The best way to increase your odds of getting shot is to own a gun. Owning guns is dangerous. Occasionally for some people it will turn out to be a positive, but in general, owning a gun is a negative.
Depression is rarely the cause of suicide. Suicide is usually the result of one overwhelming moment + means. Having a gun in the household makes suicide significantly more likely. Without easy means, most people get through the tough time and go on with their lives.
Replace "gun" in your sentence with say "power tool." Any powerful piece of technology in careless hands is dangerous. Goodness, even computers are dangerous in the hands of narcissistic hackers! That doesn't mean they are not perfectly safe useful tools in the responsible hands.
Weld. Solder. Mill. Turn. Thickness plane. 90° Join. I can’t see even fairly impractical ways to do all those without power, let alone any practical way.
Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be
prohibited in all their forms.
I could continue pasting the remainder of the document, but I would argue that the ability to defend oneself (from the State, or other individuals) is the fundamental human right. Without it, all other rights are null and void. Gun ownership is the final fallback for securing our human rights.
The police have military weapons and the best equipment money can buy - especially SWAT. What good are “citizens” going to do against them?
That’s just like the militia running around in the woods training just in case they have to fight against the government. The same government that spends billions on weapons every year. If the government wants to impose martial law - like the nutcases including Chuck Norris thought they wanted to do a few years ago - the “militia” wasn’t going to be able to stop them.
Funny, it’s worked well in countries like Afghanistan. Don’t underestimate the power of a motivated and armed gorilla force that potentially exponentially outnumbers any “officially” sanctioned armed force.
> Funny, it’s worked well in countries like Afghanistan.
No, it didn't. The guerilla forces that were successful in Afghanistan has outside state sponsorship and supply and intervention by global or regional powers on their behalf (advisers, intelligence, special ops support, etc.) That's true of the Mujahideen fighting the USSR (backed by the USA, Pakistan, and others), and true of the Taliban/al-Qaeda associated groups which were fighting the internationally-recognized government (backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.)
This always comes up in the context of using guns to fight tyranny.
Your SWAT example is great: how many guys are on the SWAT team kicking the door to get one guy? 4? 6? 10?
What about an actual military operation going door to door? Squad size is 10? 20?
Government violence, when directed against you is nearly impossible to resist. But that's not the same as government violence directed against an armed populace.
History is flush with examples of failures of superior military power to subdue a population that actively resists.
Have you considered that the answer to systematic failures in the governance of the United States might be better fixed at a systematic level, rather than just arming everyone?
Individual citizens trying to fight cops with firepower is never going to work. Cops have much better equipment than you're going to have, and have the backing of the entire government.
Unless you're literally planning on staging a coup, arming yourself to fight cops is not a viable strategy.
On the other hand, if we disarm everybody, then we don't need to have such over-militarized cops either, and maybe we can finally get to a place where cops no longer automatically reach for their gun (or even carry one) and therefore stop routinely murdering citizens.
In general, owning and shooting guns is like any other hobby, and is something to talk about or take part in with friends. Most gun owners will never use a gun in self defense, and most people will never be hurt by a gun either. Of people who do end up drawing a gun in self defense, most of the time they don't even have to shoot anyone.
A great way to get a head or spine injury is to own a ladder.
A great way to maim yourself is to own a circular saw.
A lot of popular sports have a substantial risk of very predictable injuries, from CTE (caused by repeated head trauma) to joint damage.
People accept all sorts of risks from sports activities or (mis)use of all kinds of tools. When the subject turns to guns there's this uncontrollable fear reaction certain people have and want to get rid of the object. They don't want guns. They don't want their family to have guns. They don't want their friends to have guns. They don't want anyone to have guns. Guns are evil and must be eradicated. They cannot be tolerated and anyone who has one is suspicious if not a verified homicidal maniac.
There is no magical solution to the "gun problem", just like there's no magical solution that will keep everyone safe in sports or DIY home improvement. Every "solution" that would work involves some kind of extremely harsh and limiting regulation or outright ban that, if it could be enforced, would upset a lot of people.
How do you know every single one of your friendly, stable, normal, and non-violent friends doesn't own a gun? 30% of adults in the U.S. own one. 50% live in gun households. If you don't live with them, you simply don't know.[1]
>The best way to increase your odds of getting shot is to own a gun
The three things you can do which will reduce your odds of being killed by a gun by about 95%:
1. Don't shoot yourself. That reduces your odds by nearly 70%
2. Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you're able to understand basic safety rules, owning a gun is not that dangerous. Accidental deaths are incredibly rare (literally less than a one in a million occurrence), and have been trending down since gun safety has become more popular (the modern conception of trigger discipline has only existed for like 40-50 years). I think you're conflating the inherent danger of firearms with some confounding variables that lead certain people to be more likely to possess them.
> 1. Don't shoot yourself. That reduces your odds by nearly 70%
You can't shoot yourself if you don't have a gun.
> Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
It doesn't matter what race you are, if you don't have a gun.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If doesn't matter what sex you are, if you don't have a gun.
> If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you don't have a gun, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%. And you have to worry a whole lot less about dying from a gunshot depending on your mental state, accident, or whether you are "unlucky" enough to have been born male or African-American, or have occasional bouts of severe depression.
> The best way to increase your odds of getting shot is to own a gun. Owning guns is dangerous. Occasionally for some people it will turn out to be a positive, but in general, owning a gun is a negative.
The parent was just pointing out how silly the grandparent's sentence was by replacing the word "gun" with literally any other noun. The rest of the sentences didn't really matter, and were just as silly, not to mention just as inaccurate.
> Myself and others will step up and defend that right to any who attempt to take it.
I want to hone in on this particular statement you made for some clarification. Are you referring to violence here? If the state or law enforcement are involved, what's the response?
Just trying to get an idea of what "defend that right" is supposed to mean here, since I hear it an awful lot in regards to this specific topic.
> It's a civilian right in the US. No matter how you feel about that matter it does not change it.
Just because something is the law it doesn't mean it's a sensible law nor that law should never be changed to reflect modern cultures. Otherwise you'd still be going round drowning women in rivers to prove they're innocence of witch crimes.
There has been so much evidence to prove that America's lack of gun control is counter productive:
* higher suicide rates
* the numbers family members accidentally killed by their own guns
* mass shootings
Even when looking at the figures in isolation, it's pretty damning. Then when you compare to statistics in the rest of the world, America's statistics become nothing short of embarrassing.
What's more, the UK, Australia and some other countries went through the same process of having relaxed gun control laws and then tightening them up because they came to the same realisation that guns are not comparable to free speech, power tools, nor any other the other dumb things pro-gun lobbies compare them with.
Do you know that you are quoting the junk science that Clinton via the CDC asked Kellerman and Hemmenway to produce as a lead up to the 1993/94 Brady Bill and Assault Weapon Ban? The same of power that lead the 1996 congress banning the CDC from promoting policy advocation.
Among other issues such as full data never being released, the specific quote you have there was derived from police reports where someone was shot in their home. No other factors were considered like drug or spouse related, not if the home owner was shot by their gun, or any one of a number of other factors that would paint a better picture.
Do you seriously think police reports where someone was shot no other questions asked is a good indicator for gun ownership in the USA?
The CDC has been able to and has studied guns since that 1996 law.
They have not been allowed to suggest policy changes.
Interestingly when the ability to weaponize them went away, a lot less direction went into gun studies compared to the millions of dollars spent in the ramp up to 1993.
It prevents the CDC from being weaponized like it was by Clinton admin.
Anyone pushing for policy is free to cite the CDC results of studies. As they have done.
But if you notice, the narrative has been CDC isn’t allowed to study guns which is a lie.
This was partially rolled back by an Obama EO (sorta, its complicated) and you know what ever CDC study since has found? No exact correlation to guns and crime. There have been some interesting results since 2013 like the fact that Assault Weapon Bans have not at all proven effective since less than 400 people have died per year in any recent time by rifles of all types let alone the subset of scary looking ones, that there are 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful defensive gun uses by citizens a year mostly where a shot isn’t needed compared to 10-15,000 homicides in the country of 330,000,000 are over 75% gang or drug related, and that rural areas of USA where the guns are have effectively the same homicide rates as rural Europe when you look at like for like causes of the violence.
Specifically the CDC was barred from having tax payer money used to remove citizens civil rights.
Last I checked there was no enumerated right to asbestos or nicotine.
In some ways the Dickey Amendment empowered them to push the false narrative of a strong relationship between guns and crime. Rather than having to put forward quality studies for their political purposes, they could just handwave at the legislation like it was a foregone conclusion.
Yea, but the problem was Clinton used them as a weapon and it was pretty clear that administrations couldn't trusted to not do that again.
It wasn't perfect, but you're talking millions of dollars that went into the 92/93/94 push. That's hard to come up with for narrative building when it's not tax payer money. Just look at the single source of gun control in the USA today, Michael Bloomberg, if he wasn't personally bankrolling it, things would look a lot different.
> One study found that when a gun is present in the home, that gun is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than to kill an intruder.
There's a world of difference between OP's own circumstances and a statistical household average.
If s/he lives outside of an urban area and his family has no history of mental illness, the number drops dramatically. And s/he would know his/her own circumstances.
One is an anecdote, the other is factual data. As someone else said, guns might be okay for someone's personal circumstances but on average they are far more likely to hurt you than help.
Someone thinks they know their own circumstances until they become a number contributing to that average. Also I'm curious about your distinction between urban gun access and rural access and how that affects the stats here.
> As someone else said, guns might be okay for someone's personal circumstances but on average they are far more likely to hurt you than help.
The comment I was responding to did not say this.
> Also I'm curious about your distinction between urban gun access and rural access and how that affects the stats here.
It's no secret that the gun deaths and shootings are far more likely in urban areas than rural ones. I think both sides of the debate acknowledge that.
I'm not a number contributing to an average, especially when it comes to a defensive use of a gun, because I didn't pull the trigger and no police report was made. I kept myself from becoming a statistic because I know my own circumstances. My body, my choice.
By the way, just s/gun/abortion/g and see if your arguments sound familiar.
yes, and the typical American family has 2.2 children.
first off, you didn't even cite the statistic correctly from the article:
> One study found that when a gun is present in the home, that gun is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than to kill an intruder.
it's talking about the gun being used (perhaps intentionally) to kill by anyone in the house, not just the owner.
the relevant statistic for someone seriously considering a gun for home defense would be in the cases where the weapon is properly stored, the owner trains regularly with it, and any plans for use of the gun during an intrusion are discussed with and understood by the family. it's a bit harder to find this data though...
There are multiple issues with quoting the statistic out of context:
* Even the article cites it as only a single study
* The wording of the statement implicitly includes suicide, which while non-negligible, are often conflated by gun control advocates without context. 60% of all adult gun deaths are by suicide
* You don't have to kill an intruder for the gun to be used successfully for self defense. You don't even have to pull the trigger. The context of comparing deaths as if they are equivalently valid ends is misleading
* A gun's purpose is not solely to kill intruders. Many people carry weapons concealed, which also provides value to them that is not strictly tied to killing intruders
And I'm probably missing several other misleading context, but the paper itself that's linked is behind a paywall.
No, guns do not make you violent. Being predisposed to violence and/or killing someone might make you decide to buy a gun, though.
What you quoted is that NPR-affiliate news blog's incorrect summary of a 1986 study of gunshot deaths in King County, WA from 1978-83. The paper abstract says:
"For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides."
Sample size was 50 homicides, 9 self-protection homicides, and only 2 of those by a resident against an intruder.
If you state it like that and consider that most thwarted home invasions do not end in death for the intruder, the narrative of the site you linked starts to fall apart. Studies like that tend to fall apart further when you look at exactly who was shooting who under what circumstances. How many "non-intruders" were really drugged out "family" members? Is it not okay to defend yourself if you know your attacker? "Family members" could be relatives living elsewhere and known to be dangerous, but who stop by uninvited. When studies cite "children", that can include older teen gang bangers (and gang bangers can be younger, too). The rhetorical tricks are legion.
Trying to impute homicidal impulses to people because they own a gun is simply ridiculous. You wonder why gun rights advocates get pissed off whenever any anti-gun stats or articles are tossed around? It's because they're almost always exaggerated, designed to mislead, and mis-attribute whether gun ownership or possession was the proximate cause of violence.
That the author of that WBUR blog post is still peddling an "assault weapon bad!" narrative indicates that they are not to be trusted. What those people really want is to ban all semi-autos with detachable magazines. If you could enforce it and not grandfather old guns, that might reduce mass shootings (or the number of deaths per). I can agree with that 100%. I only disagree that you could pass that law and that it could be enforced (without suspending the rest of the bill of rights). It would affect not just guns used in the Las Vegas mass shooting, but every single ordinary (non-revolver) semi-auto handgun owned commonly for self defense. They too use detachable mags of arbitrary size.
Any people using the emotional phrase "assault weapon", rather than talking honestly about banning functional characteristics like guns that accept detachable, potentially large magazines (you can't regulate magazines very well, you can 3d print ones that are good enough to be used for one mass shooting), are either not aware enough of the policy landscape to be offering an opinion, or they're intentionally writing misleading propaganda.
The only thing anyone outside of the US needs to see to understand the insane situation we have with gun ownership can be found in this news story about Waymo driverless cars:
"“Haselton said that his wife usually keeps the gun locked up in fear that he might shoot somebody,” Jacobs wrote in the report. “Haselton stated that he despises and hates those cars (Waymo) and said how Uber had killed someone.”
Haselton's wife told officers he was diagnosed with dementia, according to a police report."
In my experience it wasn't a horde - just one man - but I needed it all the same.