d-usa wrote:
I always think that looking at state/city level gun control is pretty silly anyway, especially if you want to make conclusions about national gun control policy effects.

Cities and states don't have closed borders, so any gun control laws will be hard to enforce since anybody can drive down I-whatever and pick up what they want and drive it back home, criminals even more so.

 d-usa wrote:
It's a tiny bit better!

It's a two edges sword, that's for sure. I think gun-control at the state level is pretty ineffective. Stuff like handling CCW licenses is fine, but "no magazines with more than 5 bullets" is just nothing that can ever be realistically enforced with the non-borders states have. Gun control would be better handled at the national level, but then you run into state rights issues.

.

 d-usa wrote:
Only if you pretend that any and all gun control is unconstitutional.

And we could always get rid of it...

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

And there is more to Texas than Houstan

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
What does party have to do with gun control? Answer, very little

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Except the CDC did look at gun violence, and the results did not correspond with what the Administration was agitating for. The study was commissioned by Executive Order (so those Evil Republicans couldn't interfere with funding) and it had a budget of $10 million to carry out this study, as well as overturning a ban from 1996 preventing the CDC from studying firearm violence. And what did they report back?
1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
7. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are not homicides, but suicides:
“Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”

 Frazzled wrote:
Why is suicide a problem. Thats personal choice.

WASHINGTON, DC – A senior U.S. general has confirmed that the military has secretly drawn up plans to round up large numbers of privately-owned firearms from American gun owners.

Gen. James M. Scott of the U.S. Air Force confirmed that the Pentagon received a series of formal directives from the White House between November 7 and December 13 to begin plans for a massive nationwide operation to confiscate guns using a series of federal databases compiled over the last few decades.

Scott spoke with Shifty reporters in a parking garage in northern Virginia.

Scott also confirmed that a certain four-star general who heads the U.S. Transportation Command was intimately involved in the planning. General Scott would not reveal the general’s name out of concerns for his safety.

The plan, known in the military as Operation PREAKNESS, combines a series of tactics developed for house sweeps and room clearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Scott admitted had been used as test-runs for the U.S.

“If we can confiscate millions of firearms in a country where we don’t speak the language or understand the culture, the U.S. should be easy,” Scott told Shify Blog. “I do not feel sorry for Osama fellow we had to kill to justify the whole thing.”

According to Scott, the actual planning for Operation PREAKNESS was initiated in early 2009 and developed in conjunction with the United Nations, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and several other liberal organizations such as the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Rifle Association, which is apparently a front for all the previous groups.

While there was initially some concern about the constitutionality of using the military on American soil, page 2131 of the ObamaCare Act actually amends the Posse Comitatus law to allow the military to disarm private citizens at the direction of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Objections by then-CIA Director David Petraeus were quietly silenced in November.

A test-run for PREAKNESS was actually conducted in early December in Clinger, Pennsylvania. A joint platoon of Army Rangers and UN Peacekeepers, working with select state and local officials and using imagery collected by the Google Street View Car, quietly went door-to-door and managed to collect all the firearms from Clinger owners.

The few owners who did complain were initially transported to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to explain their case before a special international tribunal, before being sent to the National Center For Gun Control in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A follow-on operation using just the UN Peacekeepers is planned later this week for any owners missed in the previous sweep, although the Peacekeepers have confirmed they will be using a post office truck to infiltrate the area.

 Blood Hawk wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Why is suicide a problem. Thats personal choice.

Lol, way to troll, way to troll....

 d-usa wrote:
Cities and states don't have closed borders, so any gun control laws will be hard to enforce since anybody can drive down I-whatever and pick up what they want and drive it back home, criminals even more so.

 Jihadin wrote:

WASHINGTON, DC – A senior U.S. general has confirmed that the military has secretly drawn up plans to round up large numbers of privately-owned firearms from American gun owners.

Gen. James M. Scott of the U.S. Air Force confirmed that the Pentagon received a series of formal directives from the White House between November 7 and December 13 to begin plans for a massive nationwide operation to confiscate guns using a series of federal databases compiled over the last few decades.

Scott spoke with Shifty reporters in a parking garage in northern Virginia.

Scott also confirmed that a certain four-star general who heads the U.S. Transportation Command was intimately involved in the planning. General Scott would not reveal the general’s name out of concerns for his safety.

The plan, known in the military as Operation PREAKNESS, combines a series of tactics developed for house sweeps and room clearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Scott admitted had been used as test-runs for the U.S.

“If we can confiscate millions of firearms in a country where we don’t speak the language or understand the culture, the U.S. should be easy,” Scott told Shify Blog. “I do not feel sorry for Osama fellow we had to kill to justify the whole thing.”

According to Scott, the actual planning for Operation PREAKNESS was initiated in early 2009 and developed in conjunction with the United Nations, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and several other liberal organizations such as the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Rifle Association, which is apparently a front for all the previous groups.

While there was initially some concern about the constitutionality of using the military on American soil, page 2131 of the ObamaCare Act actually amends the Posse Comitatus law to allow the military to disarm private citizens at the direction of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Objections by then-CIA Director David Petraeus were quietly silenced in November.

A test-run for PREAKNESS was actually conducted in early December in Clinger, Pennsylvania. A joint platoon of Army Rangers and UN Peacekeepers, working with select state and local officials and using imagery collected by the Google Street View Car, quietly went door-to-door and managed to collect all the firearms from Clinger owners.

The few owners who did complain were initially transported to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to explain their case before a special international tribunal, before being sent to the National Center For Gun Control in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A follow-on operation using just the UN Peacekeepers is planned later this week for any owners missed in the previous sweep, although the Peacekeepers have confirmed they will be using a post office truck to infiltrate the area.

Edit

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But according to the NRA that makes me "part of the problem".

So suicide isn't a problem then?

 Blood Hawk wrote:
...And? don't understand what you mean by that.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
..Because you said that cities with strict gun control have higher crime so I pointed out that among the top 10 cities they are evenly split between red states (that have weaker gun control laws) and blue states (that do)...

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Ok stop what is your point here? So if you want to feel safe you have to go out armed? What is America a warzone or something? I am not some left wing liberal who wants to strip away the second amendment or anything I just want to be able to drive down to the 7-eleven for a soda at 11pm without having to look like this http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Open-carry-Chipotle-even-via-Facebook-615x345.png. But according to the NRA that makes me "part of the problem".

I mean you look at what happened in Chicago last weekend you may think that America is a warzone but arming a bunch more citizens and putting everyone on edge is the only answer? Really?

 Blood Hawk wrote:
So suicide isn't a problem then?

 Frazzled wrote:
Why is suicide a problem. Thats personal choice.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Hawaii and Idaho have very similar firearms murder rates, but Idaho has nearly 10x the firearm ownership rate, and much laxer firearm laws. Meanwhile, CA, Illinois and NY and TX have roughly similar firearm murder rates (all several multiples above Idaho and Hawaii), but CA and NY have notably lower firearms ownership rates and much stricter gun control laws than TX has, while Illinois state has relatively lax gun laws but Chicago (the state's biggest population center and primary center of most gun violence) has exceedingly strict gun control laws.

Meanwhile Washington DC has *very* strict gun laws, *very* low firearms ownership rates, and sky high firearms murder rates.

While gun violence isn't exclusive to cities, the vast majority of it takes place in cities (especially as most people live in cities).

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

You complained when Frazz compared Houston with Chicago, saying that there was more to Illinois than one city. I was pointing out your refusal to extend the same courtesy elsewhere

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I made no mention of political party. You seem intent upon injecting it into the discussion. There are pro-gun Democrats, and anti-gun Republicans

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
You mean what was my point in absolutely refuting your sources, and your attempts to blame the Dastardly Duo of the NRA and Republicans? I would have thought that was self evident
Who said America was a warzone? You mentioned it twice in that one short passage. No one else did.
And don't conflate Open Carry Texas with all gun owners. Most gun owners think that their antics harm gun owners. And you are aware that OCT meeting was agreed with the restaurant beforehand, and none of the patrons objected to their presence?

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
It is. It is a mental health problem. It should be treated as such. Treat the issue, not the symptoms.

 Blood Hawk wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I made no mention of political party. You seem intent upon injecting it into the discussion. There are pro-gun Democrats, and anti-gun Republicans

Red states tend to have stricter gun laws generally than blue states. Forget I said anything about blue/red if that bothers you I didn't mean anything particularly by it.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Red states tend to have stricter gun laws generally than blue states. Forget I said anything about blue/red if that bothers you I didn't mean anything particularly by it.

At the top of Brady’s “best” (the most restrictive) states are:

California
Connecticut
New York
New Jersey
Massachusetts
Hawaii
Leading the “worst” list (according to Brady) are three states that might be considered the “best” states for gun owners. All three scored a ZERO on the Brady checklist. Getting a zero is probably like scoring 100 in the eyes of a firearms fan. Meet the “zeros”:

Arizona
Alaska
Utah
Rounding out the rest of the top 10 best states for gun ownership (based on Brady) appear to be:

North Dakota
Oklahoma
Florida
Wisconsin
Texas
Wyoming
Mississippi

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Ok on the refuting sources thing.

1. Gun violence does include suicide, that is part of the formal definition of gun violence. If you don't like that well whatever, but the study including those figures is appropriate.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
2. The date of the that study is before Obama study reported their findings, you know before the CDC did research on gun violence. Also different studies sometimes have different results because of actual methods, data, they are studing different things, asking different questions, etc. The CDC study doesn't disqualify all prior studies just because the prior ones had conclusions you didn't like.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Also I wasn't saying anything about Open Carry Texas, I just looked from pic of a normal looking guy carrying a gun that is what popped up in the goggle search. You made that jump by yourself.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Access does matter though, as does effectiveness. Not all suicide attempts are successful but ones done with guns, as some data shows, more likely to be successful than drug overdoses. I am not saying that trying to keep guns out of the hands of those prone to suicide will fix the problem per say, and the reality of why/how people commit suicide is complicated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/us/to-lower-suicide-rates-new-focus-turns-to-guns.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Six dead in domestic gun violence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28240831

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

I think you have that backwards... Blue states tend to have stricter gun laws than red states, Case in point:

Blue states: California, NY, Illinois (though this is mostly due to Chicago, and large urban centers tend to vote more blue), Mass.

Red states: Texas, Tennessee, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.

Dreadclaw69 wrote: So is slitting your wrists counted as knife violence? Overdosing pharmaceutical violence? Carbon monoxide poisoning from a car vehicular violence? If not why not

Dreadclaw69 wrote: Conclusions that are no longer supported by facts. Like does not come into it.

Dreadclaw69 wrote: Which jump? If you're talking about OCT I was merely giving context. The real jumping was the person who leapt feet first into the "warzone" comment

Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Oh goody, the NY Times. One of the more pro gun control sources out there. That is about as fair a source on firearms as MSNBC is on Dubya, or Fox is on Obama.
And more access to cars means a greater liklihood of getting hit by one. Anyone who is determined to end their live will do it regardless of what methods are available

 Blood Hawk wrote:
We ain't talking about any of that. You can find any irreverent example you want you are still wrong. Suicides are included as part of gun violence, never said you have to like it.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Sorry the world doesn't work that way, the CDC study doesn't all of sudden make the other study not true they looked at different aspects of this anyway. States with loser gun laws have more gun violence. Never said you have to like it.

Ever since the school shooting in Newtown, one of the preferred tactics for gun control advocates has been to argue that guns kill lots of children every year. It’s one hell of a propaganda claim, since there’s nothing quite like the bodies of dead children to empower the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex, override the analytical abilities of the voting public and try to sneak through a little gun control legislation. We’ve seen this tactic before from the New York Times and we thoroughly debunked it. Now it looks like a medical student and his advisor have taken it upon themselves to pick up the mantle and try to advance the party line a little further. And once again, they’ve used some remarkably flawed data to back up their efforts . . .


To be fair, it was actually Discovery that first tipped me off to this steaming turd of a study, but NBC News will get no less of my ire for actually running with it.

The study was conducted by a Boston medical student and his adviser at Harvard. They ostensibly investigated the death rate of “children” at hospitals from gunshot wounds. Right away we run into a problem, because like the New York Times article the medical student in question includes all patients under the age of 20 in his definition of “children.”

The reason the word “children” is so loaded is that it evokes images of innocent, cherub-faced little tots barely old enough for elementary school. The picture that the title of the article and that the study tries to paint is one of innocent little Suzie being shot and dying before her 10th birthday. But in reality, as I discussed in the Times takedown, the vast and overwhelming majority of deaths from firearms for this age range happens in those 15 and over.

Personally, my cut-off for calling someone a child is where the state believes that they’re capable of operating a deadly machine at high speeds on the public roadways: 16. Any reasonable person might expand that definition to, at most, 18. But the study included, ahem, “children” up to the age of 20 because the probability of being wounded or killed by a gun increases drastically for every year between the ages of 15 and 20. The numbers simply weren’t big enough using actual children, so the study’s authors padded their numbers with those cohorts most associated with gang membership.

OK, so the stats are plainly padded. But before we actually get to the numbers, where do these authors get their statistics? From the NBC article:

Madenci, and his colleague, Dr. Christopher Weldon, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, tallied the new statistics by culling a national database of 36 million pediatric hospitalizations from 1997 to 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Wait. So, what they were looking at were the numbers of pediatric patients hospitalized for gunshot wounds? That would exclude anyone who A) was admitted to a non-pediatric service, B) was killed at the scene and never transported to the hospital, or C) was treated at a hospital that didn’t report in to the database. That’s like trying to get water out of a well using a sieve.

OK, so the data set includes an abnormally large swath of the population and uses a terribly flawed database for its input. What were the results?

During that period, hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.

That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The authors claim that nationwide, the trend for “children” dying from firearm related causes is on the rise, but I just ran the numbers from the CDC, and they paint a different story.

For actual “children” (12 and under), the following stats were recorded:

1997: 318 fatalities
2009: 209 fatalities
For “children” between 13 and 19, here’s what the CDC said was going on:

1997: 3,905 fatalities
2009: 2,502 fatalities
Two things pop out immediately. First, the study conducted by the med student and his mentor missed a couple thousand fatalities. Second, their conclusions were completely bogus.

If the study and NBC News are to be believed, the number of children dying from gunshot wounds is on the rise. But if we look at an actually unbiased source (the CDC, who collect all death-related statistics in the United States), the number of deaths from firearms is declining.

What’s even more astounding is that the raw number going down, not just the rate. With the increase in population we might expect that the raw number of children killed by guns to rise in proportion to the population, but the rate to remain the same or drop slightly. In this case, both the raw number AND the rate are declining. And yet NBC News and Discovery are both reporting that these numbers are on the rise.

The issue here is really the source of the data. If the authors wanted to know the truth about whether increased gun ownership is increasing the risk of fatal incidents involving firearms, the CDC’s numbers are there and readily available — he didn’t need to go trudging through an incomplete and obscure database for statistics. But rather than look at the whole picture, they decided to restrict their input to deaths in hospitals.

As an EMT, I can tell you that we don’t typically transport corpses to the hospital emergency room — they go straight to the morgue. Those instances aren’t counted in the study. Similarly, not all injuries are serious enough for a $400+ ambulance ride and $1,000 hospital bill. Those instances aren’t in the study either. And including both those instances, you start to clearly see the downward – not upward – trend in “children” and firearms related deaths.

In the Discovery version of the article, the author of the study officially loses all credibility as far as statistical analytical ability is concerned.

“Based on our research, we know that there is a clear correlation between household gun ownership (and gun safety practices) and childhood gunshot wounds in the home on a large scale,” Madenci said in an email to Discovery News. [...] He said he decided to look at the question of gun ownership and childhood gun deaths after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

If the author were to say that the overall accident rate for children in houses with guns had increased, that would be an interesting finding. But he didn’t — he wrote that gun accidents happen more when guns are present. That’s like saying households with cars are more likely to have a family member die in a car accident. What would be a persuasive argument to me is if the author proved that having a gun in the home increases the overall death rate (including all methods of death), because that would indicate that guns increase the overall probability of death. But he didn’t.

All he did was point out that by owning a certain object you’re more likely to be killed by that object that means nothing. Unless he’s trying to get some free publicity to help in his search for an intern position at a hospital in the near future, that is.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Clearly then you don't understand I was just exaggerating to try to make a point. You were the one that seems invested in talking about Open Carry Texas.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
You clearly aren't getting the point, whatever. Have fun.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
Suicides are included as part of gun violence, never said you have to like it.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

You linked to a story about them, and included a picture. I merely discussed the facts you had placed in issue. I apologize if I am more familiar with the matter than you.