6 ms·

A way to measure gun violence in America

20 points by bootload 11y ago

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> They noted with interest that it appears Oakland’s gunfire was at least twice as deadly as Washington’s gunfire. Although the researchers couldn’t come up with the reasons behind this difference (Were Washington’s gunmen poor shots? Did victims in Oakland get to the hospital more slowly?), the difference points to how measuring gun violence with homicides is problematic. This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. The problematic thing is the implicit shifting of the question to "how to reduce gun violence" from "how to reduce harm" in the first place. Nobody is going to prefer the city that has half as many gunshots but twice as many fatalities. The interesting thing about numbers like this is the unexplained difference. If you can explain it then maybe Oakland can do what Washington has been doing and fewer people will die -- even if that thing has nothing to do specifically with gun violence, like improving emergency response time.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Some people might, if those fatalities were preferentially "intended targets" as that dramatically reduces the potential for harm to innocent bystanders.
- hugh4 11y ago
  > This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. Not necessarily, I'd imagine easy availability of fully-automatic weapons would lower your fatalities-per-gunshot ratio but not be a good thing.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    What is bad about a firing mode that decreases accuracy and depletes ammo quicker?
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    This is kind of the point. The fatalities-per-gunshot ratio is quite irrelevant. What matters is the number of injuries or fatalities. If hypothetically giving out automatic weapons caused there to be more gunshots because every time there was a gun battle many more shots were fired, but it reduced the total number of shooting victims because now dealers are much more wary about starting a gun battle, then you could make the argument for giving out automatic weapons. Because what matters is the actual harm. But if all it did was increase the number of gunshots by a lot and the number of injuries by a little then it's clearly a bad thing. Because what matters is still the actual harm.
- pandaman 11y ago
  Could be as simple as twice as many false positives in DC or half of shots undetected in Oakland.
- dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  The cynic in me says the DC police response is faster and more trigger happy. We all remember what happened when a bunch of cops went after two guys with a six-shooter outside of Boston a few years ago (spoiler: orders of magnitude more than six shots were fired, nobody died from the bullets).
presidentender 11y ago
Why is 'gun violence' so dire that it deserves its own category, relative to other forms of harm?
- lcfcjs 11y ago
  Because guns kill more than anything else? (just a wild guess)
- capote 11y ago
  Because it's its own category of violence. Like any other category, it's not a matter of 'deserving', but rather just a statistic category so we can discuss and analyze it. What a strange question. Why do we discuss it a lot? Because it's one of the most obvious issues in the US, compared to other advanced countries. We have shootings every day in many major urban centers, we have school shootings periodically, which people find especially awful... And because there's a lot of political debate around it, and it's at the forefront of many political elections and campaigns. It's a huge deal, and it's very dire; get caught up on this.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kec 11y ago
    The question is more why do we treat assault and homicide where a firearm is involved differently from other instances of assault and homicide? Dead is dead, no matter the manner in which it happened.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      If that's a serious question you'll be pleased to know it has a very simple answer - to those with a political agenda, no technique is below exploitation to gain command of the emotions of the people.
      - wrongc0ntinent 11y ago
nl 11y ago
This makes more sense to me: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/23/kentucky-gun-owner-gun-violence-archive-mark-bryant http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/23/kentucky-gun-ow...
vilderbar_nugg 11y ago
"ShotSpotter, the company behind a technology that listens for gunfire's acoustic signature and reports it to authorities." Yet another company spamming for yet another surveillance device. tl;dr Statistically acceptable and verifiable measures(homicides, suicides, gunshot injuries) of gun violence are not shocking enough - we should replace them with counts of every potential gun shot fired. "potential gun shot" = e.g., truck backfiring, dumpster lid dropping, slamming door, car collision, gunshot, etc. Any stats available on how many "loud bangs" occur in a city each day?
- JoBrad 11y ago
  It wouldn't be difficult to detect false positives based on the signature of a gun shot vs other loud noises.
  - capote 11y ago
    I was gonna say, having heard a gunshot as well as the other stated things that could sound like gunshots, I think gunshots are categorically louder and more identifiable. That said, I'm not a gun expert so I could be wrong for different types of guns, etc.
    - astrodust 11y ago
      I bet if you were given six months and high quality recordings of different types of gunfire you could figure out how to do it algorithmically. It's all about having a large enough corpus of input, both of the type you're looking for and the type you're looking to exclude. This is an undergraduate level problem to solve.
      - kec 11y ago
        I would be very surprised if you could figure out a way to reliably discriminate between the sound of a gunshot and the sound of a car backfiring given that they're basically the same thing (that is, the sound of a gas rapidly expanding in a metal tube).
robsears 11y ago
> The more telling number about gun violence might be “shots fired.” And now, thanks to broader adoption of new technologies, it is getting easier to show just how common gun violence is in America. I happened to be working with a dispatcher in a 9-11 call center on the night the bin Laden raid was announced. Over the course of a couple hours, we fielded hundreds of "shots fired" calls, which mostly turned out to be people lighting off fireworks (sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent). If "gun violence" had been measured by these reports, the raw stats would suggest that the entire city had spontaneously erupted into a warzone, and then spontaneously returned to normal, all for no reason and without a single injury or death. My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence. The system is guaranteed to generate lots false positives, which will be used to bolster support for more surveillance and gun control. Not only is it _not_ a better way to measure gun violence, it's a proposition so fundamentally flawed that it borders on insanity.
- esaym 11y ago
  Totally. I live within the city limits, but a somewhat rural area. On Sept 1st every year (when dove season starts), I hear multiple shot gun shots per second (yes per second) from about 5am - 9am for several days.
- parennoob 11y ago
  > sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent Seeing as it can lead to fatalities to bystanders [1], I would be fine calling it "violent". [EDIT: "potentially violent" being perhaps a better term]. In my opinion, this is why at last gun education would be a good bipartisan way to reduce gun accidents (if not gun crime). If a police dispatcher does not think that firing into the air is serious problem and can kill people, that in itself is a big problem. I was browsing the ShotSpotter website, and they have a paper that talks specifically about celebratory gunfire. [2] [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14616491 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14616491 [2] http://www.shotspotter.com/system/content-uploads/MYTHS_about_Celebratory_Gunfire.pdf http://www.shotspotter.com/system/content-uploads/MYTHS_abou...
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
What's the cheapest device one could build that isn't a firearm, but could reproduce the sound of a gunshot with enough fidelity to fool this thing? Bonus if it can do a nice AK-47 machine gun sound or something like that. Assume that the device requires electricity. It probably should be wifi-connected, so that if you can get it close enough to a Starbucks or something, you can control it remotely. Should ideally be small and unobtrusive so that it's not easily spotted. Shouldn't need any refillable fuels. Would be fun to put the plans up on the net so that many people would build and field these.
- hga 11y ago
  Not sure how much they sound like guns, but there's a whole field of scaring off birds from farms, see e.g. http://www.birdcontrolpro.com/propane_cannons.htm http://www.birdcontrolpro.com/propane_cannons.htm
- mindslight 11y ago
  How about existing home theatre systems, ideally several working together to create a false triangulation.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  In most jurisdictions, one can order full-auto blank guns that are not firearms. It would usually be illegal to fire them in a city. https://www.blank-guns-depot.com/blank-firing-guns-store/catalog/Fully-Automatic-Blank-Firing-Guns-p-1-c-407.html https://www.blank-guns-depot.com/blank-firing-guns-store/cat...
adaml_623 11y ago
Is being robbed at gunpoint part of 'gun violence'?
fiatmoney 11y ago
It's important to measure "gun violence" that apparently harms no one, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to claim the level of "gun violence" is high enough to justify Gun Control Measure X.
norikki 11y ago
I think the whole USA should be a gun-free zone. That way, no one can commit any more crimes.
ourcat 11y ago
Stop watering it down by calling it "gun violence" and call it what it actually is: "Murder" or "Attempted murder". With a gun. What's needed isn't "gun control". You can have that. What you need is "bullet control". (And a sense of humanity).

20 points by bootload 11y ago

> They noted with interest that it appears Oakland’s gunfire was at least twice as deadly as Washington’s gunfire. Although the researchers couldn’t come up with the reasons behind this difference (Were Washington’s gunmen poor shots? Did victims in Oakland get to the hospital more slowly?), the difference points to how measuring gun violence with homicides is problematic. This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. The problematic thing is the implicit shifting of the question to "how to reduce gun violence" from "how to reduce harm" in the first place. Nobody is going to prefer the city that has half as many gunshots but twice as many fatalities. The interesting thing about numbers like this is the unexplained difference. If you can explain it then maybe Oakland can do what Washington has been doing and fewer people will die -- even if that thing has nothing to do specifically with gun violence, like improving emergency response time.

sokoloff 11y ago
Some people might, if those fatalities were preferentially "intended targets" as that dramatically reduces the potential for harm to innocent bystanders.
hugh4 11y ago
> This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. Not necessarily, I'd imagine easy availability of fully-automatic weapons would lower your fatalities-per-gunshot ratio but not be a good thing.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  What is bad about a firing mode that decreases accuracy and depletes ammo quicker?
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  This is kind of the point. The fatalities-per-gunshot ratio is quite irrelevant. What matters is the number of injuries or fatalities. If hypothetically giving out automatic weapons caused there to be more gunshots because every time there was a gun battle many more shots were fired, but it reduced the total number of shooting victims because now dealers are much more wary about starting a gun battle, then you could make the argument for giving out automatic weapons. Because what matters is the actual harm. But if all it did was increase the number of gunshots by a lot and the number of injuries by a little then it's clearly a bad thing. Because what matters is still the actual harm.
pandaman 11y ago
Could be as simple as twice as many false positives in DC or half of shots undetected in Oakland.
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
The cynic in me says the DC police response is faster and more trigger happy. We all remember what happened when a bunch of cops went after two guys with a six-shooter outside of Boston a few years ago (spoiler: orders of magnitude more than six shots were fired, nobody died from the bullets).

presidentender 11y ago

Why is 'gun violence' so dire that it deserves its own category, relative to other forms of harm?

lcfcjs 11y ago
Because guns kill more than anything else? (just a wild guess)
capote 11y ago
Because it's its own category of violence. Like any other category, it's not a matter of 'deserving', but rather just a statistic category so we can discuss and analyze it. What a strange question. Why do we discuss it a lot? Because it's one of the most obvious issues in the US, compared to other advanced countries. We have shootings every day in many major urban centers, we have school shootings periodically, which people find especially awful... And because there's a lot of political debate around it, and it's at the forefront of many political elections and campaigns. It's a huge deal, and it's very dire; get caught up on this.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kec 11y ago
  The question is more why do we treat assault and homicide where a firearm is involved differently from other instances of assault and homicide? Dead is dead, no matter the manner in which it happened.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    If that's a serious question you'll be pleased to know it has a very simple answer - to those with a political agenda, no technique is below exploitation to gain command of the emotions of the people.
    - wrongc0ntinent 11y ago

nl 11y ago

This makes more sense to me: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/23/kentucky-gun-owner-gun-violence-archive-mark-bryant http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/23/kentucky-gun-ow...

vilderbar_nugg 11y ago

"ShotSpotter, the company behind a technology that listens for gunfire's acoustic signature and reports it to authorities." Yet another company spamming for yet another surveillance device. tl;dr Statistically acceptable and verifiable measures(homicides, suicides, gunshot injuries) of gun violence are not shocking enough - we should replace them with counts of every potential gun shot fired. "potential gun shot" = e.g., truck backfiring, dumpster lid dropping, slamming door, car collision, gunshot, etc. Any stats available on how many "loud bangs" occur in a city each day?

JoBrad 11y ago
It wouldn't be difficult to detect false positives based on the signature of a gun shot vs other loud noises.
- capote 11y ago
  I was gonna say, having heard a gunshot as well as the other stated things that could sound like gunshots, I think gunshots are categorically louder and more identifiable. That said, I'm not a gun expert so I could be wrong for different types of guns, etc.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    I bet if you were given six months and high quality recordings of different types of gunfire you could figure out how to do it algorithmically. It's all about having a large enough corpus of input, both of the type you're looking for and the type you're looking to exclude. This is an undergraduate level problem to solve.
    - kec 11y ago
      I would be very surprised if you could figure out a way to reliably discriminate between the sound of a gunshot and the sound of a car backfiring given that they're basically the same thing (that is, the sound of a gas rapidly expanding in a metal tube).

robsears 11y ago

> The more telling number about gun violence might be “shots fired.” And now, thanks to broader adoption of new technologies, it is getting easier to show just how common gun violence is in America. I happened to be working with a dispatcher in a 9-11 call center on the night the bin Laden raid was announced. Over the course of a couple hours, we fielded hundreds of "shots fired" calls, which mostly turned out to be people lighting off fireworks (sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent). If "gun violence" had been measured by these reports, the raw stats would suggest that the entire city had spontaneously erupted into a warzone, and then spontaneously returned to normal, all for no reason and without a single injury or death. My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence. The system is guaranteed to generate lots false positives, which will be used to bolster support for more surveillance and gun control. Not only is it _not_ a better way to measure gun violence, it's a proposition so fundamentally flawed that it borders on insanity.

esaym 11y ago
Totally. I live within the city limits, but a somewhat rural area. On Sept 1st every year (when dove season starts), I hear multiple shot gun shots per second (yes per second) from about 5am - 9am for several days.
parennoob 11y ago
> sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent Seeing as it can lead to fatalities to bystanders [1], I would be fine calling it "violent". [EDIT: "potentially violent" being perhaps a better term]. In my opinion, this is why at last gun education would be a good bipartisan way to reduce gun accidents (if not gun crime). If a police dispatcher does not think that firing into the air is serious problem and can kill people, that in itself is a big problem. I was browsing the ShotSpotter website, and they have a paper that talks specifically about celebratory gunfire. [2] [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14616491 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14616491 [2] http://www.shotspotter.com/system/content-uploads/MYTHS_about_Celebratory_Gunfire.pdf http://www.shotspotter.com/system/content-uploads/MYTHS_abou...

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

What's the cheapest device one could build that isn't a firearm, but could reproduce the sound of a gunshot with enough fidelity to fool this thing? Bonus if it can do a nice AK-47 machine gun sound or something like that. Assume that the device requires electricity. It probably should be wifi-connected, so that if you can get it close enough to a Starbucks or something, you can control it remotely. Should ideally be small and unobtrusive so that it's not easily spotted. Shouldn't need any refillable fuels. Would be fun to put the plans up on the net so that many people would build and field these.

hga 11y ago
Not sure how much they sound like guns, but there's a whole field of scaring off birds from farms, see e.g. http://www.birdcontrolpro.com/propane_cannons.htm http://www.birdcontrolpro.com/propane_cannons.htm
mindslight 11y ago
How about existing home theatre systems, ideally several working together to create a false triangulation.
fiatmoney 11y ago
In most jurisdictions, one can order full-auto blank guns that are not firearms. It would usually be illegal to fire them in a city. https://www.blank-guns-depot.com/blank-firing-guns-store/catalog/Fully-Automatic-Blank-Firing-Guns-p-1-c-407.html https://www.blank-guns-depot.com/blank-firing-guns-store/cat...

adaml_623 11y ago

Is being robbed at gunpoint part of 'gun violence'?

fiatmoney 11y ago

It's important to measure "gun violence" that apparently harms no one, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to claim the level of "gun violence" is high enough to justify Gun Control Measure X.

norikki 11y ago

I think the whole USA should be a gun-free zone. That way, no one can commit any more crimes.

ourcat 11y ago

Stop watering it down by calling it "gun violence" and call it what it actually is: "Murder" or "Attempted murder". With a gun. What's needed isn't "gun control". You can have that. What you need is "bullet control". (And a sense of humanity).