Armed Guards at Every School

A Statistical Certainty - Packing More Heat Will Result in More Killings

Huffington Post

Only one thing is predictable with statistical certainty. If there are more guns in the schools, streets, offices, military bases, and homes. more of them will be fired and more people will be killed.

If we arm all the teachers and security guards, the most likely school mass murderers will be teachers or guards who flip out and turn their guns in the wrong direction.This is not a case where we can fight fire with more fire.

What does our favorite math guru have to say about that, I wonder? It seems pretty simple and straightforward to me.

More Gun Laws, More Murder? Quinnipiac Professor Mark Gius Suggests It

Mark Gius, professor of economics at Quinnipiac University. 

The Middletown Press News

Days after a new Connecticut gun-control law spurred long lines of people trying to register firearms deemed to be “assault weapons,” a study from a Quinnipiac University professor has found that bans on assault weapons on the state level had no significant effect on murder rates around the country. And it also found that states with more restrictive concealed weapons laws had higher gun-related murder rates on average than states with less restricted concealed weapons.

But the study’s author says more research is needed on the issue before lawmakers run with its conclusions.

About a month ago, Gius was contacted by John Lott Jr., who wrote a study on the topic in 1997 with David Mustard that produced similar findings. He sent Lott a requested copy of the paper. (Lott’s study and subsequent work about “More guns, less crime,” have been sharply debated by gun-control advocates.)

For Gius, Lott’s interest may have helped shine a spotlight on his modest paper that taps into a hot-button topic in post-Newtown America.

Gius’ paper studied a broader swath of time, 1980-2009, than previous ones and focused on the gun-related murder rate instead of the more-general homicide rate. The results suggest to some that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. But nothing is simple in the gun debate, as Gius pointed out with another finding of the study.

“During the period of the federal assault weapons ban (which was repealed in 2004), murder rates were approximately 20 percent higher than in the nonfederal weapons period,” he said. “But even there, you have to think about the time the assault weapons ban was in effect. It was right at the tail end of the crack epidemic... early to ’mid-90s. From 1994 to 2004 and since then, there’s been a pretty dramatic decline in the crime rate, even the violent crime rate.”

Additional Proof that More Guns Means More Overall Deadly Violence

Intentional homicide rate by country shows that gun availability in the US makes all the difference.

United States

4.7

United Kingdom

1.2

Australia

1.0

Kyle Coplen, Liar and Founder of The Armed Citizen Project

It didn't even occur to him that Tucson was the city of the Gabby Giffords' shooting.

The Answer is Not More Guns

Alex Seitz-Wald writing for Salon refutes the idea that more guns equals less crime.  We discussed the Atlantic article here.

In this month’s Atlantic, correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg set out to make the case in a smart and reasonable way that would be amenable to the kind of people who read the Atlantic. It’s a fluke of timing that it hit newsstands just as Newtown reignited the gun debate. His massive 7,000-word feature, titled “The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control),” makes a compelling argument in what could be called the “Slate pitch” genre of contrarian counternarratives that seek to provoke by challenging widely held, though rarely debated, assumptions. In this case, he questions whether more guns invariably lead to more gun violence.

He advocates stricter gun restrictions like closing the gun show loophole and better training for people with concealed carry permits. But he concludes that with so many guns already in the hands of Americans (over 300 million, or about one per person) and the police incapable of protecting us, the situation is pretty much hopeless — so we’re probably better off arming ourselves and other law-abiding citizens so we can defend ourselves.

He goes on to explain in a most eloquent and convincing way what many of us have been saying for a long time.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

A Case for More Guns

The Atlantic

There are ways, of course, to make it at least marginally more difficult for the criminally minded, for the dangerously mentally ill, and for the suicidal to buy guns and ammunition. The gun-show loophole could be closed. Longer waiting periods might stop some suicides. Mental-health professionals could be encouraged—or mandated—to report patients they suspect shouldn’t own guns to the FBI-supervised National Instant Criminal Background Check System, although this would generate fierce opposition from doctors and patients. Background checks, which are conducted by licensed gun shops, have stopped almost 1 million people from buying guns at these stores since 1998. (No one knows, of course, how many of these people gave up their search for a gun, and how many simply went to a gun show or found another way to acquire a weapon.)

Other measures could be taken as well. Drum-style magazines like the kind James Holmes had that night in Aurora, which can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition and which make continuous firing easy, have no reasonable civilian purpose, and their sale could be restricted without violating the Second Amendment rights of individual gun owners.

But these gun-control efforts, while noble, would only have a modest impact on the rate of gun violence in America.

Why?

Because it’s too late.

There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred not because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The NRA is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective pressure groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans are predisposed to agree with its basic message.

I'd like to thank Frail Liberty who suggested the article. Apparently he doesn't know about my short attention span. I did invest the time to read it all, though.

It certainly covered some of our favorite themes.

The one which I quoted, that says it's too late because there are already 300 million guns "out there" is misleading. It makes it sound like the 300 million guns are sitting at supermarket check-out, free for the taking.  The fact is, obviously, every one of those guns is in the possession of someone who has no intention of making it available.  It's his. 

The side effect of so many guns in society is twofold.  Many are passed into the criminal world in various ways and too few of them are available when and where they're needed to stop crime. Increasing the numbers further will increase the bad part of that equation and not affect the other.

The other major argument of the article is "wouldn't increasing the number of concealed carry citizens help."

This is based on the mistaken idea, which we've already discussed at length, that concealed carry permit holders are safer than other people.  I just can't accept that.

Today, more than 8 million vetted and (depending on the state) trained law-abiding citizens possess state-issued “concealed carry” handgun permits, which allow them to carry a concealed handgun or other weapon in public.

This is a loaded statement. The word "vetted" is totally misleading. In states where they require training and testing prior to issuing the license, the requirements are minimal. Almost every applicant already does far more than what's required.  What kind of vetting is that?  In other states, as the parenthetical disclaimer alludes to, there are actually no requirements whatever.

How could people like that be better able to handle firearms than gun owners at large?  Not only is this the contention of the pro-gun folks, regardless of the absence of logic, some of them claim extraordinary and unbelievable factors of improvement.  Frail Liberty recently quoted a study which says CCW permit holders are 13 times safer than other gun owners.

Sorry, when something is so outlandish, I cannot accept it. 

No, I remain strongly convinced that more guns equals more gun violence, not less. The hypothetical question of "in a bad situation wouldn't you want to have a gun handy," in foolish. The answer is obviously yes, but so what?  My belief is guns do more harm than good. For every incident in which a gun saves the day, you've got hundreds in which one is misused.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

More Guns in Fewer Hands

Jill Lapore writing in The New Yorker

The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.

Men are far more likely to own guns than women are, but the rate of gun ownership among men fell from one in two in 1980 to one in three in 2010, while, in that same stretch of time, the rate among women remained one in ten. What may have held that rate steady in an age of decline was the aggressive marketing of handguns to women for self-defense, which is how a great many guns are marketed. Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people. One reason that gun ownership is declining, nationwide, might be that high-school shooting clubs and rifle ranges at summer camps are no longer common.

Is the suggestion of more guns in fewer hands so inconceivable? The pro-gun folks laugh at it.

Of course their reason for dismissing the idea is based on anecdotal evidence. I've asked them how many guns do they own today compared to five years ago.

Those who bother to answer support the theory that there are in fact more guns in fewer hands, a higher concentration in the hands of a small percentage.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

The Answer to Gun Violence