Oh, please, there are hundreds of variables that influence this.
Which means, that low incarceration rates are -- at minimum -- not a stronger cause of violent crime than those "hundreds of variables"; and perhaps not a cause of violent crime at all.
People can reasonably conclude from the data that lower violent crime rates in the US than in the UK are due to higher incarceration rates without seeing a correlation across countries.
No, you cannot reasonably reach a conclusion based on two data points when other data doesn't fit on any sort of interpolated curve. That's the same bad reasoning gun control advocates use: the UK has a lower murder rate than the US, the UK has strong gun control, therefore strong gun control strongly lowers the murder rate. Never mind that you don't see a dose/response relationship when you plot gun control versus homicide rates...
Many gun rights advocates makes the opposite error: the UK has a higher violent crime rate than the US, the UK has strong gun control, therefore strong gun control strongly increase the violent crime rate (unarmed victims are temping).
The data indicates that neither incarceration rates nor gun ownership is a primary driver or deterrent of violence on a society-wide level. (Locking up an individual person, or giving a good person a gun to defend themselves, can impact that person and those around them, of course.)
Putting a web server on the internet means that people will connect to it with various types of software. You don't get to determine what that software is -- a TOS that says "no IE" is meaningless, and so it one that says "no bots"; and using IE or bots to access that site, in and of itself, is not a wrong.
I didn't say murders, I said deaths. Because that is the appropriate comparison with motor vehicle deaths.
No, it's not, because most firearms deaths are suicides -- almost all of those people would kill themselves by other means if firearms magically became unavailable, while many people killed in car crashes would survive if we magically had better mass transit.
Conflating homicides with suicides under the title "gun deaths" is an intellectually dishonest tactic. I assumed you weren't doing it.
I've no idea what point you want to make with the estimate of "defensive firearms", as you don't say.
I would think that pointing out that defensive firearms uses are at least ten times, perhaps 250 times, more common than murders using firearms would speak for itself. If you choose not to see the point, all I can do is offer my hopes that you someday become less blinded by your biases.
But given the source of the figures is a gun lobby site, the figures are not reputable anyway.
Evidence that guncite.com is owned by lobbyists? Or do you just like to dismiss information contrary to your biases with such labels?
Nothing personal, but I think you have a rather twisted view of the whole thing.
And I think that the view that claims that property is a right rather than an artificial means of securing rights, and that enforcing these "property rights" is not an "initial use of force", is the twisted view. Would you like to discuss, or would you like to throw loaded adjectives at each other for a while?
one is the aforementioned fantasy of killing evil gang members or whatever. I'm going to dismiss this one, it's been argued to death and I think it's ridiculous so I'm not going to go any further with that.
In other words: "I don't have a cogent reply".
Perhaps you are too young to remember the LA riots, and the dramatic footage of gun battles with looters. Obviously that's an extreme and highly unlikely sort of event, and if shots are fired at all in a defensive situation (quite often showing a gun in enough to discourage an attacker) it's usually only a few. But preparing for the worst is a valid strategy.
More importantly, though, you're asking the question backward. It is not up to someone who wishes to own a "high capacity" magazine to justify his or her choice; it's up to those who want to stop him or her to demonstrate that having such an item is a threat to someone's rights and that a ban would be an effective and minimally-invasive counter to that threat.
but handguns are the biggest killers in the US by far and away.
Never, ever, has a handgun gotten up, pointed itself at someone, and pulled its own trigger. If handguns are "killers", so are cars (which are involved in far more deaths), knifes, axes, fists, gasoline...
It says right there in the second amendment: well regulated.
..which mean "well-trained and disciplined", not "subject to heavy legal regulation"; and it says that because such a militia is important, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. It does *NOT* say that the rights of some state-designated official militia shall not be infringed, it say the right of the people.
Problems arise when you get government confused with (or involved in) economics.
Since all private property comes from government (who issued that land deed?), getting government out of economics means getting rid of private property as we know it.
Now, anarchists -- libertarian socialists, the original libertarians -- are down with that, but most Americans talking about getting government out of economics mean that government should create private property, give it to capitalists, and then use force to defend those capitalist's "property rights".
there was an article in Scientific American decades ago which explained the evidence and statistics. The conclusion hasn't changed since then.
Scientific American isn't known as a reputable criminal justice journal.
Since the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% over the past two decades while the number of guns in private hands and the number of "shall issue" CCW states has increased, anyone who hasn't changed their conclusions over that time either started off understanding that strong gun control laws aren't useful, or hasn't examined the evidence.
History disagrees. I mean the very fact that there is history -- we went from nomadic illiterate gatherer-hunters to settled literate agriculturalists. That was a one-way change. Writing and living in houses are not going to go away.
We're now in int midst of a transition from settled literate agriculturalists to some sort of technological, industrial way of life; is we manage to survive it, this will also be a one-way change.
We make progress. Overall, violent death is less common than it was centuries ago. Slavery is rarer. Sexism and religious bigotry are fading -- not gone, by any means, but large chunks of the human population are opposed to those ideas.
Yes, it's not a one-way progression, and yes, sometimes believers in utopias get dangerous. That doesn't mean that it's not valid to envision and work for progress in the human condition.
yet even after mass shootings no-one wants to discuss gun control.
I see lots of people happy to discuss gun control. Unfortunately, too many gun control advocates only want to "discuss" gun control if that means no well-informed people will show up to point out why the gun control schemes under discussion are not helpful.
Worse that that, actually, it's a high-fructose sweetener, which makes it ironic that many folks who avoid HFCS flock to agave nectar.
But all the hubbub about which sweetener is best misses the mark. If sweeteners are making up a significant part of your food intake, you're doing it wrong.
I mean, how would you like the worst day of your life being thrown up on YouTube by some paparazzi?
Who said the guy was going to post it on YouTube? Taping the cops is an excellent precaution that I'd like all citizens to get into the habit of doing, but unless they do something bad there's no need to post the vid.
For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to offer my sympathies, and best wishes that in the fullness of time you may heal and find love again. (It's not too late -- I'm in my early 40s myself and just started dating someone pretty nifty.) Take care.
I'll vote for anyone that'll lower taxes and spend less.
This is the problem with the public. Taxes in the U.S., overall, are already quite low compared to other nations and to our history. They need to rise, most especially on the weathy, not be lowered.
Unfortunately that amounts to pretty much no-one in either party and I'm only allowed to vote for those 2 parties so I'm screwed.
"Allowed" by whom? There are numerous "third parties" on the ballot in most states; and while third parties rarely win directly due to out fsck-up electoral system, voting for them does influence the Big Two.
When I was a kid with a snapshot camera dropping film off at the Fotomat, just about the only person who ever saw those prints was me. Now when I share even the dumbest photo on the net, hundreds of people might see it. Respectfully, I believe your assertion is 100% bass-ackwards.
This is more like a store ripping the ads out of a newspaper for you before sale.
I might be willing to pay for such a service. Sure, $1.00 for the Sunday paper, $1.05 for the Sunday paper with all the advertising circulars removed and recycled for me, and any other ads blotted out with a magic marker, saving my brain the effort of screening them out of my attention.
Advertising-supported content, at least as done now, is a broken model. Ideally, we'd all pay $N additional per month to our ISP, who would divy that amount up among content providers based on accesses.
Our Founding Fathers who were far, far, far more intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful than 99.9% of US citizens now alive new the absurdity of direct democracy which is why we have a Representative Republic.
So well-read and thoughtful that many of them were slave-holders, and they wrote slavery into the Constitution, thought the vote should only go to white male land-owners, passed the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts...
Yes, the Constitution was a step forward, hooray USA. But let's lose the worship of the "Founding Fathers".
Slashdot Mirror
See the relevant xkcd strip.
Not always, no. You can send an SMS from a hell of a lot more territory than you can get a data connection.
Which means, that low incarceration rates are -- at minimum -- not a stronger cause of violent crime than those "hundreds of variables"; and perhaps not a cause of violent crime at all.
No, you cannot reasonably reach a conclusion based on two data points when other data doesn't fit on any sort of interpolated curve. That's the same bad reasoning gun control advocates use: the UK has a lower murder rate than the US, the UK has strong gun control, therefore strong gun control strongly lowers the murder rate. Never mind that you don't see a dose/response relationship when you plot gun control versus homicide rates...
Many gun rights advocates makes the opposite error: the UK has a higher violent crime rate than the US, the UK has strong gun control, therefore strong gun control strongly increase the violent crime rate (unarmed victims are temping).
The data indicates that neither incarceration rates nor gun ownership is a primary driver or deterrent of violence on a society-wide level. (Locking up an individual person, or giving a good person a gun to defend themselves, can impact that person and those around them, of course.)
Correct.
If low incarceration rates were a strong cause of violent crime, then Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany would be much more violent than the UK.
So the violent crime wave may be attributed to the lower incarceration rate by right-wing politicians, but not by anyone with a clue.
Then its up to JSTOR to detect and block bots.
Putting a web server on the internet means that people will connect to it with various types of software. You don't get to determine what that software is -- a TOS that says "no IE" is meaningless, and so it one that says "no bots"; and using IE or bots to access that site, in and of itself, is not a wrong.
No, it's not, because most firearms deaths are suicides -- almost all of those people would kill themselves by other means if firearms magically became unavailable, while many people killed in car crashes would survive if we magically had better mass transit.
Conflating homicides with suicides under the title "gun deaths" is an intellectually dishonest tactic. I assumed you weren't doing it.
I would think that pointing out that defensive firearms uses are at least ten times, perhaps 250 times, more common than murders using firearms would speak for itself. If you choose not to see the point, all I can do is offer my hopes that you someday become less blinded by your biases.
Evidence that guncite.com is owned by lobbyists? Or do you just like to dismiss information contrary to your biases with such labels?
You can find those same numbers cited in a National Criminal Justice Reference Service publication here: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf
And I think that the view that claims that property is a right rather than an artificial means of securing rights, and that enforcing these "property rights" is not an "initial use of force", is the twisted view. Would you like to discuss, or would you like to throw loaded adjectives at each other for a while?
Huh? I'd say that's about the most important and interesting thing we can say about the situation.
Annual motor vehicle traffic deaths: 33,687
Murders committed using a firearm, 2011: 67.7% * 14,612 = 9,892
Lowest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 108,000
Highest estimate of number of defensive firearms uses per year: 2,500,000
In other words: "I don't have a cogent reply".
Perhaps you are too young to remember the LA riots, and the dramatic footage of gun battles with looters. Obviously that's an extreme and highly unlikely sort of event, and if shots are fired at all in a defensive situation (quite often showing a gun in enough to discourage an attacker) it's usually only a few. But preparing for the worst is a valid strategy.
More importantly, though, you're asking the question backward. It is not up to someone who wishes to own a "high capacity" magazine to justify his or her choice; it's up to those who want to stop him or her to demonstrate that having such an item is a threat to someone's rights and that a ban would be an effective and minimally-invasive counter to that threat.
Never, ever, has a handgun gotten up, pointed itself at someone, and pulled its own trigger. If handguns are "killers", so are cars (which are involved in far more deaths), knifes, axes, fists, gasoline...
..which mean "well-trained and disciplined", not "subject to heavy legal regulation"; and it says that because such a militia is important, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. It does *NOT* say that the rights of some state-designated official militia shall not be infringed, it say the right of the people.
Since all private property comes from government (who issued that land deed?), getting government out of economics means getting rid of private property as we know it.
Now, anarchists -- libertarian socialists, the original libertarians -- are down with that, but most Americans talking about getting government out of economics mean that government should create private property, give it to capitalists, and then use force to defend those capitalist's "property rights".
Scientific American isn't known as a reputable criminal justice journal.
Since the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% over the past two decades while the number of guns in private hands and the number of "shall issue" CCW states has increased, anyone who hasn't changed their conclusions over that time either started off understanding that strong gun control laws aren't useful, or hasn't examined the evidence.
Yes, it does.
And that, kids, is why your elders have land lines. Now get off my lawn.
History disagrees. I mean the very fact that there is history -- we went from nomadic illiterate gatherer-hunters to settled literate agriculturalists. That was a one-way change. Writing and living in houses are not going to go away.
We're now in int midst of a transition from settled literate agriculturalists to some sort of technological, industrial way of life; is we manage to survive it, this will also be a one-way change.
We make progress. Overall, violent death is less common than it was centuries ago. Slavery is rarer. Sexism and religious bigotry are fading -- not gone, by any means, but large chunks of the human population are opposed to those ideas.
Yes, it's not a one-way progression, and yes, sometimes believers in utopias get dangerous. That doesn't mean that it's not valid to envision and work for progress in the human condition.
I see lots of people happy to discuss gun control. Unfortunately, too many gun control advocates only want to "discuss" gun control if that means no well-informed people will show up to point out why the gun control schemes under discussion are not helpful.
Rare earth magnets for sale.
Hint: the fact that I can buy razor blades does not mean that the CPSC wouldn't bop me for selling them as toys.
HTH. HAND.
Worse that that, actually, it's a high-fructose sweetener, which makes it ironic that many folks who avoid HFCS flock to agave nectar.
But all the hubbub about which sweetener is best misses the mark. If sweeteners are making up a significant part of your food intake, you're doing it wrong.
If Opera is calling their MITM attack "totally secure", then they are lying bastards.
Who said the guy was going to post it on YouTube? Taping the cops is an excellent precaution that I'd like all citizens to get into the habit of doing, but unless they do something bad there's no need to post the vid.
For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to offer my sympathies, and best wishes that in the fullness of time you may heal and find love again. (It's not too late -- I'm in my early 40s myself and just started dating someone pretty nifty.) Take care.
This is the problem with the public. Taxes in the U.S., overall, are already quite low compared to other nations and to our history. They need to rise, most especially on the weathy, not be lowered.
"Allowed" by whom? There are numerous "third parties" on the ballot in most states; and while third parties rarely win directly due to out fsck-up electoral system, voting for them does influence the Big Two.
LOL WHUT?
When I was a kid with a snapshot camera dropping film off at the Fotomat, just about the only person who ever saw those prints was me. Now when I share even the dumbest photo on the net, hundreds of people might see it. Respectfully, I believe your assertion is 100% bass-ackwards.
And of course drug dealers, terrorists, and child pornographers will be careful to only use government-approved, registered drones.
I might be willing to pay for such a service. Sure, $1.00 for the Sunday paper, $1.05 for the Sunday paper with all the advertising circulars removed and recycled for me, and any other ads blotted out with a magic marker, saving my brain the effort of screening them out of my attention.
Advertising-supported content, at least as done now, is a broken model. Ideally, we'd all pay $N additional per month to our ISP, who would divy that amount up among content providers based on accesses.
So well-read and thoughtful that many of them were slave-holders, and they wrote slavery into the Constitution, thought the vote should only go to white male land-owners, passed the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts...
Yes, the Constitution was a step forward, hooray USA. But let's lose the worship of the "Founding Fathers".