, bogus. And yet they are readily accepted by a large and well-amplified fraction of whichever "side" of the gun debate they favor. There's an approximately equivalent and serious deficit in critical thinking on both sides of this issue, and that's notable, rare, possibly unique (GMOs?).

    Usually it's not even close, especially on the anti-gun "side" (that is accustomed to using data, btw, sociologically - unfamiliarity is not available as an explanation): it's some goofy thing like a quarter of gun purchasers using them to commit suicide within a year, or a nonowner estimating their personal odds of being killed by gunfire using a firearm death rate that includes suicides by gun owners, or treating a suicide's recent purchase of a firearm as a causal factor in their depression (a less confused stat would be the number of gun purchasers who used that particular gun to kill themselves many years later, after their depression manifested - if you find meaning in such an approach to risk estimates at all).
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    By the way: this
    standing by itself as it does in context above, strikes literate people generally as an argument for the banning of guns.

    So no more nonsense about the foolishness of gun owners who suspect that gun regulation advocates actually want to ban guns, OK?

    Consider for a second the kinds of gun regulation that would be necessary to prevent - not reduce somewhat or specifically forestall, but largely and effectively prevent in general - American suicide by firearm. That's what you are threatening.

    Australia, recently.

    It makes sense that there would be depressed people who would shoot themselves but not poison themselves or jump off of high places or hang themselves or crash their cars - take away the gun, they might not kill themselves at all.

    That's a rarely mentioned corollary to the air bag debate, btw - one of the low-voiced but present considerations was that allowing people to switch them off might suddenly clarify the suicide crash situation, and several strong interests do not want that.
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2014
  16. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    Details?
    Timing?
    Please include factors like the economy. It is well correlated that when the economy falters, suicides increase, when the economy is expanding, suicides decrease.
    For an honest discussion, we would need to control for that, and other variables.
    ..........................
    also
    Abstract
    This study examined the increase in the rate of suicide by hanging and an apparently simultaneous decrease in the rate of suicide by firearm as hypothetical evidence that Australian males have substituted one method of suicide for another. Trends in hanging and firearm suicide rates were examined from 1975 to 1998 for all Australian males and from 1971 to 1998 for a subset of Australian male youth, as well as a group of Australian males aged over 64 years at the time of their death. When the firearm suicide rate for Australian males declined the hanging rate increased simultaneously, with no statistical difference in the rate of change of the two methods. A similar pattern of simultaneous divergence in hanging and firearm suicide rates of a 15- to 24-year-old subgroup occurred at a not dissimilar rate over a longer time period. Rates of suicide by hanging were found to have begun increasing prior to the decline in firearm suicide. The declining rate of firearm suicide in the 15- to 24-year-old subgroup coincided with an increase in the overall suicide rate.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12882416
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2014
  17. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    its a part of a larger group of studies. the easier it is to kill one's self the higher the sucide rate goes. guns make it real easy to kill one self. it happens quick and it generally works.
     
  18. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    but than again a literate person would be reading the whole thread so its not standing on its own.

    ok so you admit it would take a dishonest reading to say that and than you go ahead and make the dishonest argument anyway. bravo on your continuing your crusade of dishonesty. recognizing a fact isn't the same thing as making an extreme argument on the fact.

    no that's what your claiming I was saying. all stated was a simple fact that even you should be capable of admitting to be true. contrary to your continued lying I don't wish to ban guns and have never argued for such a venture.


    at the end of the day ICE no matter how much you want to argue everyone else but you and yours are required to be responsible for the consequences of your action the responsibility remains yours. your continued lying only continues to make people who want a rational effort done to curb gun violence inherently distrustful of people advocating for guns. you threaten people and you slander people. perhaps if you want to be taken seriously you should respecting people who want to save lives not defending people who threaten to kill others and want to commit crimes with their guns.
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    I was trying to be kind. Reading your post in the context of the thread and your previous posting makes it perfectly clear you favor banning the general, ordinary, untrained, private possession of guns in the US.
    You should be aware that when you bring up the potential benefits of banning guns, most readers will think you are referring to the potential benefits of banning guns. If you don't want to be mistaken for someone who views the prospect of the US banning guns favorably, don't bring the topic up (especially in threads where it is not relevant) by referring to its potential benefits.

    When you do that, allowing for the various trends and factors (comparing the data with a projection of the rising hanging trend from its beginnings before the gun confiscation does not indicate enough of a blip to handle its share of the gun deficit, for example) it's probably the case that a few people in Australia who would have shot themselves instead avoided suicide altogether. And it's reasonable to think that might be the case - we do know that some suicidal people choose their means carefully and do not consider all available means acceptable.

    I'm not sure what "fact about guns" that would be, in this thread.
     
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    My one son went through a bad period during which he failed miserably at committing suicide 3 times(yippee).
    One of those times, he turned on the gas and went to sleep(too much simon and garfunkel?)....and the stove had a spark ignition...... so I said: "jeez dummy, that will never work unless you unplug the stove"(some days, I'm a real idiot).
    So, he unplugged the stove and tried again. It gave him a headache, and made him vomit. That was about 5 years ago.
    Fortunately, that seems behind him now.

    During that time he was taking antidepressants, one side effect of which was/is "thoughts of suicide".
    Maybe guns ain't the real problem for the recent increase of suicides and use of antidepressants.
    Maybe this one correlation is actually causation?
     
  21. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    27,543


    As an outsider [non USA citizen and an Aussie] I actually find it quite amazing that our two nations, so much alike in many ways and both quite well off and successful.....brothers in arms in two world wars, Korean war, Vietnam war, and the present middle East turmoil, can have attitudes so different when it comes to guns.
    I know no one with a gun in Australia [I'm a city slicker] I have never had a gun personally and only ever had the opportunity to use a Enfield 303 rifle in the mid fifties in school cadets.

    What is it with the US?
    Is it the bloody constitution and this so called right to bear arms?
    Is it a reflection of the old west?

    I'm truly lost for words as to how hard some Yanks want to fight to be able to keep their guns.
     
  22. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,985
    Sinse its legal for me to own an shoot a gun... i do it cause i like target practice an for home protection.!!!
     
  23. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    27,543

    Yes, that appears to be what all gun proponents are saying.
    I don't really see it as genuine though, and it certainly does not answer my question.
    Home protection?? How about a really noisy burglar alarm?
     

Share This Page