Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 1 week agoDetermining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.
Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.
But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.
I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.
And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 1 week ago
It’s actually somewhat worse- a great many DGUs go unreported. After all, someone comes at you threateningly, you pull up your shirt and put your hand on your gun, they suddenly change direction. That’s in a sense a DGU. But most people wouldn’t report it because there’s nothing to report.
Thus most DGU stats come from statistical analysis of phone surveys. That’s why it’s inaccurate as hell, with one smart guy saying it’s 60k and another smart guy saying it’s 4 million. It’s all in how you crunch the data.
But it’s important to note that Hemenway is SOLIDLY anti-gun, if there was a way to make the number lower he’d do it. So I take that as a minimum agreed count.
Perhaps not, but it does correlate with OFFENSIVENESS of use.
The person who owns an illegal gun is more likely to be a criminal in a gang.
Correct. Each year about 30-35k people die from gunshot wounds, about 2/3 of those are suicides.
I’ll even give you that increased gun ownership may slightly increase the overall suicide rate- a gun to the head is an easy, painless, instant way to become dead. Instant is the key there, lots of people who choose slower means of suicide change their minds mid-suicide. IE, the guy who jumps off the bridge changes his mind while driving there, the person who takes a bunch of pills changes their mind and pukes / calls 911, etc. If you shoot yourself in the head, you’re dead instantly.
With that all said though, I don’t think this is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership. Suicide is absolutely tragic. But it’s also a decision that a person makes for themself, it’s not something forced upon them. And I don’t believe ‘you might INTENTIONALLY hurt yourself with this tool’ is a valid reason to deny someone from having it. I believe that’s part of having a free country- that if you decide to kill yourself that’s tragic, but it’s ultimately your own responsibility. Just the same- social media and shitty websites can drive a person to suicide, but we don’t shred the 1st Amendment to stop that.