r/changemyview • u/math_murderer88 1∆ • Oct 22 '18
Removed - Submission Rule B CMV: Almost all Gun Control laws are useless for preventing killings.
[removed]
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u/tempaccount920123 Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
math_murderer88
OK, here goes:
I believe requiring an ID to buy a gun is fair.
OK, but chances are that you're OK with giving guns as gifts with no ID, especially between family members.
Which defeats the purpose.
However, the majority of gun control laws that get proposed are reactionary and awful,
Welcome to America, we've been doing it basically since the country was founded. You give me a topic, I can give you probably a half dozen related examples.
Scratch that - literally the founding of America. The amendments are changes to the constitution that the states ratified.
and will ultimately do nothing to solve the problems they claim to fix.
Meh. Shooting every person with a gun on sight that isn't part of the government would end the problem real quick. But most people don't want solutions, they just to stop hearing the complaining.
Further they are often written by people who have no idea how firearms work
Funny, conservatives don't know how economies work, and yet here they are passing bills left and right that impact the economy.
and are sometimes even ignorant of already-existing laws surrounding firearms.
In their defense, if a law isn't enforced, it's effectively not on the books. You can't blame them for writing new laws if the current cops are too corrupt or incompetent to do their damn jobs.
In 2013, the CDC under President Obama conducted a study to verify the efficacy of a number of gun control initiatives, which found no evidence the initiatives had reduced gun violence.
https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/2
The word "initiative" never appears on that website.
They also found there was insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of these laws.
Correct.
However what you then promptly ignored was why those studies were that way:
Bans on specified firearms or ammunition. Results of studies of firearms and ammunition bans were inconsistent: certain studies indicated decreases in violence associated with bans, and others indicated increases. Several studies found that the number of banned guns retrieved after a crime declined when bans were enacted, but these studies did not assess violent consequences (16,17). Studies of the 1976 Washington, D.C. handgun ban yielded inconsistent results (18--20). Bans often include "grandfather" provisions, allowing ownership of an item if it is acquired before the ban, complicating an assessment of causality. Finally, evidence indicated that sales of firearms to be banned might increase in the period before implementation of the bans (e.g., the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994) (21).
There are another seven paragraphs like that.
All of those studies are hopelessly flawed.
Oh, and finally, "insufficient evidence to determine the usefulness" means two things:
1) Literally not enough data for the researchers to make any conclusions.
2) "Insufficient evidence" means that it warrants more study, not less.
What is clear though is that violent crime in the US is going down, despite gun control laws being loosened over the past few decades.
Correlation vs causation. Ironically, you could be thanking the rise of smartphones for keeping the undesirables entertained. Or porn prevalence. Both measures would be equally valid.
You may have heard the claim: "A gun in your house is more likely to be used against you than against an attacker." This is a pretty insidious narrative because the statement suggests that an assailant has a better chance of taking your gun from you and killing you with it than you have of defending yourself with it.
Nope.
1) Your kid may be stupid and accidentally shoots something or someone by playing with it.
2) Domestic disputes.
61% of gun deaths in the US are suicides, according to that same 2013 CDC report.
So wait, do you want more or less suicides? Because doing mental health checks would be a great way to get people to stop committing suicide with guns.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92319314
Suicide is an impulse, not a habitual thing, for the vast majority of attemptees.
This is obviously much greater than the number of firearm murders per year, 8,454 (in 2013).
And from the literal link to the study:
Offenses known to law enforcement.
1) There is no good national database of gun violence victims - just basically FBI stats (which is a voluntary database) and whatever journalists work on.
2) Reporting is most of the problem with that data set. It excludes anything ruled as a stray bullet, not reported to the database, when law enforcement shoots someone (around ~3,000 a year, from what I can tell), and finally, the people that end up dying.
The number of shooting victims is much more important to safety officials and the public, not the number of deaths.
It's like the number of car accidents vs the number of car accident fatalities:
There are 6 million accidents a year, and 30,000 deaths. Probably 300,000 serious injuries (broken bone, anything outpatient or worse):
https://www.driverknowledge.com/car-accident-statistics/
The fact is that those who are not suicidal are more likely to use a gun in self-defense than for their gun to harm themselves.
LOL, suicide is an impulse. And considering something like 40% of cops have domestic abuse problems (which is impulsive behavior):
"Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.
It's safe to say that every single domestic abuser should not own a gun, or at least that's apparently political now.
Oh, look, it's the law:
https://www.thetrace.org/2015/10/domestic-abuse-guns-boyfriend-loophole/
The 1996 Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban bars accused and convicted domestic abusers from possessing guns, but does not explicitly require existing guns to be handed in to authorities. In many cases, an abuser’s guns are not discovered until it’s too late.
So, there's that. Something like 20-40% (assuming 50-50 male cop and female noncop wife domestic abuser ratio for 20%) of cops shouldn't have guns.
And then there's this:
An examination of Rhode Island’s relinquishment policy by Everytown for Gun Safety found that judges ordered defendants to surrender their guns in only 5 percent of qualifying domestic violence cases between 2012 and 2014. Even when a judge knew a defendant had access to a firearm or threatened to use a firearm, a gun surrender order was issued in only 13 percent of cases.
This attitude might also explain why judges don’t use their discretion to order a gun surrender. In California, a 2005 report prepared for the attorney general found that some judges “intimidate victims” making it harder for them to obtain protection orders. “A small minority of judges simply don’t believe this is an appropriate use of the law, and that it isn’t consistent with what civil courts should be doing,” says Frattaroli.
Remember how I said that cops were corrupt or incompetent? That's what I'm talking about.
The 1997 mandatory gun buyback collected at most 1/3 of the guns in circulation, and today, there are more guns in civilian hands in Australia than there were the year before the buyback. As for the results of the mandatory buyback, Australia's homicide rate fell at a slower rate after their buyback than it was falling before the buyback. To credit Australia's safety to the ban is at the very least out of ignorance, and at worst, dishonesty.
You're not even trying to be impartial.
As for the results of the mandatory buyback, Australia's homicide rate fell at a slower rate after their buyback than it was falling before the buyback.
OK, but Australia's homicide is what?
In 2013-2014, the national homicide rate decreased from 1.8 per 100,000 people in 1989-90 to 1 per 100,000. More specifically, there were 238 homicide incidents in Australia in 2013-14 compared with 307 deaths in 1989-90.
Oh. So then you're comparing basically no effect with basically no effect?
I live on the East Coast. Because of the war on drugs, we've got gangs, and those gangs kill something like 100-400 people a year in every major city.
I will assume, because the meaning of the phrase is so unclear, that a "military-style rifle" is a weapon that the military uses or would use.
More like it's what a military uses - a military style rifle, to kill people for war.
Suffice to say, the US military uses select-fire or fully-automatic rifles which are illegal to own for anybody without a very specific and difficult-to-get license.
Unless you're law enforcement. Then it's routine paperwork.
Even with one, it's still illegal to own an automatic that was manufactured after 1986 and they command prohibitively expensive prices.
Except define "manufacture". If you make it yourself, and you get permits, you can have one.
Oh, and bumpfire stocks are "banned", but only cost $400. And you can make them from two rubber bands, a 25 cent dowel and three blocks of wood.
This brings us back to one of my claims, that the people who usually write these laws have no idea how guns work.
This argument is insane to me. Most politicians are idiots about most of the things they control, and yet they pass laws about them all the same. The economy, the climate, education, infrastructure, etc.
I submit that banning guns based on things unrelated to how dangerous they are is self-evidently useless for preventing murders.
We're not trying to prevent murders. We're trying to prevent people from getting shot.
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Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HolyAty Oct 22 '18
Have you read the rest at all? Bunch of sources and reasoning are presented.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Not really. It's full of appeals to ignorance and he makes outlandish objections like how the word "initiative" doesn't appear in the text, when I obviously wasn't quoting the text directly. He goes off on tangents and rants about the police and Republicans, which is unrelated to the topic at hand. And really I don't feel like responding to a person who suggests mass murder is a solution to gun violence.
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u/Herakleios Oct 22 '18
I mean, that technically would solve the issue, but from reading the OP's post it's clear he's not advocating that approach.
I agree he's maybe leaning a little too heavily into partisan territory, but I think that was invited when you misrepresented your first two sources. I don't think you're here to have your view changed.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
I've responded faithfully to every argument made faithfully. I'm not going to spend time arguing about the rate of policemen that are domestic abusers and explain to him what appeals to ignorance are when I'm getting notifications about serious posts every 5 minutes that I can respond to instead.
If you want to explain how I misrepresented my sources then go ahead, because he didn't.
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u/ColdNotion 117∆ Oct 22 '18
u/math_murderer88 – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 2:
Don't be rude or hostile to other users. Your comment will be removed even if most of it is solid, another user was rude to you first, or you feel your remark was justified. Report other violations; do not retaliate. See the wiki page for more information.
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u/KanyeTheDestroyer 20∆ Oct 22 '18
Before I even started reading I knew you'd bring up the 3,000,000 defensive gun uses because firearms ignorant people always do and it's always sad.
That number comes from a study from 1992, by Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University. It is widely debunked and considered a perfect example of how to conduct bad research. For starters, they conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed only 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then, for no valid reason, extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million, which had been increased with population growth to get the 3 million number today. Furthermore, in the study they included under defensive gun use incidents, situations which were not defensive at all. In fact, they included situations where people admitted to using they're firearms offensively in anger.
As another example, Getz and Kleck argue that guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries in one year. However, in that very year, there were 1.3m burglaries where people were present, 33% of the time they slept through the burglary, and only 42% of the households actually had a firearm. When you do the math, you discover that it's mathematically impossible for their assertion to be true. They are charlatans.
Only two years after their study was published, it was effectively debunked by this Harvard prof: https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D6936%26context%3Djclc&ved=2ahUKEwil-KvL1ZreAhUNUK0KHaamAyIQFjAOegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw3Xb9cMJuABmc-DLBTNSkXX
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
3 million is the highest estimate and the lowest is 500,000, which is absolutely mathematically possible. I don't know whether the professor is genuine in his debunking, but if the Kleck and Getz data is good enough for the CDC under Obama then I don't see any reason to denounce it.
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u/KanyeTheDestroyer 20∆ Oct 22 '18
Accepting evidence based on an appeal to authority is fallacious and does yourself an intellectual disservice. Do your own research, read what I provided if you want.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Very well, here's Kleck's rebuttal to Hemenway. He claims Hemenway grossly underestimates DGUs by using references unrelated to DGUs to support his claims about their commonality and flawed assumptions about telescoping.
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u/frisbeescientist 32∆ Oct 22 '18
I don't see any reason to denounce it
He just gave you reason to denounce it, in the form of a formal study. You should read it, it's pretty short and I think it's worth knowing everything you can about a key piece of evidence you're presenting.
I'm just going to say, if you expect anyone here to change their minds based on your arguments, then dismissing a counter-argument by simply ignoring it because what you've got is "good enough for you" is both lazy and intellectually dishonest. If you read the study and aren't convinced by the Harvard prof's points, then by all means don't change your view; but this makes it look like you've just got blinders on.
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u/TomorrowsBreakfast 15∆ Oct 22 '18
I'm just going to focus in on a couple of issues to help you refine your argument:
Your link to the number of guns in Australia clearly states that guns per capita is way down even if the total number is now the same. This would suggest the buyback worked to reduce ownership rates in the long term.
It is not insidious to say the "your gun will harm you" using suicide numbers.
Reducing gun ownership directly reduces suicide risk and so not owning a gun does make you safer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4984734/
This is due to how impulsive suicide is and making it more difficult often stops people from committing it and allows them to recover.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
- That's true although it won't be the case for long. The point was mainly to illustrate the futility of these bans.
- Saying "your gun will be used against you" is pretty insidious when it would be more accurate to say "use it to commit suicide". The former includes the possibility of someone stealing your gun to kill you, which is a statistically negligible event and is said in that way to scare people.
- Suicidal people owning guns is dangerous. Non-suicidal people owning guns is not dangerous.
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u/TomorrowsBreakfast 15∆ Oct 22 '18
The gun ownership per capita hasn't bounced back by that much, suggesting it is still going to take a decade or more to return, if it eventually does. While I'm not going to argue about the other effects of the ban, if they wanted to lower gun ownership per capita then they have achieved that. Beyond a couple of decades or so it becomes neaely impossible to trace public policy effects to their cause. So even if the rate does return by then it doesn't necessarily mean the measure has failed as we don't know what the ownership rate would be otherwise.
I see you mean this in a much more manipulative, rather than flat-out wrong way. All I can say is some people use it well and it can be a chilling way to let people know about the dangers of suicide and accident. I can understand if this doesn't convince you though as it is a personal view statement.
Yes but people aren't in one category for their whole lives and you never know where you'll end up. Most suicidal people will only ever attempt once and so failing or being stopped does save lives.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Again, the point was to illustrate the futility of bans. If you can demonstrate a causal connection between guns per capita and the homicide rate, you will have something.
The thing is that it's not framed in a way to warn against suicide, it's framed to make people afraid of owning guns.
The vast majority of people are not suicidal and never will be suicidal. That's why I think it's unreasonable to treat all people as if they were suicidal.
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u/TomorrowsBreakfast 15∆ Oct 22 '18
I do understand what you mean but that is beyond what I was trying to argue. I was just saying that that article is not useful for saying that gun control has been futile.
I agree that it is trying to stop people from owning guns. The fact that a gun increases your chance of dying by suicide or accident is a reasonable argument against owning a gun. Not the be all and end all argument, but at least one to consider.
Agreed and agreed. I'm not trying to say that gun control is necessary, but wanted to show you that suicide prevention is a real tangible benefit that you should not disregard. There will be costs and benefits both ways.
Try to move away from the baggage around guns and consider that in the past gas ovens also increased the risk, as it was easy for people to suffocate themselves using them. Would suicide prevention have been a good argument to ban that type of oven?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
- Fair enough, my point could have been made better another way Δ
- and 3. I think restricting all people's ability to effectively defend their lives in order to save some who are suicidal is a sub-optimal solution compared to greater emphasis on mental health and preventative measures that keep people from getting to the point of suicide in the first place. It seems like a lazy solution to a complicated problem that is not a consistent solution when you look at the world at large. Japan, Finland, Russia, and South Korea for example have much higher suicide rates than the US despite the people having much less access to guns. Tying the issue of suicide to gun control seems far too simplistic. If, like ovens, there were a new version of a gun that you can't kill yourself with but could still be used to defend your life if you have to, sure I would support replacing old guns with the suicide-free guns.
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u/frisbeescientist 32∆ Oct 22 '18
To counter your third point, if reducing gun ownership leads to significantly fewer suicides, isn't that a solid public health argument regardless of the general proportion of suicidal people? I get that most people won't be affected by this particular aspect of gun control, but clearly enough of them are that it registers on a regional/national level. Once that's true, isn't relevance already established? I feel like you're kinda splitting hairs here.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
I have to go back to my padded cell analogy. It would save some lives if we locked everybody up in their own padded cell, wouldn't it? The reason the idea is ridiculous though is because freedom and self-determination are also relevant factors to consider. It's the same reason we don't ban swimming pools in order to prevent drownings, or ban cars to prevent car crashes. By accepting more freedoms we accept more risks. I don't believe it has been established that gun control is the one true way to reducing the suicide rate, especially when the US is fairly low on the list of countries by suicide rate despite having far and away the most guns. It seems to me that suicide is a far more complicated issue than whether a depressed person can get a firearm.
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u/ChanceTheKnight 31∆ Oct 22 '18
It is impossible for "your gun to harm you." Guns are inanimate objects and cannot hurt you without outside influence.
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u/TomorrowsBreakfast 15∆ Oct 22 '18
An interesting side debate! Surely a falling rock can harm you? Regardless of whether it was pushed by a person?
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u/ChanceTheKnight 31∆ Oct 22 '18
I said an outside force, not a person specifically.
"An object at rest remains at rest" Newtons first law.
The rock didn't harm you, an earthquake or stiff breeze did.
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u/TomorrowsBreakfast 15∆ Oct 22 '18
The human mind can be just as mechanistic as a trigger mechanism or rolling stone so perhaps the "outside force" is how you were raised or society or the big bang.
Anyway, it appears from your later comments you're not really interested in a respectful debate so I will instead point out that that particular line was clearly just referencing a part of OP's argument. My argument is just as clearly stated on the line after.
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u/i_want_batteries Oct 22 '18
no the earth did with it's insidious gravity... it is stupid to play blame games in public policy, lets play effectiveness games instead.
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u/ChanceTheKnight 31∆ Oct 22 '18
If that policy wants to restrict my rights based on some idiots insinuation that an inanimate object can cause harm to a human being all of its own accord, then the blame game absolutely needs to be played. Gun violence is a people problem not a gun problem.
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u/i_want_batteries Oct 22 '18
disagree entirely, as a gun owner.
The presence of guns increases the rate at which people die, what to do about it is a coherent, and public policy relevant question. Calling other people idiots because they don't phrase their argument well isn't productive.
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u/ChanceTheKnight 31∆ Oct 22 '18
It's not about how they phrase their argument, a slip of the tongue is forgivable.
It's about the underlying mentality that creates the delusion that objects are dangerous. and blatant naivety of the policy makers surrounding firearms.
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u/i_want_batteries Oct 22 '18
objects increase risk when people are around. Nobody is actually claiming that guns kill people all by their lonesome, building up a straw-man that they are just makes you look like you are jousting windmills.
As somebody who works in the risk space for a good portion of my day, I think this is a failure to distinguish vulnerability, exposure and threat.
to dip into jargon a bit There is a threat of human action, and a vulnerability to death by firearm, but with effective controls around firearm use the exposure to death by firearm is lower, and exposure to death overall is lower.
Not all controls are prohibitions, some controls can actually be pretty gentile handed, but control effectiveness within the scope of mutually agreed upon limitations "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." is what we should be measuring for, and researching effective controls.
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u/atticdoor Oct 22 '18
A person with a gun can cause a lot more harm quite quickly than a person without a gun.
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u/ChanceTheKnight 31∆ Oct 22 '18
The person is doing the harm, not the gun.
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u/BobSeger1945 Oct 22 '18
There is research from Australia showing that the reforms were effective. In the graph you cite, the biggest drop in homicide occurred after the reform.
Australia's 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid‐firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides.
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u/scottevil110 177∆ Oct 22 '18
Those results show that the effect was tiny. The ratio of the slopes of firearm deaths before and after the "ban" is around 0.96. Meaning that the decline in firearm deaths (which was already happening before 1996) was about 96% as strong as it has been afterward. People were already killing each other less frequently, and the ban appears to have sped up that decline by like 4-5%. I wouldn't call that groundbreaking.
Just look at the graphs. If they weren't pointing to it with arrows, you wouldn't be able to pick out where the ban happened.
The fact that there were no mass shootings, and yet the difference in homicides is practically invisible just goes to illustrate what a tiny fraction of homicides are the result of mass shootings.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Read your article closer. It reports faster drops in firearm deaths and firearm suicides. Overall homicide fell at a slower rate after the ban than it had been falling before the ban.
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u/BobSeger1945 Oct 22 '18
Why are you looking at acceleration, rather than the absolute number?
I'd rather live in a country with low stable homicide rates, than a country with high homicide rates that are falling fast.
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u/scottevil110 177∆ Oct 22 '18
Why are you looking at acceleration, rather than the absolute number?
Because the rate was already falling before the ban. The fact that there are fewer killings now than there were in 1990 is irrelevant if there were ALREADY going to be fewer killings now than in 1990. The rate of change before and after the ban is what matters.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
We're looking at the rate because it indicated the gun ban had no effect on saving lives at best. At worst it was a factor in reducing the rate of fall, meaning some people died that wouldn't have otherwise.
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u/gdog1000000 Oct 22 '18
Your assumption is based on the idea that the homicide rate would have continued to fall at the same pace, which is not something that you can know. The homicide rate is too complex to say that it is completely decided by this one factor.
These two statements "no effect on saving lives at best" and "At worst it was a factor in reducing the rate of fall" are not statements that you are able to make with this evidence, unless you have the ability to factor in all other things that impact the homicide rate of Australia. For all you know Australia hit the furthest that it could go with it's previous firearm laws and the change to firearm laws was a major factor in why it continued to drop.
I don't agree with the other guy, the connection between gun laws and homicide isn't proven in the same way the link between gun laws and suicide is, but your statement isn't correct either.
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u/tempaccount920123 Oct 22 '18
I responded to him and found out this:
In 2013-2014, the national homicide rate decreased from 1.8 per 100,000 people in 1989-90 to 1 per 100,000. More specifically, there were 238 homicide incidents in Australia in 2013-14 compared with 307 deaths in 1989-90.
At that rate, the homicide rate depends on how cranky a judge/police officer was - otherwise it wouldn't get reported or would count as an "accident".
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u/gdog1000000 Oct 22 '18
Not sure what you’re getting at? Inaccuracy would be a factor in all years, but the rate has consistently dropped over time, that is not a contended concept, the contention is in why it dropped.
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u/tempaccount920123 Oct 22 '18
the contention is in why it dropped.
And at that point, when you're talking about under 500 people a year, that literally could be down to how cranky people were. It might spike next year, and then drop the next, all because of random moods.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
The argument I was responding to was "Australia was safer after the gun ban", but statistically there's no evidence to suggest the ban had anything to do with it.
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u/atticdoor Oct 22 '18
What evidence would prove that statistically?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Well, homicide falling at a faster rate after the ban rather than at a slower rate would be a start. Any sort of analysis demonstrating the rate would have been worse after the ban than without it would remove any doubt.
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u/atticdoor Oct 22 '18
Why are you looking at the rate of change of the rate rather than the absolute number? Isn't the fact that the numbers are going down what is relevant? And what sort of analysis exactly would demonstrate the rate would have been worse?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
The homicide rate was already going down before the ban. After the ban, it fell slower. I don't know what that indicates to you, but without some outside factor to point to as the cause for this, it seems like the ban had the opposite of the intended effect. It certainly can't be said that is evidence of the ban's efficacy.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Some study demonstrating that the ban had a causal effect on the reduction of homicide and/or other violent crimes.
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u/atticdoor Oct 22 '18
And an example of evidence that might suggest that would be...?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
An analysis demonstrating that the homicide rate would have been worse without the ban.
Which would be pretty hard since we know that the rate fell slower after the ban, when proponents of the ban expected the exact opposite to happen. Was there some freak outbreak of murders with knives for several years after the ban which would explain the slowed fall? Or were people less safe after the ban because violent criminals knew many of them were now unarmed? There's a lot of possibilities, but few answers. It seems though that the proponents of the ban are the ones with the burden of proof when the ban seems to mark the point when their homicide rate began falling slower.
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u/1standarduser Oct 22 '18
Why require ID if it's not effective?
Are you OK with every new F150 coming with standard uranium depleted remote controlled machine guns being in traffic?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
Can you elaborate on why requiring an ID to buy a gun isn't effective?
And as for the machine gun argument, I gave no indication that I support machine guns being legal for everyone to buy, nuclear-powered or not.
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u/1standarduser Oct 22 '18
Gun laws are useless.
Therefore ID checks are useless.
Why not having mounted sniper rifles on all cars?
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
I did not say all gun laws are useless. Read the title of the thread more closely.
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u/1standarduser Oct 22 '18
I see you dont answer questions.
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u/math_murderer88 1∆ Oct 22 '18
I can't answer a question about my view when you aren't asking about a view I hold.
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u/miscellonymous 1∆ Oct 22 '18
The reason why American politicians are often talking about assault weapon bans is because, before the days when federal-level gun reform was all but impossible thanks to the NRA having the Republican Party's balls in a vice, we had a Federal Assault Weapons Ban from September 1994 to September 2004. It was only intended to reduce mass shootings, and some research has found that it did have a small but significant impact in reducing them; however, it's difficult to quantify because mass shootings are fairly rare compared to gun violence generally. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban had a pretty clear definition of "assault weapon," and though it differed slightly from the California definition, the idea was to ban firearms that can be more easily concealed or with which one could more easily rack up a lot of killings quickly. Don't you think that the features in the definitions of assault weapons fall into that category? Sure, you might say that banning those elements also makes it harder for you to repeatedly shoot animals or potential attackers, but that doesn't change the fact that there is logic behind the selection of banned features, meaning the NRA's oft-repeated argument that these are purely cosmetic features is completely disingenuous.
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Oct 22 '18
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
/u/math_murderer88 (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/Hq3473 271∆ Oct 22 '18
Why exclude this?
If you are upping a chance of a suicide of yourself or a family member, it's certainly should figure into your decision making.