• #GenerationLockdown: Two Australians shake up America with viral anti-gun ad
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"the fight would be pointless, just roll over and let yourself get fucked"
not to pull the "as a black man" card, but to throw my hat in as a trans person living in a pretty shitty and unsafe town the idea that an individual doesn't have a right to defend their life with force, and that you should just count on the peaceful rule of law to protect you, is an ivory tower ideal put forward by safe upper class (usually white) democrats if you think that the second amendment is outdated or irrelevant, then you're somebody who has never had to fear for their life, whether from criminals or the law itself. to quote an amicus curiae on the subject of repealing New York's gun transport laws from Pink Pistols, an organization dedicated to firearm training for LGBT people; https://i.imgur.com/fo8Pkvi.png
What if I haven't bought into this concept of "defending myself"? The free spread and liberal access to firearms makes my existence inherently more dangerous if I choose not to defend myself with one.The "right to defend oneself" only benefits those interested in doing so, it actively harms everyone else.
what do you mean when you say you haven't bought in to the concept of defending yourself
Vietnam, as you said. Afghanistan. Iraq.
I don't trust myself with a gun, nor do I ever want to own one. If I were put into a situation that would call for defending myself, I would rationale that not defending myself would be just as good as an option as not doing so. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/ Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes, and women never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault (in more than 300 cases).  Victims using a gun were no less likely to be injured after taking protective action than victims using other forms of protective action.  Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf In 2007-11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender (table 11). This amounted to approximately 1% of all nonfatal violent victimizations in the 5-year period. The percentage of nonfatal violent victimizations involving firearm use in self defense remained stable at under 2% from 1993 to 2011 (not shown in table). In 2007-11, about 44% of victims of nonfatal violent crime offered no resistance, 1% attacked or threatened the offender with another type of weapon, 22% attacked or threatened without a weapon (e.g., hit or kicked), and 26% used nonconfrontational methods (e.g., yelling, running, hiding, or arguing). I dont think there are any reasonable statistics offering any sort of comparison on the success rates or impact of using a gun in self defense vs. any other method of resistance (or no resistance whatsoever). But as far as I can tell, it's not significant enough for me to think of it as a necessity. I'm just as well off letting whatever happen, happen or complying with the demands of the assailant. I'd personally never show myself in a burglary, for instance. I'd rather be undetected than have to shoot the invader. Either way, I dont think there's any evidence pointing towards the necessity of owning a gun for self defense. If I felt the need to do that, I would also feel the need to wear a helmet every time I got into my car - but I dont. The chance is too marginal.
I don't want to be an asshole in saying this, but like I said earlier, the fact that you can say this implies a level of privilege I don't think you're consciously aware of. Using myself as an example, like I said, I'm a trans woman. I'm a good bit larger than average for the standards of cis women, but I'm still significantly smaller and weaker than a good deal of cis men. If pretty much any given man on the street wanted to assault me, I can guarantee you that I wouldn't be able to overpower them on my own. And because I am, again, A. a woman and B. trans, there's a very real possibility that I could be assaulted either sexually or because someone just hates me for what I am. To you, "complying with the demands of the assailant" might mean getting robbed. To me, "complying with the demands of the assailant" might mean getting raped or murdered. Just because you don't feel like you need to be able to defend yourself doesn't mean that's a luxury that everyone gets to have.
I don't think I have much of a chance of overpowering anyone if they pull a knife or a gun on me. It's not a matter of strength at all in that instance. I think your concerns are totally valid, however, I do wonder if there's any quantification for how much better/worse this is for women, minorities, LGBT folk, and transfolk in other countries that do not have this option of self defense. I am LGBT myself, so it would be research that I'm interested in.
unfortunately, as far as I know, no actual studies have been done on comparing hate crime statistics alongside gun self-defense, and any evidence I could give you is ultimately anecdotal at best. especially considering, given the very conversation we're having here in the first place, gun ownership is heavily stigmatized among minority groups, making getting a viable sample size pretty difficult. all I can really do is speak personally and say that as long as there are people who would want to hurt me for being me, I'm not going to surrender my best option to protect my life.
These numbers are not accurate. In fact, the exact number of DGUs a year is difficult to ascertain. As the CDC laid out. Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use. From the same study as well A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004). Effectiveness of defensive tactics, however, is likely to vary across types of victims, types of offenders, and circumstances of the crime, so further research is needed both to explore these contingencies and to confirm or discount earlier findings.
So, as far as we know, there isn't really an accurate estimate for DGUs?
It's worth pointing out that both the NCVS and NSDS estimates are obtained through self-reporting, which is not very reliable and depends heavily on the surveyed's interpretation of the events. Their results also don't differentiate whether the DGU stopped the criminal act from happening or completing. More importantly, they don't (and can't) determine whether a lack of DGU in those instances would have resulted in death for the victim. So it's rather complicated to determine how many lives gun ownership have actually saved. That number may not even be in the same ballpark as even the NCVS DGU estimate. By comparison, annual gun death rates are precisely known. While whether gun crime would be affected by regulation in the short term is debatable, the majority of gun deaths are attributed to suicide (around 20,000 firearms-related suicides per year). Evidence suggests that gun ownership is closely tied to suicide rate, there appears to be a correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates on a state level in the US, and in Switzerland service ammo restrictions along with a lower amount of citizens with service weapons led to a drastic (>50%) reduction in suicide rate among the population that typically committed suicide with them. Gun suicides are also typically much more impulsive and immediate than other forms of suicide, and those who fall victim to it are less likely to have a psychiatric history than those who commit suicide through other methods, meaning better screening and treatment is unlikely to be as effective as for other types of suicides. So at this point in time it's quite unclear to me whether gun ownership in the US is a net positive for vulnerable people.
Right. Kleck's famous estimates have been notably disputed. One of the main criticisms of this estimate is that researchers can't seem to find the people who are shot by civilians defending themselves because they don't show up in hospital records. "The Kleck-Gertz survey suggests that the number of DGU respondents who reported shooting their assailant was over 200,000, over twice the number of those killed or treated [for gunshots] in emergency departments," crime prevention researcher Philip Cook wrote in the book Envisioning Criminology. Kleck says there is no record of these gunshot victims because most instances of self-defense gun use are not reported. "If you tell the police, I just wielded a gun pointing a deadly weapon at another human being and claimed it was in self-defense, the police are going to investigate that," he tells Young, "and they may well in the short run arrest you and treat you as a criminal until and unless you are cleared." On the flipside, Kleck says, criminals who were wounded after a gun was used in self-defense also have no incentive to go to the emergency room because medical professionals have an obligation to report it to the police. But Hemenway points out that if people don't go to the hospital to treat the original gunshot wound, they will inevitably end up there "with sepsis or other major problems." He also notes that part of the reason experts are so divided on the number is the difficulty in obtaining reliable survey data on the issue. "The researchers who look at [Kleck's study] say this is just bad science," Hemenway says. "It's a well-known problem in epidemiology that if something's a rare event, and you just try to ask how many people have done this, you will get incredible overestimates." In fact, Cook told The Washington Post that the percentage of people who told Kleck they used a gun in self-defense is similar to the percentage of Americans who said they were abducted by aliens. The Post notes that "a more reasonable estimate" of self-defense gun uses equals about 100,000 annually, according to the NCVS data. I think suicides, gang violence, and other criminal firearm violence is understated and glossed over too often. A death by a gun is a death by a gun.
I don't know how anyone could think that this survey was well-formed. If you ask someone if they've ever deterred a crime from happening simply by displaying a weapon, every lone-star cowboy savior of the realm etc. is going to claim they have because one time they walked past a Mexican while open carrying. The 2.5 million figure would lead us to conclude that, in a serious crime, the victim is three to four times more likely than the offender to have and use a gun. Although the criminal determines when and where a crime occurs, although pro-gun advocates claim that criminals can always get guns, although few potential victims carry guns away from home, the criminal, according to Kleck’s survey, is usually outgunned by the individual he is trying to assault, burglarize, rob or rape. This is also completely ignoring the fact that many of the conflicts that actually did occur could have been dealt with without a weapon being brandished or owned at all.
No we don't have an accurate number but we do have a range, and hundreds of thousands of usages a year is not some insignificant number. While this is a pretty common critique, the retort is that the problem with studies like these is actually under-reporting, people seem to be much more likely to under-report cases like this. I don't think Kleck's numbers are accurate, but I don't think he's wrong that many there's more of a problem with under-reporting. The NVCS also apparently has evidence of under-reporting in cases such rape, certain assaults, and gunshot wounds. Also, it's real easy to strawman those you disagree with, and in this case you've built a straw man of poll respondents. Nice one man. And even if we assume those low end numbers are accurate, almost 110,000 DGUs a year is not some insignifigant number.
Um, you do realize that us in the rest of the world would rather not have innocent people senselessly killed, right? Like, it's supposed to be a good thing to have people care about you?
What is the evidence that suggests this? While that's still a somewhat sizeable amount, the lack of information on exactly what type of crime was prevented (or whether a crime was prevented at all) doesn't make this statistic very useful to shape policy. Whether someone's DGU saved their and their family's lives or just their new TV drastically change how relevant the event is to the debate.
Czaja and Blair (1990) conducted an experiment that compared reference periods of 6 and 9 months for three different types of crimes (burglary, robbery,and assault). They found significant underreporting of all three types of crimes, with burglary (16 percent) and robbery (28 percent) having significantly lower under reporting than assault (71 percent). The authors attribute the significantly higher rate of underreporting for assault to conceptual issues related to whether the victim defined the event as a crime. They also found that under reporting varied by race. Nonwhites were significantly more likely not to report the crime than whites. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b278/95e5f8153b4f05eae460d45cfe46bd4fe572.pdf PDF Page 27. Of a quick glance at Google Scholar that's the most recent one I was able to find, although with different search terms I'm sure others might turn up. It seems that in the 90s some newer screening strategies increased reporting in these types of surveys - but I'm not really sure in the 20 years since. I disagree. You have a right to your property, and if you defend it or yourself with a weapon, that's a more than legitimate use. People do not have a right to trespass and just take what they want. You also do not know what the intentions of someone breaking into your home will be, and assuming that they're not going to harm you after they've already broken laws to get in is not the safest bet in my book. There was a famous case about 10 years ago in my home state where a home was initially broken into just for money and valuables, and it ended with the gentleman who owned the house nearly beaten to death in his garage, his wife and daughters raped and then murdered, and his house lit on fire. A gun likely wouldn't have changed that crime due to how it played out - but my point in using it is to illustrate that you have zero reason to trust someone trying to rob you.
And we're supposed to trust in the good faith of the person who broke into your home for what reason? as a personal example, murder for gain has been on the rise within my city's limits lately, even as robbery in general experienced a gradual downturn. last year, there was even one committed in a residence one neighborhood down from here, and as you can imagine that caused a flutter among the cops as well as local residents. Maybe the take home message is that you shouldn't simply have to be at the mercy of some dipshit who might just decide to take your life anyway, or at least leave you grievously injured.
The one thing that really grinds me is how everyone talks about how bad/ineffective our (USA) current gun laws are. But they are only ineffective because US gun culture is literally committed to circumventing them. If you lined up the average American, there will probably be something like 90+ percent agreement on what a handgun is, or a shotgun, or even the boogieman "assault rifle." But instead we get gun owners and manufacturers committed to violating the spirit of the law by following the letter of the law to a T. Making guns that violate regulations in absurd ways, or making guns that don't violate but look like they should. Until the American public warms up to the idea of gun regulations, gun owners will argue in bad faith about how gun laws are beurocratic nightmares (when in reality they just desperately don't want to be in compliance).
No. That's literally an incomplete, and ignorant reading of the situation. American gun laws don't make sense, and even pro gun leftists like myself know this. Legislations were created by people who have no concept of gun ownership or gun safety and those laws are what are being circumvented. Not honest gun safety measures. If you look up above at what is a "handgun" vs a "Rife" and see how broken those definitions are, you need to stop being mad at gun creators or owners, and be annoyed that such nonsense legislation ever got passed. It gave people, like yourself, the impressions "SOMETHING IS BEING DONE". It's too bad that "something" was literally against the goal of the legislation. I've seen gun owners argue in good faith on this site for years, and I've seen people like yourself wholesale ignore those arguments in favour for pushing a narrative that this is purely "Gun owners" fault. That only "Gun owners" are responsible for bad legislation. This is patently untrue, and it's tiring seeing what basically amounts to a totally ficitonal "Fake News" narrative be a tool of the left.
Unfortunately licensing and registration requirements is completely out of the question for us. Our country has a history of using gun registries as a means to either harass gun owners or enforce unjust gun bans such as: The federal ban on being able to register machine guns (despite only 1 or 2 legally registered machine guns ever being used in the commission of a crime throughout the entirety of the registry’s existence). The gun registry in New York was used as a political weapon and published by an anti-gun news organization essentially doxxing every gun owner in the state, ironically giving criminals a convenient shopping list of where they are able to steal guns from or alternatively which houses to avoid if they don’t want to risk an armed confrontation. The same registry was also used to threaten gun owners with legal action after the passage of an assault weapons ban. We can’t trust our government NOT to fuck us over at every given opportunity, especially after hurricane Katrina which showed us they are willing to go door to door confiscating guns even without the help of a registry. This was during a time when resources should have been spent stopping looters and helping people, but they instead decided to go after poor to middle class people boarded up in their houses with the excuse that they were “protecting the public from themselves”. Meanwhile, all the wealthy people who could afford to hire fucking Blackwater PMCs were absolutely fine. Sadly I am not joking about Blackwater. Some wealthy people literally hired mercenaries (these ones in particular are heavily associated with committing war crimes) to defend their properties while everyone else up shit creek had their paddles confiscated by the government. IMO comparing us to any other first world country is not really accurate when we have shit like cities where police tactics and standard procedures resemble a military doctrine more than anything else due to mission creep, theocrats are trying and somehow succeeding in depriving women of reproductive healthcare AGAINST previous rulings of the Supreme Court, and our democratically elected government is being sabotaged by the intelligence agency of a foreign superpower (the irony it hurts). If the military starts shooting their own citizens, do you think people will fair any better against them without guns?
That has nothing to do with my argument though. I never said you should trust robbers to not assault or murder you, and I don't have any issue with using the threat of force in this case (as long as you only open fire in accordance with self-defence). What I'm saying is that if we are to compare the scenario of loose gun laws with one of strict laws, we need to compare the amount of deaths that would have actually occured in either cases. And unless you want to compare apples to oranges by proposing an equivalent between a human life and material property, it doesn't make much sense to compare anything other than human deaths. So if, say, 70% of those DGUs would have resulted in robbery and nothing else, then those don't increase the potential death count on the strict gun laws side. Similarly, if a suicide would have occurred regardless of immediate access to a firearm, then it doesn't increase the potential death count on the loose gun laws side. Essentially, what I'm saying is that the amount of DGUs isn't strictly equal to the amount of lives saved through firearm ownership. To have an estimate of what share of DGUs actually saved lives, we'd need to know what crimes those DGUs sought to prevent. But without that information, we can't know whether 80%, 50%, 10% or 2% of DGUs did save lives.
I'm gonna say this probably a thousand times, and I'm probably gonna look like a shill for this podcast, but seriously, people need to listen to this podcast before they start talking about civil war. https://www.itcouldhappenherepod.com/
American gun laws are stupid. It isn't about gun culture being about circumventing the law, it's about arbitrary laws with arbitrary enforcement. Laws that make sense are followed. Laws that don't are ignored or worked around. Would you support jailing people for smoking weed in violation of the arbitrary classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug just because it's the law? I'm guessing not.
Relatively, it is. If it were the low end of the estimate, it would only account for 1-2% of self defense cases, with other means of self defense making up a far greater proportion. And, again, the reports that apparently posit that having a firearm decrease the rate of bodily harm in confrontation are the same ones that assume that DGUs rack up into the millions so I'll take it with a grain of salt. I'm fine with taking my chances with literally any other form of harm prevention.
If you're just going to throw up this argument when people point out that the numbers you put up are unreliable at best, why even put them up? You can't both say that DGU numbers are unreliable and then also cite them as a reason for gun ownership. The fact that you even mentioned the Kleck numbers is super disingenuous, you might as well have taken some arbitrarily high number that sounded good to you. You asserting that 100,000 DGUs a year is a low-ball has no basis in a reality, unless you can cite it. All of the data I've seen indicates that 100,000 is just about the amount of actual DGUs that occur- not a lowball. Furthermore, 100,000 would actually be a very tiny number - less than a few percent of all self-defense cases- , made only less consequential by the fact that many of those conflicts could have been resolved without a firearm present at all. DGUs vs other methods of defense is a function of 'does this victim have a firearm on them', not 'did this firearm protect this victim'
the premise of my post was that there is a distinction between spirit of the law and letter of the law. if your point is that the ATF is equally guilty of using the letter of the law rather then the spirit of the law I can agree with you on that front, but the introduction of various modifiers sold to civilian markets for the purpose of still being 'technically legal' while avoiding spirit of the ban is an indicator that the general population isn't sold on what we would call 'common sense gun laws'. For example, it is far from clear that people that are pro-their 2nd-amendment rights would even agree on restrictions relating to: magazine size, bump-stocks, handguns, bullet buttons, etc. You can argue that that these inventions/gadgets are a product of poorly worded laws but the point I am trying to make is that there is a general cultural malaise from gun owners opposed to incursions in the 2nd amendment GENERALLY. In a nut shell, I dont think we are actually disagreeing we are just talking about two different sides of the same issue. You're talking about the legal side, im talking about the citizen's general will.
No, it's displaying the range that the CDC mentions. That's not disingenuous and demonstrates that there's an academic argument within the studies. What's disingenuous is throwing out the fact that there is a range that the real number is likely in the hundreds of thousands and just saying that doesn't matter. Just because we don't know exactly doesn't mean that there isn't some sort of ballpark estimate. I'd recommend actually reading what gets posted. Because I have. RAND directly tackles this: Estimates for the prevalence of DGU span wide ranges and include high-end estimates—for instance, 2.5 million DGUs per year—that are not plausible given other information that is more trustworthy, such as the total number of U.S. residents who are injured or killed by guns each year. At the other extreme, the NCVS estimate of 116,000 DGU incidents per year almost certainly underestimates the true number. There have been few substantive advances in measuring prevalence counts or rates since the NRC (2004) report. The fundamental issues of how to define DGU and what method for obtaining and assessing those measurements is the most unbiased have not been resolved. As a result, there is still considerable uncertainty about the prevalence of DGU CDC said this Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). And further on pointed out issues with both extremes of the range. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
In a nut shell, if you're going to disregard the context of the arguments to repeat yourself, don't.
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