The People in Your Neighborhood: Dumbo Mom Demands Action for Gun Sense

I think we’re talking past each other.

“what other viable force equalizers are there?”

Therein lies the problem. I don’t think we’ve done enough, as a society, to create alternatives to lethal force for these kinds of situations, whether technological or as culturally engrained means of de-escalation. It’s messed up that as a civilization with a [supposedly] functioning judicial system, we still place so much value on allowing people to walk around acting as judge, jury, and executioner in the event of conflict.

We have a better homicide rate than Guatemala and Madagascar! Woo hoo!

I’d argue that my desire to see innovation of nonlethal defensive weapons technology is at least as reasonable and realistic as the idea that guns are the solution to the problem of guns, or that the present situation is acceptable.

As for a civil discussion, I like to think there are corners where that’s a given, and I try to contribute to that. :)

“most of this trouble could go away if you went to a boxing class or a wrestling class and learned how to use your hands like a real man/woman so that your pathetic insecurities would be handled in a safe manner”

Just want to point out that the first thing any responsible self-defense, combat, or martial arts instructor teaches you is to either try to de-escalate a situation without using violence or to flee. It’s only if you have no other choice that you may be compelled (or legally permitted) to use force, whether through hand-to-hand combat or otherwise. There’s nothing about engaging in unnecessary altercations that makes someone a “real man/woman”.

That said, I don’t think what I’ve pointed out undermines the larger point you were trying to make, which if I understand correctly was that most people have the wrong idea about gun ownership as a means of self-defense.

Actually, in part because I have over 15 years of martial arts experience that I recognize the utility of firearms. So, try again.

and most of the rest of the world as well! That’s the point, you’re just cherry-picking the data from nations with tighter gun control that support your argument while ignoring the 100+ nations with tighter gun control that also has a higher homicide rates which refute the claim that gun control is what determines a nation’s homicide rate. Again, that map is basically a map of socioeconomic issues rather than gun laws. Are Guatemala and Madagascar and the remaining 108 countries with higher homicide rates than the US not actually countries?

WSW, I stopped posting on this because you 2nd amendment freaks are intolerable and so set in your ways that there’s no reason to debate the issues. This is a microcosm of what is now going on in America. Emboldened by Fox News and conservative radio, what used to be a fringe element that was negligible, is now able to gain support and vast amounts of supporters. We can no longer shoo you off back to the caves in which you came. We now have to deal with gun freaks who are afraid of their own shadow. Unfortunately, debate is not the way to go because there is no convincing you when your brain is always on fight or flight mode. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’m not going to waste my time on it, anymore.

It has been established that the 2nd Amendment is “fundamental to the Nation’s scheme of ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” which is entirely counter to your assertions of a “microcosm” and “fringe element that was negligible.” These are our rights as enumerated in the Constitution and upon which our country was founded to which many have made great sacrifice. Yes, sir, proudly stubborn about that.

I changed my handle, for now at least, to Minarchist Jerry to distinguish from the conservative definition suggested by WSW. Generally no one knows what Minarchism is. They probably confuse it with a Minotaur.

Oh, so you only want to compare the US to countries with better social safety nets than the US, less social inequality than the US, less racial inequality than the US, lower poverty than the US, etc. Got it! You’re totally not cherry-picking, the only difference between Sweden and the US is gun laws. I’ll have to go back to college and tell my stats professor that when you’re trying to establish correlations, only rich white nations that happen to produce an outcome in line with your political leanings should be counted in a your test and control sets instead of all possible data.

After I go inform all criminologists and statisticians everywhere that they’ve been wrong all along according to internet poster alexblack, I’ll go tell Bernie Sanders to stop wasting his time trying to win the presidency. Clearly his goal to institute the economic and social reforms that most other OECD countries have is a massive waste of time, because again according to internet poster alexblac there’s no difference between the US and Scandinavia except it’s easier to buy a rifle here.

Google just told me that the poverty rate of the US is around 15% while Sweden’s is roughly 3.5% and Norway’s is so low that they can’t derive a rate for it. Since the US and those countries are the exact same, are you going to sue them for libel or should I just take care of that as well

We’re in a pretty weird spot compared to most “peer” countries, honestly. People like to blow this fact off as American Exceptionalism and say there’s no reason we shouldn’t be Norway but it’s the truth. On paper we’re a rich country but in real life due to less stringent labor laws, weaker market controls, and far fewer social programs than most other developed nations we have far higher poverty rates and income equality. We’ve got a lot of racially-based tension and social inequality since there’s around 40,000,000 people here who were descended from slaves, because unlike Europe we horrifically exploited brown people in our country instead of their own. To this day African-Americans face discrimination and financial inequality at rates that make them more like third-world citizens than first, with an unemployment rate twice that of whites and poverty rate almost three times that of whites. It’s no coincidence that most of the higher than average homicide rate is due to minority victims:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_2_murder_victims_by_age_sex_and_race_2014.xls

Black citizens make up the majority of homicide victims even though they’re only about 12.7% of the population, giving them a homicide rate of 15 murders per 100,000 people. Meanwhile the much larger demographic of Caucasian citizens (who suffer from _far_ fewer problems like poverty and unemployment) have a homicide rate of 2.7/100,000. Interestingly enough despite the racism still present in the US it doesn’t actually seem to be a major driver of homicide, as with both white and black victims over 90% of both groups were found to have been killed by someone of the same race.

Taking factors like that into account we’re actually like a third-world nation randomly distributed throughout a much richer and safer developed nation. It’s true many other OECD countries have poor citizens, but they have enough social programs in place they don’t have to kill each other to survive and thanks to far better public education (including heavily subsidized post-secondary) those in poverty have far better social mobility.

There are ways to control for difference such as these in studies but ultimately they’re just sort of highly educated best guesses, and can be manipulated as per the author’s biases. That’s always the problem with things like social sciences, you aren’t using math to predict the consistent attributes of a gluon or anything so much as trying to use trends to predict the inherently unpredictable and culturally-subjective behavior of millions or billions of human beings

Yeah. I can find you a dozen studies that all look at the same timespans and places then come to the differing conclusions that gun ownership causes crime, has no effect on crime, and decreases crime. Case studies are funny like that, thanks to a limited scope you can find your perfect test/control groups while excluding whatever doesn’t agree with you and the only thing stopping you from publishing it is getting so sloppy that whatever sympathetic peer review you submitted it to doesn’t want to be associated with it. It’s not like physics where you can only crunch the numbers from your particle collider experiment one accepted way. With social case studies you can quietly pick a test/control that will VERY likely be favorable to a specific outcome even with random selection, then “eliminate unknown variables” via one of many regression models that if abused can create correlations out of thin air.

I remember reading a critique of this one study, not gun-related, that was circulating a few years back about how someone used a case study to “prove” that GMO crops were bad because they studied the organs of GMO-fed pigs for “inflammation” in slaughterhouses. They then compared that to the organs of organic-diet pigs from smaller specialty farms and claimed to find that GMO diets correlated highly with chronic inflammation. The guy who ripped it apart noted that the particular regression model used wasn’t very well-suited for the task of eliminating other variables that could have caused said inflammation, and showed how you could cleverly manipulate study outcomes with those models. He compiled the data again with one model that pretty much totally eliminated diet as cause for the inflammation, and as an extreme example another which actually managed to flip it around to “prove” organic diets unhealthy.

I don’t take any case study at face value even if it agrees with what I believe, I only use them as proof after I’ve rummaged through what makes them tick and seen that the correlation and methods used to derive it are sound. I mean, I’m super pro gun rights but I will not cite John Lott’s work even though it claims the strongest correlation between gun ownership and decreased rates of violent crime. Much like Kellermann’s or Wintemute’s anti-gun studies which basically claim murderers will sniff out your guns and kill you for owning them, they’re just too full of samples barely small enough to be valid and clearly selected for a favorable outcome which are analyzed with a choice of methods that while technically accepted are clearly not being used objectively.

Oh, by the way, I was remiss not to include a SIXTH basic question for all the geniuses who decided they needed exercise by walking across the bridge to cancel a major constitutional right/guarantee and disrespect a key feature of the American way of life;

6) How many lives do you suppose are SAVED annually by average citizens observing a violent crime or a serious endangerment of a innocent and often helpless victims?

7) And, alternatively, How many times in the last say, ten years a violent criminal, including serial killers, have engaged in serious criminal activity and the victim or a citizen observing the event has NOT been armed or in the case of an observer, did have access to a weapon and did not intervene. The criminal was able to leave the scene and in subsequent incidents multiple other victims resulted often including multiple loss of life incidents?

Will any one reading this even make an attempt to address these questions? CAN anyone reading this answer this (or the other five questions I posed?

Anyone?….No?…..Hmmm……I thought not…..

I think if you look at some of the comments, at least between me and what’s his face, you’ll see that we established why it’s difficult to provide concrete scientific evidence in favor of or against the 2nd Amendment: there exists no “control” for the multitude of variables affecting American gun violence.