Gun love

I'm wondering to myself if this is an issue that can be discussed anywhere without the dialogue digressing into partisan politics. I'm willing to try it here.

We have a gun-loving culture in the US. Many people think that having a gun makes you safer. However, many (at least thirty in the last twenty years) studies have shown that owning a gun makes you less safe. If there is a gun in your home, there is a 1.4x higher risk of a homicide in your home and a 3.44x risk of suicide. Those numbers are higher (1.6 and 5.4, respectively) if one or more such guns are handguns.

These are factual studies using publicly available data. I read the studies, not just the synopses. The methodology was sound. It's MUCH more likely that someone in your home will die by murder or suicide if there's a gun in the house.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/

Aha, you say, but what about the times when you whip out yore shootin' iron and git th' drop on the foul varmint who's trying to break inta yore house and ravish your wimmenfolk? Well, that isn't as common as the NRA would have you believe. A recent (2015) study showed that 0.9 percent of crime victims use or attempt to use guns in self-defense. That study did not report how many of those attempts actually stopped the crime.

I would like to see some commonsense consideration of the issue--not emotional statements based on what people feel. It's an article of faith for many people that "guns make you safer." There are a couple of things wrong with that. One, cities, counties, and states with high rates of gun ownership have consistently higher rates of murder and suicide than those with low gun ownership. Two, by logical extension, if guns make you safe, maximum safety in our society would be achieved when everyone owns and carries a gun. We tried that. It was called the Wild West and homicide rates were horrific until the sheriff forced everyone to check their guns with him upon entering town. The presence of guns turns fistfights into shootouts.

I welcome any OBJECTIVE comments, but please let's not have anything based on how having a gun makes you feel like a manly man or our sacred Second Amendment rights or the NRA is mah heeero. I just want to know: are all those extra deaths worth it?

Also, preemptively, I'll state that I'm using scientific data and not considering my own position, so insulting me won't accomplish anything. Please refrain for once.

Kevin Lewis writes: "I'm wondering to myself if this is an issue that can be discussed anywhere without the dialogue digressing into partisan politics."

(Although Kevin Lewis does not frame the "issue" explicitly, poor old DonDiego supposes it concerns the "right to bear arms".)

Poor old DonDiego presents an emotion-free/non-partisan statement:

"Amendment II: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

[n.b. DonDiego knows Kevin Lewis already excluded reference to the 2nd Amendment in his request for comments.  But in fact the Second Amendment is essential to the discussion.]

Oh, . . . Kevin Lewis is mistaken about the Wild West:

" 'Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,' says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. 'Today, you're allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren't. Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.' "

Ref: Gun Control is as Old as the Old West

Poor old DonDiego spent the first few years of his retirement in Prescott, Arizona.  He recalls observing a fellow-citizen - who appeared to be a "prospector" in a B-Grade movie, only real - wearing his sixgun on his hip every time DonDiego saw him downtown.

Neither DonDiego nor other passers-by seemed alarmed or intimidated.

An excellent discussion of the Second Amendment and its history can be found at the Legal Information Institute .

DonDiego misread my post. I explicitly stated that gun violence was rampant in the Old West UNTIL local law enforcement restricted carrying guns in public. That point, in fact, was considered one of the hallmarks of a town having become "civilized" (along with a church and school being built).

I did state that the Second Amendment was not germane to this discussion. There are two reasons why: one, that amendment refers to the collective right of the citizenry to raise and maintain a militia. It has nothing to do with individual gun ownership. Two, I wasn't talking about the legality of keeping a gun in one's home; rather, I was talking about the wisdom of doing so. It's clear that having a gun in your home greatly increases the risk of a death-by-gun in your home while only giving you a slightly greater chance of defending yourself against a crime.

So DonDiego, in scurrying to the Second Amendment to frame the discussion, is mistaken. Though I personally have a much more restricted interpretation of the Amendment than gun lovers and the NRA do, I am perfectly willing to stipulate that every American has the right to keep in his home pistols, rifles, flamethrowers, bazookas, grenades, machine guns, antipersonnel weapons, poison gas, artillery, and tactical nuclear weapons. That's not what I care about. What I do care about is that American gun culture and the NRA have convinced a large segment of the public that having a gun in the home makes you safer, when the opposite is clearly true. How can we get the truth out to the public?

It's worth noting that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has been trying for decades to initiate a systematic study of deaths by gun violence in the US, but the NRA has been successful in lobbying Congress to block funding for it. The sad fact is that tens of thousands of people die by gun violence in the US each year, a per capita rate far higher than that of any other modern country. Is fealty to our gun culture really worth all those deaths? Why are guns so romanticized in America?

Though I am talking about specifically guns in the home, my initial post was inspired by Oct. 1 being the anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting. Something is seriously out of joint when a disgruntled loser can stroll down to the nearest gun store and easily purchase the means to shoot hundreds of people. But that's a different discussion.

The playbook will go along the same lines as gays in the military.    At some point the left will just have the votes to stiff arm the other side and make our gun laws in line with the rest of the free world...and then 2 years later everybody will wonder what the big deal was.

I've yet to meet a gun lover yet that can give a rational defense of civilians owning the kinds of weapons used in the Las Vegas massacre 2 years ago.    Most of them actually agree civilians should not have them....but they "dont want no laws leading to no slip'ry slope n'such."     

I have yet to see how the liberals can explain why cities run by democrats have the highest homicide rates, even though they have strict gun laws. 

The comeback of buying guns in Indiana doesn’t fly, because then why doesn’t Indiana have the highest homicide rate?

Tom is bad at math. Chicago has a population of 2.7 million Gary's population is 76k. 

Tom is bad at reasoning. He doesn't define "run by Democrats" (and ignores the simple fact that no city in the US is "run" by either political party). He provides no data to back up his false claims. He also provides no support for his claims that these cities "run by Democrats" have stricter gun laws.

This is why I didn't want the discussion to devolve into partisan politics. Tom is clearly speaking from his perspective as a Trumper, from what he wishes were true, rather than from any rational or factual basis. You can't discuss any issue rationally while wearing your Trumper mask and cape.

If Tom could support his general claim with a few peer-reviewed empirical studies that show that gun deaths are higher in Democratic communities AND that there is a causal relationship between the politics of a community and the rate of gun deaths, that would support his claim. But there are no such unbiased academic studies.

Otherwise, Tom should go back outside and let the grownups talk.

To make a parallel, requirements to have driver's licenses and traffic regulations did not lead to a loss of citizens' right to drive.

Slippery slope arguments are usually crap. Gun lovers like to make that argument, though---because they can't come up with any cogent reason why an individual should be able to kill dozens of people in a few minutes.

I would expect ANY reasonable and sane person to find that to be seriously wrong.

The cities with the highest homicide rates are all democratic run with strict gun laws 

From Kevin Lewis: "I did state that the Second Amendment was not germane to this discussion. There are two reasons why: one, that amendment refers to the collective right of the citizenry to raise and maintain a militia. It has nothing to do with individual gun ownership. Two, I wasn't talking about the legality of keeping a gun in one's home; rather, I was talking about the wisdom of doing so."

I. Kevin has not kept up with the pertinent Supreme Court decisions.

From The Legal Information Institute :

quote i: In 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court considered the matter in United States v. Miller. 307 U.S. 174. The Court adopted a collective rights approach in this case, determining that Congress could regulate a sawed-off shotgun that had moved in interstate commerce under the National Firearms Act of 1934 because the evidence did not suggest that the shotgun "has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated milita . . . ." The Court then explained that the Framers included the Second Amendment to ensure the effectiveness of the military.

 quote ii: This precedent stood for nearly 70 years when in 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the issue in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290). The plaintiff in Heller challenged the constitutionality of the Washington D.C. handgun ban, a statute that had stood for 32 years. Many considered the statute the most stringent in the nation. In a 5-4 decision, the Court, meticulously detailing the history and tradition of the Second Amendment at the time of the Constitutional Convention, proclaimed that the Second Amendment established an individual right for U.S. citizens to possess firearms and struck down the D.C. handgun ban as violative of that right.

[italics added - DD]

Given that the Supreme Court recognizes the right of individual citizens to possess firearms, . . . poor old DonDiego does also.

Kevin Lewis may continue to believe whatever he wishes.

II. On a personal note, . . . poor old DonDiego purchased his first revolver shortly after his first marriage when his wife and he took up residence in a mid-sized metropolis.  It was a large caliber revolver, . . . with which he is proficient. (n.b. Over time poor old DonDiego has learned it was a poor choice for home defense - the bullet is way overpowered for in-home defense; smaller, less-powerful caliber slugs are sufficient and they won't go through walls and place nearby neighbors at risk.)

Subsequently DonDiego came into possession of several more revolvers, . . . a few 45LC "Peacekeepers" - copies of Colt45's like the Earps might've carried, a Colt "Official Police" 38-special, a Walther PPK - like James Bond carries, and a Berretta or two - like Bond's foes might carry. The only handgun not in a very, very secure safe is a Smith&Wesson 38 Special, and even it is under lock and key.  

III. DonDiego notes that the rifle(s) employed in the "Las Vegas Massacre" were pretty much like most hunting rifles in use today - semi-automatic; one trigger-pull fires one-round.  Unfortunately the shooter employed "bump stocks" to physically "bump" the weapon upon recoil so that it could simulate fully-automatic, . . . i.e. hold the trigger and the weapon would simulate fully-automatic fire.

Subsequent to the event bump-stocks have been legally banned.  Owners are directed to destroy any in their possession.  DonDiego has never owned, does not currently own, and is unlikely to ever own a bump-stock.  He fully supports the ban. Ref: FoxNews