A) I have seen studies that show that gun registries save lives - I can dig them up but I think you've made up your mind and it won;t shift your opinion (correct me if I am wrong and I will dig them up). B) It's not the number of inhabitants but rather the sample size (the number of murders) - so when you spread them out over years it does indeed reduce the difference with cali from 5x to 3x. A couple of considerations - NH is surrounded by tight gun restrictive states. Crime in general is lower in NH than it would be in a state with big cities - NH's largest city barely scrapes 100k. Rural areas, with a lot of high relative wealth are simply going to have low crime. Its also a outlier in weather. So trying to compare a sparsely populated, isolated, high per capita income, cold weather state with a state like Cali - you have so many differing variables it's a flawed analysis. Especially when you look over the larger trend that red states have more gun violence than blue states and the pattern holds across variables. Cherry picking outliers is a flawed type of reasoning. C) Gun control laws are ONE factor in affecting gun deaths - but it's not the only one. It's not even the primary one in all cases. But as a whole, gun control will reduce gun homicides. That's not an opinion given it's backed by tons of data - it's a conclusion based on data otherwise I wouldn't support gun control. I make my decisions in life based on data - my job, my work, my household - I've always been a data guy - and the data here is very clear. Yes you can cherry pick data to tell whatever story you want - and I'm afraid that is what you are doing to support your ideas. But if you look at it without bias, there is no other conclusion than the right gun control laws do reduce gun homicides and there is a lot more room for improvement nationally and locally in that realm. We aren't Nazi germany. A gun registry isn't going to be used to take guns away from people. I would support better defining the 2nd Amendment in a way that secure's gun right more strongly in exchange for a gun registry and the outlines I have provide to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally unwell. I have no desire to take guns away from people like yourself who don't exhibit anger or mental unstableness. It's the people who have an itch to scratch emotionally that I want the guns out of their hands. The people who look for trouble, the people who have a short fuse, the people who shoot someone on their property to get their ball - because they think they can.
I've seen studies that show increased gun ownership saves lives. There are studies that show lots of things. That is not a sampling error, the difference just varies over time. Some years the difference is greater, some years it is less. Even looking at decades of data, clearly there are far fewer murders in the state with far lighter gun control. This doesn't matter at all, because you can get the guns directly in New Hampshire. The opposite is an argument made for why gun control is a failure in Illinois or Washington DC. It doesn't work the opposite direction. You don't need neighboring states from which to bring in the guns. The red states with high rates of homicide or gun homicide or gun violence or whatever metric you want to cite later, are also largely rural. The largest city in Mississippi is only 153,000 people. Nashua's weather is nearly indistinguishable from Chicago. The variation in mean daily temperatures by month is within about a degree. There are going to be those confounding variables with all state to state comparisons. That has not prevented people from looking at red vs. blue or differences in gun laws in other states. Like you just did here. This is cherry picking. Why limit it to gun homicides. Wouldn't homicides be a better indicator? Are people less dead if they are killed by a knife or bomb or truck? If you look at gun ownership, average income, murder rate, and population demographics (specifically percent black) by state. The two most strongly positively correlated variables are population demographics and murder rate. Average income is negatively correlated with gun ownership. The correlations between income and murder rate, income and population demographics, and gun ownership and murder rate are very weak, essentially zero. You are free to run the analysis yourself, all those variables are publicly available on wikipedia. Why is this? It relates to your cities argument, although it turns out 100,000 person cities can still have these problems. The major driver of murders (especially of non-family members) is gang violence. In the United States, this is a much bigger problem in the black and Hispanic communities, less of a problem in white and Asian communities (though some white or Asian gangs do exist as well). The underlying reasons for this are varied and long contested, but access to guns is not it. Except that right now you have people pushing for bans of guns generally or specific guns, including the President of the United States. You can say all you want that there is no attempt to take people's guns, but President Biden just this past week was talking about how he is going to reinstitute the "assault weapons" ban. If such a ban passes, and everyone who owns one of these "assault weapons" has it registered to their name and address, what happens next.
Alright we are not making a lot of progress here since we disagree on basic ideas of statistical interpretation and what constitutes a legitimate study. So let me ask you this - why do you think that NH with it's lax gun laws has so many fewer gun homicides than Mississippi also with high lax gun laws? If your theory that less gun laws reduce gun homicide - how do you explain red states having the most gun homicides?
Several things here: 1. I don't differentiate between gun homicides and other homicides. If you replace 10 shootings with 10 strangulations, it makes no difference, the victim is just as dead. 2. I don't think lax gun laws reduce gun homicides, I think they have little effect. The stats don't show a strong correlation between a state's rate of gun ownership and a state's murder rate. 3. As I have said repeatedly, the driver of high murder rates is gang violence. Whichever jurisdictions have high gang violence have high murder rates. 4. The most statistically significant variable appears to be the demographic composition, probably as a proxy for high levels of gang violence. This was all covered in the post you quoted.
That's quite the assertion that a gun death vs a strangulation death are still deaths. I think you are glossing over the fact that it's a tiny little bitty bitty easier to kill someone with a gun than by strangulation. Otherwise, why not just ban guns and give people wires to strangle people? You say the stats don't show strong correlation but in fact they do - incredibly strong. I am not sure why you keep saying it's not. Just because you can find an outlier or two doesn't break a statistical correlation. That's not how stat works. Even if you feel Gang violence is the major driver, then shouldn't you favor stricter gun control to reduce the accessibility of guns to gangs? I know, they will just strangle people instead right?
That is taken into account by using the murder numbers and not just the gun murder numbers. You don't have to guess how many shootings would turn into stabbings, you can just see how many murders there are with gun law X here and gun law Y there. There are two reasons gun control people ALWAYS quote gun deaths instead of murders. First, they want to include suicides in the stats without telling people that the majority of the deaths they are talking about are suicides (they will show stats of gun deaths, but always paired with talking about things like school shootings with AR-15s which are among the least prevalent form of gun deaths). I encourage you to run the numbers yourself. Take every state and put the following into excel: gun ownership rate, murder rate, average income, and percent black population and run a covariance analysis. See which variables are strongly positively correlated, which have no meaningful correlated, etc. I have already told you the results of doing this, but go ahead and do it yourself. You will find that murder rate and percent of population that is black is the only strong positive correlation. Also, there are more than an outlier or two, the high murder red states are almost all in the south. The District of Columbia dwarfs the murder rate of any red state and has very strict gun control. Top 15 states by murder rate are: Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Michigan, and Indiana. 6 of those 15 are blue states. 8 are red states in the south. Indiana is the only northern red state in that group. Bottom 15 states by murder rate are: New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Utah, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, New Jersey. 7 of those 15 are red states. You don't even really need to do that, you can come at the same issue in many different ways. White Americans own more guns per capita than any other group, yet have about 1/6 or so the murder rate of black Americans. If access to guns drove the murder rate, wouldn't that be reversed? 1. I don't believe in taking the rights away from 98% of people to try to affect change in the extreme minority of people that are driving the violence. 2. Because the numbers, as I have said, do not support the idea that fewer guns means less murder. We should instead target our focus on those who are driving the violence with increased enforcement in gang neighborhoods, stronger penalties for crime in general and gang crime in particular, longer probation and parole periods during which convicted criminals are searchable without a warrant, etc.
The parents should be arrested and never be able to purchase a gun again when incidents like this happen.. This is why we need annual vetting and licenses to carry guns, along with mandatory gun safety classes.
I don't know... maybe in the absence of a readily available firearm the preschooler would have resorted to strangulation...
I don't know how you do things in Texas, but we would charge them with child endangerment resulting in GBI/Death and they would get a felony conviction (and as a result, never be able to purchase a gun again, or even keep the ones they already have). Annual vetting is completely impractical and licensing to have a gun at home is unconstitutional under Heller. Accidents are not murders. You have about a 1/670,000 chance per year of dying in an accidental shooting, not quite as rare as one in a million, but less than two in a million. You are actually about 15 times as likely to die of accidental suffocation or strangulation, so it is funny you mentioned that.
The assumption that homicide rates would not change if you eliminate guns is a bad one. The data doesn't support it. I've seen many analysis over the year showing a strong correlation between gun deaths and gun laws. Look, you can spin numbers to show there isn't a correlation. RAND did an excellent analysis of all the studies across various types of gun laws and how much evidence they had in terms of influence on various outcomes: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-p...lls-us-about-the-effects-of-gun-policies.html I suggest you take a look at it. You can keep throwing out factoids and point out things that help build your argument - but when you look at the data without bias, it's clear gun laws do have an impact - and many reduce gun homicides. Gun control is a small sacrifice to increase public safety and well being. Instead of fighting against it, it's too bad gun owners don't embrace it because it makes the country safer for everyone, and would only serve to elevate gun owners to an even higher status of respect versus fear. It's like having to go through security at an airport - yes it's a small headache, but it's worth it to save a few lives.
Again, why limit to gun deaths. Should be murders. Edited to add: I looked at your linked study. They say almost all of the studies are inconclusive. There were a couple of studies by one researcher (Siegel) that indicated reduced homicides (but not reduced firearm homicides) and some that showed increased firearm homicides. They then concluded that dealer background checks may reduce firearm homicides, with moderate support, universal background checks may reduce all homicides, with moderate support, and universal background checks may reduce firearm homicides with limited support. Maybe there is strong evidence of some other issue, like suicides, but in terms of total murders, the evidence appears pretty weak, far too weak to infringe on peoples' rights. I don't limit it to gun homicides. I think it is a high price to pay. Too high for limited or no benefit. We should radically reduce security screening at the airport as well. All the stupid 3 oz bottle limits are ridiculous.
[/QUOTE] Why not discuss the problem of too many gun deaths by saying you shouldn't limit gun deaths? And what is the "high price to pay"? Having more stringent background checks? Having longer wait periods? Eliminating the gun show loophole? Reducing the size of magazines? Heck... even the extreme of banning AK15s and similar weapons? People that feel the need to own weapons will still be able to buy weapons.
Because keeping the number of murders the same but reducing gun deaths is not a win, it is a pretend accomplishment. If every gun murder is replaced with another kind of murder, then nothing has been gained. It is a statistical game to convince people something has been accomplished. The high price to pay is infringing on people's rights.
Because murders are most easily done with guns. It's much easier to survive a madman with a knife than with a semi-automatic. Also - moderate is not "weak" - it means "two or more studies—at least one of which was not compromised by serious methodological weaknesses—found significant effects in the same direction, and contradictory evidence was not found in other studies with equivalent or stronger methods." And you left out the ones labeled supportive. Given the rigor that RAND is having a standard, these are significant results. Not weak. You're letting bias color your views here. Scientifically, this is a strong case for gun control and limiting gun rights. I don't see infringing on anyone's rights - you and many other "law abiding" gun owners can still get their guns, while the rest of everyone else can practice their right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness - and the right to go shopping without being filled with holes from rifle fire.
The one-yr old should've been armed and trained in battlefield something something... - @StupidMoniker
