11 ms·

It's disingenuous to compare shootings purely by a per-capita basis. It should be per-capita among gun owners. The data as shown indicates the US has a cultura

by kromem 11y ago

It's disingenuous to compare shootings purely by a per-capita basis. It should be per-capita among gun owners. The data as shown indicates the US has a cultural mass shooting phenomenon, but it's simply not accurate. The US just has more guns, and mass shootings happen at extremely rare rates among gun owners everywhere. This approach would be like comparing drunk driving fatalities in Los Angeles vs Venice, Italy. Edit: I was curious and just ran the numbers with the full OCED countries. The US had 0.136 rampage shootings per gun (compared to 0.120 rampage shootings per capita), and non-US countries had 0.177 rampage shootings per-gun (compared to 0.246 rampage shootings per capita). I used the author's numbers and the Wikipedia page data for guns/100 residents.

habitue 11y ago
This is exactly the point. The variable in question is whether to try to reduce the gun-owning population to get shooting rates down. It sheds no light on that problem (and makes no sense) if you restrict the shootings to the gun owning pulations.
girvo 11y ago
> It's disingenuous to compare shootings purely by a per-capita basis. It should be per-capita among gun owners. First off, I don't live in the US and I don't have a horse in this race. You may have a point. However, wouldn't the fact that having a large number of gun owners directly correlating to mass-shooting fatalities still come down to the same conclusion: that guns should be regulated further? Or do you think that if the analysis was done it'd show something different to what the analysis in the original article shows?
- bmelton 11y ago
  > First off, I don't live in the US and I don't have a horse in this race. Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Those who live in countries where gun rights are strong tend to favor gun rights. Those who live in countries where gun control is strong tend to favor gun control. This is true of most things, as the moral compasses of most are drawn from what is currently normative to their existing environment. This is true of most places in which socio-political biases are codified into law, whether regarding religion, gay rights, whatever; Change in these areas tends to come slowly if at all. > guns should be regulated further Perhaps they should, perhaps they shouldn't. I have my bias, as I'm sure does everyone engaged in the discussion, but, at the end of the day, the document of the highest possible authority suggests that the citizenry should have access to guns, and the only way to overturn that is by ratifying that document. Thankfully, the document itself offers prescriptive measures for such ratification, but at the end of the day, without a strong enough amount of support throughout the nation and states for such a measure to pass. At present, such support does not exist, so our politicians play different games on what does or does not constitute "infringement". In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it. Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home. It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court. So, legally speaking, we know that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, disconnected from membership in a militia, and it extends outside the home. To those who favor gun rights, the matter might settled, but to those who favor gun control, it's a challenge to come up with a new rule that doesn't directly contradict those recently affirmed rules by the Supreme Court. In D.C., the argument is currently that the right to keep and bear arms is only available to those with a heightened need... but what other right in our Constitution merits such a high bar to exercise? Would it be okay to restrict voting only to those harmed by the current administration? Would it be okay to limit speech only to those who can show that they have been victimized? Anyway, I'm obviously ranting, and there's certainly more of my bias in this post than I intended, so I should shut up. The point, that I'm sure I made poorly, is that the law here says that we can have firearms, and that not even the elected legislature has the power to overturn that without ratifying the Constitution... unless they can come up with something legally clever, or wait until there exists a more favorable court to their cause.
  - girvo 11y ago
    > Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Sure. And I have my own opinion on the matter, but I kept it out of my comment for a reason: my opinion isn't particularly important on this matter. I was merely discussing the article and kromem's call for a different analysis.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      Understood, and apologies for not having kept my own biases in check, but I felt it worth pointing out that ignoring whether or not imposing additional regulations is good or bad, there is much more complication to the matter than just passing a law, especially as the passage of a law that countermands the Constitution is an exercise in futility.
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    What's your point? You just wrote a 9 paragraph comment to say "US law supports gun ownership". We know. That's the whole issue. The question is whether U.S. law (including the constitution) should support gun ownership, which is something completely different.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      The point was that until enough of the US supports gun control for the Constitution to be amended, there's not really any changing whether or not the US law supports gun ownership, and that majority support does not currently exist. Congress could not simply pass a law to ban speech because it is protected by the Constitution. To ban free speech, you would have to modify the Constitution. To modify the Constitution, you would have to have much more support for it than currently exists.
      - umanwizard 11y ago
        Yeah, I know all this. What's your point? I'm sure Petzold and everyone in this thread knows that gun control laws are hard to change -- what you're talking about has nothing to do with the actual question at hand, which is whether they should be changed.
- kromem 11y ago
  If your only concern is reducing the number of mass shootings, yes, that is exactly (and the only) correct answer from the data. The only reason why the US has more of these shootings is because we have more guns, and reducing the number of guns will reduce the number of shootings. However, the fact that these are extremely rare occurrences needs to be noted. Gun control has a lot more factors that are probably much more important than the rare issue of mass shootings. To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns. And the broader gun control issue has other issues and data that would need to be examined. Unfortunately, we don't have particularly good data regarding guns in the US due to the effective ban on government funded gun data (thanks NRA!). Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion? For example, a study in the 1990s found between 800,000 to 2.4 million defensive gun uses annually (Kleck & Gertz). And apparently while in the UK roughly half of all burglaries are when homeowners are present, in the US it's only 13%. There's also some data that suggests increases in crime rates in the years after gun bans, but the data comes from strong pro-gun sources and I'm a bit skeptical as to the validity. Basically the data I could find regarding general gun control is spurious at best. We need better data on the pros and cons of gun ownership, and our decisions should be driven from that data and not anecdotal or tragic but extremely uncommon (statistically) events. So in my opinion, the rallying cry when national attention is on guns should not be taking head conjecture from all sides, but rather a national plea for better data so we can have an informed opinion on the issue.
  - ajuc 11y ago
    > To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns. This is a false alternative. There's nothing forcing us to solve just 1 of these problems. > Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion? Another question that should be asked to be fair - do gun ownership among general population encourages criminals to take guns with them when they perform crime? Does the presence of a gun increase probabililty of a crime turning violent/deadly? My expectation: gun ownership makes crimes slightly less frequent (higher barrier to entry), at the cost of making it much more common for the crime to turn violent/deadly to someone.
demallien 11y ago
Noooooo, that's the whole point! The question that is being asked is not "how to make gun owners less likely to shoot people" but rather "how to make it less likely that people get shot". Per capita is absolutely the right measure to use for the latter question.
- kromem 11y ago
  In terms of rampage shootings, the way to reduce the number of shootings is to reduce the number of guns. That's what the data shows. A per capita analysis starts discussions about how the US is different in multiple ways. Oh, well, in the US a person is 5x more likely to go on a shooting rampage than in other OCED countries. Maybe it's US media coverage? Maybe we don't have the background checks or psychological evaluations other countries have. Maybe it's our action movies? No. It's simply that we have more guns. In fact, on a per gun basis, other OCED countries combined have a 50% higher rate of spree shootings. We just have a LOT more guns than other countries. Now, whether this is a good or bad thing is a much broader discussion. But the ONLY data driven answer to "why does the US have more spree shootings than the rest of the world?" is: "Because the US has more guns". TL;DR: A per-capita analysis leads to sociological problem solving as the base metric is people-based. A per-gun analysis cuts directly to the significant factor.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    I wonder how good a proxy the number of guns is for the number of people with access to guns. (It's probably reasonably good, I'm interested in what the numbers would be, not trying to put forward a conclusion) I guess in the US over recent decades the number of people with access to guns has increased relative to the number of guns (because I think there are less hunters and more self defenders).
kromem 11y ago
Edit: It's been to long since I last edited and I think I've been locked out from an edit, but it should be noted that those numbers in my last edit are PER MILLION (for both per-capita and per-gun).
ajuc 11y ago
Of course mass gun ownership is the source of problem. Nobody claims otherways. Some people just want to solve the problem by changing the law so that people have fewer reasons to own guns.
- kromem 11y ago
  Actually quite a lot of people claim otherwise. If you watch mainstream news after a massacre, you frequently see everything from video games, to the state flag, to national attitudes regarding mental illness, to bad parenting, to bullying, to nearly any other non-gun topic blamed for the tragedy. As long as mass shootings are discussed as a uniquely "US-issue" and not simply as a uniquely "Gun-ownership issue" these red herring discussions will continue. Especially as the narrative that the US is different from the rest of the world is one we love to tell (even when negative). There is a difference, but that difference is only the # of guns. All other sociological differences don't seem significant. Now as I've said elsewhere in this thread, the issue of gun ownership has a heck of a lot more nuance than the two sides seem to recognize, and personally I find that I don't have enough solid data to be pro-gun or anti-gun, and mostly just want for the country to finally agree this is an issue worth spending national dollars on studying. But I think so far we're much more likely to end up with studies on video game violence, mental health treatment models, etc, as NO ONE on TV utters anything but rhetoric after these events, and ironically these extremely rare and statistically insignificant (but anecdotally significant) events are the only time it comes up at all. In fact, the leading cause of gun deaths in the US is suicide. And there's actually some REALLY interesting data and discussion to be had there (such as extrapolating bridge suicide nets with successful suicides before and after), and with around 20,000 annually this is a much bigger public safety issue than a few hundred spree shooting deaths, but it's also a discussion we'll simply never have at a national level.
  - Rapzid 11y ago
    I'm surprised I read down so far before somebody brought up that about sqaurely 2/3 of the 30kish gun deaths stat that always gets banded about is from suicides.. Not surprised you brought it up. Probably not the best post to throw my 2c in to but... I don't see how the right to own guns could ever be anything more than opinionated. For me personally the numbers are just too low (especially after accounting for gangs deaths) to get behind anything other than increased purchasing checks.. Even then not sure how much actually good that would do.
bluedino 11y ago
Look how low the murder rate is in the United States right now. It's half of what it was in the 70-90's. http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/ http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/
- hga 11y ago
  And something fascinating about that is that per capita gun ownership has at minimum stayed steady during that period, when very roughly both increased by 100 million from 200 million. Since we have a (very rough) control for that variable, it suggests we need to look elsewhere. One I like is detailed demographics, younger men tend to be the most violent, and the demographic Baby Boom may explain most of that.

by kromem 11y ago

habitue 11y ago

This is exactly the point. The variable in question is whether to try to reduce the gun-owning population to get shooting rates down. It sheds no light on that problem (and makes no sense) if you restrict the shootings to the gun owning pulations.

girvo 11y ago

> It's disingenuous to compare shootings purely by a per-capita basis. It should be per-capita among gun owners. First off, I don't live in the US and I don't have a horse in this race. You may have a point. However, wouldn't the fact that having a large number of gun owners directly correlating to mass-shooting fatalities still come down to the same conclusion: that guns should be regulated further? Or do you think that if the analysis was done it'd show something different to what the analysis in the original article shows?

bmelton 11y ago
> First off, I don't live in the US and I don't have a horse in this race. Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Those who live in countries where gun rights are strong tend to favor gun rights. Those who live in countries where gun control is strong tend to favor gun control. This is true of most things, as the moral compasses of most are drawn from what is currently normative to their existing environment. This is true of most places in which socio-political biases are codified into law, whether regarding religion, gay rights, whatever; Change in these areas tends to come slowly if at all. > guns should be regulated further Perhaps they should, perhaps they shouldn't. I have my bias, as I'm sure does everyone engaged in the discussion, but, at the end of the day, the document of the highest possible authority suggests that the citizenry should have access to guns, and the only way to overturn that is by ratifying that document. Thankfully, the document itself offers prescriptive measures for such ratification, but at the end of the day, without a strong enough amount of support throughout the nation and states for such a measure to pass. At present, such support does not exist, so our politicians play different games on what does or does not constitute "infringement". In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it. Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home. It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court. So, legally speaking, we know that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, disconnected from membership in a militia, and it extends outside the home. To those who favor gun rights, the matter might settled, but to those who favor gun control, it's a challenge to come up with a new rule that doesn't directly contradict those recently affirmed rules by the Supreme Court. In D.C., the argument is currently that the right to keep and bear arms is only available to those with a heightened need... but what other right in our Constitution merits such a high bar to exercise? Would it be okay to restrict voting only to those harmed by the current administration? Would it be okay to limit speech only to those who can show that they have been victimized? Anyway, I'm obviously ranting, and there's certainly more of my bias in this post than I intended, so I should shut up. The point, that I'm sure I made poorly, is that the law here says that we can have firearms, and that not even the elected legislature has the power to overturn that without ratifying the Constitution... unless they can come up with something legally clever, or wait until there exists a more favorable court to their cause.
- girvo 11y ago
  > Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Sure. And I have my own opinion on the matter, but I kept it out of my comment for a reason: my opinion isn't particularly important on this matter. I was merely discussing the article and kromem's call for a different analysis.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Understood, and apologies for not having kept my own biases in check, but I felt it worth pointing out that ignoring whether or not imposing additional regulations is good or bad, there is much more complication to the matter than just passing a law, especially as the passage of a law that countermands the Constitution is an exercise in futility.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  What's your point? You just wrote a 9 paragraph comment to say "US law supports gun ownership". We know. That's the whole issue. The question is whether U.S. law (including the constitution) should support gun ownership, which is something completely different.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    The point was that until enough of the US supports gun control for the Constitution to be amended, there's not really any changing whether or not the US law supports gun ownership, and that majority support does not currently exist. Congress could not simply pass a law to ban speech because it is protected by the Constitution. To ban free speech, you would have to modify the Constitution. To modify the Constitution, you would have to have much more support for it than currently exists.
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      Yeah, I know all this. What's your point? I'm sure Petzold and everyone in this thread knows that gun control laws are hard to change -- what you're talking about has nothing to do with the actual question at hand, which is whether they should be changed.
kromem 11y ago
If your only concern is reducing the number of mass shootings, yes, that is exactly (and the only) correct answer from the data. The only reason why the US has more of these shootings is because we have more guns, and reducing the number of guns will reduce the number of shootings. However, the fact that these are extremely rare occurrences needs to be noted. Gun control has a lot more factors that are probably much more important than the rare issue of mass shootings. To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns. And the broader gun control issue has other issues and data that would need to be examined. Unfortunately, we don't have particularly good data regarding guns in the US due to the effective ban on government funded gun data (thanks NRA!). Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion? For example, a study in the 1990s found between 800,000 to 2.4 million defensive gun uses annually (Kleck & Gertz). And apparently while in the UK roughly half of all burglaries are when homeowners are present, in the US it's only 13%. There's also some data that suggests increases in crime rates in the years after gun bans, but the data comes from strong pro-gun sources and I'm a bit skeptical as to the validity. Basically the data I could find regarding general gun control is spurious at best. We need better data on the pros and cons of gun ownership, and our decisions should be driven from that data and not anecdotal or tragic but extremely uncommon (statistically) events. So in my opinion, the rallying cry when national attention is on guns should not be taking head conjecture from all sides, but rather a national plea for better data so we can have an informed opinion on the issue.
- ajuc 11y ago
  > To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns. This is a false alternative. There's nothing forcing us to solve just 1 of these problems. > Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion? Another question that should be asked to be fair - do gun ownership among general population encourages criminals to take guns with them when they perform crime? Does the presence of a gun increase probabililty of a crime turning violent/deadly? My expectation: gun ownership makes crimes slightly less frequent (higher barrier to entry), at the cost of making it much more common for the crime to turn violent/deadly to someone.

demallien 11y ago

Noooooo, that's the whole point! The question that is being asked is not "how to make gun owners less likely to shoot people" but rather "how to make it less likely that people get shot". Per capita is absolutely the right measure to use for the latter question.

kromem 11y ago
In terms of rampage shootings, the way to reduce the number of shootings is to reduce the number of guns. That's what the data shows. A per capita analysis starts discussions about how the US is different in multiple ways. Oh, well, in the US a person is 5x more likely to go on a shooting rampage than in other OCED countries. Maybe it's US media coverage? Maybe we don't have the background checks or psychological evaluations other countries have. Maybe it's our action movies? No. It's simply that we have more guns. In fact, on a per gun basis, other OCED countries combined have a 50% higher rate of spree shootings. We just have a LOT more guns than other countries. Now, whether this is a good or bad thing is a much broader discussion. But the ONLY data driven answer to "why does the US have more spree shootings than the rest of the world?" is: "Because the US has more guns". TL;DR: A per-capita analysis leads to sociological problem solving as the base metric is people-based. A per-gun analysis cuts directly to the significant factor.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  I wonder how good a proxy the number of guns is for the number of people with access to guns. (It's probably reasonably good, I'm interested in what the numbers would be, not trying to put forward a conclusion) I guess in the US over recent decades the number of people with access to guns has increased relative to the number of guns (because I think there are less hunters and more self defenders).

kromem 11y ago

Edit: It's been to long since I last edited and I think I've been locked out from an edit, but it should be noted that those numbers in my last edit are PER MILLION (for both per-capita and per-gun).

ajuc 11y ago

Of course mass gun ownership is the source of problem. Nobody claims otherways. Some people just want to solve the problem by changing the law so that people have fewer reasons to own guns.

kromem 11y ago
Actually quite a lot of people claim otherwise. If you watch mainstream news after a massacre, you frequently see everything from video games, to the state flag, to national attitudes regarding mental illness, to bad parenting, to bullying, to nearly any other non-gun topic blamed for the tragedy. As long as mass shootings are discussed as a uniquely "US-issue" and not simply as a uniquely "Gun-ownership issue" these red herring discussions will continue. Especially as the narrative that the US is different from the rest of the world is one we love to tell (even when negative). There is a difference, but that difference is only the # of guns. All other sociological differences don't seem significant. Now as I've said elsewhere in this thread, the issue of gun ownership has a heck of a lot more nuance than the two sides seem to recognize, and personally I find that I don't have enough solid data to be pro-gun or anti-gun, and mostly just want for the country to finally agree this is an issue worth spending national dollars on studying. But I think so far we're much more likely to end up with studies on video game violence, mental health treatment models, etc, as NO ONE on TV utters anything but rhetoric after these events, and ironically these extremely rare and statistically insignificant (but anecdotally significant) events are the only time it comes up at all. In fact, the leading cause of gun deaths in the US is suicide. And there's actually some REALLY interesting data and discussion to be had there (such as extrapolating bridge suicide nets with successful suicides before and after), and with around 20,000 annually this is a much bigger public safety issue than a few hundred spree shooting deaths, but it's also a discussion we'll simply never have at a national level.
- Rapzid 11y ago
  I'm surprised I read down so far before somebody brought up that about sqaurely 2/3 of the 30kish gun deaths stat that always gets banded about is from suicides.. Not surprised you brought it up. Probably not the best post to throw my 2c in to but... I don't see how the right to own guns could ever be anything more than opinionated. For me personally the numbers are just too low (especially after accounting for gangs deaths) to get behind anything other than increased purchasing checks.. Even then not sure how much actually good that would do.

bluedino 11y ago

Look how low the murder rate is in the United States right now. It's half of what it was in the 70-90's. http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/ http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/

hga 11y ago
And something fascinating about that is that per capita gun ownership has at minimum stayed steady during that period, when very roughly both increased by 100 million from 200 million. Since we have a (very rough) control for that variable, it suggests we need to look elsewhere. One I like is detailed demographics, younger men tend to be the most violent, and the demographic Baby Boom may explain most of that.