I wonder if Sen. Reid knows that the risk of homicide is three times higher in homes with firearms; the risk of suicide is three to five times greater; and that a gun in the home is 21 times more likely to be used against the homeowner or family member in a completed or attempted suicide, a criminal assault or homicide, or an unintentional shooting death or injury, than used in self defense.
I wonder, finally, whether Sen. Reid knows that among gun-owning parents who reported that their children had never handled their firearms at home, 22% of those children, when questioned separately, said that they had, and that of youths who committed suicide with firearms, 82% obtained the firearm from their home, usually a parent’s firearm.
How anyone in their right mind can justify owning guns in the light of these facts is beyond me. I believe gun owners who are able to be honest with themselves should immediately drop all the rationalizations and take steps to disarm. The wishes of a powerful and vocal minority should cease to prevent common sense from prevailing.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
How anyone in their right mind can justify owning guns in the light of these facts is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteI usually hear this one in England. My response is sporting uses: target shooting and hunting. Those people can belong to clubs and register their firearms.
Display purposes for militaria collectors. In the old days, this niche could be filled by nonfiring replica or deactivated firearms in the UK, but replica and deactivated firearms have been under attack since the Jill Dando shooting. It has been alleged that Jill Dando was shot with a reactivated firearm.
Wow, I thought even liar Helmke had quit using those fraudulent, dis-proven claims. I guess he had to fall back into the crap bag to make an argument this time. He too must be low on ammo (forgive the pun).
ReplyDeleteNotice how he wants us to drop rationalized thought and disarm. Even he knows gun control is an irrational response to crime.
heh, your 2nd Link is a piece by Douglas J. Wiebe, an anti-gun shill who's "research" is bought & paid for by the Joyce Foundation
ReplyDeletehttp://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ficap/research/docs/Cheney%20-%20Firearms%20and%20Violence%20Issues%20for%20Elder%20Health%20and%20Well-Being%20in%20SE%20PA.pdf
See lower left corner.
He also was invited to speak at a meeting for Joyce's board of directors. Hardly an impartial, objective researcher.
And of course there's your cited Kellermann studies. Not only is Kellermann a Joyce shill who's been paid hundreds of thousands for his "studies" his research has also been thoroughly debunked.
Laci - My 2nd Amendment rights don't have one thing to do with "sporting uses"
As for your other point. Thank you for offering yet more evidence that NO firearms are safe from anti-gunners. You want to ban guns, all of them. That goal has never changed.
Let's see, places with registration and storage requirements have a lower rate of accidental injury or death from firearms.
ReplyDeleteAnd those stats are hardly discredited, unless you would care to back up with statement.
FatWhiteMan- you are a hoot!
ReplyDeleteMike- your title, 'Guns and Health,' is quite interesting. Tomorrow all 40 GOP senators will vote NO on health care, but they always vote YES on guns.
How's that for screwed-thinking?
Let's see, places with registration and storage requirements have a lower rate of accidental injury or death from firearms.
ReplyDeleteReally? Let's see actual facts (not Kellermann's study, but raw data)
Also, explain how requring me to register my firearms with the government reduces the risk of accidental injury with said firearm.
Do you even try to think before you type?
Mike W: "explain how requring me to register my firearms with the government reduces the risk of accidental injury with said firearm."
ReplyDeleteEasy.
The registration requirements will be made such that the time and expense will discourage some gun ownership. The theory is: Less gun ownership = reduced risk of accidental injury.
What? Many people STILL want to own guns, and are complying with the time and expense of registration? Looks like it's time to "adjust" the registration requiremments!
Don't want to own a gun? No problem!
ReplyDeleteDon't think other people should own guns? No problem!
Want to try to convince other people not to own guns? No problem!
Want to pass laws to prevent me from owning guns? BIG problem!
Helmke: "By contrast, England and Wales have about 200 gun deaths total in a year, including 60 gun homicides, with a gun homicide rate over 30 times lower than ours."
ReplyDeleteUh-oh. Mikeb, tell Helmke that "there are many factors."
True - Registration over time reduces the overall number of legal gun owners (which is the goal of registration to begin with, reducing gun ownership)
ReplyDeleteIf no one owns gun no one can have accidents with them. Same goes for cars, chainsaws, or any other tool.
If we did away with cars and roads we wouldn't have traffic accidents and fatalities. Let's ban cars in the name of public safety!!.....
Wait?! We have licensing and registration of cars and yet they contribute to more death and injury than firearms do.
If registration is supposed to "reduce death and injury" why has it not done so with cars?
The theory is: Less gun ownership = reduced risk of accidental injury.
Actually the anti's theory is that less gun ownership = reduced risk of accidental injury with a gun.
As usual they focus on guns and only guns.
So Helmke claims that the concerns of gunowners regarding the health care bill are a "non-healthy conspiracy theory from the Gun Owners of America."
ReplyDeleteThen he objects to an amendment that rules out possible anti-gunowner abuses under the health care bill -- but why object if no such abuses were possible since the objections were a "conspiracy theory"?
It's not unusual to find contradictions in two statements by anti-gunowner advocates, but it's funny to find contradictions in the same statement.
I like articles such as this one by Helmke -- here's why:
ReplyDeleteMany gun control advocates like Helmke often say: "We do not want to take guns away from law-abiding citizens; we just want laws that keep guns away from criminals and children". But those same people just as often write article such as this one by Helmke, which focuses on the supposed consequences of gun ownership by the "ordinary" citizen. It is important to remember that gun control advocates are ACTIVISTS. They do not merely "recommend" that which they believe promotes the public good; they want LAWS. It is naive to think that those activists who continually remind us of the dangers of gun ownership by ordinary citizens would stop at taking guns from only criminals and children, and allow continued gun ownership by others who incur death by gunshot at a rate "21 times" that of defensive use. Thus, the frequent use of such claims by gun control advocates, regardless of their truth or falsehood, serves to remind us of their true goal of drastic reduction or elimination of gun ownership, and the deception of their frequent claim: "We do not want to take guns away from law-abiding citizens; we just want laws that keep guns away from criminals and children".
Helmke's article is NOT about criminals or children or gun shows or assault weapons. It’s about keeping guns from YOU. There may still be some foolish gunowners who do not yet realize that. (Mikeb is often honest about the above -- this is more about Helmke contradicting himself.)
Helmke: "...a gun in the home is 21 times more likely to be used against the homeowner or family member in a completed or attempted suicide, a criminal assault or homicide, or an unintentional shooting death or injury, than used in self defense."
ReplyDelete"21 times"?
Is it just me, or is that figure somewhat like Senator Joe McCarthy's number of communists in the State Department?
The number seems to change every time it is given.
Convicted felons who are ignoring gun laws skew most of these numbers drastically--Felons make up around 2% of our population, roughly half of murder victims, and roughly 3/4 of murderers.
ReplyDeleteIs there a good reason that virtually all of these scary statistics include felons in the statistical population? What are the equivalent statistics among carry license holders, or even average non-felons?
As we've said here before, the "21 times" number includes felonious households, and counts someone who knows their attacker as "used against". A defender has to shoot someone for it to count as "self defense"--If a criminal runs and doesn't get shot in the back, it doesn't count. (Of course, if he runs and does get shot in the back, that doesn't count either, since it is no longer self defense)
I would like to see a similar statistic, but limited to the law abiding, and counting "success" not only when a defender shoots, but also when they cause an attacker to retreat or surrender without harm.
I wonder why the "gun-owning parents who reported that their children had never handled their firearms at home" is so specific? Is it because many responsible gun-owning parents will take the mystery out by allowing their children to handle guns in safe and supervised circumstances, and those children aren't as tempted?
I cannot recall an anti-gun statistic that isn't at minimum extremely exaggerated or defined in some unusual way to get a particular answer. I've found a few pro-gun statistics that are somewhat exaggerated, but nowhere near as badly as the most honest 'study' promoted by the Brady Bunch.
Sevesteen, Thanks for that very convincing comment. I mean it. But I don't know, not only if it would be possible to eliminate all the felons from gun stats, but even if it would be right. Haven't you yourself said they have the right to bear arms too? Besides, subdividing the gun owners into more useful categories for your argument doesn't respond to our claim that gun availability is the problem.
ReplyDeleteI believe in the gun argument, we divide into only two groups, those who own guns and those who don't.
FishyJay, That's a good point. I've heard many times that the Bradys really want to ban guns in spite of their claims not to. I thought it was just pro-gun exaggerating, but you've made a good point here. In the health debate and assessing whether guns in the home are a health threat, we're mainly talking about legitimately owned weapons. Maybe the Helmke rationale is like mine, the only way to reduce guns in the criminal world, unfortunatlely is to reduce them first in the legitimate world. Maybe the Brady Campaign can't say it a plainly as that.
ReplyDeleteBloomberg is another that hides behind the Illegal Guns Mantra. In spite of the fact that his group says that they only oppose "illegal" guns, we have seen him attack "legal" guns time and again. The national reciprocity issue is one fine example. Even though the question was clearly about licensed, non-felons carrying firearms, his group publicly opposed it even lying to say that it would allow criminals to carry guns nationwide.
ReplyDeleteMikeb: "Maybe the Helmke rationale is like mine, the only way to reduce guns in the criminal world, unfortunatlely is to reduce them first in the legitimate world."
ReplyDeleteYes, that is indeed the rationale of most of the major gun control players. And the best way, perhaps the only way, that they can accomplish it is to lie about it.
Most of the major gunowner rights players know all this, too. It's not paranoia or irrational slipppery slope -- they have much more evidence than you have seen here.
Mikeb, keeping the above in mind will explain much as this debate continues.
I haven't figured out exactly where I stand on felons with guns, or felons' rights in general. I'm concerned with felony inflation, and I don't think that most nonviolent felonies should be a permanent ban.
ReplyDeleteTo convince me we need to give up gun rights, you would need to convince me that the guns were causing quite a lot of harm to innocent people in ways that they can't personally avoid--"a lot" in statistical terms, not a bunch of stories. Suicide isn't unavoidable, nor is being shot as the result of a criminal lifestyle. Only about 1/4 of gun deaths are "unavoidable innocent".
There are things we could do to reduce bulk straw sales, or at least catch the sellers sooner with minimal inconvenience to honest gun owners. Requiring gun shops to report multiple purchases appears to fit this, and there is a chance that could be expanded in a way that made it more difficult for criminals without restricting the honest. Maybe add a line in the 4473 "Have you purchased more than 3 guns in the past 30 days?" Without knowing the statistics on straw sales vs other methods of diversion, I don't know if even this is necssary--I suspect that more emphasis on prosecuting people lying on 4473's would be more effective.
Requiring gun shops to figure out which of their sales are suspicious, especially without a legal definition of suspicious isn't fair. They aren't law enforcement. Asking them to do concrete things, like reporting multiple sales is at least fair.
Sevesteen, Thanks for the reasoned discourse as usual.
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas to everybody.
Mokeb: "Sevesteen, Thanks for the reasoned discourse as usual."
ReplyDeleteDitto. I agree with:
Sevesteen: "There are things we could do to reduce bulk straw sales, or at least catch the sellers sooner with minimal inconvenience to honest gun owners."