Guns, Guns Guns

Ann, I wasn’t referring to the murder rate when I was talking about murder rate when I was referring to safer. I acknowledged it’s been higher if anything I just found it funny it was higher for the first time.

What I was talking about the fact that nyc has less assaults, less rapes, less robberies than London. Which is why I can argue nyc is safer.

ywing14 wrote:Ann, I wasn’t referring to the murder rate when I was talking about murder rate when I was referring to safer. I acknowledged it’s been higher if anything I just found it funny it was higher for the first time.

What I was talking about the fact that nyc has less assaults, less rapes, less robberies than London. Which is why I can argue nyc is safer.

And if we're talking about crime *rates*, why arbitrarily pick London and New York as representative cities of the UK and the US?

London is in the top 5 most dangerous cities in the UK based on violent crime rates. New York isn't even top 100 in the US. (They're exactly 101st in FBI Uniform Crime statistics for violent crime rates in the latest fully compiled data available for 2014. 163rd for murder rate)

The United States is 87th on the world murder rate, with 5.35 murders per 100,000 of the population
(The most dangerous city in the US is St. Louis with a murder rate of 65.83 per 100,000)

The United Kingdom has a murder rate of 1.20 per 100,000, 170th in the world.

Courtesy of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
http://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs ... OK_web.pdf

(There are 4 US cities on the list of top 50 cities by murder rate, and not one British City ... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/mos ... world.html)

GC.

London and NY are remarkably similar.

Financial centers, total population, iconic locations.

For two cities in different countries, damn close.


And, of course, the false equilivancy thing too.

@Joat

Statistics are made up of real life incidents that occur in everyday life. Most people can not afford private security or gated communities. Evil exists in this world and their are people that do not care what happens to a person or person's family in order to secure theitr desires. The police rarely stop a crime in progress. So, a person must be able to use a firearm to defend against an intruder. Now, a properly trained individual can defend their selves and their loved one's with a semi automatic pistol. What I am doing is giving a face to those statistics. Hope that clarifies my intent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpzu4Pg7_w

smr wrote:@Joat

Statistics are made up of real life incidents that occur in everyday life. Most people can not afford private security or gated communities. Evil exists in this world and their are people that do not care what happens to a person or person's family in order to secure theitr desires. The police rarely stop a crime in progress. So, a person must be able to use a firearm to defend against an intruder. Now, a properly trained individual can defend their selves and their loved one's with a semi automatic pistol. What I am doing is giving a face to those statistics. Hope that clarifies my intent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpzu4Pg7_w

How many that buy a gun in the US belongs in the category properly trained?

If the biggest reason to own a gun is to protect yourself and your family because the police can't or won't, maybe that indicates that your society is broken?

I have nothing against people owning guns - but an owner should prove that he or she really can handle a gun. You don't let people drive a vehicle without some training before getting a drivers license, it should be the same for any tool that can impinge on others safety.

If you're going to use vehicles as an example of a system where people are trained before being given licenses, I think it a poor choice. Consider how many fatal accidents there are every year. Considering that there were about 37k fatalities from cars, and 33k fatalities from gun violence, it's probably not a good example of how we don't give cars to people without proper training.

Especially when you factor in the number of people who are doing illegal or blatantly stupid things with cars at the same time. DUI, texting and driving, etc.

Fireflair wrote:If you're going to use vehicles as an example of a system where people are trained before being given licenses, I think it a poor choice. Consider how many fatal accidents there are every year. Considering that there were about 37k fatalities from cars, and 33k fatalities from gun violence, it's probably not a good example of how we don't give cars to people without proper training.

Especially when you factor in the number of people who are doing illegal or blatantly stupid things with cars at the same time. DUI, texting and driving, etc.

It isn't a perfect comparison but it is relevant, you are just missing an important factor. You aren't taking usage into consideration.

On average a vehicle owner drives ~29 miles/day and spends about 55 minutes doing it.

We can also with a high degree of confidence say that people that have proper gun training is less likely to cause a fatality, but since a majority of gun owners in the USA never had any gun training they are more likely to cause a fatality, directly or indirectly.

That means that a person using a gun is magnitudes more likely on average to cause a fatality than someone driving a vehicle per minute of usage.

The point I'm making is that with some training a lot of gun related fatalities can be avoided.

Fireflair wrote:If you're going to use vehicles as an example of a system where people are trained before being given licenses, I think it a poor choice. Consider how many fatal accidents there are every year. Considering that there were about 37k fatalities from cars, and 33k fatalities from gun violence, it's probably not a good example of how we don't give cars to people without proper training.

Especially when you factor in the number of people who are doing illegal or blatantly stupid things with cars at the same time. DUI, texting and driving, etc.

Yeah, as Joat pointed out already usage matters.

If everyone who owned a car actually *used* it as often as everyone who owns a gun those car fatality numbers would be cut by like a factor of a thousand. There are tens of millions of cars on the road being driven at any given time during the day. There are not tens of millions of guns being fired... if there were those statistics wouldn't even be *close*.

So why are people so concerned about the statistic that there 200-300 million guns (depending on which statistic you believe) in private hands in the US? With an average of 8 guns per gun owner, or about 30% of Americans. Something like 3 million people carry a gun every single day.

There are about 260 million registered vehicles in the US, roughly the same number as the number of guns. At any given time during the day there's about 18 million people on the road around the US. All the way up to as much as 50 million during rush hour. There are also about 6 million accidents every year, which are non-fatal, but plenty of people are hurt and property damaged.

Of course, an argument for the notion of training people and licensing them for gun ownership (Which will never happen without the repeal of the 2nd Amendment) is Israel's gun policies. Seeing armed guards around a mall or movie theatre is quite common there. I can distinctly recall a pair of women getting on the bus with rifles over their shoulders when I was there. They do not have school shootings or massive gun violence issues. Their gun violence is something on the order of 2 per every 100,000. But they also have a very precise process for gun ownership and people are denied ownership or permits all the time. They also have a significant portion of their populace which has served in the military and received the associated weapons familiarization and training. (I wouldn't quite call it the mandatory service requirement they used to have as there's been some significant deviation from that policy in recent years.)