The Flip Side of an Armed Public

OmSigDAVID wrote:

In checking your links, I encountered this:

76-year-old man with Parkinson's opens fire on home invader

This is my point. I easily found eight links showing misuse of guns. If I wanted to take the time to link to them, I had 20 more. You can say wait for the court appearance, but when a 70 year old pulls a gun on someone who passes him or someone draws on a cyclist who he has a road dispute with, it's going to be hard to show that the gun use was appropriate. You present one counter article. That doesn't balance the scales.

My point is not that guns won't on occasion prevent a crime from occurring, I believe it will. My point is that human nature being what it is, there will be more cases of people who would otherwise just get mad and frustrated deciding on the spur of the moment that they can resolve the issue by pulling that gun. Mad that someone flipped you off - show them your gun! I'm not saying you would do such things or that you condone them, but I don't think you can determine who will freak out in an emotional situation and ship them out of the country. The end result is that people in aggregate are less safe in a well armed population. That 76 year old with Parkinsons was more safe, but that cyclist was not. Rather than just throw that idea out there, I went looking for data and I think I found it. I found far more articles than I expected to find even when restricting my search to stuff published last week.

Engineer, u are ignoring the evidence:
I pointed out that your theory is DISPROVEN
by the experience of the US Army, (probably by other armies also)
by police forces and by the citizens of Vermont none of whom
have histories of the rage that u alleged and speculate about,
but u have said nothing about my counterargument, Engineer.

Their collective experience disproves your theory.

I found hundreds of news articles from newspapers all over the country. I restricted my search to articles posted in the last week and still found too many to read through. Some of the top hits:

Engineer, u are ignoring the evidence:
I pointed out that your theory is DISPROVEN
by the experience of the US Army, (probably by other armies also)
by police forces and by the citizens of Vermont none of whom
have histories of the rage that u alleged and speculate about,
but u have said nothing about my counterargument, Engineer.

Their collective experience disproves your theory.

I disagree that professional soldiers
are representative of the average population both due to their training (+) and age (-),

but there are several stories of gun abuse

I'll have to address the good folks of Vermont sometime this weekend,
though if you have some good data concerning their love of guns and lack of violence, please post them.

Responding to the initial post, without having read the responses yet:

engineer wrote:

I found hundreds of news articles from newspapers all over the country. I restricted my search to articles posted in the last week and still found too many to read through. Some of the top hits:

1) "Hundreds of articles" does not equal "hundreds of incidents" -- especially on the internet,
where each interesting news event is picked up by dozens of newspapers and hundreds of blogs.

2) "Eight cases and counting" sounds like a lot, but it's still just anectdotal evidence in a nation of 300 million.
If you specifically search for those things, you will find them. A lot of them.

1) "Hundreds of articles" does not equal "hundreds of incidents" -- especially on the internet, where each interesting news event is picked up by dozens of newspapers and hundreds of blogs.

I disagree that professional soldiers are representative of the average population both due to their training (+) and age (-),

1) "Hundreds of articles" does not equal "hundreds of incidents" -- especially on the internet, where each interesting news event is picked up by dozens of newspapers and hundreds of blogs.

The Russell's Viper is one of the world's most deadly snakes, and it does most of its killing in India.

At least 20,000 victims a year, mostly agricultural workers, suffer the fatal consequences of its bite - pain, vomiting and dizziness, followed by kidney failure. It's not a nice way to die.

the thing is - people using their guns stupidly isn't as "interesting" as stupid people managing to save themselves with their guns in stupid situations

Homicide: Explaining America's Exceptionalism

Since at least 1932, American scholars have recognized the differences in homicide rates between the United States and Europe. They have struggled unsuccessfully to explain these differences, which perhaps is why the topic has almost become a non-issue or tautology: the United States, many concluded, is more violent because it is in its nature to be so. For example, Richard Brown, a distinguished scholar of American homicide, states: "it was natural for Americans to react to stress or provocation with violence."

Along the way, however, they made a startling discovery: when the time line is stretched back farther, to the Middle Ages, much of Europe also exhibited high rates of homicide. For European scholars, this discovery has raised complex theoretical issues.

Since the nineteenth century, it was assumed that urbanization and industrialization had caused both crime and poverty.

Simply put, the rise of urban and industrial society was seen as causing social disruption, which in turn led to increased deviance, crime, and violence. In his famous 1903 essay on the "Metropolitan Personality," George Simmel argued dramatically that the anonymity of cities and the immiseration of industrialization explained a rise in personal violence"which, it now turns out, did not happen.

The shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft left Europe with fewer rather than more homicides per capita.

Only the United States has had the social crack-up posited by theory.

The most recent explications of the European data and their theoretical impact can be seen in articles by Manuel Eisner in the British Journal of Criminology and by Helmut Thome in Crime, History & Societies, where the sociology of Max Weber and Norbert Elias looms large in explanatory power

One thought on using crime statistics: many of the cases I site get pleaded down in court. These people have clean records so it is a first offense, the perpetrator is sorry and the court doesn't perceive a long term threat, so these become misdemeanors. Most of the cases I posted didn't end in injury, some didn't involve gunfire, only the threat of it. A lot of these cases will not show up in felony crime stats.

Have you had an opportunity to read Randolph Roth's American Homicide? I'd be curious to get your take on it.

engineer wrote:

I disagree that professional soldiers are representative of the average population both due to their training (+) and age (-),

Although I generally agree with you that David tends to overstate his case for gun rights, I don't think yours is a particularly good argument to counter him in this case. For one thing, I'm not sure professional soldiers in America get trained in rage control. I certainly wasn't during the 15 months I spent as a draftee in the Bundeswehr. Moreover, young adult males are anthropologically well known as an especially violent demographic in any society. So in this regard, David is actually loading the dice against himself by using soldiers as representatives for the general population.

One version of the "flip side of an armed public" is having 50,000 people killed every year by ******* snakes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5314104.stm

Quote:

The Russell's Viper is one of the world's most deadly snakes, and it does most of its killing in India.

At least 20,000 victims a year, mostly agricultural workers, suffer the fatal consequences of its bite - pain, vomiting and dizziness, followed by kidney failure. It's not a nice way to die.

That cannot happen in a nation whose people are armed. The second amendment is an ideas whose time has come, all over the world.
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