this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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For some people the right to keep and bear arms is a good thing not a bad thing.
I think the bigger problem is not that armed people are everywhere, but that violent crime is common...
Right to self defense and reasonable means to do so is a fair enough.
The problem is that currently people think the explodey instant death pointers are somehow a defensive tool instead of just adding more offense to the problem.
Want to feel secure in your home? Invest in something actually useful like durable doors and windows, difficult to pick locks, if law enforcement is outside a safe response time range, a panic room is probably a good idea. All of those are infinitely more helpful against the one in a million shot of a home intruder event happening to you than all but handing said intruder the weapon they will soon kill you with.
And that's not exaggerating, women who purchase arms for defense against stalkers and/or abusers are more likely to be specifically killed with that weapon they bought for their own defense than they are to successfully defend themselves with it.
Also, most of these home intruder fantasizers have all the sense of avoiding escalation in a conflict of a fucking nuclear powered rocket breaking the carmen line speed record.
While I recognize your good faith argument, I don't believe it fits with the reality of how criminals operate, or the practicality of what most people can afford.
You can turn your house into a prison/fortress, which is expensive and only protects you when you're inside with everything locked up. Panic rooms are expensive as fuck, if you weren't aware.
And the odds of self-defense are MUCH better than you think. It's not a 'one in a million' shot that your gun helps you- in 90+% of defensive gun uses, the criminal sees the gun and runs away because he's not there to fight to the death, he's there to steal things he can get somewhere else from someone else without risk to his life. He wants a helpless victim, not a fight.
Click this reddit link- it goes to reddit's /r/ccw (concealed carry weapon) but filtered to show only stories of when /r/CCW members had to use their guns in self-defense.
Please just go read some of those stories and rethink your 'one in a million shot' position.
Nice selection bias, as if the many more people it turns out catastrophically for are able to speak their opinions on the matter in contrast.
"Fuck what this guy said goes directly against my worldview... maybe there's nuance to this very layered conundrum?"
...
"Nah, double down"
Ah yes, pointing out that the denizens of the building jumper survivor's club might have a skewed view of the survival rate of jumping off buildings. What a double down and rejection of nuance.
The statistics take murders into account, you know.
Ok you say it's selection bias... Can you show me some news stories of people who's guns were taken from them? Surely if as you say a successful defensive gun use is one in a million there are tens of not hundreds of millions of failed DGU gone wrong stories...
I doubt you will find many. Even anti gun researchers say there are minimum 4x as many DGUs as firearm homicides. I can cite stats on that when back at my desktop if you want them.
There's plenty of valid reasons to be against gun ownership. But the idea that DGU is one in a million is not one of them.
I can has stats plz? 🥺
My pleasure.
Various types of crimes are tracked by the FBI which then publishes an awful lot of statistical data. In question for us is expanded homicide table 8- same data is available on a different page that doesn't deep-link well up to 2021, but the result for all is the same- about 10k-12k firearm homicides per year.
Side note- rifles (including 'assault' rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles) are used in about 300-400 homicides/year, never more than the number of people who are punched and kicked to death. Suggests that maybe trying for 'assault weapon bans' is a waste of time that won't have much effect.
But back on track. 10k-12k firearm homicides per year, the vast majority committed with handguns or 'unknown type' guns. A gun might be 'unknown type' if it's not recovered- for example if there's a drive-by shooting and the perpetrators are not caught, you can't say for sure what kind of gun it was because even pistol rounds can be fired from certain rifles.
Measuring defensive gun uses (DGU) is much harder. In the vast majority of incidents (90-95%) the criminal sees the gun and runs away so there's not much to report. That means a great many go unreported, and of those that do get reported, there's no central tracking system the way there is for homicides. That means the only way to get any sort of number is with surveys and statistical analysis, which are of course open to the interpretation and opinions of the statistician crunching the numbers.
Wikipedia has a good page on that subject which I would encourage you to read. But to briefly summarize- anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55,000-80,000/year, pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz put it at 2.1 million/year, pro-gun researchers Cook and Ludwig put it at 4.7 million/year. More direct analysis of the government NCVS survey data put it between 100,000 and 370,000 DGU/year which is the area I think is probably most accurate. However the one thing just about every researcher involved seems to agree on is that the question hasn't been answered reliably and considerable uncertainty exists.
Thus, for the sake of argument, I take the lowest number from that- 55,000 DGU, and compare it with the highest number of say 12k firearm homicides, and I say there are AT LEAST 4.58x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
With that in mind, the argument that 'a successful DGU where your own gun isn't used against you is one in a million' becomes statistically impossible.
A lot of the whole 'owning a gun makes you more likely to get shot' bit comes from bad stat analysis and selection bias. Put simply, if you live in an unsafe area, you're more likely to get shot, but you're also more likely to want a gun for self-defense. That makes the connection between gun ownership and getting shot a correlation, not a causation; but many people confuse the two.
Another big misused stat is suicide. You've probably heard a stat like '35,000 people die of gun violence every year'. How does 12k become 35k? Simple answer is that the rest are suicides. But I think it's disingenuous to count suicides as 'gun violence' because the term 'gun violence' sounds like something that will happen to you, not something you do to yourself. There is a small correlation between gun ownership and suicide rate- I believe that's partially due to socioeconomic factors (the guy who lives in a bad neighborhood more likely has no money and thus is more likely to suicide) but it's also causative (happens because of the gun)- a gun will kill you instantly; whereas many other methods take time during which you may change your mind or fail in your suicide attempt. I still don't believe that self-harm is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership though, but I respect that many disagree with that.
Hope that helps! Does it give you what you were looking for?
Okie, thank you
🤔 I don't understand why the government doesn't track defensive gun uses directly.
I wish they did also. The stat would still be incomplete as many go unreported, but I'd still at least like a number of people who call and report a DGU.
I'm one of those. An educated armed population is a formidable adversary. Now I don't agree with most American bullshitery but being armed isn't the issue, being armed, dumb and emotionally unstable is the issue which are 100% things we as a society chose not fix not something that isn't fixable.
Yes a world where crackheads can legally carry guns will definitely not lead to violence.
It won't. Do you think crackheads won't sell their gun for crack?
Do you think they will not rob people for crack? They are addicts not stupid
If they are not stupid they won't.
Worst that can happen is that nobody walks alone.
Implying crackheads don't have agency
Violent crimes are common because armed people are everywhere.
Because no man has ever beaten a woman with his fists or anything.
Um, please think this through. You're basically saying that weapons cause violence.
But that's not how human nature works. Some PEOPLE are violent, and they commit acts of violence whether they have weapons or not.
I could approach you on the street and beat you up- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
I could approach you on the street and stab you or hit you with a baseball bat- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
Guns don't cause violence. Weapons don't cause violence. Weapons in the wrong hands can make violence worse, or in the right hands can prevent violence or stop it.
Guns enable more efficient violence. The US army discovered this during World War 1 when they stopped slapping people and shot them instead.
If I want to punch you in the face I think twice because I can't kill you from distance with a single blow, but having access to a gun is lowering the hurdle
And you're missing the most important part of the point here. WOULD you?
Whether you can kill me from a distance or from up close, WOULD you do so? I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't.
There's a few who would. And a few of them think it's fun.
You say you can't kill me from a distance. I think you can, even without a gun. Consider this a thought experiment. You need to kill me from say 100' away. You don't get a gun. How do you do it?
As an European, we have culture, we know about (cross)bows and spears and whatnot. The world is not black and white, its not about some people that always would and some people that always would not. Different environments will bring different behavior in different people. An environment where everyone has access to a firearm will lower the hurdle for extremely violent crimes that can easily result in death.
Please, have a "thought experiment" yourself and think this whole thing through, at least once. Its kindoff unfair debating with someone that went through an american school system, I know you don't have the mental capacity for this conversation, but for the sake of inclusion, we are still having it.
I think you do me an injustice, and needlessly so.
The US is not 'just one country' with the same ideals and attitudes everywhere. We are 50 states, and while there is an overall American culture, each state or even city area has its own local culture, ideals, politics, etc.
I live in a 'blue state' (IE Democrat-majority, Democrats are generally an anti-gun party). There's not a big gun culture here. There are not people with 10 gallon hats and a 6-shooter on their hip riding around in a giant pickup truck with a gun rack. My state has more gun control laws than most in the union.
When I grew up we had no guns or interest in guns. During my whole childhood the only exposure to guns I had was once at summer camp there was an activity shooting .22LR rifles (small caliber), lying down, at targets. And once on vacation we went to a shooting range that was part of a resort.
If we'd had this conversation 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been mostly on your side. I recognized the 2nd Amendment was a thing that existed, but I saw no reason anybody needed an 'assault rifle', I thought gun free zones were a pretty good way to improve safety, and overall a lot of 'gun culture' seemed like needless penis extension.
It was actually one conversation that kicked off a change in my position. An old friend of mine and I were getting lunch together. This guy has always been very Republican (pro-gun/conservative party), owns several guns, goes hunting, etc- but we have a lot of mutual respect despite differing worldviews on many subjects. Anyway, as we finished lunch he mentions that he's going to buy an AR-15 rifle and would I like to come along? I made a dumb joke like 'damn man, I didn't realize it was that small, I'm sorry dude'. He just laughed and said 'You know my deer hunting rifle, the one you said you have no problem with civilians owning? Well it's actually a lot MORE powerful than an AR-15.' I started to argue but he said 'look, nothing I say is going to convince you. So just Google it when you get home, okay?'.
I KNEW he was wrong- a 'military weapon of war' would definitely be more powerful than a stupid wood stock hunting rifle like Elmer Fudd would carry. Surely the military wouldn't be carrying weapons inferior to those of random civilian hunters, right?
So I went home and Googled it. And I found he was right- his .30-06 hunting rifle has SIGNIFICANTLY more muzzle energy than the .223 AR-15 he was planning to buy. The hunting rifle was larger and heavier and in almost every way, more powerful.
I'm usually not wrong about technical things. So I was curious what else I was wrong about on the subject, turned out it was a lot. Not about policy or position, but about provable technical things of how guns work and how deadly they are and whatnot.
So I decided the best course of action was to basically forget everything I thought I knew, and start fresh. That kicked off a good 3-4 week deep dive on the subject, reading articles, watching YouTubes, doing research on both sides of the issue.
This brought about a few basic conclusions. The biggest is that most of the politicians who talk about guns appear to know little or nothing about guns, as many of their gun control arguments are easily disproved on basis of fact. And many of the laws they promote do nothing to regulate the actual lethality of guns, but rather try to describe 'scary looking guns' and ban those. For example, my own state's laws regulate rifles that have ergonomic features like a pistol grip or collapsible stock that have NO bearing on the rifle's lethality.
I then started doing research into use of force, defensive situations, etc. And that brought a very sobering realization- I lived in a bubble. Violence is not a part of my life (and I prefer it that way). My area is quite safe. But that doesn't mean I am immune to violent people- and there ARE people out there who ARE violent. Not many near me, but they exist.
And I'd say I've done more research than most into what happens in a fight. I've seen a lot of videos of defensive situations- robberies, fistfights, assaults, kidnapping, and straight up attempted murder. I've seen what happens when people get shot (you won't find it on YouTube). And I've seen how easy it is to seriously harm a human. We live safe lives in civilized society, but on the scale of the world, our bodies are pretty fragile and it doesn't take much to seriously damage them.
And that's why I say thought experiment for how to kill someone from 100' away. It's why I say that if someone wants to kill people, they will, gun or not. It's why I reject the logic that removing guns will save lives, because I recognize that gun regulations affect the law-abiding more than the criminals who are doing the most harm.
Point is-- I have done the thought experiment, a few different ways.
Do I want guns in vending machines? No. Is the absolute ideal to have everybody armed? No, the ideal is where nobody needs to be armed. But absent that perfect future, I think civilian armament as a deterrence to criminals works.
In a place like Night City i think it's pretty clear why everyone walking around armed to the gills is a bad idea.
The fact that you're pretty likely to be shot into ribbons is a big downside, even if sometimes that's survivable (and it's pretty clear that it is not for most people).
To add to this, there are literally vending machines in the game that sell loaded guns.