tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post3427462522043162574..comments2024-03-14T11:50:14.761-04:00Comments on DarwinCatholic: Is US Gun Ownership Causing a Wave of Gun Deaths?Darwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-90814313579950027542015-10-12T09:40:38.941-04:002015-10-12T09:40:38.941-04:00Also, I should point out that we don't actuall...Also, I should point out that we don't actually have any ammunition in the house. When Darwin takes the guns down to the shooting range (something that doesn't happen very often), he buys bullets there. We do have little round shells for the air gun downstairs, and Darwin and the kids go downstairs sometimes and shoot at targets taped to cereal boxes. Of all the guns in the house, I myself have only ever shot the air gun, and then only once, though I did do a lot of work helping Darwin refinish the vintage guns.<br /><br />The best way to understand the American mindset of individualism (of which gun ownership is a part) is to read the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I know they've been translated into Hungarian. <a href="https://discoverlaura.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/unique-laura-ingalls-wilder-little-house-series-covers/" rel="nofollow">There's an image of the Hungarian version of Little House in the Big Woods (the first book) here.</a>MrsDarwinhttp://darwincatholic.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-16743913835154316322015-10-12T02:52:51.139-04:002015-10-12T02:52:51.139-04:00Darwin,
This is funny. i have never thought to co...Darwin, <br />This is funny. i have never thought to connect archery to firearms, although my husband and my 3 kids do archery as well, it is connected to Hungarian cultural heritage. Hunting in Hungary is restricted, hunting rights are owned by hunting and forest preserving companies, one has to be very rich and/or influential to be able to hunt as a hobby. Also, during Communism, civilians obviously weren't allowed to keep weapons, so another 40 years to break any traditions there might have been. Target shooting is not a common hobby either. It may support your original post's theory though, that even with so few civilians owning guns, I found 2 incidences of school/university campus shooting in Hungary in news archives. Without doing statistics, it seems that it is not in proportion to gun ownership. Also, although in Hungary licence to owning a gun is supposed to depend on some kind of psychological testing, it clearly did not filter those individuals responsible. Agnesnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-41341223146098139202015-10-11T20:44:11.300-04:002015-10-11T20:44:11.300-04:00Agnes,
The polling data that I've seen sugges...Agnes,<br /><br />The polling data that I've seen suggests that something along the lines of 30-40% of US households own some kind of gun, so what that per capita data works out to (and yes, you're reading that right, to the best of our knowledge there are more guns than people in the US) is that there are a minority of adults who own a lot of guns.<br /><br />I'm something of an example, though I don't know how typical, in that I own five. I have an old .22 rifle that I inherited from my father and a .22 pistol that I bought twelve years ago when I had a membership at a shooting club with an indoor shooting range which was near my work. (This was before kids, and MrsDarwin worked as a stage manager at night, so I had a lot of time to kill in the evenings after work.) Then I own three World War II era rifles which I bought out of historical interest but have been restoring, and I take those out to a local range to shoot every so often. <br /><br />Some gun owners have self defense as a primary or secondary motivation. Others go hunting every season. Hunting is very common in many rural parts of the US. Personally, I don't expect to ever have to defend myself with a gun (we live in a very safe small town) but I simply enjoy target shooting and the connection with history. <br /><br />And there is something very rewarding about shooting sports. Our second oldest girls took archery lessons for a while, and I went along to the club as well since I had done some archery back in boy scouts, and in many ways its very similar -- you need to have a lot of precision and control of your motions to aim and shoot well, so there's a sort of enforced calmness that you need to be able to summon up, but there's also a certain exhilaration to releasing a shot and the feel, sound and sight of it flying down range and hitting the target.Darwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-17402722246992646002015-10-11T12:20:36.631-04:002015-10-11T12:20:36.631-04:00Agnes,
In response to your last question - the an...Agnes,<br /><br />In response to your last question - the anti-gun voice tends to be people who live in urban or inner-suburban areas.<br /><br />I think a lot of the gun control debates boil down to a tension between rural culture and urban culture. In the countryside, guns tend to be seen as just another power tool, like a drill or a chainsaw. You use guns to kill pests, or hunt for food, or for sport shooting. Yes, you can use guns to kill, rural people acknowledge - but it's no different than using a power drill to defend yourself.<br /><br />In contrast, in urban areas, pests of the kind seen in rural areas, or things to hunt are rather less common to say the least. Furthermore, sport shooting requires significant amounts of space you just don't have in the city. So the only time guns become something worthy of note tends to be either when the police are using them to subdue suspects, or when criminals are using them.<br /><br />So for country people, the positive effects of gun ownership would be, for example, less loss of livestock or crops due to less vermin; more food to put on the table, and a nice bit of recreation out in open areas. In urban areas, less so. The problem is that most states are a mix of rural and urban areas, and country people and city people have proverbially found it hard to understand each others' culture.Cojuancohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10370602894706553030noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-26645852820020686592015-10-11T06:37:52.747-04:002015-10-11T06:37:52.747-04:00This is... interesting. I had no idea thatthe comm...This is... interesting. I had no idea thatthe common concept "people in the U.S. have more guns" meant quite so much more guns. If I understand correctly, it means rather more than one gun for every adult (1.1 guns per capita back then, and increasing since...and children obviously don't have them, and without meaning to be sexist, I can't imagine all adult women own guns - sorry if I am mistaken). With this estimate, it seems strange to ask whether there are positive effects of gun ownership (does it actually occur that your average law-abiding citizen has to raise firearms to defend themselves from criminals?) Or is it mostly about honoring the traditions of your forefathers? Also, if so many people either owns guns or has someone in the family who does, who is the anti-gun voice?Agnesnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-65479791328790649232015-10-09T09:59:57.668-04:002015-10-09T09:59:57.668-04:00Michael,
I'm aware of two major pieces of leg...Michael,<br /><br />I'm aware of two major pieces of legislation:<br /><br />- The Brady Bill instituted a background check and a five day waiting period for gun purchases in 1993, however the background check became an instant background check with the institution of the FBI NICS database in 1998. This remains in effect.<br /><br />- The Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed in 1994 and expired in 2004. It banned "high capacity magazines" for both rifles and pistols, and also banned guns with more than one of a list of "military" features. The list, however, didn't really ban anything normally used in crimes, it was mostly a ban on military "looking" guns. The ban was not renewed when it expired in 2004.Darwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-36307256651953939062015-10-09T08:34:32.242-04:002015-10-09T08:34:32.242-04:00Interesting piece, but I have a question. Was the...Interesting piece, but I have a question. Was there a change is gun-ownership screening (waiting period, etc.)after the index year 1986 (I was too young in those years to notice one way or the other), that might have a correlation with the decline in gun-violence? I honestly don't know the answer, and I do not have the time to look into it personally, at the moment. <br />As I understand it, violent crime per capita is actually lower now, overall, than it has been in decades (perhaps ever?). However, the public perception is that we are in an 'ultra-violent' period of history. This perception, I think, makes it hard for both sides of a gun-control debate to dig into the details, which is worth doing, I think. Thanks for your time.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16544490946192855733noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-29484142329959972062015-10-08T22:31:59.834-04:002015-10-08T22:31:59.834-04:00RL,
Agreed. I just ran into this piece (predicta...RL,<br /><br />Agreed. I just ran into <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america" rel="nofollow">this piece</a> (predictably from Vox) which contains the following asinine paragraph:<br /><br />"The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths."<br /><br />Once your control for socioeconomic factors and crime? So, basically, once you adjust down the murder rate of Detroit so that its as low as rural Utah, taking out the effect of poverty and unemployment and urban decay and drugs and crime -- then you find that after accounting for all those other factors the number of guns appears to have some affect. Seriously? This is called analysis?<br /><br />Though note to myself: In that article I did fine a link to a more recent CDC data set that goes through 2013. It shows that gun suicides have increased somewhat in the 2007 to 2013 period (though not as much as non-gun suicides -- apparently suicides are simply becoming more common) -- but gun homicides and gun accidents have continued to go down.<br /><br />http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.htmlDarwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-47212067249547673662015-10-08T21:47:54.981-04:002015-10-08T21:47:54.981-04:00The thing that always gets me with this stuff is w...The thing that always gets me with this stuff is while necessary to examine in a way that is empirical to combat alleged emperical claims, the reality is it's still largely playing into a false premise. <br /><br />The problem is cultural at root. Each society or community will respect life and each other to varying degrees and in different manners. Comparing the US to other countries isn't going to be that great. Heck, looking at the differences between something like Texas and Illinois would be more telling. Or how about Cook County vs. the rest of Illinois. <br /><br />I know some would immediately balk at that citing the porous nature of such a boundary and the ability of gun laws to be breached, but that's just proving the point that it's a cultural thing. There is Facebook meme that cites just by removing 4 or 5 big cities from the mix the US has a relatively low gun homicide rate. I didn't dig into it but it certainly seems plausible. After all would you feel safer from gun violence in a small town in Nebraska where there are 3 guns for every man, woman, and child or in a major city with strict gun control laws and only .25 guns per person? RLnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-32194796390715004212015-10-08T18:19:27.046-04:002015-10-08T18:19:27.046-04:00Anon,
I didn't try to dig into mass shootings...Anon,<br /><br />I didn't try to dig into mass shootings because the data on them isn't very good, and there are so few that I didn't think correlations would be very useful. <br /><br />If you want to look at some data points on the issue, there was an FBI report put out at the request of the administration which looked at "active shooter incidents" (which is what most people think of when they talk about a mass shooting) between 2000 and 2013. It found an increase during that period from 1 in 2000 to 17 in 2013, though with the highest number in 2010 (26 incidents). That's an increase, but in a pretty noise trend line. And since there were already 250 million guns in the US in 2000, it seems a little odd to plot a trend in which that level produces only one mass shooting but the increase from 250 million to 350 million results in a 17x increase in active shooter incidents.<br /><br />https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/september/fbi-releases-study-on-active-shooter-incidents/pdfs/a-study-of-active-shooter-incidents-in-the-u.s.-between-2000-and-2013<br /><br />The Homicide Trends 1980 to 2008 data here:<br /><br />http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=311<br /><br />provides data on the percentage of homicides which involve more than two victims during that time range. That seems to show an increase in the percent of homicides which involved two or more victims from 0.5% of homicides in 1986 to 0.8% of homicides in 2008. If I multiply those rates by the CDC total homicide numbers, I get a rate of murder victims in multi victim homicides per 100,000 in population which is flat to declining from 1986 to 2007 at an average of 0.05.<br /><br />Finally, there are mass shooting trackers put together from media reports. These get around the issue that FBI data is accurate on the number of people killed but sometimes doesn't include details of the incidents like the number of people in each shooting. Here's an example:<br /><br />http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Main_Page<br /><br />They define a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are killed or wounded. Their counts of total dead in mass shootings are:<br /><br />2013: 502<br />2014: 383<br />2015 ytd: 379 (compared to the same time period, that's on track to be the same as 2013)<br /><br />However, these media aggregated data sources don't go back very far, and it's harder to do this kind of work in retrospect, so I didn't go after it in order to see if there's a trend.<br />Darwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-13751618614161946292015-10-08T17:16:15.535-04:002015-10-08T17:16:15.535-04:00"However, no type of gun related deaths has i..."However, no type of gun related deaths has increased in a way that correlates with the increase in gun availability."<br /><br />What about the type of gun death that has led you to look into the relationship of guns to deaths at this time—mass murders (defined, I believe, as the murder of 4 or more people at any one time/by one individual)? The statistic that is often given is that Australia has had no mass murders since implementing their 1996 laws, and we are up to more than one per day, on average.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com