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A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

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Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#131

Post by DanBC »

danielweber wrote: post #129
DanBC wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method. What does "real world" evidence mean? Because real world evidence from England (paracetamol pack sizes; switch to natural gas from coal gas; removing coproxamol from general use) shows that many people do not find another method.

The real world evidence in the comment you replied to, from the paragraph that you selected your quote from. 1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate. 2. The fact that…

You seem to be saying that there are two groups of equal size (people who complete suicide by gun and people who complete suicide by other methods) and then saying that if you remove access to guns that all or most of the gun group would just switch to the other group and that the total number would stay the same.

Don't think that an attempted suicide by gun is the same as an attempt using another method. Guns are a very lethal method of suicide. Other methods of suicide are not as sure. This might explain the differences in completed suicide numbers for men and women (more men die to suicide) and rates of self harm (very many more women self harm) -- men might be using more lethal methods.

Some members of the "want to use a gun as a method of suicide group" would use a different method and would complete suicide. But certainly not all that group. Some would use a less fatal method and attempt suicide but not die. Others would find help before attempting suicide.

For a tiny US example: look at the Taft and Ellington Bridges in Washington State. They were both used by people to complete suicide, although more people used Ellington. After a number of people dying to suicide in a short number of days a suicide barrier was put up. People did not switch to the other bridge, even though it was close.

http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/

Again: look at the rates of completed suicide in England after switching gas supplies; after removing coproxamol from general use; and after reducing the amount of paracetamol. All of these resulted in permanent drops in the suicide rate.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#132

Post by danielweber »

DanBC wrote: post #131
danielweber wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real world evidence in the comment you replied to, from the paragraph that you selected your quote from. 1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate. 2. The fact that…

You seem to be saying that there are two groups of equal size (people who complete suicide by gun and people who complete suicide by other methods) and then saying that if you remove access to guns that all or most of the gun group would just switch to the other group and that the total number would stay the same. Don't think that an attempted suicide by gun is the same as an attempt using another method. Guns are a…

You seem to be saying that there are two groups of equal size (people who complete suicide by gun and people who complete suicide by other methods)

I think you might be misreading me. The reason it's important that gun-suicide and non-gun-suicide are about the same size is that about equal number of households have guns and don't have guns.

If about 10% of households had access to a gun, and about 10% of suicides were done via gun, I'd say the same thing: access to guns isn't the significant driver of suicide completion.

> But certainly not all that group

Sure, certainly not all. I agree some people would stop. My guess is that around 10% or so.

The problem I have with the thesis that "most people won't switch to another method" is that it leads to a world where the United States is supposed to have an amazingly low suicide rate compared to most other first-world countries. And the thing that is stopping the US is a hot-button political issue, especially because most of the people who are inclined to try and get rid of the guns would disagree that the United States has an especially good mental health system compared to Canada, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, France, and Finland.

You can point to a bunch of small effects, but you want to apply them to the big picture. Well, why isn't the big picture a lot different? If the US had twice the suicide rate of most other countries, I think you'd be right.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#133

Post by MrMember »

Trillinon wrote: post #75

It's important to note that, according to the chart, both are on the decline. Auto deaths are simply declining further. Gun ownership is an important civil liberty in the USA, but one that comes with danger. The Economist is recommending a technological approach to mitigating that danger. Research and development has been done in this department, and many technologies have been applied to modern firearms. Better safe…

>ammunition that prevents over-penetration

Ironically, many gun control advocates still argue against civilian ownership of ammunition that doesn't overpenetrate. In some California cities hollow point ammunition is illegal to buy. In New Jersey it is illegal to carry hollow point ammunition outside the home. The Brady Campaign still to this day calls hollow points "cop killer bullets" despite the fact that every law enforcement department in the country uses them.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#134

Post by philwelch »

ashark wrote: post #107
philwelch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? It's not a far step away from the kind of firepower they lost to in Vietnam and Iraq.

A US government worth overthrowing by armed insurrection and that couldn't be overthrown some other way would practically by definition be willing and able to engage in some really nasty practices to put down a domestic rebellion. Like, filling-mass-graves nasty. Shooting at them wouldn't help. Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than…

Nonetheless, it isn't going to reach the point of the government dropping atom bombs on their own country. The US has forests, cities, and mountains; good partisan country. Heavy weapons aren't effective in these terrains. Even the actual Nazis were held at bay for weeks and months by armed urban uprisings.

The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#135

Post by TheDong »

symfoniq wrote: post #77
TheDong wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the NRA is also in part defined by its members. These members are, for the most part, highly conservative and see technology like that as making guns worse. They don't worry about safety; after-all, the point of the gun is power and something that is dangerous feels more powerful. The other reason people oppose them is because it would reduce the gun-owner's ability to re-sell the gun to criminals with no difficulty…

Most gun owners I know are like Unix programmers, in that they favor the simplest solution that could possibly work. A safety feature that makes a gun significantly more complicated—and therefore possibly less likely to work when needed—is a non-starter for most gun owners. Furthermore, most gun owners have firearms at least in part because of the criminal element. I find the argument that a significant number of gun…

The criminal bit was tongue in cheek. The "government control" bit right afterwards was the real point.

I disagree with your comparison. If a gun owner wanted the simplest thing that would work, then their guns would not be so fancy / complicated. There would not be a market for non-restrictive but non-essential gun enhancements.

Sorry my joke wasn't clear to you and that you missed the point that it's conservatives that fear government control over ownership/reselling who have issue here.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#136

Post by glenra »

apetresc wrote: post #4

From the article: > By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns. Can someone explain the NRA to me? At this point they come…

The notion of "smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption" is a recipe for making guns - an inherently quite simple tool - into something vastly more complicated, expensive, and failure-prone. The NRA doesn't actually oppose the development of "safety features on firearms", but they do oppose the legal requirement that guns should all include features that don't yet exist and haven't been proven to work.

Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?

Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?

As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#137

Post by glenra »

mseebach wrote: post #23
apetresc wrote: post #4

From the article: > By contrast, safety features on firearms—such as smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption—are opposed by the National Rifle Association, whose allies in Congress also block funding for the sort of public-health research that might show, in even clearer detail, the cost of America’s love affair with guns. Can someone explain the NRA to me? At this point they come…

Accepting the premise that it's a good thing that the population at large can own guns, their argument is that they're thinking a few steps ahead: If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns). Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a governm…

The simpler objection is that smartgun technology - being a brand new thing - is likely to be expensive and complicated, which makes the guns that use it expensive and complicated. Forcing people to install it anyway is like a tax - it makes gun ownership more painful and expensive. If you care that lower-income people should be able afford guns for personal defense and that guns should be easy to use, you ought to oppose smartgun mandates as a matter of reflex. At least until the technology in question actually exists so we can see just how expensive and complicated it turns out to be, and probably well past that point.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#138

Post by chrismcb »

vor_ wrote: post #100
sosuke wrote: post #64

I keep looking through the data, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf , and it seems like cars still beat out guns by a good margin. They even say in the article most of the gun deaths are by suicide. Just the few numbers I grabbed says you're still 3 times more likely to be killed by or in a car. I looked again at the article and they don't even list the numbers because it conflicts with the story…

> They even say in the article most of the gun deaths are by suicide. It says "suicides, accidents or domestic violence." These are all vital statistics in determining the deadliness of guns. Gun advocates have been arguing here that suicides shouldn't be counted, which doesn't make sense. Access to an effective suicide method is one more consequence of a gun-owning society. It should be acknowledged, analyzed, and d…

A gun death is not necessarily a gun death. For many people who commit suicide, they will find a way. If there is a gun available they will use it, if there isn't they'll do something else. Contrast that with someone who wants to go postal, with a gun they kill a someone, without a gun perhaps they toss a computer monitor off the desk.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#139

Post by collyw »

sosuke wrote: post #123
vor_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy access to an effective suicide method is one more impact of the pervasiveness of guns in a modern society. It's an important factor in determining gun deaths. In determining the deadliness of drugs to a society, should suicides be ruled out? Accidental overdoses? Drug-related shootings? Where do you draw the line in filtering the statistics so that they're more comfortable for a given political position?

Access to guns is very restrictive in Japan, extremely restrictive in fact, yet they have a higher suicide rate than the United States. http://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

I'll bet they have less gun deaths though.

Re: A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S

#140

Post by FeeTinesAMady »

danielweber wrote: post #125
ianferrel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I intentionally shoot myself and I die, I would likely have found another effective suicide method and died anyway without the gun. This isn't true. You certainly could find another method, but you wouldn't likely do it. Most suicides are not well-planned, they are spur-of-the-moment decisions, and removing easy methods actually reduces the number of suicides substantially. This is not intuitive, but it is supp…

> but it is supported by facts. It might be based on what some sociologist said, but if you compare suicide rates by country, these is nothing suggesting access to guns is a strong driver of suicide rate. If you assume the US turns into Canada, then of every 50 people who kill themselves via gun, about 42 would find another method. (Unless you want to argue that, because of the superiority of the US's health system o…

The US has a superior health system to Canada's now?
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