I understand that Hacker News is a sharing and discussion website and that it sucks not being able to read the submitted stories, but it seems people here are generally against paywalls and try to subvert them in any way possible. It also seems that many people here also subvert non-paywall sites that monetize their content using ads by installing various adblockers.
As a publisher myself, I'd be interested in hearing if there are any other ways to monetize my website and content other than paywalls and advertisements which people seem to dislike so much?
Sponsored posts, sponsored events, sponsored custom takeovers don't fall into ad blockers since they aren't being served by Akamai etc. If you're doing products, affiliate links from your posts.
I make a point of only enabling an ad-blocker if I find the ads overly invasive, resource-intensive or objectionable.
Another suggestion is that, for sites that I regularly visit and like the content, I will (and do) happily pay a subscription fee in exchange for guilt-free ad-free content.
Scary title, but I think I'll mark this one up as a victory for auto safety. Especially considering a good chunk of death by firearms are (tragically) suicides.
As a European it seems blatantly obvious that your gun laws are absurd in the States. (I am assuming you are from the States from the fact you see the argument that way around, correct me if I am wrong).
Most of the perceived absurdity comes from disingenuous framing of the issues. Here are some examples:
Over half of all quoted gun deaths are suicides. [edit: removed mention of suicide survivability as I don't have a reference handy. But remember: The most likely person to shoot you is yourself.]
Let's remove suicide from the discussion and talk about violence. The primary driver for violence is socioeconomic. The US has a huge wealth and education disparity problem, exacerbated by a drug war which focuses primarily on the lower economic classes. Most political rhetoric surrounding gun violence focuses on denying lower-class individuals access to firearms and is inexorably linked to institutionalized racism [ cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special#Economic... ]
What these stats don't show is the EXTREME socioeconomic skew involved in violent crime. If we look at gun deaths by wealth quadrile we find that the upper 40% have very, very few gun deaths -- on par with the nicer areas in Europe. Our inflated gun death statistics come almost entirely from the lower 40%. That is, gun deaths are emblematic of America's class divide.
The right to self defense is a convenient target for politicians to score easy wins. Constructively addressing the USA's violence problem is a very different issue and frankly is almost entirely unrelated to firearm legislation.
Because no one is discussing "gun deaths" in a vacuum.
"Gun death" weren't selected at random to compare to "car deaths" by some antiseptic algorithm. It's done, pretty obviously, to drive a narrative, i.e., "guns should be more regulated."
When discussing that narrative, there is a big gap between "you shouldn't have a gun because you might hurt your neighbor" and "you shouldn't have a gun because your neighbor might use a gun to hurt himself."
Easy access to an effective suicide method is one more impact of the pervasiveness of guns in a modern society. It's an important factor in determining gun deaths.
In determining the deadliness of drugs to a society, should suicides be ruled out? Accidental overdoses? Drug-related shootings? Where do you draw the line in filtering the statistics so that they're more comfortable for a given political position?
Because the fact that there is a very small chance that a person may kill themselves with a gun does not mean the government should deny that person the right to own a gun. And people with a history of mental illness are already excluded from owning guns.
I believe the point is that if the chance of suicide is very small, and the mentally ill are forbidden from owning guns, it would seemingly be at odds with the claim that "over half of all quoted gun deaths" are suicides.
I don't see the direct connection between the suicide risk of a single gun owner and the ratio of suicide to homicide in total gun deaths.
The claim regarding suicide vs homicide is easy to confirm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...). It is not possible to predict every suicide, the best we can do is make an approximation using obvious risk factors like hospitalization for mental illness. There are millions of gun owners in the US, so yes the chance of a suicide is small.
How is it at odds with that? That is a fact, not an opinion. It's true that over half of all quoted gun deaths are suicides, and it's true that the chance of suicide is very small. The great majority of gun owners don't commit suicide. There's no contradiction.
Even though most gun deaths are suicide [1], your odds of killing yourself via suicide are still low. There's slightly less than 1% chance of your life ending via suicide. Taking away guns to stop suicides is a pretty big NNT.
This article is a comparison of deaths caused by vehicles and guns as well as a comparison of the amount of government regulation between the two, not an argument to ban the 2nd Amendment. One point in the article is the lack of oversight on gun sales to criminals.
When I accidentally shoot someone and they die, they would be alive if I hadn't had the gun.
When I intentionally shoot someone and they die, they would likely be alive if I hadn't had the gun.
When I intentionally shoot myself and I die, I would likely have found another effective suicide method and died anyway without the gun.
Killing someone with a pill is not something you do in a fit of rage. Killing someone with your car could be, but only if you're driving and they're in the road (ideally not in a car of their own).
Killing yourself is quite easy to do using non-gun methods, without any additional planning or prep time.
In short, take my gun away, and I can still commit suicide, but it's much harder for me to kill others or accidentally kill myself.
>When I intentionally shoot myself and I die, I would likely have found another effective suicide method and died anyway without the gun.
This isn't true. You certainly could find another method, but you wouldn't likely do it. Most suicides are not well-planned, they are spur-of-the-moment decisions, and removing easy methods actually reduces the number of suicides substantially.
This is not intuitive, but it is supported by facts.
It might be based on what some sociologist said, but if you compare suicide rates by country, these is nothing suggesting access to guns is a strong driver of suicide rate.
If you assume the US turns into Canada, then of every 50 people who kill themselves via gun, about 42 would find another method.
(Unless you want to argue that, because of the superiority of the US's health system over Canada, that the US should have a way lower rate than Canada. I'm not making that argument, but let's just say it wouldn't be popular among those who want to ban guns.)
I'm saying that the people who say that the US's suicide rate should be half what it is now are those least likely to believe that the US's mental health care system is superior.
Mental health care can be lousy and people can be attempting suicide in similar numbers but with a less lethal method of suicide you will see a reduction in numbers of completed suicide.
England changed gas supplies from coal gas to natural gas. Nothing else changed. Rates of completed suicide dropped.
England changed the way that coproxamol was prescribed. Again suicide rates dropped.
England changed the way that paracetamol is sold and again there has been a permanent drop in completed suicide.
You keep saying that people who use guns would just use a different method. You are wrong, most of them would not. Research shows the people have preferred methods and that reducing access to those methods reduces the rates of attempted and completed suicide.
> It might be based on what some sociologist said,
Internationally respected psychiatrists at a respected high quality academic institution.
You dismiss the research but demonstrate your ignorance of who conducts the research. You haven't yet provided any specific refutation to any bit of research.
Note that the director is a consultant psychiatrist working within the NHS as well as an academic. ("Consultant" is the rough equivalent to a US attending physician.)
I get that you want to make the fight over those studies. That's fine, but I won't.
Instead, I'm assuming that all those studies are fine, but I'm still trying to figure out things that actually exist in the world around me:
1. why does the UK, with all its "permanent drops" in suicide, still have a rate within 10% of the US, which has so many guns?
2. why is the suicide rate for young people in the UK higher than it was 50 years ago? http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/msui6811.html NB: this especially points to the fact that cultures adapt in the long term to availability of suicide methods; young people who've never seen a coal gas stove don't even try.[1]
3. if half of homes have access to a guns, and assuming gun owners are as sane as non-gun owners[2], and if access to a gun is a major major factor, how come only slightly more than half of suicides are done via gun? (NB There is some factor, and I haven't denied that.)
4. instead of being in the same cluster as most modern countries, is the US really "supposed" to have a rate of suicide that places it about a factor of two lower than that bump? Why is the US so exceptionally awesome this way?
There's something in the macro-picture that isn't adding up to what all the micro-studies are asserting. All those micro-studies can be completely right and still not add up to the right picture.
[1] this suggests that you could reduce suicide rates by promulgating a widespread story that a great way to kill yourself is to do something that is plausible enough to cause self-harm but actually doesn't; then when people try it and it doesn't work, maybe they give up
[2] you could argue that gun people are crazy, because guns, but it would work against your position
(i'm having problems with tone. I apologise for previous tone and am grateful to you for not getting sucked in.)
About increasing rates: coroners are much more likely to report a death as suicide now than they used to. It doesn't have the same levels of social stigma. Suicide needs a different level of proof ("beyond reasonable doubt", not "balance of probabilities") - these two factors led to under-recording of suicide in national statistics. National statistics started using reports of "death by misadventure" and open verdicts.
Socio-economic factors are also important. We know that when unemployment rises the number of attempted and completed suicides rise. Rates of unemployment for young men are very much high now than they were 45 years ago.
And while some medication has got more restrictive others have got more permissive. It's easier to get opiate style pain relief now.
Point 3:
People have a preferred method of suicide. A person who considers death by overdose may not want to die by gun. People's thinking about suicide is distorted. People might think they want a "serene" death, or they might want a certain death, or a very quick death. So removing access to guns will see some people transferring to other methods. At the moment we seem to disagree about the numbers.
Seems outside the relevant scope of discussion regarding gun policy. Just my opinion, though, as a former card-carrying NRA member with a liberal political leaning.
I am curious, though: Are carbon monoxide suicides-by-car counted in the car deaths for this gun-vs-car deaths comparison?
Down voted as this is not factual. Suicide by firearm is much less survivable than taking pills, and even when it is survivable it can be incredibly disfiguring and/or debilitating.
There's also the fact that suicide by firearm can be done impulsively, without much preparation, in contrast to asphyxiation or falls. When there's more requirement for preparation there are more opportunities for someone to change their mind or for some intervention to take place.
The use of guns might be the reason why more women attempt suicide than men, but more men actually die of suicide. It may be that women are more likely to prefer a method that doesn't result in disfigurement (pills) and, because that method is less likely to be successful, women are less likely to die of suicide.
If guns were banned, it is at least plausible that deaths by suicide would go down because the alternatives might be less accessible to those making an impulsive decision and more survivable.
It is also worth noting that according to their graph that the critical point to be made is that both rates of death have been on a decline since their starting point of 1990. Cars are indeed getting safer, but apparently something is being done right in the firearm area as well.
Gun ownership has been in decline for decades (along with hunting). In response, the industry shifted from hunting and home defense toward civilianized combat weaponry like the AR-15. There's a large accessory and customization market for these things. It's essentially a toy for military hobbyists and gadget-lovers.
> By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.
Can someone explain the NRA to me? At this point they come across as cartoon villains, senselessly evil for no apparent purpose. Why can car companies be persuaded to invest in safety features but somehow the NRA works against its own interests to make guns as dangerous as possible? I feel like I must be missing some side of the story, because from the stuff I read, they're literally twirling their mustachios while cackling right now.
Guns are a political issue for American conservatives. Attempts to regulate guns are seen as an attack on their freedoms. The more extreme members maintain a fantasy of government overthrow (see the Cliven Bundy standoff).
the NRA is also in part defined by its members. These members are, for the most part, highly conservative and see technology like that as making guns worse. They don't worry about safety; after-all, the point of the gun is power and something that is dangerous feels more powerful.
The other reason people oppose them is because it would reduce the gun-owner's ability to re-sell the gun to criminals with no difficulty or government intervention. It would remove some control from the gun owners.
One man's safety feature is another man's oppressive inconvenience.
Most gun owners I know are like Unix programmers, in that they favor the simplest solution that could possibly work. A safety feature that makes a gun significantly more complicated—and therefore possibly less likely to work when needed—is a non-starter for most gun owners.
Furthermore, most gun owners have firearms at least in part because of the criminal element. I find the argument that a significant number of gun owners want to be able to resell their firearms to criminals to be patently absurd.
The criminal bit was tongue in cheek. The "government control" bit right afterwards was the real point.
I disagree with your comparison. If a gun owner wanted the simplest thing that would work, then their guns would not be so fancy / complicated. There would not be a market for non-restrictive but non-essential gun enhancements.
Sorry my joke wasn't clear to you and that you missed the point that it's conservatives that fear government control over ownership/reselling who have issue here.
Why couldn't me and my buddies go to the range and all shoot the new gun I just got? DRM for software is bad enough, lets not extend it to the physical world.
I guess unlimited "Gun Admins" would be an okay compromise.
As I understand it, the NRA oppose these safety features as it provides a stepping stone to the full control/ban of guns. ie once you have a mechanism to restrict guns to an individual, it's easier to extend that (technically/politically) to a wider restriction or total ban.
There are good reasons to oppose expensive ineffective gimmicks. Gun lobbyist sometimes look like 'cartoon villains' because people draw them that way.
This is going to be unpopular, but the NRA is really just a bunch of conservative rednecks who throw tantrums when they don't get things their way. It's the kind of people who post pictures of their $20k arsenal on Facebook, like to shoot at empty bottles in their backyards with semiautomatic weapons just because they think it's fun, and somehow they have it in their heads that blowing things up every Sunday afternoon is their God given right- any form of additional regulation gets in the way of their fun.
It's hard to imagine when you're a well educated, well spoken rational person living in a large city: if you want to understand, go spend some time in the rural southern states, where you will meet many such people.
I get that it's not good mental hygiene to say things bluntly and generically like I am in this post, but coming from a country where guns are treated with much more circumspection than they are in the US, having lived in the south and met many of the aforementioned types, I just have to call a spade a spade. I tried for a long time to develop a better understanding of it than "just dumb dudes who like seeing things blow up", but I have failed.
I think there are far more reasonable (Occams razor) explanations than just "redneck crazies". I'd go so far as to say that most truly rural people I knew didn't give a single damn about the NRA one way or the other. Perhaps these are outliers; but I'm much more inclined to see a financial explanation:
If gun safety studies come out, guns look BAD. Regulation goes up and sales go down. If special safety mechanisms are allowed, and show positive impact, they may be more forcefully imposed, raise costs and decrease margins.
It may just be a sign of how jaded the last few years of news have made me, but I'm far more likely to expect malfeasance from those who hold the reins and have significant amounts of money on the line than those who just want to 'blow stuff up.'
There was a documentary on them just a few days ago.
I didn't watch it, but heard the producers talking on the radio. In the 60s NRA was basically a sports/ gun safety organization. At some point they pivoted to be a gun rights organization.
Politicians fear them, because they have money and get out the vote power. There is some thought that the NRA cost Al Gore his presidential run.
Its complex, because a lot of the US (The more rural parts mostly) have a much stronger gun culture. There is some distrust of government and any regulations.
Within 50 years quality 3-d printed guns will make a lot of regulations moot anyway.
Didn't see the Frontline episode, but the NRA's history is quite interesting. The organization was quasi-governmental in that it administered the government's civilian marksmanship program (this was a war preparation thing) and it ran shooting tournaments and did other educational programs. It's interesting to read about the gun control debates of the 60s (leading to the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968) because people at the time thought that the debates were very heated but, compared to today, the NRA's position was pretty moderate. The organization was supportive of certain elements of the '68 act, including banning mail-order guns (one of which killed JFK) and Saturday Evening Specials.
After '68 there was a huge split in the organization between hardline types who wanted to focus on politics and lobbying and traditionalists who wanted to focus on shooting sports. At one point the NRA was even going to move from the DC area to Colorado and essentially give up politics altogether. In 1977, the political types took over the organization and purged the organization of sportsmen types.
Interestingly, the new head of the NRA was a former chief of the US Border Patrol who had shot and killed someone when he was a teenager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlon_Carter
The organization grew exponentially in membership, budget and political influence. Interestingly, they went through a few cycles of purging people who were even more hardline than their leadership.
It makes sense, they became political when guns came under political threat.
As a side note, it's funny to see that parts of the media still mechanically repeat LaPierre calling the ATF "jack booted government thugs" in 1995 like it was a bad thing, after the full-on liberal awakening over police militarization via the Boston Marathon Bombing and Ferguson, MO. The NRA was 20 years ahead of the curve on that.
Well, among the key facts necessary to understand that is that the "safety features" are not pure cost-free benefit, and the NRA believes the costs outweigh the benefits. They have some decent arguments for the existence of the costs; reasonable people could disagree about the relative degree of each.
It is also not generally the case that guns are always "bad"; guns are also significantly used in self-defense, usually without even being fired. Those who present "oh, just remove the guns" as a cost-free move are being disingenuous; again, people can reasonably disagree about the relative nature of the costs and benefits but those who present this as a zero-cost transaction are trying to pull one over on people.
It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down, and crime has significantly dropped in the past couple of decades. This is not exactly a set of circumstances that leads a rational person to leap to the conclusion that the presence and ownership of guns is an obvious root cause... and, yes, again, there may be confounding variables at play, but it still provides a bound on what you could even hope for if guns were entirely removed.
When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
> Well, among the key facts necessary to understand that is that the "safety features" are not pure cost-free benefit, and the NRA believes the costs outweigh the benefits. They have some decent arguments for the existence of the costs; reasonable people could disagree about the relative degree of each.
Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
> It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down
That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."
> When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
I agree. That was the premise of my question. Unfortunately, I haven't seen too much clarification yet :(
That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."
They don't give a source, but their own graph [1] shows that, aside from a tick on 2006, gun deaths have been trending down, almost indistinguishable from flat in recent years.
I couldn't find a nice graph, but googling gave me these two years (that I did not cherry pick): here's an anti-gun site giving the numbers for 1998 as 30K [2] and another anti-gun "just the facts" editorial in 2013 saying it's 31K. [3] Using normal per-population numbers, the US increased in population over 13% over that time.
The US in the 21st century is a very safe place to be. Foreign news may distort the picture, but middle-class Americans don't worry about being killed by guns.
> > Well, among the key facts necessary to understand that is that the "safety features" are not pure cost-free benefit, and the NRA believes the costs outweigh the benefits.
> Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
The cost at issue here is generally not monetary.
Most safety features are designed to prevent the weapon from firing, which gives rise to the expression "loaded club."
Consider, e.g., the magazine safety, which prevents a semi-automatic weapon from firing without a magazine, even if a round is already chambered.
If I owned a handgun, which I do not, I would absolutely want this feature.
The likelihood that it would prevent a potentially fatal negligent discharge is much higher than the likelihood that it would be the decisive factor in me losing a gunfight.
However, there are combat techniques that depend on the weapon firing without a magazine, and competitions in which it would be difficult or impossible to participate without that ability.
There is also the risk that the safety would otherwise interfere with the operation of the weapon.
That's just a drive-by comment by an ideologue. Consider it scientifically: The theory is that gun ownership causes crime. The truth is that gun ownership in the US has significantly increased in the past decade. Therefore, the theory predicts that gun crime must necessarily have gone up in the past 10 years. It has not.
Therefore, the only conclusion available is that the theory is incorrect.
You may be able to salvage pieces of the result your are trying to obtain by a more careful analysis, but the facts do not permit "guns = gun crime" to be sustained at such a simplistic level. By the time one is done examining what the facts do sustain the result is far, far weaker.
An alternative statement of my theory is that easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms is a causal factor in gun crime.
That there is easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms in the US has not, to my knowledge, changed in the past 10 years, so a lack of change in the gun crime statistics indicates pretty much nothing.
As someone from a country with no easy access to firearms (and generally unarmed police), and knowing the gun crime statistics, I am continually amazed that people can argue that guns are uncorrelated with gun crime and keep a straight face.
Accepting the premise that it's a good thing that the population at large can own guns, their argument is that they're thinking a few steps ahead:
If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns).
Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a government permit, which can then be used, explicitly or implicitly - imagine a "no fly list" for guns, with the same opacity - to prevent large groups of people to own guns (well, specifically, to fire them).
Further not-very-fantastical "enhancements" could include remote-disabling of guns, initially for law enforcement use, but quickly extended to much broader use.
All this, of course, while the criminals (who are already obtaining guns illegally) keep using "dumb" guns and aren't affected by this.
These are the simple, practical reasons - there's also the ideological reason founded on the historical reason for the 2nd amendment: A government can't turn on it's own people if said people is armed. If the government can effectively control the guns of the people, that stops being a factor.
I won't hold my breath waiting for the followup news report, "GNU software is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S."
edit: to make this comment more than just a dumb throw-away joke, I'll add that sometimes the consequences of an argument are as important as its assumptions/logical soundness.
Is the "keep the government in line" thing really a reason that anybody actually believes anymore? Like, if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?
A US government worth overthrowing by armed insurrection and that couldn't be overthrown some other way would practically by definition be willing and able to engage in some really nasty practices to put down a domestic rebellion. Like, filling-mass-graves nasty. Shooting at them wouldn't help.
Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary. A domestic rebellion wouldn't win by shooting enough people, it'd win when the tactics necessary to stop it were beyond what the government and/or military were willing to do.
Guns are much more useful when:
1) the enemy is foreign (killing enough people actually might make them go away), and/or
2) your position doesn't actually have popular support so other means are unavailable to you, and/or
3) foreign powers have the will and capacity to bomb the shit out of your country if the government goes too far in its attempts to suppress your uprising (this, or loss of military support for the government, are basically the only reasons authoritarian states fail to stop revolutions in the modern world)
>Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary.
Actually, having closely studied the dissolution of a modern European country (the former Yugoslavia) and seen the fallout from up close, it's not that simple (at least not always).
What happened in that case was that although the Yugoslav government [1] retained control of most of the heavy weaponry (artillery, tanks), and although the succeeding republics (Croatia and Bosnia) were initially limited to small arms belonging to local militia and hunters, the republics did have an abundance of active and retired officers with loyalty to their ethnic homelands who were quick to raise and lead battalions of troops into the field [2].
Those troops then went on to capture some heavy arms from the Yugoslav army, and scored lots of small arms, and eventually heavy arms and aircraft, from overseas allies.
Eventually, after lots of brutal warfare, ethnic cleansing, and in Bosnia, genocide, the republics did gain their independence from Yugoslavia (with significant help from the U.S. and other countries).
What was key in this case were the experienced military leaders who quickly assumed charge in the succeeding republics.
I suspect a worst-case, nightmare U.S. scenario would look much the same, with experienced military leaders taking control of ad hoc forces in their respective states and/or regions, and then fighting with small arms until they were able to capture heavy arms, receive outside help, or were defeated/captured.
1. Essentially, Serbia and Montenegro, plus ethnic Serbs elsewhere
2. Slovenia's succession was a different story than that of Bosnia and Croatia, for a variety of geographical, cultural, and historical reasons.
Nonetheless, it isn't going to reach the point of the government dropping atom bombs on their own country. The US has forests, cities, and mountains; good partisan country. Heavy weapons aren't effective in these terrains. Even the actual Nazis were held at bay for weeks and months by armed urban uprisings.
The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.
America's inability to really win in Afghanistan and Iraq, and South American states inability to even militarily defeat drug cartel forces is ample proof that it's not that simple to just beat 'some guys with guns'.
A few thousand guys in the Middle East with guns have given the U.S. government a lot of grief over the past decade. A few million people in the U.S. with guns would give them a lot more grief.
Yes, there's little doubt that a rural population that has grown up using guns and hunting can wreak havoc on a larger, conventional force using guerrilla warfare tactics. History abounds with examples of this.
As for "guys with guns from Wal-Mart" in the US, let's not forget that we have tens of thousands of experienced returned officers and NCOs, who are very knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and who identify very strongly with that rural population base here in the US.
There are people that believe that's already happened. The Waco & Ruby Ridge incidents of the 90s fueled the "government out to get you" mindset and started people talking about "not letting it happen again". And by talking I mean openly in mainline churches in the midwest-not gun shop boasting.
Since then it seems like federal law enforcement has taken a softer touch with their sieges. This could be simply a change in doctrine to avoid bad press but enough people believe it's more than that.
Also, these days it isn't so much about guys with guns from Wal-Mart as it is country boys that did a couple tours in IQ/AF as a 11something and their friends. <digression> That's also why the NRA is touchy about funding for studies on things--there's a perception that "the powers that be" want to diagnose everyone who served with PTSD and then use that as a reason to take away their guns. This is compounded by some despair over disarming IQ villagers so they are easy pickings for ISIS and the perception that "they were training us to do it back home". </digression>
> Is the "keep the government in line" thing really a reason that anybody actually believes anymore?
If they don't, they should (I'm not a gun owner or an NRA member). If you look at history, it is exceptionally rare to find a 100 year stretch where governments and militaries didn't kill more civilians than any amount of murderers. Not always domestic governments, but that only adds to the point.
> if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?
I'm not going to speculate, but it might not be as one sided as you'd think. Put all the hunters in the U.S. together and you have the largest army in the world by a factor of five.
Regardless it doesn't have to be that bad. Government apathy or corruption can be enough to justify retaining the right to self defense. Consider the police work slowdown in NYC turning into a thinly veiled version of protection money. Local LEOs that ask for more money every year or 'gee I guess we will have to just let everyone out of jail'. Or consider something like that judge that sold children into private prisons. Imagine that despite protests and uproar, they sweep it under the rug and continue? History is rife with examples of people being exploited simply because they were dependent or defenseless.
Someone who has your best interests in mind won't demand that you be defenseless or dependent upon them.
This is just a variation of the slippery slope argument except this slope doesn't seem very slippery to me. Gun rights have been getting stronger in the US not weaker, courts in recent years have decided that the 2nd amendment is an individual right and that it is incorporated against the states.
I don't see how a libertarian, as many gun advocates but certainly not all, can make a rational argument for preventing a private company from selling smart-guns to individuals.
It isn't a slippery slope, it is already reality. The New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law outlaws the sale of non-smart guns once a smart gun becomes available for sale anywhere in the US.
Another practical reason where pro-gun vs. anti-gun traditionally do not see eye-to-eye is proximity/availability of police forces.
In the city, where most people are anti-gun, the police are often very close by, and rhetoric often talks about how guns are not needed because of the police.
In the country, where most people are pro-gun, the police can easily be very far away. I have co-workers who live at least an hour from the closest police station. Naturally, rhetoric covers the fact that the police very likely cannot help you.
The simpler objection is that smartgun technology - being a brand new thing - is likely to be expensive and complicated, which makes the guns that use it expensive and complicated. Forcing people to install it anyway is like a tax - it makes gun ownership more painful and expensive. If you care that lower-income people should be able afford guns for personal defense and that guns should be easy to use, you ought to oppose smartgun mandates as a matter of reflex. At least until the technology in question actually exists so we can see just how expensive and complicated it turns out to be, and probably well past that point.
These "safety" features make guns less deadly, in the sense that they make guns less reliable in the first place. If you're using one to defend yourself, your family, or your home, that might actually make the gun less safe in the sense that it won't work when you need it. This defeats the entire purpose of having a gun.
Guns also have safety features that protect against accidental discharge, namely the trigger safety. Some guns have an additional trigger safety that triggers if the gun is pressed against something (or someone). Since these features don't reduce the reliability of a gun when it is intended to be used, the NRA doesn't have any problem with them, and at least the trigger safety is standard on all guns.
The NRA also does a lot of work to teach firearms safety to children (which basically boils down to "don't touch it and tell an adult if you find an unexpected gun somewhere"). For those who do shoot, the NRA is also good with basic safety principles.
Not a one of the NRA's members/funders wants smartguns. Just another thing to go wrong with it, in their eyes. Traditionally a good gun was about as complicated as a shovel or pickaxe.
As for the safety features, I think the opposition is because some of the states have mandated that if a safety feature become available then all guns in the state are required to have it. Given that the technology would no be 100% reliable there is obvious opposition. If the laws were not there then I think the NRA membership would be more open.
> somehow the NRA works against its own interests to make guns as dangerous as possible?
In an ideal world, cars are designed to be as safe as possible, as they are transports and getting people home safely is their most important aspect.
In an ideal world, guns are designed to be a dangerous and murderous as possible, as they are killing devices and efficiently turning people into corpses is their most important aspect.
The NRA does exactly what it should: advocate for murder device efficiency and access.
Of course, whether easy access to highly efficient murder devices should be allowed is a public policy question, but in the US, the answer is yes, and the NRA's strategies are a rational move based on that policy. The problem here is that advocating for easy access and efficiency of murder machines kinda looks bad.
Easy. Each weapon is a tool that will likely never be used, but if it is must be 100% reliable and quickly deployable while under extreme stress. "Smart" guns introduce a new feature that would impact both speed and reliability.
No implementation of a TouchID-like system for guns would be perfect and so the gun owner must weigh the potential benefits and risks. I don't think the NRA's members want to take that choice away from the gun owner, but even having a commercial solution come to market means some states will require it's use. IIRC one state has laws on the books to mandate the use of the technology once it's commercially available.
What the NRA is really against is the legislating of these safety devices. They certainly don't care if a manufacturer wants to sell a gun like this. The other argument is that technologies like this (microstamping is another) aren't effective, thus why force them on people?
Also keep in mind that a lot of NRA folks are rural. They have almost no local gun crime and have (what they feel) are legitimate reasons for owning a gun (self-defense, hunting, etc). Their opinion is why should they give up their guns because the city folks have a problem?
Actually, the NRA really is against any manufacturer creating them, because a few states have passed laws saying (in a lot more words) "once smart guns are on the market, you can only buy smart guns." They view the creation of this technology the way some people on HN feel about porn-filtering technology: if it exists, a corrupt government will use it.
(I don't count myself in either of those camps but I listen to them enough to be able to explain their arguments.)
Essentially, once a smart gun becomes available for sale in the US, all guns sold in New Jersey must be "smart" within 30 months. I wouldn't be surprised if other jurisdictions had similar laws in place. This dramatically increases the cost of legal firearms while doing very little to impact firearm murder or suicide rates.
The NRA is not opposed to the development of smart guns. They are opposed to legislation that bans the sale of non-smart guns once smart guns are available on the market.
Such a law already exists in New Jersey and was proposed at the federal level by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
There was a law in New Jersey that basically said as soon as smart gun technology was for retail sale in any part of the country, a general ban on non-smart guns would go into effect:
Effectively, allowing smart gun technology would cause a bunch of other guns to get banned, so based on their values system it was logical for the NRA to oppose the tech. There have also been complaints that the tech is not reliable. I looked into this myself and frankly, I would not trust my life with it. Also, in most cases it's using passive RFID technology which is a joke for "security" (there is one company that's using a challenge response system though.) I can think of half a dozen ways to disable or clone most of these systems, but they are sold like they are a panacea.
The NRA is against anything which gets in the way of a patriot and their duty. RFID and similiar 'safety' features can be used by the government to identify gun owners, confiscate weapons and suppress the public's right to revolt against their tyranny. Americans have a sacred right enshrined into the Constutition to be able to bear arms in order to respond to the presence of government with deadly force.
It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.
Thing many people are missing, I think, is that the position of the NRA is not necessarily based on the merits of that particular issue. It is based on the STRATEGIC view of the political battle to restrict and eliminate firearm ownership.
The gun control side claims they "don't want to take away your guns" or they "don't want to take away all guns" but when you look at DC and Chicago, where they have the most power, they completely banned private ownership of handguns. This demonstrates their goal, and this is what the NRA is fighting against.
It is much harder to repeal a gun control law than to pass it (if you look at things on the scale of decades and/or centuries), partly because this is a demographic issue and the pro-gun demographic is smaller and shrinking.
So the NRA has absolutely no incentive to concede ground in the battle for private gun ownership. I've never heard a gun control proponent suggest "OK if you give us background checks, registration and capacity limits, we will loosen gun laws in states where they are more strict and promise never ever to go further." That would be compromise. I've never heard it, neither has the NRA.
That is why they are absolutists, because ultimately so is the other side. (Their leadership anyway, which is what counts, not the moderate "let's split the difference" voter who only cares about the issue when its a major news item.)
The notion of "smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption" is a recipe for making guns - an inherently quite simple tool - into something vastly more complicated, expensive, and failure-prone. The NRA doesn't actually oppose the development of "safety features on firearms", but they do oppose the legal requirement that guns should all include features that don't yet exist and haven't been proven to work.
Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?
Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?
As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?
Cars are not a good example because people need cars. But alcohol is a good example, nobody needs alcohol and plenty of innocent people die from drunk drivers. Yet most people consider alcohol "normal" and the idea of restricting it to home use only, for example, as absurd. But since these people didn't grow up with guns they consider them "abnormal" and see no problem with restricting them, since it doesn't affect them. This is why I think the conflict is mainly cultural.
I can't read the article, but I would assume that they have not included the suicides happening at home using the car (by inhaling exhaust in a closed space), and have only counted the deaths on the road.
gun owners place a high value on agency. I have wondered if one reason they tend to not see suicides as legitimate in gun death stats is because they tend to see suicide as a willful act that a person also has a right to. Just a speculation...
Just making suicide slightly more difficult dramatically reduces suicide rates. It's difficult to stop someone determined to kill themselves, but most suicides are impulse decisions, so removing the opportunity often prevents the suicide. That's why suicide barriers on bridges actually reduce suicide rates rather than changing the method.
I agree with you generally… but in this specific case, do regions with very strong and effective gun control have dramatically lower suicide rates than the US? My understanding is that suicide rates in Europe aren't dramatically lower, though they do appear to be a bit lower in western europe and higher in eastern… I can't tell if this might be handgun related, is the delta large enough?
I don't have any information on the suicide rates by gun in each country, though it would be useful information from a public health standpoint (especially if, as you pointed out, the accessibility could be reduced).
Just eyeballing, I see a handful of strongly liberal European countries above the US, and a bunch that are just below the US.
But this is a tough thing to compare, as you note. Suicide rate is encompassing a whole bunch of things. I'm tempted to compare against Canada, where the suicide rate is only less by 1 per 100,000 people per year, but I have no idea if I'm picking that out fairly.
But you're doing that at the cost of denying all non-suicides the right to own a gun. The government's mandate is not to eliminate all deaths at all costs. It is to balance a wide variety of conflicting issues. And many people who wish to own firearms do not believe that the very small chance that they may commit suicide justifies the government preventing them from owning a firearm.
Statistics don't work that way. It's not an even distribution. For instance, I am not around gun violence at all, but I've seen and been involved in several serious car accidents. I live and work in areas nearly devoid of gun crime. My odds of being shot are vastly less than being injured or killed by an auto.
Good point. If you think about it, due to the distribution of guns and the fact that the majority of gun deaths are suicides, accidents, or domestic violence - living in a gun-free household should reduce your risk even more dramatically than these statistics might suggest.
About half of suicides are done via gun, and about half of households have access to a gun.
There's nothing "dramatic" about reducing your chance of dying via suicide by being in the second half. I don't want to say it's zero, because I'm sure someone's life is spared by not having a gun around when the urge to suicide pops up.
Ignoring the click-bait headline implying that guns have become more dangerous than cars - what we actually see are that deaths from both have declined. Car deaths slightly more quickly than gun deaths.
I find that incredibly encouraging. Nothing about guns or gun ownership has changed dramatically in the United States over this period. Perhaps this signals that the bizarre, and often fetishized, culture of violence in the United States is on the wane. I hope so.
Depending on your source of numbers, 40-60% of gun deaths are suicide and 30-60% are gang related. That at most leaves 0-30% "preventable" shootings. Gang member aren't going to use "smart guns" and I have the moral right to kill myself.
The ethics of suicide spawns some interesting philosophical conundrums.
Would you be justified in entering a time machine, traveling 40 years into the future, and murdering your future self? If not, how could you be justified in murdering your future self without the use of the time machine?
Or imagine a person with multiple personalities. Each has a theoretically equal claim of ownership of the body. While one is in control of the body, it commits suicide. Is that ethical? Now consider that your personality now is not the same as it was 10 years ago, nor will it be the same 10 years from now. Your personality may also change permanently or temporarily under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
If you have nothing left to lose but your own life, and no longer care about losing that, would it not be preferable to gamble it in a bid to gains something that you would like to keep, rather than merely throwing it away for no gain?
If you outlaw suicide, who would you ever be able to prosecute for the crime?
I think the stats are that suicide by gun shows far more successful percentage than most other attempts. And I believe there's evidence that thwarted attempts often work out for the better. Essentially, if the only options for suicide fundamentally required a persistent decision over time to carry out rather than a spur-of-the-moment decision, there's an argument that it would be better for society and for suicidal people overall.
Note that I didn't say there wouldn't be any improvement.
The statistics do show guns more effective than, for instance, overdose. However:
1) it is still the case that the method is more likely to change than the result; and
2) it is likely that means is not assigned randomly, and those more intent on ending their life pick more lethal means - absent guns, some comparably lethal means remain readily available.
I'm really not an expert here, but I heard an argument that guns aren't chosen more in some sort of thought-out way like you describe. Instead, guns are there already, and get used by people who realize that there is a gun and they might even not make the attempt otherwise. Regarding suicide, I have much less concern about guns as a method than I do about any sort of lethal tool being available on short notice instead of a situation that requires persistent determination and waiting.
I keep looking through the data, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf, and it seems like cars still beat out guns by a good margin. They even say in the article most of the gun deaths are by suicide. Just the few numbers I grabbed says you're still 3 times more likely to be killed by or in a car. I looked again at the article and they don't even list the numbers because it conflicts with the story they WANT to have. The proper title is "The forecast for ways you might die in the next 5 years if you remain in the 15-24 age bracket shows a higher change of being killed by a gun, or killing yourself with a gun, than by being killed in or by a car."
Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms 11,068
Accidental discharge of firearms 591
Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent 248
Motor vehicle accidents 35,303
Unless you're taking your own life:
Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of
firearms 19,990
> They even say in the article most of the gun deaths are by suicide.
It says "suicides, accidents or domestic violence." These are all vital statistics in determining the deadliness of guns.
Gun advocates have been arguing here that suicides shouldn't be counted, which doesn't make sense. Access to an effective suicide method is one more consequence of a gun-owning society. It should be acknowledged, analyzed, and discussed.
It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly. That's nonsense. This is a comparison of deadliness; a gun death is a gun death. Despite a decline in gun ownership, gun deaths are trending upward, and the NRA opposes smart-unlock features like thumbprint identification that contrast with the myriad safety controls placed on vehicles.
How many people reading that headline do you think actually think of suicides when they read it?
The reason for determining the deadliness of guns is to know whether they should be banned or not. And we're arguing that since suicides don't justify prohibition, it's not fair to include them in "deadliness". Suicides don't justify prohibition because I as a person should have the right to choose to own a gun at the small risk that I may commit suicide with it. It is not the governments place to protect me from that small risk.
It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should
be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly.
And the other side is doing the same thing, inflating the statistics with deaths that we believe should not affect the policy decision.
I'd argue that domestic violence shouldn't be separated in that, and to my point the word domestic doesn't appear in the data. It is suicide, homicide, or accidental. As for suicide prevention, removing the instruments of death only makes people more creative, and isn't the right focus. http://clinicalpsychreading.blogspot.com/2014/12/suicide-by-...
Removing access to means and methods is a well know. Part of suicide reduction.
You are wrong when you say that people get creative. Suicide is often an impulsive act and so making people work even a little bit harder does reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
England changed the domestic gas supply from coal gas to natural gas. It's now not possible to use a home even to complete suicide. This led to a permanent reduction in suicide numbers.
England made it very much harder for people to get coproxamol. That led to a small permanent drop in completed suicide.
If this were epidemiology, we would talk about "total morbidity." If I develop a flu vaccine that 100% stops flu deaths but kills 10% of patients via heart attacks, I have not improved the situation. A troll or person otherwise committed to a narrative that my flu vaccine should be foist on everyone might say "a flu death is a flu death" but it's not what matters.
About half of American households have access to a gun while about half of suicides are done via gun. The US is within 10% of most other first world countries in terms of suicide rate. The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method.
> The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method.
What does "real world" evidence mean? Because real world evidence from England (paracetamol pack sizes; switch to natural gas from coal gas; removing coproxamol from general use) shows that many people do not find another method.
The real world evidence in the comment you replied to, from the paragraph that you selected your quote from.
1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate.
2. The fact that the US is within about 10% of most other first-world countries in terms of suicide rate. Unless you want to argue that something especially good about the US's mental health system such that only Luxembourg ought be in front of it.
If the US turned into Canada (meaning: essentially no guns and a suicide rate 0.92 of the US) then more than 80% of gun suicides would find another way.
You seem to be saying that there are two groups of equal size (people who complete suicide by gun and people who complete suicide by other methods) and then saying that if you remove access to guns that all or most of the gun group would just switch to the other group and that the total number would stay the same.
Don't think that an attempted suicide by gun is the same as an attempt using another method. Guns are a very lethal method of suicide. Other methods of suicide are not as sure. This might explain the differences in completed suicide numbers for men and women (more men die to suicide) and rates of self harm (very many more women self harm) -- men might be using more lethal methods.
Some members of the "want to use a gun as a method of suicide group" would use a different method and would complete suicide. But certainly not all that group. Some would use a less fatal method and attempt suicide but not die. Others would find help before attempting suicide.
For a tiny US example: look at the Taft and Ellington Bridges in Washington State. They were both used by people to complete suicide, although more people used Ellington. After a number of people dying to suicide in a short number of days a suicide barrier was put up. People did not switch to the other bridge, even though it was close.
Again: look at the rates of completed suicide in England after switching gas supplies; after removing coproxamol from general use; and after reducing the amount of paracetamol. All of these resulted in permanent drops in the suicide rate.
You seem to be saying that there are two groups of equal size (people who complete suicide by gun and people who complete suicide by other methods)
I think you might be misreading me. The reason it's important that gun-suicide and non-gun-suicide are about the same size is that about equal number of households have guns and don't have guns.
If about 10% of households had access to a gun, and about 10% of suicides were done via gun, I'd say the same thing: access to guns isn't the significant driver of suicide completion.
> But certainly not all that group
Sure, certainly not all. I agree some people would stop. My guess is that around 10% or so.
The problem I have with the thesis that "most people won't switch to another method" is that it leads to a world where the United States is supposed to have an amazingly low suicide rate compared to most other first-world countries. And the thing that is stopping the US is a hot-button political issue, especially because most of the people who are inclined to try and get rid of the guns would disagree that the United States has an especially good mental health system compared to Canada, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, France, and Finland.
You can point to a bunch of small effects, but you want to apply them to the big picture. Well, why isn't the big picture a lot different? If the US had twice the suicide rate of most other countries, I think you'd be right.
A gun death is not necessarily a gun death. For many people who commit suicide, they will find a way. If there is a gun available they will use it, if there isn't they'll do something else. Contrast that with someone who wants to go postal, with a gun they kill a someone, without a gun perhaps they toss a computer monitor off the desk.
It's important to note that, according to the chart, both are on the decline. Auto deaths are simply declining further.
Gun ownership is an important civil liberty in the USA, but one that comes with danger.
The Economist is recommending a technological approach to mitigating that danger. Research and development has been done in this department, and many technologies have been applied to modern firearms. Better safeties that prevent accidental discharge, better safes, ammunition that prevents over-penetration, etc.
We have yet to see a simple and trustworthy technology that limits who can fire a gun. When we do, it will start to be used.
For such a technology to work, the user needs to feel in complete control of it. There can be zero risk that an authorized user won't be able to fire the gun due to system failure or low battery.
Ultimately, though, no technological solution will prevent suicide. For that, a different approach will be necessary, and I don't have an answer for that.
Ironically, many gun control advocates still argue against civilian ownership of ammunition that doesn't overpenetrate. In some California cities hollow point ammunition is illegal to buy. In New Jersey it is illegal to carry hollow point ammunition outside the home. The Brady Campaign still to this day calls hollow points "cop killer bullets" despite the fact that every law enforcement department in the country uses them.
Comparing cause-of-death rates between automobiles and firearms is a lot like comparing the median number of miles traveled riding in a car versus carrying a gun.
Death is a possible unintended side effect of riding in an automobile. Death is the explicit primary purpose of discharging a gunpowder weapon.
Thus, this is far more laudable accomplishment for automotive safety than it is a deplorable statistic for gun owners. Cars now cause less deaths by accident than a consumer product that is actually designed to kill things when used correctly. Yay.
I don't ever have an absolute need to own or use a gun, but it is practically impossible to earn a profitable living without spending at least 40 minutes per day driving in my car, or riding in any other form of on-road transportation.
I don't particularly feel like the jerkass riding on the hard shoulder at 50 mph to bypass a rush-hour jam is in any way comparable to someone who plinks beer bottles--the ones they just emptied--off their back fence without stopping to consider if there are neighbors living in that general direction. They could even be the same guy. If so, I meet him far more often on the road.
Neither guns nor cars kill without an operator--not yet, anyway. If I am now less at risk from an idiot behind a wheel than an idiot with his finger on the trigger, that is unequivocally good news, because I encounter far more of the former. But the article doesn't exactly break the statistics down by intent. I suspect that rates of deaths by gun due to accident or operator negligence are still less than deaths by vehicle due to accident or operator negligence.
So I still feel like guns are safer for me than the average person, because I don't particularly feel like anyone has an actual desire to kill me specifically, especially given my own disinclination toward suicide.
The article doesn't tell me anything meaningful. It seems to be presenting the statistics in a very narrowly interpreted way to advance a particular editorial point of view. The Economist might as well tell me how likely I am to die from falling off a ladder while cleaning my gutters, and compare that to deaths by food poisoning, except that there are far fewer passionate advocates for pasteurization and ladder stabilization bars.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadAs a publisher myself, I'd be interested in hearing if there are any other ways to monetize my website and content other than paywalls and advertisements which people seem to dislike so much?
Another suggestion is that, for sites that I regularly visit and like the content, I will (and do) happily pay a subscription fee in exchange for guilt-free ad-free content.
Over half of all quoted gun deaths are suicides. [edit: removed mention of suicide survivability as I don't have a reference handy. But remember: The most likely person to shoot you is yourself.]
Let's remove suicide from the discussion and talk about violence. The primary driver for violence is socioeconomic. The US has a huge wealth and education disparity problem, exacerbated by a drug war which focuses primarily on the lower economic classes. Most political rhetoric surrounding gun violence focuses on denying lower-class individuals access to firearms and is inexorably linked to institutionalized racism [ cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special#Economic... ]
What these stats don't show is the EXTREME socioeconomic skew involved in violent crime. If we look at gun deaths by wealth quadrile we find that the upper 40% have very, very few gun deaths -- on par with the nicer areas in Europe. Our inflated gun death statistics come almost entirely from the lower 40%. That is, gun deaths are emblematic of America's class divide.
The right to self defense is a convenient target for politicians to score easy wins. Constructively addressing the USA's violence problem is a very different issue and frankly is almost entirely unrelated to firearm legislation.
Why? This is the second time I've seen that suggestion in these comments, and I don't understand why suicides should not be counted as gun deaths.
"Gun death" weren't selected at random to compare to "car deaths" by some antiseptic algorithm. It's done, pretty obviously, to drive a narrative, i.e., "guns should be more regulated."
When discussing that narrative, there is a big gap between "you shouldn't have a gun because you might hurt your neighbor" and "you shouldn't have a gun because your neighbor might use a gun to hurt himself."
In determining the deadliness of drugs to a society, should suicides be ruled out? Accidental overdoses? Drug-related shootings? Where do you draw the line in filtering the statistics so that they're more comfortable for a given political position?
The claim regarding suicide vs homicide is easy to confirm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...). It is not possible to predict every suicide, the best we can do is make an approximation using obvious risk factors like hospitalization for mental illness. There are millions of gun owners in the US, so yes the chance of a suicide is small.
Even though most gun deaths are suicide [1], your odds of killing yourself via suicide are still low. There's slightly less than 1% chance of your life ending via suicide. Taking away guns to stop suicides is a pretty big NNT.
===
[1]
Accidental discharge: 591
Suicide by firearm: 19,990
Assault by firearm: 11,068
Unknown involving firearms: 248
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf
If we're talking about "gun sales to criminals," we are way way less likely to be caring about gun suicides.
When I intentionally shoot someone and they die, they would likely be alive if I hadn't had the gun.
When I intentionally shoot myself and I die, I would likely have found another effective suicide method and died anyway without the gun.
Killing someone with a pill is not something you do in a fit of rage. Killing someone with your car could be, but only if you're driving and they're in the road (ideally not in a car of their own).
Killing yourself is quite easy to do using non-gun methods, without any additional planning or prep time.
In short, take my gun away, and I can still commit suicide, but it's much harder for me to kill others or accidentally kill myself.
This isn't true. You certainly could find another method, but you wouldn't likely do it. Most suicides are not well-planned, they are spur-of-the-moment decisions, and removing easy methods actually reduces the number of suicides substantially.
This is not intuitive, but it is supported by facts.
It might be based on what some sociologist said, but if you compare suicide rates by country, these is nothing suggesting access to guns is a strong driver of suicide rate.
If you assume the US turns into Canada, then of every 50 people who kill themselves via gun, about 42 would find another method.
(Unless you want to argue that, because of the superiority of the US's health system over Canada, that the US should have a way lower rate than Canada. I'm not making that argument, but let's just say it wouldn't be popular among those who want to ban guns.)
I'm saying that the people who say that the US's suicide rate should be half what it is now are those least likely to believe that the US's mental health care system is superior.
England changed gas supplies from coal gas to natural gas. Nothing else changed. Rates of completed suicide dropped.
England changed the way that coproxamol was prescribed. Again suicide rates dropped.
England changed the way that paracetamol is sold and again there has been a permanent drop in completed suicide.
You keep saying that people who use guns would just use a different method. You are wrong, most of them would not. Research shows the people have preferred methods and that reducing access to those methods reduces the rates of attempted and completed suicide.
Internationally respected psychiatrists at a respected high quality academic institution.
You dismiss the research but demonstrate your ignorance of who conducts the research. You haven't yet provided any specific refutation to any bit of research.
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/
Note that the director is a consultant psychiatrist working within the NHS as well as an academic. ("Consultant" is the rough equivalent to a US attending physician.)
Nope. I'm assuming it's fine.
I get that you want to make the fight over those studies. That's fine, but I won't.
Instead, I'm assuming that all those studies are fine, but I'm still trying to figure out things that actually exist in the world around me:
1. why does the UK, with all its "permanent drops" in suicide, still have a rate within 10% of the US, which has so many guns?
2. why is the suicide rate for young people in the UK higher than it was 50 years ago? http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/msui6811.html NB: this especially points to the fact that cultures adapt in the long term to availability of suicide methods; young people who've never seen a coal gas stove don't even try.[1]
3. if half of homes have access to a guns, and assuming gun owners are as sane as non-gun owners[2], and if access to a gun is a major major factor, how come only slightly more than half of suicides are done via gun? (NB There is some factor, and I haven't denied that.)
4. instead of being in the same cluster as most modern countries, is the US really "supposed" to have a rate of suicide that places it about a factor of two lower than that bump? Why is the US so exceptionally awesome this way?
There's something in the macro-picture that isn't adding up to what all the micro-studies are asserting. All those micro-studies can be completely right and still not add up to the right picture.
[1] this suggests that you could reduce suicide rates by promulgating a widespread story that a great way to kill yourself is to do something that is plausible enough to cause self-harm but actually doesn't; then when people try it and it doesn't work, maybe they give up
[2] you could argue that gun people are crazy, because guns, but it would work against your position
About increasing rates: coroners are much more likely to report a death as suicide now than they used to. It doesn't have the same levels of social stigma. Suicide needs a different level of proof ("beyond reasonable doubt", not "balance of probabilities") - these two factors led to under-recording of suicide in national statistics. National statistics started using reports of "death by misadventure" and open verdicts.
Here's a link about English coroner verdicts: http://www.inquest.org.uk/help/handbook/section-4-3-verdicts
Socio-economic factors are also important. We know that when unemployment rises the number of attempted and completed suicides rise. Rates of unemployment for young men are very much high now than they were 45 years ago.
And while some medication has got more restrictive others have got more permissive. It's easier to get opiate style pain relief now.
Point 3:
People have a preferred method of suicide. A person who considers death by overdose may not want to die by gun. People's thinking about suicide is distorted. People might think they want a "serene" death, or they might want a certain death, or a very quick death. So removing access to guns will see some people transferring to other methods. At the moment we seem to disagree about the numbers.
I am curious, though: Are carbon monoxide suicides-by-car counted in the car deaths for this gun-vs-car deaths comparison?
I disagree. Most suicides are impulse decisions. Making suicides difficult dramatically reduces suicide rates. cf suicide barriers on bridges.
Source? This study gives a 'case fatality rate' of 85% for firearms, 69% for suffocation, and 2% for poisoning:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-f...
There's also the fact that suicide by firearm can be done impulsively, without much preparation, in contrast to asphyxiation or falls. When there's more requirement for preparation there are more opportunities for someone to change their mind or for some intervention to take place.
The use of guns might be the reason why more women attempt suicide than men, but more men actually die of suicide. It may be that women are more likely to prefer a method that doesn't result in disfigurement (pills) and, because that method is less likely to be successful, women are less likely to die of suicide.
If guns were banned, it is at least plausible that deaths by suicide would go down because the alternatives might be less accessible to those making an impulsive decision and more survivable.
More info: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/business/the-ar-15-the-mos...
> By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns.
Can someone explain the NRA to me? At this point they come across as cartoon villains, senselessly evil for no apparent purpose. Why can car companies be persuaded to invest in safety features but somehow the NRA works against its own interests to make guns as dangerous as possible? I feel like I must be missing some side of the story, because from the stuff I read, they're literally twirling their mustachios while cackling right now.
The other reason people oppose them is because it would reduce the gun-owner's ability to re-sell the gun to criminals with no difficulty or government intervention. It would remove some control from the gun owners.
One man's safety feature is another man's oppressive inconvenience.
Furthermore, most gun owners have firearms at least in part because of the criminal element. I find the argument that a significant number of gun owners want to be able to resell their firearms to criminals to be patently absurd.
I disagree with your comparison. If a gun owner wanted the simplest thing that would work, then their guns would not be so fancy / complicated. There would not be a market for non-restrictive but non-essential gun enhancements.
Sorry my joke wasn't clear to you and that you missed the point that it's conservatives that fear government control over ownership/reselling who have issue here.
I guess unlimited "Gun Admins" would be an okay compromise.
It's hard to imagine when you're a well educated, well spoken rational person living in a large city: if you want to understand, go spend some time in the rural southern states, where you will meet many such people.
I get that it's not good mental hygiene to say things bluntly and generically like I am in this post, but coming from a country where guns are treated with much more circumspection than they are in the US, having lived in the south and met many of the aforementioned types, I just have to call a spade a spade. I tried for a long time to develop a better understanding of it than "just dumb dudes who like seeing things blow up", but I have failed.
If gun safety studies come out, guns look BAD. Regulation goes up and sales go down. If special safety mechanisms are allowed, and show positive impact, they may be more forcefully imposed, raise costs and decrease margins.
It may just be a sign of how jaded the last few years of news have made me, but I'm far more likely to expect malfeasance from those who hold the reins and have significant amounts of money on the line than those who just want to 'blow stuff up.'
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections...
Politicians fear them, because they have money and get out the vote power. There is some thought that the NRA cost Al Gore his presidential run.
Its complex, because a lot of the US (The more rural parts mostly) have a much stronger gun culture. There is some distrust of government and any regulations.
Within 50 years quality 3-d printed guns will make a lot of regulations moot anyway.
After '68 there was a huge split in the organization between hardline types who wanted to focus on politics and lobbying and traditionalists who wanted to focus on shooting sports. At one point the NRA was even going to move from the DC area to Colorado and essentially give up politics altogether. In 1977, the political types took over the organization and purged the organization of sportsmen types.
Interestingly, the new head of the NRA was a former chief of the US Border Patrol who had shot and killed someone when he was a teenager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlon_Carter
The organization grew exponentially in membership, budget and political influence. Interestingly, they went through a few cycles of purging people who were even more hardline than their leadership.
As a side note, it's funny to see that parts of the media still mechanically repeat LaPierre calling the ATF "jack booted government thugs" in 1995 like it was a bad thing, after the full-on liberal awakening over police militarization via the Boston Marathon Bombing and Ferguson, MO. The NRA was 20 years ahead of the curve on that.
It is also not generally the case that guns are always "bad"; guns are also significantly used in self-defense, usually without even being fired. Those who present "oh, just remove the guns" as a cost-free move are being disingenuous; again, people can reasonably disagree about the relative nature of the costs and benefits but those who present this as a zero-cost transaction are trying to pull one over on people.
It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down, and crime has significantly dropped in the past couple of decades. This is not exactly a set of circumstances that leads a rational person to leap to the conclusion that the presence and ownership of guns is an obvious root cause... and, yes, again, there may be confounding variables at play, but it still provides a bound on what you could even hope for if guns were entirely removed.
When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
> It is also worth remembering that even as the number of guns have increased, the death rate has, as the article pointed out, gone down
That's actually the direct opposite of what the article says. The very first paragraph states: "Deaths by guns, though—the great majority suicides, accidents or domestic violence—have been trending slightly upwards."
> When you find yourself completely unable to understand how anyone could possibly believe something, that's usually a sign that you've been exposed to only the propaganda of one side. Note that I said understand, not agree with or believe. I understand many points of view I do not agree with. Some of them I even had to go chase down, in accordance with the principle I just gave, because I could tell I'd just been fed one side of the propaganda.
I agree. That was the premise of my question. Unfortunately, I haven't seen too much clarification yet :(
They don't give a source, but their own graph [1] shows that, aside from a tick on 2006, gun deaths have been trending down, almost indistinguishable from flat in recent years.
I couldn't find a nice graph, but googling gave me these two years (that I did not cherry pick): here's an anti-gun site giving the numbers for 1998 as 30K [2] and another anti-gun "just the facts" editorial in 2013 saying it's 31K. [3] Using normal per-population numbers, the US increased in population over 13% over that time.
The US in the 21st century is a very safe place to be. Foreign news may distort the picture, but middle-class Americans don't worry about being killed by guns.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
[2] http://college.cengage.com/english/resources/research_guide/...
[3] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/16/16547690-just-the...
> Sure. Advanced safety features in cars probably cost a lot to develop, too, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think seatbelts are lame and cars would be cooler without them. But car companies actively work to promote safety while the NRA seems to actively undermine it.
The cost at issue here is generally not monetary. Most safety features are designed to prevent the weapon from firing, which gives rise to the expression "loaded club."
Consider, e.g., the magazine safety, which prevents a semi-automatic weapon from firing without a magazine, even if a round is already chambered. If I owned a handgun, which I do not, I would absolutely want this feature. The likelihood that it would prevent a potentially fatal negligent discharge is much higher than the likelihood that it would be the decisive factor in me losing a gunfight. However, there are combat techniques that depend on the weapon firing without a magazine, and competitions in which it would be difficult or impossible to participate without that ability. There is also the risk that the safety would otherwise interfere with the operation of the weapon.
Therefore, the only conclusion available is that the theory is incorrect.
You may be able to salvage pieces of the result your are trying to obtain by a more careful analysis, but the facts do not permit "guns = gun crime" to be sustained at such a simplistic level. By the time one is done examining what the facts do sustain the result is far, far weaker.
That there is easy access to and widespread ownership of firearms in the US has not, to my knowledge, changed in the past 10 years, so a lack of change in the gun crime statistics indicates pretty much nothing.
As someone from a country with no easy access to firearms (and generally unarmed police), and knowing the gun crime statistics, I am continually amazed that people can argue that guns are uncorrelated with gun crime and keep a straight face.
If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns).
Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a government permit, which can then be used, explicitly or implicitly - imagine a "no fly list" for guns, with the same opacity - to prevent large groups of people to own guns (well, specifically, to fire them).
Further not-very-fantastical "enhancements" could include remote-disabling of guns, initially for law enforcement use, but quickly extended to much broader use.
All this, of course, while the criminals (who are already obtaining guns illegally) keep using "dumb" guns and aren't affected by this.
These are the simple, practical reasons - there's also the ideological reason founded on the historical reason for the 2nd amendment: A government can't turn on it's own people if said people is armed. If the government can effectively control the guns of the people, that stops being a factor.
I wish the public at large could understand these are largely parallel to the arguments FSF makes (at least to me, they are)
edit: to make this comment more than just a dumb throw-away joke, I'll add that sometimes the consequences of an argument are as important as its assumptions/logical soundness.
Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary. A domestic rebellion wouldn't win by shooting enough people, it'd win when the tactics necessary to stop it were beyond what the government and/or military were willing to do.
Guns are much more useful when:
1) the enemy is foreign (killing enough people actually might make them go away), and/or
2) your position doesn't actually have popular support so other means are unavailable to you, and/or
3) foreign powers have the will and capacity to bomb the shit out of your country if the government goes too far in its attempts to suppress your uprising (this, or loss of military support for the government, are basically the only reasons authoritarian states fail to stop revolutions in the modern world)
Actually, having closely studied the dissolution of a modern European country (the former Yugoslavia) and seen the fallout from up close, it's not that simple (at least not always).
What happened in that case was that although the Yugoslav government [1] retained control of most of the heavy weaponry (artillery, tanks), and although the succeeding republics (Croatia and Bosnia) were initially limited to small arms belonging to local militia and hunters, the republics did have an abundance of active and retired officers with loyalty to their ethnic homelands who were quick to raise and lead battalions of troops into the field [2].
Those troops then went on to capture some heavy arms from the Yugoslav army, and scored lots of small arms, and eventually heavy arms and aircraft, from overseas allies.
Eventually, after lots of brutal warfare, ethnic cleansing, and in Bosnia, genocide, the republics did gain their independence from Yugoslavia (with significant help from the U.S. and other countries).
What was key in this case were the experienced military leaders who quickly assumed charge in the succeeding republics.
I suspect a worst-case, nightmare U.S. scenario would look much the same, with experienced military leaders taking control of ad hoc forces in their respective states and/or regions, and then fighting with small arms until they were able to capture heavy arms, receive outside help, or were defeated/captured.
1. Essentially, Serbia and Montenegro, plus ethnic Serbs elsewhere
2. Slovenia's succession was a different story than that of Bosnia and Croatia, for a variety of geographical, cultural, and historical reasons.
The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.
So, yes, I believe it. Because I'm seeing it happen.
Also, look at the Nazi invasion of the Island of Crete. A ton of local farmers with gun took a huge toll on the Nazi paratroopers.
As for "guys with guns from Wal-Mart" in the US, let's not forget that we have tens of thousands of experienced returned officers and NCOs, who are very knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and who identify very strongly with that rural population base here in the US.
Since then it seems like federal law enforcement has taken a softer touch with their sieges. This could be simply a change in doctrine to avoid bad press but enough people believe it's more than that.
Also, these days it isn't so much about guys with guns from Wal-Mart as it is country boys that did a couple tours in IQ/AF as a 11something and their friends. <digression> That's also why the NRA is touchy about funding for studies on things--there's a perception that "the powers that be" want to diagnose everyone who served with PTSD and then use that as a reason to take away their guns. This is compounded by some despair over disarming IQ villagers so they are easy pickings for ISIS and the perception that "they were training us to do it back home". </digression>
If they don't, they should (I'm not a gun owner or an NRA member). If you look at history, it is exceptionally rare to find a 100 year stretch where governments and militaries didn't kill more civilians than any amount of murderers. Not always domestic governments, but that only adds to the point.
> if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?
I'm not going to speculate, but it might not be as one sided as you'd think. Put all the hunters in the U.S. together and you have the largest army in the world by a factor of five.
Regardless it doesn't have to be that bad. Government apathy or corruption can be enough to justify retaining the right to self defense. Consider the police work slowdown in NYC turning into a thinly veiled version of protection money. Local LEOs that ask for more money every year or 'gee I guess we will have to just let everyone out of jail'. Or consider something like that judge that sold children into private prisons. Imagine that despite protests and uproar, they sweep it under the rug and continue? History is rife with examples of people being exploited simply because they were dependent or defenseless.
Someone who has your best interests in mind won't demand that you be defenseless or dependent upon them.
I don't see how a libertarian, as many gun advocates but certainly not all, can make a rational argument for preventing a private company from selling smart-guns to individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_...
In the city, where most people are anti-gun, the police are often very close by, and rhetoric often talks about how guns are not needed because of the police.
In the country, where most people are pro-gun, the police can easily be very far away. I have co-workers who live at least an hour from the closest police station. Naturally, rhetoric covers the fact that the police very likely cannot help you.
Guns also have safety features that protect against accidental discharge, namely the trigger safety. Some guns have an additional trigger safety that triggers if the gun is pressed against something (or someone). Since these features don't reduce the reliability of a gun when it is intended to be used, the NRA doesn't have any problem with them, and at least the trigger safety is standard on all guns.
The NRA also does a lot of work to teach firearms safety to children (which basically boils down to "don't touch it and tell an adult if you find an unexpected gun somewhere"). For those who do shoot, the NRA is also good with basic safety principles.
Unlocked by owner's thumbprint? Tough luck, police officer wearing gloves. Unlucky, dear soldier with muddy hands.
Unlocked by radio-frequency? Rob a bank after installing a radio-frequency jammer.
In an ideal world, cars are designed to be as safe as possible, as they are transports and getting people home safely is their most important aspect.
In an ideal world, guns are designed to be a dangerous and murderous as possible, as they are killing devices and efficiently turning people into corpses is their most important aspect.
The NRA does exactly what it should: advocate for murder device efficiency and access.
Of course, whether easy access to highly efficient murder devices should be allowed is a public policy question, but in the US, the answer is yes, and the NRA's strategies are a rational move based on that policy. The problem here is that advocating for easy access and efficiency of murder machines kinda looks bad.
No implementation of a TouchID-like system for guns would be perfect and so the gun owner must weigh the potential benefits and risks. I don't think the NRA's members want to take that choice away from the gun owner, but even having a commercial solution come to market means some states will require it's use. IIRC one state has laws on the books to mandate the use of the technology once it's commercially available.
Also keep in mind that a lot of NRA folks are rural. They have almost no local gun crime and have (what they feel) are legitimate reasons for owning a gun (self-defense, hunting, etc). Their opinion is why should they give up their guns because the city folks have a problem?
(I don't count myself in either of those camps but I listen to them enough to be able to explain their arguments.)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...
Essentially, once a smart gun becomes available for sale in the US, all guns sold in New Jersey must be "smart" within 30 months. I wouldn't be surprised if other jurisdictions had similar laws in place. This dramatically increases the cost of legal firearms while doing very little to impact firearm murder or suicide rates.
Such a law already exists in New Jersey and was proposed at the federal level by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/24/325178...
Effectively, allowing smart gun technology would cause a bunch of other guns to get banned, so based on their values system it was logical for the NRA to oppose the tech. There have also been complaints that the tech is not reliable. I looked into this myself and frankly, I would not trust my life with it. Also, in most cases it's using passive RFID technology which is a joke for "security" (there is one company that's using a challenge response system though.) I can think of half a dozen ways to disable or clone most of these systems, but they are sold like they are a panacea.
It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.
The gun control side claims they "don't want to take away your guns" or they "don't want to take away all guns" but when you look at DC and Chicago, where they have the most power, they completely banned private ownership of handguns. This demonstrates their goal, and this is what the NRA is fighting against.
It is much harder to repeal a gun control law than to pass it (if you look at things on the scale of decades and/or centuries), partly because this is a demographic issue and the pro-gun demographic is smaller and shrinking.
So the NRA has absolutely no incentive to concede ground in the battle for private gun ownership. I've never heard a gun control proponent suggest "OK if you give us background checks, registration and capacity limits, we will loosen gun laws in states where they are more strict and promise never ever to go further." That would be compromise. I've never heard it, neither has the NRA.
That is why they are absolutists, because ultimately so is the other side. (Their leadership anyway, which is what counts, not the moderate "let's split the difference" voter who only cares about the issue when its a major news item.)
Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?
Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?
As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?
> The U.S. Department of Justice reports that approximately 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Stat...
Why?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
I don't have any information on the suicide rates by gun in each country, though it would be useful information from a public health standpoint (especially if, as you pointed out, the accessibility could be reduced).
But this is a tough thing to compare, as you note. Suicide rate is encompassing a whole bunch of things. I'm tempted to compare against Canada, where the suicide rate is only less by 1 per 100,000 people per year, but I have no idea if I'm picking that out fairly.
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/9/07-043489.pdf suggests that the US is the only country where firearm is the preferred method of suicide. A bit morbid to read but there you go.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
There's nothing "dramatic" about reducing your chance of dying via suicide by being in the second half. I don't want to say it's zero, because I'm sure someone's life is spared by not having a gun around when the urge to suicide pops up.
By contrast, 53,000 die from the flu, 27,000 from falls, 36,000 from accidental poisoning, and 600,000 from heart disease.
Table 10: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf
I find that incredibly encouraging. Nothing about guns or gun ownership has changed dramatically in the United States over this period. Perhaps this signals that the bizarre, and often fetishized, culture of violence in the United States is on the wane. I hope so.
And of course, even if someone disagrees with that, getting rid of the gun is more likely to change the method than the result.
Would you be justified in entering a time machine, traveling 40 years into the future, and murdering your future self? If not, how could you be justified in murdering your future self without the use of the time machine?
Or imagine a person with multiple personalities. Each has a theoretically equal claim of ownership of the body. While one is in control of the body, it commits suicide. Is that ethical? Now consider that your personality now is not the same as it was 10 years ago, nor will it be the same 10 years from now. Your personality may also change permanently or temporarily under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
If you have nothing left to lose but your own life, and no longer care about losing that, would it not be preferable to gamble it in a bid to gains something that you would like to keep, rather than merely throwing it away for no gain?
If you outlaw suicide, who would you ever be able to prosecute for the crime?
The statistics do show guns more effective than, for instance, overdose. However:
1) it is still the case that the method is more likely to change than the result; and
2) it is likely that means is not assigned randomly, and those more intent on ending their life pick more lethal means - absent guns, some comparably lethal means remain readily available.
Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms 11,068
Accidental discharge of firearms 591
Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent 248
Motor vehicle accidents 35,303
Unless you're taking your own life: Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms 19,990
It says "suicides, accidents or domestic violence." These are all vital statistics in determining the deadliness of guns.
Gun advocates have been arguing here that suicides shouldn't be counted, which doesn't make sense. Access to an effective suicide method is one more consequence of a gun-owning society. It should be acknowledged, analyzed, and discussed.
It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly. That's nonsense. This is a comparison of deadliness; a gun death is a gun death. Despite a decline in gun ownership, gun deaths are trending upward, and the NRA opposes smart-unlock features like thumbprint identification that contrast with the myriad safety controls placed on vehicles.
The reason for determining the deadliness of guns is to know whether they should be banned or not. And we're arguing that since suicides don't justify prohibition, it's not fair to include them in "deadliness". Suicides don't justify prohibition because I as a person should have the right to choose to own a gun at the small risk that I may commit suicide with it. It is not the governments place to protect me from that small risk.
And the other side is doing the same thing, inflating the statistics with deaths that we believe should not affect the policy decision. Not according to the graph in the article: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...You are wrong when you say that people get creative. Suicide is often an impulsive act and so making people work even a little bit harder does reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
England changed the domestic gas supply from coal gas to natural gas. It's now not possible to use a home even to complete suicide. This led to a permanent reduction in suicide numbers.
England made it very much harder for people to get coproxamol. That led to a small permanent drop in completed suicide.
England changed the amount of paracetamol that people could buy. This led to a reduction in suicide deaths from paracetamol. http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resparacet.html
Restricting access to means and methods of suicide is a useful and important suicide prevention measure.
About half of American households have access to a gun while about half of suicides are done via gun. The US is within 10% of most other first world countries in terms of suicide rate. The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method.
What does "real world" evidence mean? Because real world evidence from England (paracetamol pack sizes; switch to natural gas from coal gas; removing coproxamol from general use) shows that many people do not find another method.
1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate.
2. The fact that the US is within about 10% of most other first-world countries in terms of suicide rate. Unless you want to argue that something especially good about the US's mental health system such that only Luxembourg ought be in front of it.
If the US turned into Canada (meaning: essentially no guns and a suicide rate 0.92 of the US) then more than 80% of gun suicides would find another way.
Don't think that an attempted suicide by gun is the same as an attempt using another method. Guns are a very lethal method of suicide. Other methods of suicide are not as sure. This might explain the differences in completed suicide numbers for men and women (more men die to suicide) and rates of self harm (very many more women self harm) -- men might be using more lethal methods.
Some members of the "want to use a gun as a method of suicide group" would use a different method and would complete suicide. But certainly not all that group. Some would use a less fatal method and attempt suicide but not die. Others would find help before attempting suicide.
For a tiny US example: look at the Taft and Ellington Bridges in Washington State. They were both used by people to complete suicide, although more people used Ellington. After a number of people dying to suicide in a short number of days a suicide barrier was put up. People did not switch to the other bridge, even though it was close.
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/
Again: look at the rates of completed suicide in England after switching gas supplies; after removing coproxamol from general use; and after reducing the amount of paracetamol. All of these resulted in permanent drops in the suicide rate.
I think you might be misreading me. The reason it's important that gun-suicide and non-gun-suicide are about the same size is that about equal number of households have guns and don't have guns.
If about 10% of households had access to a gun, and about 10% of suicides were done via gun, I'd say the same thing: access to guns isn't the significant driver of suicide completion.
> But certainly not all that group
Sure, certainly not all. I agree some people would stop. My guess is that around 10% or so.
The problem I have with the thesis that "most people won't switch to another method" is that it leads to a world where the United States is supposed to have an amazingly low suicide rate compared to most other first-world countries. And the thing that is stopping the US is a hot-button political issue, especially because most of the people who are inclined to try and get rid of the guns would disagree that the United States has an especially good mental health system compared to Canada, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, France, and Finland.
You can point to a bunch of small effects, but you want to apply them to the big picture. Well, why isn't the big picture a lot different? If the US had twice the suicide rate of most other countries, I think you'd be right.
Gun ownership is an important civil liberty in the USA, but one that comes with danger.
The Economist is recommending a technological approach to mitigating that danger. Research and development has been done in this department, and many technologies have been applied to modern firearms. Better safeties that prevent accidental discharge, better safes, ammunition that prevents over-penetration, etc.
We have yet to see a simple and trustworthy technology that limits who can fire a gun. When we do, it will start to be used.
For such a technology to work, the user needs to feel in complete control of it. There can be zero risk that an authorized user won't be able to fire the gun due to system failure or low battery.
Ultimately, though, no technological solution will prevent suicide. For that, a different approach will be necessary, and I don't have an answer for that.
Ironically, many gun control advocates still argue against civilian ownership of ammunition that doesn't overpenetrate. In some California cities hollow point ammunition is illegal to buy. In New Jersey it is illegal to carry hollow point ammunition outside the home. The Brady Campaign still to this day calls hollow points "cop killer bullets" despite the fact that every law enforcement department in the country uses them.
Death is a possible unintended side effect of riding in an automobile. Death is the explicit primary purpose of discharging a gunpowder weapon.
Thus, this is far more laudable accomplishment for automotive safety than it is a deplorable statistic for gun owners. Cars now cause less deaths by accident than a consumer product that is actually designed to kill things when used correctly. Yay.
I don't ever have an absolute need to own or use a gun, but it is practically impossible to earn a profitable living without spending at least 40 minutes per day driving in my car, or riding in any other form of on-road transportation.
I don't particularly feel like the jerkass riding on the hard shoulder at 50 mph to bypass a rush-hour jam is in any way comparable to someone who plinks beer bottles--the ones they just emptied--off their back fence without stopping to consider if there are neighbors living in that general direction. They could even be the same guy. If so, I meet him far more often on the road.
Neither guns nor cars kill without an operator--not yet, anyway. If I am now less at risk from an idiot behind a wheel than an idiot with his finger on the trigger, that is unequivocally good news, because I encounter far more of the former. But the article doesn't exactly break the statistics down by intent. I suspect that rates of deaths by gun due to accident or operator negligence are still less than deaths by vehicle due to accident or operator negligence.
So I still feel like guns are safer for me than the average person, because I don't particularly feel like anyone has an actual desire to kill me specifically, especially given my own disinclination toward suicide.
The article doesn't tell me anything meaningful. It seems to be presenting the statistics in a very narrowly interpreted way to advance a particular editorial point of view. The Economist might as well tell me how likely I am to die from falling off a ladder while cleaning my gutters, and compare that to deaths by food poisoning, except that there are far fewer passionate advocates for pasteurization and ladder stabilization bars.
That isn't true for any target rifle, target pistol, or shotgun intended to be used for skeet or trap.