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> A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading False. I listed a few facts that are easily verified. > As you may not know,

> A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading False. I listed a few facts that are easily verified. > As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related injury" deaths are suicides False. Roughly half are suicides, and not "most." Suicide by gun is a violent death. Your entire diatribe regarding suicide is a straw man. > 70 million people died in World War II... I paraphrased, and the title of the article is slightly ambiguous, leaving a tiny pinhole which you are trying to squeeze a straw man of epic proportions through. To be perfectly clear, more Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 than the number of Americans killed in all US wars combined. In this statistic the number of Japanese, North Koreans or Vietnamese, etc., killed are not counted. It is only comparing the number of Americans killed by guns since 1968 to the number of Americans killed in all wars. Yes it is terrible so many have died in war, but unfortunately your argument here is still a straw man and therefore fallicious. > It is indeed very inaccurate to say that most gun violence occurs in the US, As stipulated, but I was merely making the point that the statement is more accurate than: >> Almost all gun violence is international warfare which is entirely false, and not even 1000 pages of straw man arguments can change that. In order for your argument to be valid, as mine is, you must focus on what is said, as is, and avoid introducing new information only to attack it. I understand some people really like guns, but no matter how much they like guns, it doesn't change the simple fact that the more guns there are, the more gun deaths there will be. This is a formula proven over and over, year after year. It also doesn't change the fact that the Founders had no intention of arming the citizenry, and that our beloved 2nd Amendment is only referring to militias, and we know this beyond doubt from the minutes of the Constitutional Congresses, even though most gun owners can't seem to read the first 3 words of the Amendment. The salient point is not about regulation, it is about militias during a period of history that was so different from today that the 2nd Amendment no longer rationally applies, and people are dying because fanatics, those not exactly mentally stable, insist on owning guns, and not just one or two, but an entire arsenal. One of the statistics in that BBC article is missing something, which is the statistic that for every 100 US citizens there are 120 firearms. But only 1/3rd of Americans are gun owners, so a lot of them have more guns than they can carry or operate, which underscores their fanaticism and irrationality. No one wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment, not even liberals, because "liberal" literally means tolerant, as in tolerant of those with insane ideas about gun ownership. Though it wouldn't be a bad idea to strike down those portions of DC v. Keller (2008) that overreach beyond the mandate of the Supreme Court to gut the 2nd Amendment, changing it from a selfless right to protect against tyranny to a redundant and selfish right to protect self or property. The Founders debated self-defense and intentionally left it out of the Amendment, because a right of self-defense is much older and more fundamental than the Bill of Rights. And Scalia was completely mistaken: most Americans are not confused about that, nor is there any significant agenda to include self-defense in the 2nd. If that agenda exists, it is of a vanishingly tiny percentage. DC v Heller weakens the 2nd immensely, and is part of a larger trend of dismantling the US Constitution piece by piece, after the suspension of habeas corpus and the continuing assaults on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments, and most recently, Article II. I wish the Right would just leave the US Constitution alone and be patriots instead of anarchists.

kragen 4y ago
I am deeply disappointed in the quality of your response. The issue being disputed is whether, as I said, almost all gun violence is international warfare, or not. I clearly showed that your figure for deaths from international warfare is low by at least an order of magnitude. Your lengthy diatribe about the US is almost entirely irrelevant; whether you are right or wrong about the motivations of 18th-century politicians, your countrymen's eccentric hobbies, or trends in your country's jurisprudence, those have no bearing whatsoever on the death tolls of the Congolese Civil War, Operation Barbarossa, or Nigerian bandit gangs. The US has very little special relevance to this question, since, as I said, some 95% of deaths and 97% of killings happen elsewhere; there are only a few exceptions: 1. They manufacture a significant fraction of the weapons people everywhere use to kill each other. 2. They have started a significant fraction of the wars in the world over the last century or so by invading other countries. 3. They have unusually transparent and reliable health statistics, from which we can to some extent draw conclusions about the rest of the world. It is entirely unclear what kind of "straw man" you think I am making of your arguments. You said: - Less than 100K [people] die in war annually: this is dramatically false, as I showed. - Some people who die in war don't die from gun violence: I agreed with this, but I don't think the fraction is small enough to change the picture much. - Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs: here you were agreeing with my point that petty crime and gangs are a rounding error. - Statistics about US "gun-related injuries": I explained why this is misleading (cherry-picked year, cherry-picked country, conflation of suicide with violent deaths) and put it in the wider context. - "more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined": presumably this meant more people, not more hamsters, more bottles of wine, or more Americans, since the subject at hand was how many people die, not how many hamsters or Americans die. This is completely false; as I showed, the relationship is the other way around, and it's not even close. - "It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US": I explained why this statement is actually less accurate. - "67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise": this juxtaposition is calculated to produce the false impression that those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed with a gun by someone else than otherwise. In fact, as I explained, in the US, they have a greater chance of killing themselves with a gun, and almost exactly the same chance, on average, of being killed with a gun by someone else. (The direction of the association depends on exactly how you try to control for confounding factors like being poor or living in a dangerous neighborhood.) So, of your seven "facts that are easily verified", two are correct (and I explicitly affirmed them), three are completely false, and the other two are misleading half-truths. As for whether suicide by gun is "a violent death", well, yes, there is a sense of the word "violent" in which almost anything you do with a gun is "violent": if you shoot a target, a violent explosion in the gun propels the bullet into a violent impact with the target, at which point usually either the bullet or the target violently shatters. However, as you are presumably aware, this is not the sense of the word "violent" being used in the phrase "gun violence". When concerned parents complain about "TV violence" they are not complaining about filmed 4th-of-July fireworks shows or after-school specials about suicide; they are complaining about people being depicted as intentionally harming others. Shelters for "domestic violence" victims are not for people whose house was destroyed by a hurricane or who have overdosed on pills at home; they are for people who need to escape from someone else in their home who is intentionally harming them. An old woman, living alone, found in her bathtub after slitting her wrists is not called "domestic violence". Similarly for "sexual violence", "youth violence", "collective violence", "political violence", and so on. So, when we talk about "gun violence", we are talking about people using guns to intentionally harm others, not for target practice, and not for shooting themselves. This is important because suicide is different from homicide in almost every way that matters: it has different effects, it has different causes, it affects different people, and in general different measures are effective in reducing it. Almost all they have in common from a public-health perspective is that they do not disproportionately affect old people in the way most causes of death do. Conflating them is not helpful for reasoning. Please, if you reply again, try to write a higher-quality comment next time, and don't insult my intelligence by substituting puns for reasoning in this way. Also, it would be nice to read less irrelevant tangents about your local partisan politics.

kragen 4y ago

I am deeply disappointed in the quality of your response. The issue being disputed is whether, as I said, almost all gun violence is international warfare, or not. I clearly showed that your figure for deaths from international warfare is low by at least an order of magnitude. Your lengthy diatribe about the US is almost entirely irrelevant; whether you are right or wrong about the motivations of 18th-century politicians, your countrymen's eccentric hobbies, or trends in your country's jurisprudence, those have no bearing whatsoever on the death tolls of the Congolese Civil War, Operation Barbarossa, or Nigerian bandit gangs. The US has very little special relevance to this question, since, as I said, some 95% of deaths and 97% of killings happen elsewhere; there are only a few exceptions: 1. They manufacture a significant fraction of the weapons people everywhere use to kill each other. 2. They have started a significant fraction of the wars in the world over the last century or so by invading other countries. 3. They have unusually transparent and reliable health statistics, from which we can to some extent draw conclusions about the rest of the world. It is entirely unclear what kind of "straw man" you think I am making of your arguments. You said: - Less than 100K [people] die in war annually: this is dramatically false, as I showed. - Some people who die in war don't die from gun violence: I agreed with this, but I don't think the fraction is small enough to change the picture much. - Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs: here you were agreeing with my point that petty crime and gangs are a rounding error. - Statistics about US "gun-related injuries": I explained why this is misleading (cherry-picked year, cherry-picked country, conflation of suicide with violent deaths) and put it in the wider context. - "more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined": presumably this meant more people, not more hamsters, more bottles of wine, or more Americans, since the subject at hand was how many people die, not how many hamsters or Americans die. This is completely false; as I showed, the relationship is the other way around, and it's not even close. - "It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US": I explained why this statement is actually less accurate. - "67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise": this juxtaposition is calculated to produce the false impression that those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed with a gun by someone else than otherwise. In fact, as I explained, in the US, they have a greater chance of killing themselves with a gun, and almost exactly the same chance, on average, of being killed with a gun by someone else. (The direction of the association depends on exactly how you try to control for confounding factors like being poor or living in a dangerous neighborhood.) So, of your seven "facts that are easily verified", two are correct (and I explicitly affirmed them), three are completely false, and the other two are misleading half-truths. As for whether suicide by gun is "a violent death", well, yes, there is a sense of the word "violent" in which almost anything you do with a gun is "violent": if you shoot a target, a violent explosion in the gun propels the bullet into a violent impact with the target, at which point usually either the bullet or the target violently shatters. However, as you are presumably aware, this is not the sense of the word "violent" being used in the phrase "gun violence". When concerned parents complain about "TV violence" they are not complaining about filmed 4th-of-July fireworks shows or after-school specials about suicide; they are complaining about people being depicted as intentionally harming others. Shelters for "domestic violence" victims are not for people whose house was destroyed by a hurricane or who have overdosed on pills at home; they are for people who need to escape from someone else in their home who is intentionally harming them. An old woman, living alone, found in her bathtub after slitting her wrists is not called "domestic violence". Similarly for "sexual violence", "youth violence", "collective violence", "political violence", and so on. So, when we talk about "gun violence", we are talking about people using guns to intentionally harm others, not for target practice, and not for shooting themselves. This is important because suicide is different from homicide in almost every way that matters: it has different effects, it has different causes, it affects different people, and in general different measures are effective in reducing it. Almost all they have in common from a public-health perspective is that they do not disproportionately affect old people in the way most causes of death do. Conflating them is not helpful for reasoning. Please, if you reply again, try to write a higher-quality comment next time, and don't insult my intelligence by substituting puns for reasoning in this way. Also, it would be nice to read less irrelevant tangents about your local partisan politics.