The second amendment of the constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. As the specter of gun violence continues in our workplaces, roads and schools, the question keeps arising: do guns keep you safe, or just increase the level of violence?
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The Gun Lobby's Myths
- From Freedom States Alliance
By Freedom States Alliance - Working to Prevent Gun Violence
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Facts yes, truth no.
You seem to confuse a fact with the truth. All a fact is is a piece of data. One must consider the nature of the data before one can proclaim it supports an underlying truth. Let us do so with your facts, even though I see not a single source for them.
"Each time a gun is used in a legally-justifiable shooting in a home, there are 22 unintentional, criminal, and suicide-related shootings."
In order to have this 'fact', such as it is, support the underlying truth that guns are bad, we must accept three things. The first is that a legally justified shooting is the valid measure to use when making a cost/benefit analysis of them. It is not, because of the simple fact that a law abiding citizen who brandishes his gun in self defense is much less likely to fire in the first place because his objective is to drive the aggressor off which many times will not require an actual discharge of the weapon. The second is that suicides are a valid statistic to include in this debate. As I noted earlier they really aren't. The third is that we must accept the fact's definition of legally-justified shooting. Given that in Chicago, if the shooting is done with the handgun it cannot be legally justifiable, we see that this is a very sloppy 'fact' indeed.
"Having a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide fivefold."
Just from reading this statistic I can with 99% certainty guarantee that the study that came up with it is neither scientifically valid or reliable. Firstly, the study certainly does not control for legal or illegal gun ownership. Secondly, the study does not control for illegal drug use on behalf of the suicide. Thirdly and finally, the statistic does not even control with whether the suicide was committed with the gun or not.
"Having a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home."
Again, this statistic certainly does not control for legal or illegal gun ownership. Neither does it control for method of homicide.
- ravenshrike
September 5, 2008 8:57AM
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were are your sources?
No sources cited. Rather poorly constructed argument.
- jaker277
February 24, 2009 6:17PM
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That is blatantly wrong...
If you put a loaded gun on the table, it will not harm anybody. It takes a person to look someone in the eye, point a gun at them, and pull the trigger. People do kill people, not guns. By your logic, we should ban cars because of some of the imbeciles we have on the road today.
- pdethier
March 16, 2009 6:16PM
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...or is it?
While the oft touted phrase, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people.", is used to separate the act from the object, the fact is that firearms act as a facilitator of violence. The simple fact is that access to firearms makes it much easier for people to kill one another. In many cases, the presence of a firearm escalates a situation from an otherwise non-fatal incident into a homicide. So while it is technically true that firearms do not kill people in-and-of themselves, they make it much easier for people to kill each other. However, this is not to say that firearms cannot have a role in preventing violence, but rather that the relationship between firearms and the occurrence of violence is more complex than it appears.
- Sesquipedalian
May 21, 2009 7:20AM
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As a gun carrying citiczen, Yes.
Someone once said to me in a discussion about concealed carrying of firearms that "Only police should have guns " I said "Ok lets look at that. Police have the responsibility to keep the civil peace and solve crimes, not prevent them. Crimes are not preventable. The robber or rapist is not going to be deterred by police programs or fear of arrest, he has already made the decision to commit a crime . The odds of police interference are remarkably low. The odds of actually getting caught for a murder are 1 in 14. The responsibility for your own safety is ultimately yours, not the police. I choose to carry a firearm to protect myself and those I love. By being in proximity to me you are also being protected, as I can prevent a rapist or robber from harming you. Carrying a gun is a heavy burden, I have made the decision to take human life if necessary to protect myself with all of the emotional and physical baggage this entails. If you were being assaulted I guarantee that you would be praying for someone with a gun to help you and stop the perpetrators.I do not choose to carry a gun to take lives, I carry a gun to save lives, Maybe even yours
- DArtagnan1966
April 5, 2009 7:20AM
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Statistics don't lie
Uh...the risk for suicide in the home in America is 10 out of every 100,000. So if the likelihood of suicide in America increases fivefold with the presence of a gun in the home, the risk would be .0005 percent. That's NOTHING compared to the worldwide suicide rate of 1.5%. Ironically enough, 30% of all suicides take place in China, a country that doesn't allow citizens to bear arms. Huh.
The rate of suicide in China is 3.6%. The rate of suicide in America is .0001%.So going by your logic (that guns are the underlying causal factor), if we took away the right to bear arms from our citizens, the rate of suicide would go up by 36,000 times.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/146507.php
Having a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide, does it? Well, according to genevadeclaration.org, Homicide in America is at 5.6 per 100,000 (last year's rates). If we were to assume owning a gun tripled that number, we would still have a lower suicide rate than that of...the Caribbean? And I know you had no idea the ideal vacation spot was a war zone, but there it is - 18.1 out of every 100,000.
I can't help but be suspicious of an organization that not only throws out emotion laden words to get their point across - death AND "despair"? - but also cherry picks statistics, as well as forgets to cite references.
- Livvy
April 28, 2009 11:00AM
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1 + 1 = FAIL
The math you have used is all wrong. You multiplied instead of dividing.
Using your figure of 5.6 per 100k and assuming that firearm ownership triples the rate, then the rate in homes NOT owning a firearm would be 1/3 of 5.6, which is 1.86 (repeating).
But even so, it doesn't work that way, because the figure of 5.6 per 100k is a mathematical average based on national data. It does not reflect the situation in any given household. Its like saying that 45% of Americans own a dog. That does not mean that 45% of every household has a dog (or that every household has 45% of a dog!).
To generate meaningful data, you would have to do a study of the homicide rate in households with and without a gun, in a sample population. The data from national crime rate reports is too general to draw those kinds of specific conclusions.
- Sesquipedalian
June 1, 2009 1:16PM
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To generate meaningful data, you would have to use your brain
"To generate meaningful data, you would have to do a study of the homicide rate in households with and without a gun, in a sample population. The data from national crime rate reports is too general to draw those kinds of specific conclusions."
Even the results from that study would be next to meaningless. I was merely trying to point out that Freedom States Alliance's data is flawed, and I don't think anyone needs statistics to figure their math out (or prove or disprove it). The only thing that they've proven is that owning a gun and higher rates of homicide are correlated. But is it likely that more homicides are committed because of the presence of the gun, or more likely that people who commit homicides use guns as their weapon of choice.
When I said "statistics don't lie" I was being semi-facetious. Statistics, in this instance, prove nothing.
- Livvy
June 11, 2009 1:28PM
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Regarding statistics
I disagree that the study I suggested would be meaningless. If the study were carried out across a range of areas with similar demographics, in homes with and without guns , you could isolate the gun variable to a reasonable degree. Obviously you cannot control for all the extraneous variables and you couldn't categorically say that the rate in homes with guns is X% and in homes without guns it is Y%, but you would be able to determine if there is a visible trend difference. But to a certain extent you are correct in that statistics are easy to distort, and tend to be shaped by how the question is framed.
- Sesquipedalian
June 12, 2009 3:52AM
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Lies
There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
- Nightowl22
September 7, 2009 7:37PM
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WRONG!!
If you REALLY want to evaluate statistics, read John Lott or Ralph Cramer. THEY have correct statistics. One of which is; The actual number of weapons in America has INCREASED over the past ten years and the number of violent acts with a weapon has DECREASED.
That alone belies the whole premise.
The actual number of times that a weapon is used to prevent a crime is estimated between one million and two million times a year AND most of them did not require firing the weapon.
- Nightowl22
September 7, 2009 7:31PM
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