Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:
No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.
If you are already a member then feel free to login now.
Crispy78 wrote: I've been reading a few of Jim Wright (@Stonekettle)'s articles on mass shootings, gun ownership, responsibility and so on. They're well worth a read. Despite him being in favour of guns and me not so much, I really can't fault how he argues. He's a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer, certified rangemaster, armourer and gunsmith. I'm happy to call him an expert on guns.
I won't list all his articles, but this one particularly impressed me. It's largely on responsibility.
I'd generally say that if America wants some sensible ideas on the whole gun thing, they could do a lot worse than talk to this guy.
All of the responsible gun owners I know, myself included, agree with the statement that "There are no accidental discharges only negligent ones." Modern firearms are designed very well for the most part and they won't just fire by themselves. If a firearm you are handling goes off when you didn't intend to fire a round then you are guilty of not following safe handling procedures. Firearm safety is pretty simple:
Treat every gun like it's loaded,
Always make sure the muzzle is pointed in a safe direction,
Identify your target and what's beyond it before you fire,
Make sure the gun is unloaded before you strip/clean it,
Store firearms securely when they're not in use.
Everyone who owns a firearm should always follow those rules and should make sure that everyone else that they live with or shoot with follows those rules as well. If you follow those rules you should never have a negligent discharge. The safe usage of any dangerous tool can also be governed by a similar set of basic rules.
We have a society that guarantees a lot of individual freedom so we therefore, as a society, need to consistently reinforce the importance of individual responsibility.
I'm guessing you've never heard of bolt cutters or sledge hammers or hack saws?
Show a news article that can reliably source that the Santa Fe shooter used bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, or a hacksaw to gain access to what was used.
This is where the problem comes from. There's all these ridiculous scenarios where people can come up with rather than just the father did a shoddy job securing his firearms and is looking for anyone else to point the finger at. He already tried to blame the victims with the "bullying" and "embarrassment" nonsense.
The Santa Fe shooter didn't need to break in to access the firearms because his parents had deemed their 17 year old honors student to be trustworthy in regards to responsibly using the firearms they owned. In hindsight that was clearly a mistake but I haven't seen any evidence that the parents were aware of any warning signs that their son was planning a mass murder. It's a less egregious version of what happened with Sandy Hook but in that instance the Sandy Hook murderer's mother chose to use recreational shooting as a way to connect with her son that she knew was suffering from mental/behavioral problems. Again, the gun the properly secured but the teenage was trusted with the ability to access it, which in hindsight was wrong and the mother paid for that mistake with her life since she was her son's first victim.
The world would certainly be a better place with better parenting across the board and parents having better knowledge of what's going on with their kids' lives but that's a very difficult thing to fix with laws.
GC knew very specifically how to open one of the quicksafes in a bathroom in case of home invasion or her crazy bio dad braking in, and it was her Beretta in it.
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
skyth wrote: Gun suicides should very much be included in the graph. The whole point is that the more guns out there, the more often they are used in a bad way.
Gun suicide is not relevant here. Suicidal rampages are but suicides are not related to guns. There are many ways one can commit suicide - people choose the gun because it is painless and quick. They can simply choose another device. Anyone serious about killing themselves (and basically anyone that pulls the trigger with a handgun to the head is serious) have probably gone to a website like this https://www.quora.com/What-are-ways-to-painlessly-commit-suicide?redirected_qid=14365332 and even discussed it with other people.
Most suicides occur after months or years of intrusive thoughts. But the actual act itself is usually impulsive, and keeping a gun handy is an easy way to kill yourself on impulse.
My friend Mike Lareau was raised in a gun free home. When he committed suicide he ran an acetylene gas line into a plastic bag pulled over his head. His life was ending that night regardless of what instrument he had at hand. Had his blowtorch been empty, he would have found something else. I've also seen OTHER suicide attempts, some being successful, and less than a quarter of them involved guns.
I once won $20 on a scratch off ticket, but I'm not expanding that to assume everyone in the country who buys a scratch off ticket will win $20, because I know that is an uncommon event in the face of overwhelming evidence that most people won't. That is how anecdotal data works.
Automatically Appended Next Post: An academic study into suicide by gun made the following discovery:
[quote=]The restriction of firearm availability in Switzerland resulting from the Army XXI reform was followed by an enduring decrease in the general suicide rate.
Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios
Ouze wrote: I once won $20 on a scratch off ticket, but I'm not expanding that to assume everyone in the country who buys a scratch off ticket will win $20, because I know that is an uncommon event in the face of overwhelming evidence that most people won't. That is how anecdotal data works.
Given that the US isn't an outlier for suicide I'd say its not something to consider at all.
A gun might make an already suicidal person more likely to be successful, but it doesn't make them suicidal in the first place. Just like having a gun doesn't make you more likely to commit murder.
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios
Suicide is suicide. Why does the method matter?
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
Ouze wrote: I once won $20 on a scratch off ticket, but I'm not expanding that to assume everyone in the country who buys a scratch off ticket will win $20, because I know that is an uncommon event in the face of overwhelming evidence that most people won't. That is how anecdotal data works.
Given that the US isn't an outlier for suicide I'd say its not something to consider at all.
A gun might make an already suicidal person more likely to be successful, but it doesn't make them suicidal in the first place. Just like having a gun doesn't make you more likely to commit murder.
Grey Templar wrote: A gun might make an already suicidal person more likely to be successful, but it doesn't make them suicidal in the first place. Just like having a gun doesn't make you more likely to commit murder.
Emphasis mine - literally no one suggested that.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/05/25 06:39:02
lord_blackfang wrote: Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.
Flinty wrote: The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
cuda1179 wrote: The only real statistic that matters is overall murder rates. When you do a graph correlating overall murder rates to state gun ownership things get weird. The two outliers are Washington DC and Louisiana. DC has no guns and high murders, Louisiana has lots of guns and high murder. The overall trend is a bell curve that has a sweet spot of mid levels of gun ownership and low murders. Luckily I live in one of these states.
Suicides matter, but we'll stick to murders if you want.
First up, you're 100% wrong when you say DC has no guns. DC has tight gun laws, banning semi-auto rifles and requiring registration, but oh man it has guns. It has 50% more guns than any state, DC has 66.4 guns per 1,000 people, next is Arkansas is 41.6 guns per 1,000. Only proviso is my data is registered guns, which will bump DC up relatively, but still, it's a myth that there's no guns in DC. There's guns. Heller made sure of that.
Anyhow, I went and got the guns per capita stats, and put them against murders per capita. I tried putting the table here but html and coherent tables are natural enemies. I can give anyone the figures if they want. But here's the scatter graphs showing the results;
The first has DC excluded to show the relationship without that one strong example, the second includes DC for completeness. Either way the relationship is pretty clear, honestly its a bit more clear than I would have thought, I would have thought urban/rural share, police funding, education funding etc would have muddied the picture more than it does. I guess someone could claim that gun ownership correlates to a bunch of the above, but given that argument basically boils down to 'it isn't the guns it's the Republicanism' I'm not sure any pro-gun person exactly wants to make that argument
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Easy E wrote: I would love to see the Histogram you are siting. Care to share. I am a bit of a graph nerd.
I've had my crack at it, seen above. Only limit in my figures, that I am aware of, was my guns per 1,000 people stats showed registered guns, which would likely understate relative guns in states with weak registration requirements.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Xenomancers wrote: The declaration of independence is not a legal document. It was a declaration of war against tyranny. It's essentially the charter of the free world now.
It really isn't. The Declaration is one of the great documents of history, but it has no role to play in how freedom works in any other country. It's actually quite noticeable how little of it was copied or even used as inspiration outside of the US.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2018/05/25 07:08:58
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
Suicide isn't suicide. Suicide is successful attempted suicide.
A method of suicide which is easily accessible, and instantly successful, is likely to lead to a higher suicide rate because it reduces the chance of second thoughts or rescue.
The studies I referred to in previous posts show this through statistics.
This has been explained over and over. You just refuse to acknowledge it. Because a lot of suicides are impulsive acts. Grab the gun, pull the trigger. One and done. There is no feeling of regret like with pills, car exhaust, or slitting ones wrists. All which can be stopped by calling for assistance. No setup like hanging or dropping a toaster in the bath, which can turn people away.
If you use a gun and survive, the odds of you being able to call for help or help arriving from another person hearing the shot is low. If you do get saved, the chances of having permanent damage which would require extensive recovery time and care costs are incredibly high.
Just stop and read this. One time. Don't skim over it and in two pages go "but why does the method matter?" Because you know why now.
Xenomancers wrote: There are many ways one can commit suicide - people choose the gun because it is painless and quick. They can simply choose another device.
You are really wrong there in two very big ways. The first is that suicide is less of a choice and more of an impulse produced by a mental health failure. Being an irrational impulse it can be made more likely by external factors, particularly the presence of triggers. One very powerful trigger is the presence of a gun in the house. For instance, when Israel noted a chronic suicide rate among soldiers on weekend leave, it stopped the soldiers taking their guns home. Suicides dropped 40% immediately.
The second reason is that when a gun is used in a suicide attempt, the result is almost always fatal. Cutting, poison are rarely fatal.
The simple reality is that when a gun is nearby, a suicide attempt is more likely, and that attempt is more likely to be fatal.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/05/25 06:57:36
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
The Swiss Army study I referenced in a previous post, showed that gun suicides were reduced and there was also a long-term reduction in the total number of suicides, when the number of available guns was reduced.
Kilkrazy wrote: The Swiss Army study I referenced in a previous post, showed that gun suicides were reduced and there was also a long-term reduction in the total number of suicides, when the number of available guns was reduced.
Yep, this stuff is really well established, and clear to anyone who isn't actively trying to deny it. This is what I meant earlier on when I talked about the basic dishonesty among the pro-gun segment. It is okay to argue that further restrictions won't work, or wouldn't be justified by the increased inconvenience. That's a legitimate political argument. But instead they attempt to deny there is any cost at all to gun proliferation. They attempt to deny that a greater presence of guns could possibly increase the greater misuse of guns. It's an absurd position that someone could only argue for by showing a plain indifference to empirical reality.
As I said earlier, I love pizza, and want there to be more pizza everywhere all the time, but I'm not gonna pretend it is healthy.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2018/05/25 07:17:57
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
Correlation between murders per capita and guns per capita doesn't necessarily mean the latter is the cause of the former, it could just as easily be the other way around.
It's anecdotal I know, but when I first moved to the US I lived in an area with a pretty high crime rate and lots of break ins and I met a few people who did not own guns previously got them after moving in to the area.
But either way it does need to be broken down even more than just murders per capita, it really needs to be broken down in to the type of murder as well. In a cost-benefit analysis of guns, not all murders can be lumped together because not all murders have the same perceived "cost".
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Correlation between murders per capita and guns per capita doesn't necessarily mean the latter is the cause of the former, it could just as easily be the other way around.
It's anecdotal I know, but when I first moved to the US I lived in an area with a pretty high crime rate and lots of break ins and I met a few people who did not own guns previously got them after moving in to the area.
That's pretty much a definition of a vicious circle. Insecurity leads to more guns, more guns lead to potential criminals being more aggressive which in turn creates the conditions for an even higher murder rate.
At the end of the day random shootings are still statistically feth all and if muricans deem the level of random shootings an acceptable price for having guns, I'm fine with that. Not every country has to be Sweden, if you don't like the American philosophy on life then don't move there.
... ...
The political issue is that an increasing number of Americans don't think the level of random shootings is an acceptable price to pay.
Perhaps, but...
1. These internet discussions usually seem to be dominated pro gun Americans vs anti-gun non-Americans (or perhaps ex-pats). The split among Americans doesn't seem as distinct left/right as many other political discussions. When I was living in the US it seemed like even a lot of my left leaning friends were fine with guns, or would mention something negative about them but also admit they owned and enjoyed guns themselves. It wasn't like a lot of other political issues where the mere mention of the topic made it obvious which side of the political spectrum a person was on.
2. Of the Americans who think the level of random shooting is unacceptable, how many of those are actually grounded in factual analysis of the probability of a random shooting occurring? There does seem to be a whole bunch of fear mongering over guns these days and that will sway public opinion of the uneducated masses (and we all know how loud the uneducated masses of Americans can be ). I've read discussions where apparently kids are scared to go to school because of shootings, which to me suggests fear mongering more than anything because at the end of the day they're probably more likely to get killed by getting run over by a soccer mum in an SUV or trip over and bash their heads on something sharp or choke on a fish bone.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Correlation between murders per capita and guns per capita doesn't necessarily mean the latter is the cause of the former, it could just as easily be the other way around.
It's anecdotal I know, but when I first moved to the US I lived in an area with a pretty high crime rate and lots of break ins and I met a few people who did not own guns previously got them after moving in to the area.
That's pretty much a definition of a vicious circle. Insecurity leads to more guns, more guns lead to potential criminals being more aggressive which in turn creates the conditions for an even higher murder rate.
Not necessarily, the areas with high murder rates may have high murder rates regardless of gun ownership, it's just they attract high gun ownership because people want to be able to protect themselves.
Maybe, I don't know, but it's what makes it hard to do a real proper analysis, there's so many factors that go in to something that separating causation from correlation is damned near impossible.
Even on the suicide thing, there's so many factors that affect suicide rates that it is difficult to get a concrete number on the affect of guns on suicide. I do believe based on the evidence that guns make suicide more likely, but by how much? Without any concrete numbers all we have are emotional discussions instead of factual ones.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/05/25 09:54:15
At the end of the day random shootings are still statistically feth all and if muricans deem the level of random shootings an acceptable price for having guns, I'm fine with that. Not every country has to be Sweden, if you don't like the American philosophy on life then don't move there.
... ...
The political issue is that an increasing number of Americans don't think the level of random shootings is an acceptable price to pay.
Perhaps, but...
1. These internet discussions usually seem to be dominated pro gun Americans vs anti-gun non-Americans (or perhaps ex-pats). The split among Americans doesn't seem as distinct left/right as many other political discussions. When I was living in the US it seemed like even a lot of my left leaning friends were fine with guns, or would mention something negative about them but also admit they owned and enjoyed guns themselves. It wasn't like a lot of other political issues where the mere mention of the topic made it obvious which side of the political spectrum a person was on.
I have 4 guns at home so I can't possibly be anti-gun. I have also lived (and shot) in the US for extended periods of time.
I do believe that firearm regulations in other countries do a decent enough job of keeping the bad side of guns to a more manageable level.
That said, I agree with you that there is an additional split in the gun politics question besides left/right and that's rural/urban. Urban types tend to be more ideological in their opposition to any kind of gun ownership, while I've come across lots of left of centre gun owners in more rural areas.
Likewise pro-gun are also split into the utilitarian type who probably wouldn't mind reasonable measures and the ideological don't-take-my-guns-it's-my-divine-right.
Overread wrote: That said I've honestly no idea how common those random searches are and I would highly suspect that most typical firearms owners only get inspected when they are starting out (ensuring compliance) and at any point their licence changes state or is renewed/ended.
My dad had a gun for quite a while, and I don't ever remember him being visited. There was some advice on the sort of secure cabinet that was required, but even then, I don't know if the local constable ever actually visited our house.
Just Tony wrote: My friend was raised in a gun free home. When he committed suicide he ran an acetylene gas line into a plastic bag pulled over his head. His life was ending that night regardless of what instrument he had at hand.
Or had his acetylene bottle been empty maybe he would have reconsidered? In the UK the preferred method for a long time was the stove, running on coal gas, found in a lot of homes. When they started using natural gas instead (no or not enough CO to kill you) the suicides dropped sharply, especially among females. They didn't go out and find another means because this sort of suicide was an impulsive act made easy by access to a perfect tool.
Some will find another way, sure, but most people that want to die for reasons are so depressed that they can't be bothered with any complicated plans for it.
Just Tony wrote: My friend was raised in a gun free home. When he committed suicide he ran an acetylene gas line into a plastic bag pulled over his head. His life was ending that night regardless of what instrument he had at hand.
Or had his acetylene bottle been empty maybe he would have reconsidered? In the UK the preferred method for a long time was the stove, running on coal gas, found in a lot of homes. When they started using natural gas instead (no or not enough CO to kill you) the suicides dropped sharply, especially among females. They didn't go out and find another means because this sort of suicide was an impulsive act made easy by access to a perfect tool.
Some will find another way, sure, but most people that want to die for reasons are so depressed that they can't be bothered with any complicated plans for it.
Then there was the response to people using paracetamol. A restriction on number of paracetamol that can be purchased in a single transaction was imposed. Result was a lot less successful suicides using paracetamol.
So having to go round a shop twice, or go to a different shop, was enough of a barrier to reduce the number of suicides.
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
cuda1179 wrote: The only real statistic that matters is overall murder rates. When you do a graph correlating overall murder rates to state gun ownership things get weird. The two outliers are Washington DC and Louisiana. DC has no guns and high murders, Louisiana has lots of guns and high murder. The overall trend is a bell curve that has a sweet spot of mid levels of gun ownership and low murders. Luckily I live in one of these states.
Suicides matter, but we'll stick to murders if you want.
First up, you're 100% wrong when you say DC has no guns. DC has tight gun laws, banning semi-auto rifles and requiring registration, but oh man it has guns. It has 50% more guns than any state, DC has 66.4 guns per 1,000 people, next is Arkansas is 41.6 guns per 1,000. Only proviso is my data is registered guns, which will bump DC up relatively, but still, it's a myth that there's no guns in DC. There's guns. Heller made sure of that.
Spoiler:
Anyhow, I went and got the guns per capita stats, and put them against murders per capita. I tried putting the table here but html and coherent tables are natural enemies. I can give anyone the figures if they want. But here's the scatter graphs showing the results;
The first has DC excluded to show the relationship without that one strong example, the second includes DC for completeness. Either way the relationship is pretty clear, honestly its a bit more clear than I would have thought, I would have thought urban/rural share, police funding, education funding etc would have muddied the picture more than it does. I guess someone could claim that gun ownership correlates to a bunch of the above, but given that argument basically boils down to 'it isn't the guns it's the Republicanism' I'm not sure any pro-gun person exactly wants to make that argument
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Easy E wrote: I would love to see the Histogram you are siting. Care to share. I am a bit of a graph nerd.
I've had my crack at it, seen above. Only limit in my figures, that I am aware of, was my guns per 1,000 people stats showed registered guns, which would likely understate relative guns in states with weak registration requirements.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Xenomancers wrote: The declaration of independence is not a legal document. It was a declaration of war against tyranny. It's essentially the charter of the free world now.
It really isn't. The Declaration is one of the great documents of history, but it has no role to play in how freedom works in any other country. It's actually quite noticeable how little of it was copied or even used as inspiration outside of the US.
Honestly not trying to be argumentative or pedantic here but I'm curious where you got statistics from gun registries for the states since 44 states have no gun registry of any kind (8 of those states even have laws forbidding the creation of a registry). I'm not saying your gun ownership rates aren't reasonably accurate but they can't come from gun registries because the majority of states don't have such a thing. There's been polls/surveys of gun ownership per capita for the states and the North Carolina numbers usually align with my anecdotal experience so I think your numbers are likely accurate enough if that's where you got them. If you actually used registered firearms DC would be an even greater outlier because 44 of the states have zero registered firearms.
States that Require Registration of All Firearms
District of Columbia
Hawaii
States that Require Registration of Handguns
New York
States that Require New Residents to Report Their Firearms
California
Maryland (handguns and assault weapons)
States that Require Registration of Pre-Ban Assault Weapons or 50 Caliber Rifles
California (assault weapons and 50 caliber rifles)
Connecticut (assault weapons and large capacity magazines)
Hawaii (assault pistols)
Maryland (assault pistols)
New Jersey (assault weapons)
New York (assault weapons)
States that Prohibit Registries of Firearms
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota
Vermont
Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios
Kilkrazy wrote: We've got concrete numbers on the effect of guns on suicide rates in the Swiss study referred to twice above.
Studies in other countries can’t really be applied to the US because there are so many different variables. The fact that some of the countries with the highest suicide rates have strict gun laws and/or very few guns in circulation
But fine, let’s assume you are correct. Getting rid of guns because it might reduce successful suicides is not a good idea. It tramples on constitutional rights and attempts to solve a problem that really isn’t an issue here. The effort would bear more fruit without the other issues if you focus on preventing and treating depression, rather than demonizing tools and innocent people.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/05/25 16:06:45
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
Kilkrazy wrote: We've got concrete numbers on the effect of guns on suicide rates in the Swiss study referred to twice above.
Studies in other countries can’t really be applied to the US because there are so many different variables. The fact that some of the countries with the highest suicide rates have strict gun laws and/or very few guns in circulation
But fine, let’s assume you are correct. Getting rid of guns because it might reduce successful suicides is not a good idea. It tramples on constitutional rights and attempts to solve a problem that really isn’t an issue here. The effort would bear more fruit without the other issues if you focus on preventing and treating depression, rather than demonizing tools and innocent people.
Literally nobody in this thread is saying ban all guns. No one. That's just you, Captain of the USS Ludicrous Hyberbole, boldly going where no has gone before.
We were once so close to heaven, St. Peter came out and gave us medals; declaring us "The nicest of the damned".
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Kilkrazy wrote: We've got concrete numbers on the effect of guns on suicide rates in the Swiss study referred to twice above.
Studies in other countries can’t really be applied to the US because there are so many different variables. The fact that some of the countries with the highest suicide rates have strict gun laws and/or very few guns in circulation
But fine, let’s assume you are correct. Getting rid of guns because it might reduce successful suicides is not a good idea. It tramples on constitutional rights and attempts to solve a problem that really isn’t an issue here. The effort would bear more fruit without the other issues if you focus on preventing and treating depression, rather than demonizing tools and innocent people.
Okay, first step on the road to getting better mental health in the USA:
Stop using mental health to deflect from guns every time there is a high profile killing with guns.
Stop demonizing mental health problems and innocent people by only ever mentioning it as a means of deflecting the focus from guns, reinforcing stigma around mental health issues.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/05/25 16:26:00
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
I used to think gun ownership was fine, despite not owning any guns myself or ever really wanting to. I'm actually becoming more pro-gun now though, particularly given the Dodd-Frank situation and the sabre-rattling about embargoes. Once we see the collapse, guns and ammo are going to be a better investment than just about anything else you can come up with after all.
It's funny to me, as when the gun-clutchers were freaking out about buying up as many guns as possible under President Obama, I laughed for quite a while. Now we have Trump, and while I'm not going to liquidate any investments over it, but I'm seriously thinking about buying quite a few pretty damned soon.
I'm going to put my tinfoil hat on for just a second. This just popped into my head though.
Thinking about suicide attempts.
Guns are almost always fatal in suicide attempts - other types of attempts are quite often not fatal.
So who benefits the most from guns not being available in regards to suicide victims? Suicide attempts will still occur - they will just be unsuccessful. Those failed attempts lead to hospitalizations - which in turn lead to anti-depressions/anxiety medications being prescribed to the victims - medications that these people will likely be taking for years or their entire life.
Is Big pharma behind this campaign against guns?
Tinfoil hat off.
If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced.
- Fox Mulder
I think Big Crafting is behind this. Nothing sells poster board and markers like an anti gun rally.
We were once so close to heaven, St. Peter came out and gave us medals; declaring us "The nicest of the damned".
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9371561/fatal_suicide_attempts.jpg)
). I've read discussions where apparently kids are scared to go to school because of shootings, which to me suggests fear mongering more than anything because at the end of the day they're probably more likely to get killed by getting run over by a soccer mum in an SUV or trip over and bash their heads on something sharp or choke on a fish bone.
