351–360 of 373 posts
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Two numbers are similar. Obviously they must both be fictitious. Such a sound argument of the highest caliber. Or maybe it was just money laundering for an ad hominem .
There's a better estimate right there in the second sentence.
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> I grew up in a rural area, I own rural property and I will be back for Christmas. I think you have some odd ideas about why people live in rural areas. 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 he…
> So that right there is enough to question the efficacy of what you suggest (gun control as a mechanism to prevent suicide). It isn't really, because we have lots of other evidence to show that reducing access to means and methods is useful. Mann JJ et al(2005), "Authors identified 6 studies that have demonstrated a decrease in firearms-related suicides after introduction of firearm control legislation, two of which…
You're already measuring the lethality of the suicide method in the reviews you cited, because the studies involved measured actual suicide rates and not attempts. So let's not double count any effect or handwave away any failure to show an effect based on dubious logic.
> two of which also proved a positive effect on overall suicide rates
Another way to put this is that four of six studies failed to show an effect. ;) The language "proved" here is a little loaded compared to what's usually used in meta-analyses and systemic reviews for this exact reason.
> "While firearms are used in less than six percent of suicide attempts, over half of suicide deaths are with firearms."
One way to interpret this: people who choose to commit suicide spin a roulette wheel to pick suicide method (or pick whatever is convenient), and the people who pick firearms die more.
Another way to interpret this: people who are more determined to die choose more lethal suicide attempt methods, implement them better, and then die at a higher rate. Firearms are one "more lethal" choice.
Truth is probably somewhere in-between... Everyone knows that hanging is a lot more lethal than overdose attempts, and is roughly equally convenient/available. Including the people committing suicide.
We can even see e.g. research has shown that people who attempt a more lethal method and fail are more likely to successfully commit suicide later-- even when the later method is different.
In any event, I do not really like banning things to avoid possible damage people might do to themselves with those things. There's all kinds of things we could get rid of that would cause a big, clearer improvement to public health at a cost to personal liberty (cigarettes, motorcycles, fast food, processed meats, poutine, etc)...
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> I grew up in a rural area, I own rural property and I will be back for Christmas. I think you have some odd ideas about why people live in rural areas. 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 he…
> 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. This is great because the self-defence argument isn't applicable at all for these guns, then.…
But you ignored the whole actual line of argument around the guns used for defense, so you could get a little snipey comment in here.
> I'm curious about what mechanism you think explains the result that owning a gun increases the non-gun suicide rate.
Do you think that people who choose to own guns are identical to people who don't? Do you think attempts to pick a few controlling variables to try and even out the populations makes a difference? Maybe there are differences in values and personality attributes between gun owners and non-gun owners?
Seriously, everyone knows that epidemiological studies, and even case control studies suck, in large part because of just how prone they are to finding associations that are actually caused by unmeasured factors that affect multiple measured variables.
> Is this the same Ludwig and Cook that found in 2004 that handgun owners accounted for a much higher rate of suicides than long rifles? That's one of the reasons I suggest owning a 22 bolt action.
Again, handgun owners have different underlying beliefs and demographics than people who only own rifles. And if you're going to buy a weapon just for suicide, everyone knows a rifle is less convenient than a handgun and only equally effective. But-- if one were to accept your argument-- this further "exonerates" "assault rifles". ;)
I'm done with your cherrypicking of arguments and sniping at little passages. Have a nice day.
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That's not the argument at all. Rather it's that if you address the root cause, which you need to do anyway, then you don't need to worry about mitigations. If your house has a gas leak and someone says "don't turn on the light, it's dangerous" then even if they're right, the real solution is to do something about the gas leak, not to sit in darkness and do nothing while your house is full of gas. And once the gas is…
Metaphors are unhelpful. First of all, here's the US CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicideTechnicalP... Page 12 says "Reduce access to lethal means among persons at risk of suicide" Here's the World Health Organisation: https://www.who.int/mental_health/mhgap/evidence/suicide/q7/... > At the population level, restricting access to means of self-harm (such as pesticides, firearms, high places) is rec…
Yes of course. People on psychiatric hold shouldn't have access to firearms any more than they should have access to cutlery or shoelaces.
> The reducing access to means and methods is equivalent in your metaphor to "as you're leaving this gas filled house do not strike any matches".
Leaving the house is equivalent to a psychiatric hold.
> If you have tens of thousands of people dying each year from one method of suicide you need to reduce access to that method while you're putting in place other stuff to reduce suicidality in the population.
We already do this for anyone known to be at immediate risk, the problem is in accurately identifying who that is.
There is also a real risk that if you do things like condition voluntary outpatient psychiatric treatment on losing access to firearms, that would deter people who own firearms from seeking treatment. Then the choice isn't between treatment and firearms or treatment and no firearms, it's between firearms and treatment or firearms and no treatment.
> In your analogy "doing something about the gas leak" (fixing suicidality across a population) is something that takes years of concerted effort across national and local government agencies, see the linked CDC report above for examples.
Which is, nonetheless, still the only real solution.
What are you suggesting that we do? Declare a state of emergency and confiscate all firearms, but then give them back in a few years once we better address the root causes of suicide? Considering that firearms are used in about half of US suicide deaths and some non-zero number those would only switch to another method, that seems rather extreme for a temporary solution that would solve less than half of the problem, even if it wasn't politically infeasible.
And spending time fighting over that instead of starting to address the root causes right now means that the same number of people die in the short term (as we do nothing but argue) and more die in the long term because it's that much longer before a real solution that addresses the problem independent of method is actually implemented.
We know that there is a large contingent of people who oppose restricting firearms, but who is it in opposition to getting underway with this "concerted effort across national and local government agencies" right away?
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> Even more interesting to me is the idea that the American government has such a hold over the patriots in the military that they could be commanded to enforce tyranny. Tyranny generally doesn't come overnight. There are plenty of things you can ask soldiers to do that they'll feel uncomfortable about but still do it, and then in eighteen months when it's time to reenlist they decline. A decade later you've got only…
So what I'm hearing you say is that you feel an american insurgency will be effective and persistent. Where is the confederacy?
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That's not the argument at all. Rather it's that if you address the root cause, which you need to do anyway, then you don't need to worry about mitigations. If your house has a gas leak and someone says "don't turn on the light, it's dangerous" then even if they're right, the real solution is to do something about the gas leak, not to sit in darkness and do nothing while your house is full of gas. And once the gas is…
Luckily for gun control advocates the rate of firearm injuries also sharply increases for households that own guns, too. So while yeah, there may be other issues with mental health, gun training, domestic violence etc, you can significantly reduce deaths and injuries by removing guns - which people often have because they think having a gun will reduce those.
The thing about statistics is that they have causes. More people having guns causes more criminals to be shot (or, better yet, deterred), but also more accidents. But those are two different things, one good and one bad, so why don't we work to reduce the bad and keep the good instead of losing both?
We know that much of the bad is caused by poor safety training and by teenagers, so why not add firearms safety training to the school curriculum? How many accidental deaths would be prevented by a semester of "always assume it's loaded and don't point the barrel at anything you wouldn't want to shoot"?
We know that gun safes and range practice reduce accidents, so why not institute some tax incentives? These things may cost less than requiring additional law enforcement and much less than accidental shootings.
And soon you have a net positive instead of a net negative. (Though your original claim did fail to account for the deterrent effect on crime. Which is hard to measure since it's area-wide rather than per-household given that criminals know local culture but not which individual households are armed, but just measuring the households with firearms against those without fails to account for it at all.)
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How do you want me to look for the data? Thank you for acknowledging that you didn't have actual data you were basing that claim on in the first place.
What? You won't take a pinky swear as proof? Prepare for some kind of snarky defense of a flawed "correlation is causation" argument.
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> 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. This is great because the self-defence argument isn't applicable at all for these guns, then.…
> This is great because the self-defence argument isn't applicable at all for these guns, then. Hooray! But you ignored the whole actual line of argument around the guns used for defense, so you could get a little snipey comment in here. > I'm curious about what mechanism you think explains the result that owning a gun increases the non-gun suicide rate. Do you think that people who choose to own guns are identical t…
What argument negates the fact that owning a gun is dangerous for the owner, in some of the exact ways a gun is meant to defend against (and some of the ways rural men seem to think they're immune to)?
> Seriously, everyone knows that epidemiological studies, and even case control studies suck, in large part because of just how prone they are to finding associations that are actually caused by unmeasured factors that affect multiple measured variables.
What superior alternative are you proposing?
> And if you're going to buy a weapon just for suicide, everyone knows a rifle is less convenient than a handgun and only equally effective.
Again, this is precisely one of the reasons why I recommend owning a 22 bolt action.
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> a major critique of this methodology remains unanswered: that the increased risk of completed suicide is so tightly coupled with military servitude that the role of guns cannot be convincingly established in either the univariate or multivariate analysis. > What do you say to this?
I say this supposedly major critique isn't represented in the data. The everytown article you seem to be mentioning recommends tighter gun controls.
I have to say: I think that you have stopped making sense or putting in any effort to this discussion so I'm just going to move on.
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Luckily for gun control advocates the rate of firearm injuries also sharply increases for households that own guns, too. So while yeah, there may be other issues with mental health, gun training, domestic violence etc, you can significantly reduce deaths and injuries by removing guns - which people often have because they think having a gun will reduce those.
> So while yeah, there may be other issues with mental health, gun training, domestic violence etc, you can significantly reduce deaths and injuries by removing guns - which people often have because they think having a gun will reduce those. The thing about statistics is that they have causes. More people having guns causes more criminals to be shot (or, better yet, deterred), but also more accidents. But those are…
Actually, people tend to more often die of homicide if they own a gun.