4 ms·
Anecdata, I suppose, but while I never cared for guns myself (until somewhat recently, I've become a convert), until I moved to Hawai'i, I honestly don't believ
by bmelton 12y ago
Anecdata, I suppose, but while I never cared for guns myself (until somewhat recently, I've become a convert), until I moved to Hawai'i, I honestly don't believe I'd been in a single home that didn't have a firearm in it. To be fair, I grew up in the South, Virginia and Tennessee, but never rural south, and, to be even fairer, my father was military, so a lot of the homes I'm speaking of were Marines.
That said, even outside of military homes, everybody I knew had a firearm of some sort.
Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I never had any experience with them or opinion of them whatsoever, and always believed that, hey, this is America, if I ever need a firearm, I'll go get one. It wasn't until my current home state attempted to ban a variety of firearms that I got interested in the history of the second amendment, and came to the conclusion that the bans they were enacting were unconstitutional.
Since then, in addition to the protests for marriage equality, against NSA surveillance, etc., I've begun attending firearms rallies. In my experience there, I've met many gun owners, many of whom have been asked to self identify as to whether or not they own firearms over the years, and overwhelmingly, the response is 'Nope.'
So, the long and short of it is that while I believe the 33% number is too low, I don't have any idea how low it is. Of course, having seen outright, provably false statistics in use by gun control advocates (and again, to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful), and provably wrong exaggerations (e.g., 40% of firearms were purchased without going through a background check), that leads me to believe that the variance is higher than just a couple of points.
Admittedly, I can't prove (nor am I trying to) that it's 50% or greater, but while the census puts 'urban' populations as comprising ~80% of America, most of those urban centers aren't big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and outside of areas with heavy gun control, gun ownership rates skyrocket.
- LyndsySimon 12y ago> Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I always like to see this. I've always viewed arms possession as a civil right, and I sense that there is something of a paradigm shift in that direction happening. > to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful Part of the problem is that data is extremely hard to come by anything resembling unbiased data on the topic. One of my personal pet peeves is when someone writes about "10,000 kids are murdered in gun violence every year", only to find upon further investigation that for the dataset they used, "kids" refers to all persons age 25 and under and "murdered" really meant "killed by". Counting a 24-year-old gang member who is shot by police as a "child murdered by gun violence" is absurd. I'm not familiar with any similar criticisms going the other direction. The closest thing I've seen would be a handful of academics dismissing the work of John Lott out-of-hand without giving a specific reason for doing so. Asserting that a peer-reviewed paper is "widely discredited" has no meaning when one cannot point to a single published criticism of the work.
- bmelton 12y agoAgreed. I'm not a Lott fan, and many critiques of the man himself are valid (especially the sock-puppeting fiasco), but the most damning critique of his work I've seen is the NAS study which agreed with his conclusions, but found some of them to be statistically irrelevant. That said, I've had to play something of the foil to my gun-friendly friends, pointing out inaccuracies of memes and such, and cautioning against leaping to too many conclusions. For every example of gun control failing, there seems to be a counter-example elsewhere. I think it's fair to say that gun control laws, strict or lax, have very little effect on crime rates altogether, and in my own studies, have found that gun violence is most prevalent wherever there is greater economic disparity or distress. That isn't particularly great knowledge to either party's agenda, but makes me really wish that our nation would get over its fetish against "assault weapons" and start working on the real causes of violence.