Lurker > darkknight109

TigerTycoon posted...

Whether there is a "staggering" amount of guns in the U.S. is really an opinion.

It's not, but whatever helps you sleep at night.

For reference, the United states has more guns than people (101 for every 100 people); the next runner up has 58 per 100.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

Gun homicides are most common in poor urban areas and are frequently associated with gang violence

Yes, yes, I got that the first time you posted it. And you seem to have completely ignored my response.

The US does not have a significant gang violence problem compared to its peers. It is 57th in the world, based on the world economic forum, which puts it roughly on par with countries like France, Israel, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Canada, and South Korea. All of those countries have far, far lower murder rates and gun homicide rates.

The US's own data estimates that gang killings account for just 13% of all homicides, meaning that even if you were to completely eliminate every gang-related killing for a year, the US would still be "leader" of the developed world by a mile in killing rates (the US rate would drop from 4.68 to 4.07 per 100k - every other developed nation on the planet is less than 1.7).

In other words, gang violence is not a satisfactory explanation for why the US has such a high murder rate.

Selenara posted...

I believe I am done replying to you. It was nice to have a civil discussion, but if you're not following what I say, there's very little use in repeating myself.

If you want to bow out, that's your prerogative, but at least have the courtesy not to blame it on me.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

My point was that those countries did not have a significant problem with gun violence prior to the enactment of gun control legislation. If those countries had similar levels of gun violence comparable to the US and gun control legislation resolved it, you would have a point.

Again, that assertion is baseless - you have no way of knowing if that's true or not. You can't say "Gun control doesn't work in countries that have the same gun crime rates as the US" because there is no comparable country that has gun crime comparable to the US for you to be able to make that statement. In order for your assertion to hold true, there would have to be another developed nation with the gun crime levels of the US that tried tightening their gun laws and discovered that it didn't work.

I am using the best comparisons we have. You can't say "your examples aren't good enough" when there is no better example to work with.

Speaking of which:

Selenara posted...

There are also other countries with more gun homicides than the US:

Sure there are, and none of them are developed nations, so they are extremely poor comparisons for numerous reasons that should be self-evident.

Selenara posted...

You have not even established that this occurred in Connecticut, because the number you gave combined accidents with homicides and suicides.

I already posted a study that estimated that Connecticut's gun laws cut gun homicides by 40%. I'm not sure what more you want from me on that front.

Here it is again if you missed it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504296/

Selenara posted...

No, it does not, because you have not established that the gun control laws were responsible for a reduction in gun homicides.

Then let's take a first principles approach to this. Do you agree with each of the following:
1) That states with stiffer gun laws have lower gun crime rates than states with looser gun laws?
2) That countries that have implemented tougher gun laws have seen their gun homicide rates decrease or, where a decrease was already present, seen the rate of decrease go up?

If, as you said earlier, you acknowledge that gun law implementation and lower gun crime are correlated then neither of these should be contentious points. We're ignoring, for a moment, the causal factor in these decreases and simply acknowledging they exist.

If we're in agreement on that, then we're agreeing that tighter gun laws and lower gun homicide rates are correlated. So what's your explanation for that trend? You can't disagree with my argument without putting forward and backing up one of your own - debates don't work like that. If you believe that a third outside factor results in tighter gun laws and less gun crime, I'm interested to hear what it is.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

@Selenara posted...

No matter how many paragraphs you write, you STILL do not understand the phrase "correlation does not equal causation."

Given what I do for a living, I highly doubt that.

Selenara posted...

Correlation means that we know two factors have occurred at the same time. You seem to think this term means causation, but it does not. Causation refers to the factor that made the two factors occur.

Close but not quite.

Correlation means that two properties - A and B - share a statistically significant relationship. Where one is found to be elevated, you can expect a proportional increase or decrease in the other. Note that it is entirely possible - through coincidence - to have two independent (and therefore uncorrelated) variables occur at the same time, usually through small sample size errors (for instance, if I go outside and see a bird land in a tree, that does not mean that me leaving my front door is correlated to a bird landing in a tree).

Causation is identifying the dependent/independent variables in the A/B relationship and determining if one causes the other. It is decidedly not "the factor that made the other two factors occur". That's the entire point of the "Correlation does not equal causation" phrase - pointing out that a correlation between two (or more) properties does not prove that one causes the other.

In brief:
Correlation: Where A, then B
Causation: A causes B
Correlation != Causation: A may cause B or B may cause A or C may cause A and B.

Or, to apply it to the topic at hand:
Correlation: Where gun laws have been tightened, gun crime has dropped (which... I can't honestly tell if you agree with or not at this point).
Causation: Gun laws cause decreases in gun crime
Correlation != Causation: Gun laws may decrease gun crime, or decreases in gun crime may prompt stiffer gun laws, or (unknown third factor - you still haven't said what you think this is) causes both tighter gun laws and decreased gun crime.

Selenara posted...

You are saying that decreasing and increasing is "stagnant"? That is preposterous. The numbers fluctuated before settling in a downward trend, and you are trying to spin it to fit your assumptions. Perhaps you should set aside your assumptions and look at the data before you form a conclusion.

I've done that, you're just not listening to what I have to say, no matter how many ways I try and explain it.

Since work is slow at the moment, I went ahead and plugged the numbers into excel and got the actual equations for the trend lines.

1981 - 1991: Trendline is defined as Y = -0.0103X + 21.216
1992 - 2002: Trendline is defined as Y = -0.272X + 54.906

In other words, the average rate of decline nearly tripled after the gun law than before it.

If you still disagree with my assertions, consider that the trend from 1986 to 1991 was actually positive - the trendline for those years is Y = 0.434X - 85.601. In other words, for the six years immediately prior to the gun legislation, gun killings were trending upwards, which immediately reversed upon the law's passage.

And lest you accuse me of cherry-picking my data, there's no five-plus year period after the gun law implementation that had a positive trend. The closest you get is if you clip out 1997 to 2001, which still has a negative trend but one that's very nearly flat (Y = -0.008X + 16.558).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Which totally explains why every other country that consumes the exact same violent media doesn't have the US's issues with out-of-control gun crime.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Nope. Definitely near the bottom, but not quite the worst.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

This discussion started because I stated that countries with successful gun laws did not have a significant problem with gun violence prior to enacting those laws. So yes, it is precisely the point that the US has far worse problems with gun homicides.

But listen to what you're arguing. You're saying that the positive effects that Canada, Australia, et al saw because of their gun legislation wouldn't apply to the US because those places didn't have as much gun crime as the US (though you haven't specified why that makes a difference).

My point is that no one in the developed world has the gun crime problems the US does, which makes your assertion baseless. You can't say "gun control doesn't work here, because we have high gun crime and gun laws don't work in places with high gun crime", because there is no other country suffering from the same soaring gun crime that you can use to back up that argument.

And this all ignores the fact that individual states within the US *have* tightened gun laws and have seen those same positive effects, which sort of sinks your argument.

Selenara posted...

It's a reduction in the number of suicides by gun, which constitutes the majority of gun violence

Sure, but most of what we've been talking about in this topic, and the data related to it, has been gun homicide, which effectively makes this a side conversation.

Admittedly, suicide is a subject I am not as well versed on. Based on what I've seen in the data it looks like the drop in overall suicide rate was negligible, although it may simply be that the gun law counteracted some other factor increasing suicides (notably, in Canada suicide rates doubled between 1950 and 1985, decreased slightly in the decade after and have been fairly stagnant since, suggesting that something else is driving higher suicide rates).

I'll punt on this one, as it's not really an area I'm familiar with and isn't related to a lot of my points anyways.

Selenara posted...

Most gun deaths are suicides.

Which wouldn't be reflected in the homicide rates I was referencing.

Selenara posted...

Out of those that are homicides, many occur in poor urban areas as gang-related violence. The drug war in the US is a major instigator of gun-related crime and homicides. If you excluded gang violence from the statistics, the numbers would be more in-line with other countries.

But then, as previously mentioned, if gangs and drugs really are the issue we would expect to see higher crime rates across the board and that isn't the case - murder is the only major outlier

Not to mention, the US isn't particularly exceptional in its gang proliferation and drug policies. American drug laws are not radically out of step with other developed nations, save perhaps for harsher punishments than average (though not by an inordinate amount). As for gangs, the World Economic Forum ranked countries based on their problems with organized crime and the US ranks 57th, which is far from the worst. Of note, Italy and Mozambique - both in the top 15 for gang activity - both have lower homicide rates than the US does.
http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-index-2017-2018/competitiveness-rankings/#series=EOSQ035

Moreover, the National Gang Center estimates that gang-related homicides account for just 13% of US homicides.
https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring-the-extent-of-gang-problems

In Canada, to contrast, roughly 25% of all homicides are gang related.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2009004/article/10929/c-g/c-g6-eng.gif

So no, sorry, chalking it up to gangs and drugs doesn't account for the difference.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

That is an oversimplification. The numbers went up and down for years before they began a downward trend prior to the enactment of gun control legislation.

Which ignores the fact that gun crimes were increasing in the years immediately prior to the NFA's implementation.

Selenara posted...

I have agreed there is a correlation. But just because there is a correlation between gun laws and gun homicides, that does not mean that the gun laws caused the gun homicides to drop. It is a complex issue with many factors in play besides gun control laws, as shown by the fact they were already declining by the time gun control laws were enacted.

Your third sentence invalidates your first two.

If gun laws and lower crime rates are correlated that means one exists whenever the other is present - either one causes the other or both are caused by a third factor.

Yet your third sentence implies that the lower crime rates were occurring due to factors other than gun law implementation - in other words, that they are not correlated and the fact they occurred at the same time is coincidence. Which fits in with your overall theme of what you're arguing. I mean, the very first thing you posted in this topic was "Gun control laws didn't really affect gun-related incidents and deaths in these countries", which is absolutely saying that the two are not correlated.

You need to pick a lane on this. The main thrust of your argument seems to be that gun laws don't impact gun crime, which is no correlation. If you're now saying that you've changed your mind and they are correlated, that either means that you think gun laws reduce gun crime (my argument*), a decrease in gun crime prompts the introduction of stricter gun laws (which seems backwards on multiple levels) or that a third factor both reduces crime and prompts tighter gun laws (possible, although you haven't elaborated on what this third factor would be).

*For the record, obviously gun laws are not the only factor in gun crime and I certainly acknowledge that other trends - improvements in policing and better social services, for instance - also play a role in reducing crime, which means that determining the full impact of gun laws involves no small amount of guess work. That said, given that every data set I've seen so far (including all the ones posted in this topic) shows gun laws either resulting in a decrease in gun crime or increasing the trend of an already-existing decrease, I do believe that gun laws reduce gun crime.

Selenara posted...

The average does not tell the whole story. If you look at your numbers, they were consistently dropping prior to gun control being enacted.

They weren't though. Look at the data again. From 1981 to 1991 we had No Change, Increase, Decrease, Increase, Decrease, Decrease, Increase, Decrease, Increase, Decrease, Increase - five year-over-year increases, five decreases, and one no change. That's pretty stagnant. From 1992 to 2002 we have decrease, decrease, no change, decrease, increase, decrease, decrease, increase, increase, decrease, decrease - seven decreases, one no change, and just three increases (and it should be noted that after the regulations were passed six of the next seven years either saw gun homicides decrease or not change).

Taken with the numerical analysis I gave before, that pretty much supports my assertion that while there was a slight downwards trend before the legislation, gun homicide rates were largely stagnant, while after the legislation there was a pronounced decrease.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

Those numbers include homicides, suicides and accidents. I was looking for a gun homicide statistic, because the typical trend is for gun suicides to drop while homicides remain relatively unaffected.

I'm interested in seeing a source on that (particularly given that I just spent half my post talking about Canadian homicide rates and how they dropped).

But, perhaps more to the point, so what? Gun violence of all types is bad. Even if the reduction is seen in suicides instead of homicides, isn't that still a goal worth pursuing?

Selenara posted...

There are other studies that show the opposite however, so this is debatable.

Of course it is. You can find studies that say whatever you want them to, particularly on an issue as contentious as guns.

So dial back and think big picture. Why does the US have an out-of-control murder rate (4.9 per 100k, more than countries like Rwanda, Niger, and Lebanon)? If it held that minimalist gun laws and widespread access to firearms at worst do not affect crime rates and at best helps lower them, why does the US have a the highest murder rate in the developed world? And not one that's a little bit higher than its peers, but one that's between ~triple (it's 2.9x Canada's 1.7 per 100k) and 16 times (Japan boasts a 0.31 per 100k rate) higher?

You could make the case that the US is simply more predisposed to crime due to non-gun-related factors, but that doesn't add up either - if that were the case, you would expect crime rates to be up across the board and while the US does trend on the average-to-high side for crime rates compared to other developed nations, the numbers are still largely in line compared to the aggregate data set. It is only the murder rate in which the US is so wildly out of step with the rest of the developed world.

And we see this play out in micro-scale within the states. Gun-tolerant states almost universally have higher homicide rates than those states that have stricter gun laws.

If you have an alternate explanation for these trends, I'm open to hearing it, but the evidence in support of gun laws seems pretty airtight to me.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

That's still not showing much before the gun laws took effect. Look at this chart instead:

I see a gun rate that was holding fairly steady for twenty odd years, experienced a drop between '87 and '95, which then started to climb again. Then the NFA was passed and the gun rate proceeded to drop almost unabated for a decade, plummeting to 1/5 of the pre-NFA levels (and that reduction is unmatched by anything else on that chart).

Selenara posted...

Correlation also does not imply causation.

That phrase doesn't mean what you think it does, judging by how you're using it. It means that if A & B are shown to be linked then that doesn't mean A causes B (B could cause A, for instance, or a third factor could lead to both A and B). You're not suggesting that gun laws are correlated with lower crime rates but aren't causing them (because there's not really a good explanation for that - decreased crime rates don't cause gun laws and there isn't any third factor I can think of that would lead to both a decrease in crime and an increase in gun laws happening concordantly).

What you're arguing is that gun laws and crime decreases AREN'T correlated - that it's just a coincidence that gun laws were passed at the same time that gun rates started dropping. And I'm sorry, but the amount of data suggesting otherwise simply does not lead me to support that conclusion. Not in the States and not globally.

Selenara posted...

Table 10 shows the number of gun homicides in Canada by year for a decade before and after gun control laws passed. You can see that there was already a downward trend

Was there? Firearm homicide rate for the 10 years prior to 1991 were 0.80, 0.99, 0.88, 0.89, 0.86, 0.67, 0.76, 0.63, 0.80, and 0.71. That's an average of 0.80 over that time frame (standard deviation of 0.1). In the 10 years after, we see rates of 0.87, 0.68, 0.68, 0.60, 0.71, 0.64, 0.50, 0.54, 0.60, and 0.55. Average is 0.64, SD is once again 0.1.

So we see a drop of 20% across the decade prior and after. More to the point, the homicide rate was actually fairly stagnant beforehand. There were the occasional dips below average (1986 and 1988, for instance, were both more than one SD below average), but generally even towards the end of that ten year frame we see three years (1989, 1987, and 1985) where the homicide rate was within half an SD (or, in the case of 85, above the average value).

Contrast that to the second data set. The second half of that ten year frame all is below average, and three are 0.9 SD or more below average. The decline is decidedly more marked after the introduction of gun legislation.

Selenara posted...

and that compared to the US there was not a significant problem with gun violence.

Compared to the US nobody has a significant problem with gun violence. That's exactly the point.

If you're using that as your metric, you're going to have a difficult time doing much analysis because you're working with a sample size of one.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

This chart is misleading, because it doesn't show that there was already a downward trend prior to the enactment of gun control. There are other factors besides gun control laws that affect numbers like these.

Here's a more blown up view, with the (stagnant) US death rate for reference.:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Gun_deaths_over_time_in_the_US_and_Australia.png

While there certainly was a decline beforehand, said decline increases significantly right when the NFA took effect.

Selenara posted...

The gun death homicide rate was less than 1 per 100,000 people according to this chart, which is fairly low.

Not really. Nearly all first-world countries have an overall murder rate around 1 per 100k - restricting it to just firearms would frequently give you a number less than 1.

The US is the only major outlier there because - surprise surprise - lots of guns means lots of killing.

Selenara posted...

30% can be misleading. Do you have have some hard numbers or per capita numbers? Or studies that showed a link between the new laws and the decline in gun deaths?

Did you not read the link? Because both of those are in there.

Gun deaths in 2012: 226 (6.3 per 100k)
Gun deaths in 2016: 164 (4.6 per 100k)

Violent crime has dropped across the US over those four years, but Connecticut's rates have fallen farther and faster than anywhere else in the US. And while I don't have a study for that particular gun law, a separate study estimated that different gun law tightening in 1994 may have accounted for as much as a 40% drop in gun crime, based on analysis of demographics, nearby states, and other such factors

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/06/12/gun-killings-fell-by-40-percent-after-connecticut-passed-this-law/?utm_term=.efeb6387689d (you can ignore the clickbaity title - I mostly went with this simply because it outlines the study I'm referring to)

Again, there's a wealth of data here that suggests that gun laws save lives. The states in the US with strict gun laws almost universally enjoy lower violent crime and homicide rates than those with permissive gun laws. Likewise, the US has a homicide rate nearly 7x the first world average (and triple the runner up), most of which is due to a wildly disproportionate firearm death rate. It's not hard to see the picture this paints.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Born Lucky posted...

Last year:
1200 people killed with knives
200 people killed with rifles
Liberals want to ban rifles.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

How many by all types of guns?

I mean, not to accuse you of cherry-picking, but if we're comparing apples to apples it should be knives to guns, not knives to one-specific-subset-of-guns, no?

EDIT: Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing a source for your numbers because they look incredibly low (on both counts). Gun homicides are usually in the ~10000 range in any given year - I doubt that non-rifles account for a full 98% of that figure - and knife deaths are usually around 2000-2500.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Selenara posted...

darkknight109 posted...

Sure, because it's not like other countries with strict firearms regulation - Japan, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, to name just a few - which DON'T share an open border with areas that allow civilians to easily obtain battlefield weaponry don't have sky-high gun violence and murder rates.

Gun control laws didn't really affect gun-related incidents and deaths in these countries however, because they never had a significant problem with gun violence in the first place. The statistic most affected is usually suicide rates, because gun violence is more often suicidal rather than homicidal. Those who did not have access to guns were less likely to succeed in killing themselves.

Debatable and not universally true. Take Australia, for instance:

http://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/4905120/data/chart3a-deaths-resulting-from-firearms-data.jpg

Or Canada (last major gun law tightening was in 1991):

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/11925/c-g/c-g03-eng.gif

Or, within the states, how about Conneticut? After the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting they tightened their gun laws and gun deaths dropped nearly 30%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/nyregion/florida-shooting-parkland-gun-control-connecticut.html
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Troll_Police_ posted...

so you mean to tell me that chicago, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, doesnt have absurdly high firearm deaths?

Sure, because it's not like other countries with strict firearms regulation - Japan, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, to name just a few - which DON'T share an open border with areas that allow civilians to easily obtain battlefield weaponry don't have sky-high gun violence and murder rates.

You just go ahead and keep clinging to that one example that you think kind of sort of proves your point while fastidiously ignoring the mountain of evidence to the contrary. I'm sure it will work out for you.

(Also, for what it's worth, states with stricter gun regulation have - on average - noticeably lower gun violence rates than those with permissive gun laws. Sorry to toss more stats in your face, but I figure it's pretty relevant to the discussion).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unquestionably yes. The War was effectively over as soon as Hitler decided to double-cross Stalin.

The US likes to paper over this fact, but the Eastern front - where the USSR fought the Axis almost unsupported - was larger than all other fronts of the war combined and the Axis got their ass kicked there. The Soviets had more casualties than the US had soldiers and still became a global superpower in the war's aftermath.

In contrast, the US only joined after the war had already started to turn against Germany and the other Axis powers. Their involvement hastened the war's end, to be sure, and probably prevented a large chunk of East Asia and Western Europe from becoming communist vassal states, but the war's outcome did not hinge on America's involvement, much as some Americans like to think otherwise.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!