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Old 02-26-2013, 01:26 PM
 
Location: Anchorage Suburbanites and part time Willowbillies
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Ferd & lifeexplorer.
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Old 02-26-2013, 01:32 PM
 
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Originally Posted by Ferd View Post
I just read this study. Thank you for linking it.

The numbers for suicide here are interesting but only as a matter culture in America. We have a wide body of evidence that clearly indicates no link between national gun laws and suicide rates. Japan has a high suicide rate and very strict gun laws.

As for homicide, this study I am afraid, doesn’t really show much of anything. It deals ONLY with homicides in the home of the decedent. While statistical evidence may say a person is more likely to die from a firearm, if there is a firearm in the home, there are a whole host of factors that were not considered.

Causation was not factored here.

Nowhere did I read that previous legal trouble was taken into consideration. While there is indication that drugs and alcohol was considered, the study does not indicate if those things have a greater correlation.

The study itself points out that they did not consider the neighborhood (socio-economic) the decedent lived in. Is that a greater correlation? Could there be causation hidden here that would point to other factors as being primary over the existence of the gun? What about firearm training? Further, while taking “education into consideration digging into the numbers show this only considered if the decedent completed high school or not. Higher Education was not considered. I wonder what that would do to the statistics.

And we are also talking about infinitesimal fractions of percentages. The data comes from 1993 considering the population of America at somewhere near 250 Million at the time, there were a grand total of

490 people died in their home from gunshot. 188 had a gun in the home 339 died from gunshot but what is missing is the number of people who died from a gunshot in their home where they did not store a firearm. We know 188 did, but we cannot assume all of those 188 died from gunshot. Only that they were killed. We know that 339 died from gunshot which means even if we could show the 188 total were killed with guns, there was still 151 killed with guns that did not store a firearm in their home.

Consider 250 million in the population, even using incomplete numbers and assuming all 188 who had a gun in the home were in fact killed by a gun, even considering this to be a 10% sample of the deaths in 1993 we are talking about a difference of 37 people in a population of 25 million people. The numbers are so small as to have virtually no real meaning in the context of who dies from what. If we are going to have a discussion about saving lives, which is what this discussion ought to be about, I think I could come up with a few hundred other topics that have more value and will save vastly more lives.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lifeexplorer View Post
Elle, you seem to be a person who at least wants to learn the truth.

The research you quoted has multiple problems which even the authors admit (see their section of limitations). One big issue is to blame suicide on gun ownership. There's no better way to counter this argument by comparing suicide rate of Japan (21), China (22) and Korea (32) with that of USA (12). If gun ownership caused suicide, there's no reason that they have so much higher rate of suicide - those countries have almost no civilian owning firearm.

That took out a big piece of "gun death".

The second major flaw is mixing lawful ownership of firearm with unlawful ownership. It has long been established that within lawful gun owners, the homicide rate is 1/8 of the general population. The main reason is lawful gun owners are mostly model citizens to begin with; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to pass background check and legally own a gun.

Does gun control really reduce crime? By definition, it doesn't, it can't and it won't. This is because the current "gun control" only controls law abiding citizens - law abiding citizens just don't commit crimes that often.

The only way to make real gun control works is to control criminals.
Had to repeat these, just because!!

Excellent writing gentleman!
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