10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down

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An interesting article that directly responds to many of the pro-gun fallacies that are regulary parroted on this board.

Across the board, states with most civillian gun owners have the most gun related murder with little evidence that private gun ownership does anything to deter crime in the public domain.

Article:-
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... fact-check

"Guns don't kill people, people do."

As a history teacher of mine put it, "That's like saying 'cars don't kill people, people do.' "

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/0 ... r-part-01/
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/0 ... part-deux/
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/0 ... -debunker/
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/1 ... in-the-us/


That's just the tip of the iceberg, the lies and distortions of the anti-gun movement would take an encyclopedia to fully catalog.

Citing Mother Jones as a credible source regarding guns...how absurd.

Yet more grasping at straws.

This article fails to realize the purpose of the second amendment. An armed population is necessary not only to discourage invasion, but to pressure our own government into following the rules. The founding fathers knew very well that the government they were creating should be overthrown should it become a tyranny.

As a matter of utility, guns should not be overly controlled by the very thing the second amendment was designed to control. As far as the crime issue goes, you must look at our past: the idea of gangs became popular during the time of the wild west. The fact that old habits die hard coupled with population concentration and poor education systems means that crime in the more western states is inevitable.

Also, keep in mind that criminals, by definition, do not have to follow gun regulations; only law-abiding citizens do. According to the punishment system, those who abuse this right does not deserve it, even if abuse is involuntarily from lack of training.

One of the first things Hitler did upon his rise to power was abolish the right of the citizens to own firearms. Imagine how much more difficult the holocaust would have been if he hadn't done this, especially at the time of the uprising in Warsaw.

Which is right.

Most people who die where the car is the cause would be due to driver error rather than fault of the car itself. Note, driver error. Homicide where the car is the weapon is still the fault of the murderer.

Not many people die due to fault in the firearm and/or ammunition. People who use a firearm to murder someone are at fault. We don't send the firearm to prison, we send the person.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOYGkcOsLpw[/youtube]

Mainly for posterity, I've chosen to argue the against each point in the article.

Disregarding the fact that there doesn't seem to be much of a point in the myth itself (after all, "they're coming for your guns" is used figuratively to mean that people are trying to prohibit people from owning weapons that they already own). This has literally already happened.

During Hurricane Katrina, National Guard units and New Orleans police illegally confiscated any gun they found. Many of those guns were never returned to their owners. http://www.examiner.com/article/five-ye ... a-gun-grab



Now, even assuming all of the data used to come up with this is 100% accurate (and that's a big if - as the primary sources for this information are buried so deep I couldn't actually find them) - all it does is prove a very vague correlation, and the causation is entirely presumed. With few exceptions, that graph roughly approximates a heat map of the largest populations in the US. You'll also not that it is based on gun *deaths* - NOT gun *homicides*.



Taken directly from the methodology on the summary page of the reference:



A sample size of 2400 people is statistically irrelevant to extrapolate to a population of 313 million.



The wording in this is tricky, but what it means is that people who are *already criminals* are more likely to threaten someone with a firearm if they have a concealed carry permit than those without. It *DOES NOT* mean that people with concealed carry permits are more likely to be aggressive.



Holy crap, they actually directly referenced a study that explains their methodology! I haven't read this study, so I can't refute it - but I will most definitely read it and comment later.



Intuitively - this makes sense. If you stop a mass shooter, it ceases to become a mass shooting (duh). The link referenced here is a link to another mother jones article (HAH!), so I'll try to argue some of the points there:


A) The fact that they *were* (as in, no longer) law enforcement officers means absolutely nothing. Literally. Nothing. Regardless of their past profession, they were normal citizens, and were *not* acting under color of law.

B) The gunman was in the process of returning to his car where he was *getting more ammunition*. Also according to those same police investigators.



Again - that means *nothing*. And, calling him a vigilante is extremely offensive.



Quoting from the conclusions of the linked study:



If the only place where you can find any statistically relevant instance where law-abiding gun owners have their guns used against them/others is in a small portion (ER) of a small portion (hospital) of places - then you need to question how relevant that really is.



What was meant based on the sources is "Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of death by firearm injury, suicide employing a gun, and accidental death by gun." Um...having a gun is kind-of a prerequisite to all of those, so...duh.



Note that the homes where there are those assaults, murders, suicide attempts, and accidents involving guns may or may not also have guns - so it does nothing to prove the point that keeping a gun at home makes you less safe.



I think we would all agree that that is not a good idea.



Which is why it's not a good idea to have unlocked firearms in a house with kids...



Again - the people who were shot and killed in arguments may or may not have been carrying a gun. So that has nothing to do with whether carrying a gun makes you safer or not.



Ahem...

Seriously? A sample size that constitutes less than 1% of the total population, less than 1% of the total population of gun owners, and even less than 1% of the population of concealed carry permit holders.



The study doesn't differentiate between assault victims carrying a weapon legally and those carrying a weapon illegally (or, in otherwords, for criminal purposes). Many studies over the years have shown that criminals are the most common victims of violent crime - so it would stand to reason that criminals who would carry guns would be more likely to themselves be victims of violent crime.



This is basically a fancy way of saying "you're more likely to be killed by someone you know than someone you don't" and is a universal truth that doesn't just apply to Women.



Again, that study reduces the sample size to people who *have already committed a crime*.



This study sample size is over 10 years old, the most current data looked at was from 1997! Huge drops in the crime rate as well as the gun violence rate have been made since then, and the data is fundamentally different.



I agree - that statement is flat-out BS. Both are equally irrelevant.



Both the myth and the "refuting evidence" are 100% correct. How? The US population is much larger than it was in 1973. Mystery solved.



Thanks for the stats?



Yes - and you've already established they're legal. Your point?



Yes - but they weren't legal. Of that number, around half of them reported they got the gun "from a family member or friend", and most of the rest say that they bought the gun from a drug dealer, and knew the gun and transaction were both illegal.



I'm not even kidding - this is the source the article took me to: http://www.fixgunchecks.org/deleteonlineoutlaws



Yeah - there's that pesky sample size issue again:



As of this month, there are 2,667 licensed firearms dealers in California (according to the ATF - which manages FFLs). That's 17% of all firearms dealers in CA.



The BATF is backward in so many ways it's not even funny. There is no reason for them to exist at all, and they should just get folded into the FBI anyway. They were originally a part of the Treasury dept, as their mission was to regulate and police the requirements for firearms dealers. In 2006, Congress split them off from the Treasury dept to make them a separate agency, which means their director has to be approved by the Senate (which is the same for directors of other agencies - the FBI, CIA, etc). They were attempting to redefine the agency in the new light that it had been tasked with (general jurisdiction over all federal gun crimes, not just those committed by dealers/traffickers). The fact that Congress hasn't been able to approve any nominee since has less to do with the NRA and more to do with the fact that Congress can't get *anything* done, ever.

The data comes from these two sources, BTW (as per the links in the article thomas81 posted):

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf (page 87)
http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/conten ... 0.full.pdf (page 4)

To illustrate the power of the association between gun ownership and gun death, I just ran a regression analysis based on those data, yielding an R-Squared of 0.4963.

In other words, almost 50 percent of the variation in gun deaths between US states can be statistically explained by a single variable: Gun ownership. Vague correlation?

Second of all, it is incorrect to claim that the causation is "entirely presumed". Several studies have specifically linked the mere access to guns several types of gun-related deaths

The following are referenced in the Pediatrics link from thomas81's post:

Injury and suicide among adolescents:
http://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/pdf/LockboxJAMA.pdf

Suicide in general:
http://www.healthandlearning.org/docume ... auma04.pdf

Another look at the gun ownership/homicide correlation (with control for different variables)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447364/

An illustrative example from the article comparing "high-gun" and "low-gun" states:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... /table/t3/

Other examples I came across:

Gun-related deaths in domestic violence against women:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/

Homicide and suicide risk:
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/1 ... 9.full.pdf

A review on the scientific studies of the relative risks and benefits of having a gun in the home (Conclusion: The risks outweigh the benefits)
http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks ... 202011.pdf



If you check the links I provided, you will see that the *homicide* link also is robust.

Besides, are only bullets fired with the intent to kill others lethal?

... Oh, and one more thing...




Could you please elaborate? Last time I checked, the effect of sample size on the accuracy of statistical estimates follows the law of diminishing returns. A lot of opinion polling organizations (see LINK) don't bother with larger sample sizes than 1,500 because larger sample sizes have very little effect on the margin of error. Sample sizes of 1,905 - 2,400 people should be more than adequate if you want to test a simple correlation between two variables.

It is reasonable to accept more stringent statistical standards for the search for the Higgs-Boson, for instance, but I doubt that the conclusion that private property rights are good for economic growth (one of the only truly robust conclusions in the social sciences) would even hold at that standard. Nonetheless, market economies are in general much more wealthy than non-market economies.

On a more serious note, though:

STICK TO f*****g PEER-REVIEWED SCIENCE WHEN DISCUSSING THE EFFECT OF GUNS!

There is no reason (unless one is deliberately trying to misrepresent reality) to embrace biased sites advocating countless pro-gun/anti-gun beliefs with either overt or covert agendas, cherry-picking "studies" to suit their particular political positions. Just look at the science... How hard can it be?

After all, one of the rationales for the institution of peer review is to weed out the unscientific crap and allow those who have the scientific skills and the scientific integrity to provide the actual facts.

The political debate about guns in the US, however, seems to have a lower standard of evidence than the average YouTube video...

... In other words... Why did I even bother with this post?

/Out.

WHY THE HELL DID THEY STOP?!
Christ, a good idea comes along, and again, they flounder.

BECAUSE ITS ILLEGAL!

Seriously, contribute something of value to the discussion or go away.

Statistically speaking, 100% of gun deaths involve gun ownership. That much is obvious - you can't kill someone with a gun if you don't have one. It stands to reason that more guns will approximately equal more deaths with guns. However, that isn't nearly the entire picture.



Of course not - but not all bullets fired that end up killing are *crimes* either.






I don't claim to be a statistician - but it seems to me that when you wish to extrapolate multiple variables (how many people have used a gun in self-defense, and then how many of those people acted in an extra-legal capacity) you need a much larger sample size because you're whittling down your sample size dramatically. To determine that 1% of americans reported using guns in self defense, your sample size decreases from 2,000 to 2. Of those 2 people, if one acted outside of the law, that's a 50% rate.

But there's another problem with the methodology of that study - they determined whether each case was legal or not by taking the description supplied by the person and giving it to a criminal court judge to decide. The judge knew nothing of the altercation other than the passing description the person on the other end of the phone made.

In most self-defense shooting situations, tiny details many times make up the difference between a shooting that is justified, and a shooting that is manslaughter.

Only in America - illegal to take away guns!
We don't peace - we just want to die!

Christ, how f*****g stupid.

Indeed...

...then we agree?
Like it!

change the law, so that taking away firearms is not illegal and everyone is safer. We're not banning firearms that's so opposed, but we can just take there money and there guns - just purchased - all legally! Brilliant! Then melt down the gun for raw materials and it's profit galore!