United States to fund gun-violence research after 20-year freeze

OK. I think you heavily overestimate your own level of knowledge and understanding on this topic.

> A bolt action 22 is enough for pretty much anyone,

This is a terrible defensive choice. It is unlikely to be available if needed, and doesn't work well at short-moderate range. Longer ranges are too far for credible self defense. Also, the lethality is limited; you're going to need to get lucky to stop someone from stabbing the fuck out of you.

There are a whole lot of sketchy people who come out because the area is isolated and police response is slow.

I'm not rural BTW; I just spend a couple months a year up there recreationally.

> assault rifles is worth their availability.

Civilian semi-auto rifles use in crime (which aren't "assault rifles" btw)-- and in suicide-- is negligible. It's rounding error on the statistics.

> Owning a gun also significantly increases the risk of death by suicide.

Correlation equals causation, amirite? Risk of non-gun suicide increases with firearm ownership, but it's still clearly causative. ;)

Ok. How do you want me to look for the data?

> 1) a survey on firearms-related deaths that doesn't even look at in-home use or defensive vs offensive use.

It's not just a survey.

> 2) A review of 26-year-old death certificates. Did you read this part? "Blacks, persons less than 35 years of age or older than age 100 years, and persons who died from external causes of homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury were oversampled in this survey."

Oversampling doesn't invalidate studies. Are you annoyed they acknowledged it? A less rigorous study wouldn't.

> 3) Uses same cooked data as #2, study done by an anti-gun interest group (VPC).

What neutral groups do you think are studying this stuff? The CDC? Well, they can start now.

> 4) Again uses the same cooked data from 26 years ago. > > 5) A thirty-year-old phone survey that doesn't even examine in-home gun use. Seriously?

Could you help me understand what you'd consider "evidence", considering you won't accept articles from peer-reviewed journals. Why does suicide or homicide have to happen "in-home" for it to be valid?

I'll provide more references if you can explain exactly what evidence would satisfy you. Otherwise it seems like a waste of time on my part.

I have odd ideas about the behavior of itinerants who pass through rural areas. It's amazing the amount of crime you can have when law enforcement effectively doesn't exist.

> Do you need an assault rifle (I didn't mention semi-auto rifles) to defend against meth heads with knives?

Civilians (with exceptions for grandfathered items before 1984 and manufacturers, etc) can't legally own anything that meets the real definition of "assault rifle". Things people call "assault weapons" are often synonymous with a subset of semi-auto rifles. If semi-auto rifles are nearly irrelevant in violent crime epidemiology, subsets of them are even more so. :P

Handguns are the weapon of choice for ordinary defense scenarios, because they can be readily carried, have a muzzle energy that limits overpenetration risks, and can be positively controlled by the wielder even in short-range engagement scenarios.

I "need" "assault rifles" (which they're not) because I shoot them in competitive events and for fun and training. They're not a particularly good choice for suicide; they're not really that useful in crime scenarios; they are good at marksmanship and plinking. They're functionally identical to other semi-automatic rifles.

> Actually, some studies have found a slight negative correlation for other types of suicide when people own guns. Haven't seen one yet that says the risk increases for non-gun suicides.

First, Ludwig and Cook performed a time-series analysis of the Brady law and found a statistically significant reduction in gun suicide rates after the law's passage, but a non-statistically significant change in suicide rates. So that right there is enough to question the efficacy of what you suggest (gun control as a mechanism to prevent suicide).

In 2004, the NRC said:

> There is also cross-sectional, ecological association between gun ownership and overall risk of suicide, but this association is more modest than the association between gun ownership and gun suicide; it is less consistently observed across time, place, and persons; and the causal relation remains unclear

It's a bit dubious that internet-rando-from-outside-the-US can be trusted to confidently proclaim the efficacy of gun control as a suicide reduction technique when the nation's research academies are not so sure. ;)

Also a surprisingly large fraction of guns used in suicide are purchased shortly before death, which calls into question the efficacy of removing guns from households as a means to prevent suicide.

But for what I directly asserted, "Guns and Suicide,” , Duggan (2003) found a positive correlation between firearm prevalence and nonfirearm suicide. “The Epidemiology of Case Fatality Rates for Suicide in the Northeast,”, Miller, 2004 found a positive correlation between firearm prevalence and nonfirearm suicide attempts. The finding that high firearm prevalence is correlated with increased nonfirearm suicide rates is also supported by multiple analyses by different authors of the CDC's BRFSS data.

But anyways-- time for me to move on. We're down in the weeds and won't be read by others; the stuff you assert seems to vary between uninformed and dubious; and neither of us is gonna convince the other.

  How do you want me to look for the data?

Reducing access to means and methods is one of the most important suicide prevention measures we can take. It's a key part of any national suicide prevention strategy.

> because even without a gun, someone may have a rope on hand, or a bottle of pills.

People tend to have a preferred method, and method substitution takes years. But assume they do instantly switch from using a gun to using some other method: that's still beneficial, because they've switched from something that's very lethal to something that's probably less lethal.