Gun Political Issues Megathread. (Control for or Against?)

[Megadeath]

Guns don't kill people. Criminals kills people (after all, accidents are shown to be minimal, even suicides aren't that big a factor, and it's not like homicides disappear in countries with gun control, see Mexico). That's the point. While the clickbaity term "leading cause" really means "something like 15-20% of total because other causes are classified in a fragmented way".
Long story short, no matter how you justify, you are trying to use journalism 101 manipulative tricks, that is a fact, and even CNN tries to be more subtle with it now.

Are other causes broken down? Coz, even using such catch all's as "motor vehicles" "Other injuries" or "congenital disease" you still don't get another category as high as guns. And you say that like 20% of youth death being to guns is some minor thing. It's really not. It's ridiculous that you're pushing back so hard on the idea "Too many young Americans die from gun injuries." Like really? That's an objectionable statement to you? 4,000 something youth getting shot is the system working as intended and worth it for your "freedom"? Also, suicides account for like a third of the youth gun deaths. To quote a fine article:

The U.S. also has a higher overall suicide rate (regardless of whether a firearm is involved) among peer nations. In the U.S., the overall child and teen suicide rate is 3.6 per 100,000 children and teens, and 1.7 per 100,000 children and teens died by suicide from firearms. In comparable countries, on average, the overall child and teen suicide rate is 2.8 per 100,000 children and teens, and 0.2 per 100,000 children and teens died by suicide from firearms. If the U.S. child and teen firearm suicide rate was brought down to 0.2 per 100,000 children and teens (the same as the average in peer countries), 1,100 fewer children and teens would have died in 2020 alone.

In other words, it sure looks a hell of a lot like youth suicide in America is inflated by an ammount pretty strongly correlating with the number of gun suicides.

What other countries have US style gang culture in its cities and on similar scale? Honduras, Brazil and the like? Those might be worse.

Lol, well we keep hearing about those terrifying immigrant gangs in the UK, Germany and Sweden right? How's their youth mortality rate looking? I'd love to see what statistics you're looking at to suggest that the US is as lawless as Honduras.

Don't think many places that do have a similar social problem, like Honduras, even bother with such detailed statistics.
Still, it's a step in honesty, and also, compared to the above, due to said honesty a far less acceptable political pitch.
Imagine if democrats were selling gun control with "Teenage gang members in the cities run by our crappy politicians and raised by crappy parents who vote for them and crappy schools run by unions that love us, are killing each other a bit too effectively, and so we have to restrict the rights of all of you, so that some 25-50% more of them can live to do gang stuff another day. No, we won't be doing stop and search and locking them up, that would be racist, wtf".

Well then, I guess the solution is more guns, right? Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun? Except if guns do stop gun violence, why does America still have this terrible gang problem you keep talking about? Why does it still have so much gun death overall, and why is it that any sensible American parent should statistically worry more that their kid will end up dead with a bullet in them, than they need to worry about car accidents, or medical issues despite the crappy health care?

 

[Bear Ribs]

Could you show us that study?

You can find all sorts of references to the study...

Unpublished CDC Study Confirms More than 2 Million Defensive Handgun Uses Annually

An unpublished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study confirms Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck’s findings of more than two million defensive handgun uses (DGUs) per year.

www.lawenforcementtoday.com

That Time The CDC Asked About Defensive Gun Uses

Why did the CDC fail to publish 1990s research on numbers of defensive gun uses?

www.forbes.com

CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence That Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns

CDC surveys in the 1990s, never publicly reported, indicate nearly 2.5 million defensive uses of guns a year. That matches the results of Gary Kleck's controversial surveys, and it indicates more defensive than offensive uses of guns.

reason.com

Unfortunately, once the study became publically known the CDC deleted all the data.

CDC removed stats on defensive gun use over pressure from gun control activists: report

The CDC reportedly removed references to a CDC-commissioned study on defensive gun use from its website following an online meeting with gun control advocates.

www.foxnews.com

CDC caved to gun control orgs, hid gun self-defense stats

Gun control advocates successfully pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into hiding one of its own studies.

americanmilitarynews.com

 

[Megadeath]

You can find all sorts of references to the study...


Unfortunately, once the study became publically known the CDC deleted all the data.

Well, it's certainly interesting that there's such a high degree of certainty about what the data shows when it was apparently never published, and was subsequently totally deleted. It's also interesting to note that if we trust the assertion, 2-2.5 million defensive gun uses doesn't just beat out the number of offensive gun uses, but in fact is broadly comparable with the total violent crime rate. Which doesn't seem to track with anecdotal evidence at all, and certainly doesn't track with studies where we can actually look at the data:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tpfv9318.pdf

For example that seems to suggest a defense rate that's more like a couple of percent.

 

[Zachowon]

Defensive use will ALWAYS be underreported. And never make news

 

[Bear Ribs]

Well, it's certainly interesting that there's such a high degree of certainty about what the data shows when it was apparently never published, and was subsequently totally deleted. It's also interesting to note that if we trust the assertion, 2-2.5 million defensive gun uses doesn't just beat out the number of offensive gun uses, but in fact is broadly comparable with the total violent crime rate. Which doesn't seem to track with anecdotal evidence at all, and certainly doesn't track with studies where we can actually look at the data:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tpfv9318.pdf

For example that seems to suggest a defense rate that's more like a couple of percent.

Uh, no, it doesn't, you just drew a conclusion that's totally different than what the study actually said. That study's massaging the data harder than a Soap Girl with a million-dollar client. Even then it doesn't support what you just said, notice that the 2% figure is only for specifically defensive use where there was violence but no fatality, and where the victim directly attacked or threatened the offender. For some reason, defensive gun use in any other circumstance, ie. a supermajority of them, doesn't show up at all in the study. And that situation... shooting or directly threatening where there was violence but no fatalities, well that's obviously a pretty narrow window. A majority of gun defensive use is going to go one of two ways, either the attacker backs off and thus there's no violence, or somebody gets shot and likely killed. By excluding both of those scenarios they can reduce GDUs to their ludicrously small figure.

It's also readily apparent they have an ax to grind in how they're presenting the data, f'rex every group uses "offender" until you get to blacks, who are "perceived offenders." This kind of language distortion points pretty clearly to biased manipulation.

As for the CDC data, it has been preserved and some studies have been done on the data, you just can't get it from the horse's mouth anymore.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344273747_What_Do_CDC's_Surveys_Say_About_the_Prevalence_of_Defensive_Gun_Use

The study incidentally also points out another reason why studies based on the NCVS data, like yours, are so anomalous compared to every other study. They collect all the interviewee's personal data before questioning, and for most gun owners giving the government detailed information on their guns when they also know your name, address, and social number is as likely as a vampire tanning on Malibu beach.

 

[Marduk]

Are other causes broken down? Coz, even using such catch all's as "motor vehicles" "Other injuries" or "congenital disease" you still don't get another category as high as guns. And you say that like 20% of youth death being to guns is some minor thing.

For example suicides are broken down by methods - firearms, suicides and drugs being the notable ones, of roughly similar scale. But if you added up all suicides regardless by method they would be bigger than homicides, especially homicides by gun.

It's really not. It's ridiculous that you're pushing back so hard on the idea "Too many young Americans die from gun injuries." Like really? That's an objectionable statement to you? 4,000 something youth getting shot is the system working as intended and worth it for your "freedom"? Also, suicides account for like a third of the youth gun deaths. To quote a fine article:

This is "have you stopped beating your wife" level of objectionable statement.
There is no "appropriate" number, as in there is no appropriate statement, hence those who use such statements should be counterattacked for attempts at verbal-emotional manipulation.
I will give you a right wing equivalent:
It's ridiculous that you're pushing back so hard on the idea that "Too many young Americans die from gang crime."

In other words, it sure looks a hell of a lot like youth suicide in America is inflated by an ammount pretty strongly correlating with the number of gun suicides.

Still gun suicides are not even a majority of suicides. To imply that if guns magically disappeared suicide would fall by the same amount is utterly delusional. What next, trashbag and rope control? (see: suffocation suicides).

Lol, well we keep hearing about those terrifying immigrant gangs in the UK, Germany and Sweden right? How's their youth mortality rate looking? I'd love to see what statistics you're looking at to suggest that the US is as lawless as Honduras.

US consists from everything from calm midwestern towns to Chicago ghettos. Of course the average won't be as bad.
This is a story illustrative of how this happens in one of places where it happens the most:

Surge in Chicago violence highlights teens in trouble and efforts to save them: ‘The stakes feel higher.’

The realistic painting in vivid colors by Adolfo Davis shows two sides of the same street, one bathed in sunlight with a college and an art center and the word “choices” written along t…

www.chicagotribune.com

This high-stakes intersection that Chicago's youths find themselves in has been brought into sharp relief in recent months in a series of troubling crimes: a 16-year-old already serving a probation sentence for three carjackings accused of fatally shooting 8-year-old Melissa Ortega; another 16-year-old on electronic monitoring for two gun cases charged with killing a 15-year-old by shooting him first in the head, then nine times as he lay on the sidewalk; and an 11-year-old cited in six different carjacking incidents, including some that involved armed robbery.

In a sane country, teenagers with such rap sheets would not be free to walk the streets. Even one carjacking should be enough to get into a correctional facility until at least 18, nevermind 3. This is what light handed "NOOO muh school to prison pipeline" governance on youth justice gives you. Violent teenage criminals with a sense of impunity somewhat grounded in their past experience.

Well then, I guess the solution is more guns, right? Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun? Except if guns do stop gun violence, why does America still have this terrible gang problem you keep talking about?

The solution is to lock up the people who should not be trusted with a gun, knife, or a baseball bat. Many of them would even hospitalize someone with their bare hands.
Hell, considering the age they sure didn't legally buy that gun anyway. They stole it or got it from their gang pals. Destroy the gangs, lock up all their members regardless of age, and shit on gang culture in the media so badly that it will be seen worse than the KKK, and then the problem will be cut by a three quarters at very minimum.

Also, oh the irony, have you seen the gun laws in the specific places that have the most gang violence? Let's just say Chicago surely is no Texas.

Why does it still have so much gun death overall, and why is it that any sensible American parent should statistically worry more that their kid will end up dead with a bullet in them, than they need to worry about car accidents, or medical issues despite the crappy health care?

Again, you should stop throwing the verbal manipulation at me right now, because i'm better at it and one doesn't play a player. The detailed table has a nice injury vs non-injury death division. Non-injury deaths add up to double the motor deaths, so even now it's certainly higher, but hey, if you split all the gun deaths by firearm caliber then they could never be a "leading cause", while disease deaths are split by individual disease.

 

[LordsFire]

Well then, I guess the solution is more guns, right? Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun? Except if guns do stop gun violence, why does America still have this terrible gang problem you keep talking about? Why does it still have so much gun death overall, and why is it that any sensible American parent should statistically worry more that their kid will end up dead with a bullet in them, than they need to worry about car accidents, or medical issues despite the crappy health care?

The places that are notorious for terrible gun violence, are also notoriously under Democrat control, and have been for decades if not a century or more, and they have draconian gun control measures.

Chicago and New York are particularly notorious examples, and Chicago, depending on the year, can account for upwards of a quarter of all the murders in the country.

It isn't hard at all to see the pattern when you step outside of the leftist propaganda box.

1. Democrats take control of an area.
2. Democrats implement soft on crime policies.
3. Democrats make it increasingly difficult or outright impossible to own/carry a gun legally in the area.
4. Crime rate skyrockets.
5. Violent crime rate skyrockets.
6. Democrats demand that guns be banned to stop the violence.

They've done this shit in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and LA to name some A-list cities, all to varying degrees of terribleness as a result. Seattle is rapidly collapsing into the same level of anarchy over the last decade as well.

Get outside of these Democrat hellholes, and you end up in towns and neighborhoods where people don't even bother to lock their doors at night. I've lived in such places, one even was in an area that had a serious drug crime problem, but no violent crime problem, in no small part because the local population was very well-armed.

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Basically all gun related statistics are utter crap.

The number that should matter is assaults/attempted assaults with a firearm. From a decision making perspective, it doesn't matter whether or not someone is killed, wounded, or merely threatened by a firearm. Nor should defensive/legal firearms use be accounted.

For example, right now, it gets counted as a homicide if a gangbanger rapist attempts to rape a young women with a CCW and she shoots him dead in literally the most righteous shoot you could imagine. Those stats count that the exact same as the gangbanger rapist pulling the gun and shooting said young women after he is done with her.

Death vs. wounding is also a false distinction as it inherently skews the figures massively. Get shot in NYC and, generally, unless it is basically instantly fatal you will probably survive. Getting to the hospital and receiving top flight care inside an hour or two is generally the expected result. Gun shots will be basically immediately reported to the police, there will be a rapid police response, ambulances are generally a handful of minutes away, and top flight trauma facilities are literally a handful of minutes away. Contrast with a shooting in rural upstate New York. The odds of anyone calling the police when they hear a gun shot are basically nill, police response times when a call is received are generally two to three times as long, it physically takes longer for the ambulance to get on scene, and it takes substantially longer to get the individual to an ER, and that ER is generally less capable than what you would find in NYC.

You can have the exact same event occur in both locations are in one case you get an assaults with a firearm while in the other you get a homicide.

Then you get the inclusion of suicides in gun deaths. While there is a correlation between access to firearms and suicide rates, there is no causal link.

Then you get the skewed nature of mass shooting events.

Take two situations. A man breaks into a house to rob his drug dealer. The drug dealer is home alone and is killed. This results in one homicide. The drug dealer's girlfriend and her parents were over for dinner. This results in four homicides.

In both of those cases you had identical access to firearms, identical circumstances leading up to the attackers decision point, etc. All that changed was the number of potential victims in the event. From a gun policy perspective, both those events should be treated identically; it was one occurrence of an assault with a firearm (even if it would be charged as four separate incidents). In reality, one of those is treated as a gangland shooting and the other as a mass shooting of a family in a home invasion.

Then, from a policy perspective, you should be looking at who the attacker is and how they got their weapon. For example, if the attacker is a convicted felon who is legally barred from possessing a weapon then using that incident to push for greater restrictions on who can legally possess a firearm is disingenuous. Instead you should be looking at how the felon got the weapon and where the flaw was.

Or take the "assault weapon" bans. Any gun related incident involving a handgun or shotgun (and not an "assault weapon") should not be used to try and justify those bans.

---
The reality is that most of the gun violence incidents are caused by already criminal individuals involved in criminality on a regular basis and performed using quite cheap and illegally obtained firearms.

Criminals don't, as a general rule, use thousand plus dollar firearms. They use three hundred dollar pieces of shit illegally obtained (either the product of a robbery or via straw purchase or via criminal production).

Yes, you absolutely can outfit a kill team with AR's, Glocks, encrypted radios, body armor, night vision, and sniper rifles. Yes, you can send that kill team through training that is generally as good or better as much of the worlds special operations and SWAT training. In reality, crime events with that kind of training and equipment have occurred only a handful of times (if that) in US history.

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Suppressors/Silencers? I've made one using literally nothing more than a drill, a few drill bits, and wood.

Hell, take a two liter bottle of soda, a bit of pipe, a hacksaw, a drill, a hot glue gun, a razor blade, and a rubber mat. Size the pipe to fit down the neck of the bottle and come out the base. Cut a hole in the base sized for the pipe to come out. Remove the pipe and every inch or so along it, cut out a notch the width of the rubber mat (you want a tight fit), cut out a bit of rubber to fit within that notch and fill the pipe, use the exacto knife to cut an 'x' into that rubber washer, in between the rubber washers drill tiny holes in the pipe, use the hot glue gun to lock the pipe inside the bottle. There you go, a really effective suppressor that could literally be made as an elementary school kids arts and crafts project.

Making an effective enough firearm really isn't much more difficult. Seriously, a Sten gun would be a decent first or second year high school shop project. Anyone with a CNC machine, hydraulic press, and basic welding ability could turn out an effective submachine gun in basically zero time.

What makes modern firearms difficult is their durability, consistent reliability, and weight vs. size vs. cost vs. reliability vs. durability precision.

For a crime gun you don't need a pistol that is sub 1 MOA at a hundred yards and able to run reliably for twenty thousand rounds with no real cleaning or maintenance. You need one that will be reliable for a few dozen to a hundred rounds with reasonable accuracy at twenty yards or less (and often under 20 feet).

Explosives are basically just as easy. Even Semtex is now sixty years old, and making it on a non-industrial scale is something you you can do in basically any highschool chemistry lab using easily available precursor materials.

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Ultimately, firearms are a highly mature technology that are not fundamentally different today than they were a century ago. You can make an obsolescent firearm using technologies from the 1400's if you really want. With modern knowledge (and not that advanced or technical knowledge) you could give the Roman Empire pistols, rifles, smokeless powder, and machine guns. Smokeless powder isn't actually all that advanced in terms of chemistry, and steel and bronze produced at scale isn't that advanced either. If you have decent steel, bronze, smokeless powder, and primers (again not that advanced chemistry) then you can make basically any WW2 era firearm.

 

[Zyobot]

Fresh video from Don’t Walk, Run! Productions:

 

[Zyobot]

Well, since they're the most-discussed weapon as of late, here's where fixation on the AR-15 apparently came from:

 

[Husky_Khan]

An interesting development concerning the recent gun panic in New Mexico instigated by its Leftist Democrat Governor Lujan Grisham.

Even Gun Grabber David Hogg couldn't abide her Palpatine esque level of invoking Emergency Powers to grab the Constitutionally protected right of citizens to possess arms.

 

[Spartan303]

All he's doing is trying to appear reasonable because he knows she fucked up something fierce. So the left sacrifices a moron to appear more reasonable while later using that cloak to push for more anti-gun legislation. Don't under any circumstances believe that David Hogg has suddenly had a change of heart.

 

[f1onagher]

Hogg is also clearly not running his own account independently since many other Democratic talking pieces have been echoing his statement very closely. Almost like they got a memo or something. Part of it is a desire to avoid having such practices reversed on them, but I also suspect they don't want to rile up the normies. Most political talking heads are crediting Dobbs with firing up the Democrats voting base and they really don't want to the reverse done because some two-bit apparatchik went mask off on gun policy.

 

[Spartan303]

Hogg is also clearly not running his own account independently since many other Democratic talking pieces have been echoing his statement very closely. Almost like they got a memo or something. Part of it is a desire to avoid having such practices reversed on them, but I also suspect they don't want to rile up the normies. Most political talking heads are crediting Dobbs with firing up the Democrats voting base and they really don't want to the reverse done because some two-bit apparatchik went mask off on gun policy.

They got their update from the Liberal Hive Mind.

 

[Typhonis]

They got their update from the Liberal Hive Mind.

Umm LHM? He mocks and derides the Dems.

 

[Abhorsen]

Umm LHM? He mocks and derides the Dems.

No, this is an exception from his normal gun grabbing, which is why it's weird.

Now is it coordinated? maybe. But more importantly, this shows how much we've won. If this had been done a decade ago, there would be none of this.

 

[Typhonis]

Abhorsen, When I was told Liberal Hive Mind, I was thinking of the Youtube channel. Because I doubt the Left is smart enough to keep a hive mind going.

However, this could be enlightened self-interest at work over what the governor did.

 

[Spartan303]

Abhorsen, When I was told Liberal Hive Mind, I was thinking of the Youtube channel. Because I doubt the Left is smart enough to keep a hive mind going.

However, this could be enlightened self-interest at work over what the governor did.

Somewhat literal but a tongue in cheek joke too.

 

[Coyote]

I don't even understand the ideas behind gun control.

If we make them illegal people won't have them.

Really cuz I know someone who made a .22 pistol out of a bbgun.

When has making anything illegal ever kept it out of the hands of criminals.

I'm against all forms of it, including registration.

People should be mentally balanced and strong enough on their own they don't need gun control.

The real question is.

What's causing the people to go crazy and shoot up crowds.

It's an American problem.

Ok let's talk about pipe bombs in Northern Ireland.

Surely those were illegal too.

See.

 

[PeaceMaker 03]

They got their update from the Liberal Hive Mind.

Nope, but it is an election-ish season. Plus the Democratic front-runner can not tie his shoes, ride a bike, know what country he is in, or who the scripted bad guy is.