Let’s Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

.45

Be my guest.  I did not intend the list to be all inclusive. 

Your comments on the Jihadist situation in Europe are well taken.  We have gone into Europe twice in the last century to clean up their mistakes, and I firmly believe we will go in again to clean out the Jihadists.

Major Major -

Oh, come now.  You have gone from faulty interpretations of Lott, to irrelevant comparisons with Canada, to illiterate and irrational confusion of polar opposites. 

Patriots and tyrants, indeed.  If you can’t make a coherent argument, and can’t distinguish between, for example, George Washington and Robert Mugabe, you must be the educational product of the Neocommunist NEA.  Just how old are you, anyway?

Hi Scorp,

It does no harm (and probably no good either) to remind the likes of “MM” about the 100M odd (probably more, Mao & Stalin together give over 110M) disarmed citezens who became victims of state genocide in the 20th century.

Perhaps a few people capable of thinking beyond:

“4 legs good: all guns bad” will read it and begin to think for themselves.

It is interesting that the British Govt, with its law abiding part of the population disarmed, is still terrified that if a predominantly Moslem area errupts into rioting, that the surrounding white population will go in and burn them out.

There are any amount of good honest Moslems who deserve the ability to defend themselves and there loved ones, and who would almost certainly have kept the minority wahabiist element down, now they are facing the posibility of being petrol bombed out. shame.

You’re completely correct about Europe messing up. Hitler was democratically elected.

I’m sure everyone has seen the ww2 adverts for guns to be donated to protect British homes ?

Britain dis-armed the law abiding part of it’s working class in the 1920’s (naturally the comunists who were the real targets, and the criminals who were the claimed target, did not comply).  Therefore faced with a genocidal dictatorship with plans for invasion, Britain’s population was defenseless.

You know what happened to those guns which were kindly donated?

The Govt rounded them up at the end of the war and they were dumped at sea.

When I’ve run out of fluff to extract from my navel, and there’s really nothing better to do (on long flights and that sort of thing), I sometimes wonder where the strange “shiboliths” of the left, such as the weird metaphysical, quazi religious property of “Progress”, and the all out belief in gun control come from. They seem to be taken as religious articles of faith, received wisdom rather than being ideas which are open to debate or logic.

So much for the left being “government by scientific principals"…

I don’t think any of the leftists who contributed here (least of all MM) will be capable of answering but, its worth asking anyway.

“One man’s patriot is another man’s tyrant.”
- Major Major

“Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free?  More just it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, their liberty, than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow slaves.  They who seek nothing but their own just liberty, have always the right to win it, whenever they have the power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it.”
- John Milton

jdege -

MM does not care what Milton said.  Milton is a dead white male.  Dead white males are not politically correct. 

The wisdom and insight that inspired the creation of our world have given away to political correctness, appeasement, pacifism, and globalism which are the defining values of the Neocommunists. 

The Communists and Neocommunists have an unrelieved history of death, destruction, and failure, all of which are irrelevant to True Believers who think that political correctness will bring a new Utopia, and Americans will become the New Soviet Man. 

Not as long as you and I enforce the Second Amendment.

Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages 15 to 24. Since 1960, more than a million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries.

Public health research has shown that firearms violence is directly related to firearms availability and density. What separates America from other Western, industrialized nations is not our overall rate of violence, but our rates of lethal violence�which can be directly traced to gun availability. In 2004 alone, 29,569 Americans died by gunfire: 16,750 in firearm suicides, 11,935 in firearm homicides, 649 in unintentional shootings, and 235 in firearm deaths of unknown intent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. More than twice that number are treated in emergency rooms each year for nonfatal firearm injuries.

Most Americans are surprised to learn that most gun deaths are not homicides, but preventable suicides. Even in homicide, the vast majority stem not from criminal activity, but are the result of arguments between people who know one another. Less than eight percent of all gun deaths are felony related. The most common scenario for homicide in America is an argument between two people who know one another.

Gun violence places a tremendous burden on America’s health care system. Direct medical costs for gunshot wounds total more than six million dollars a day. Nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading source of uninsured hospital stays in the United States, with an estimated half of such costs borne directly by the public. These numbers reveal that while most Americans view gun violence solely as a crime issue, it is, in fact, a broad-based public health issue of which crime is merely the most recognized aspect.

http://www.vpc.org/gunviolence.htm

Replace the firearms stats with automobile stats (about as many cars in the US as guns).

“Automobiles are the leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and is the most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages 15 to 24. Since 1960, more than two million Americans have died in autombile suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries.

Public health research has shown that automobile violence is directly related to automobile availability and density. What separates America from other Western, industrialized nations is not our overall rate of violence, but our rates of lethal violence—which can be directly traced to automobile availability. In 2004 alone, 45,153 Americans died by automobile: 108 in automobile suicides, 51 in automobile homicides, 44,933 in unintentional driving deaths, and 51 in automobile deaths of unknown intent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. More than ONE HUNDRED TIMES that number are treated in emergency rooms each year for nonfatal automobile injuries.”

Gee, aren’t stats so horrific when stated in a vacuum?

In Japan they had more non-firearms suicides than all firearms related deaths in the US COMBINED! Thay have half as many people, and no firearms, yet they have more deaths and about three times the suicide rate. The LIE that firearms suicides would have been prevented if there is no suicide looks pathetically ridiculous when we look at the handgun free UK and Japan much higher suicide rates.

“The most common scenario for homicide in America is an argument between two people who know one another. “ ANother out of context trick. The most common scenarios for murder really is an argument between two people who know each other by at least aquantance or familiarity, BUT that is for ALL homicides and not just homiceds using firearms. They slip that little line in there hoping suckers don’t double check the facts.
Murders and suicides will happen regardless of if there are a firearm present or not...just look at Japan, the UK and Russia. Russia has NO handgun ownership, but SIX times the murder rate of the US!!

Major Major, think for yourself and stop cutting and pasting lies. Once you look into the figures you will discover the gun control nuts are wrong and are doing nothing but trying to scare you with mistated figures and lies.

This liberal did, and this liberal approves of this message.

So, according to your “illiberal” logic, not only should we not license gun owners and register their firearms, but we should also abolish auto licensing and registration.

Suicide in Japan is a culturally accepted practice, regrettably, and almost completely irrelevant to the issue of gun ownership, and like homicide would be much higher if firearms were as endemic to the Japanese as they are to Americans.

Novus, if you could think for yourself you’d be dangerous.

Besides mentioning the fact that many deaths are caused by unlicensed and unregistered drivers driving illegally in public, car licensing and registration is only required when driven on public roads. You and I can own a car and drive it on our own property in most states without licensing or regisration.
If someone owns a gun and never wears it loaded in public, then that is no different. Most murders occur in public.

Your argument about Japan with a culturally accepted practice of suicide....well that argument can just as easil used here now can’t it! It would be a culture of suicide and not the availability of guns in America leading to the prevalence of suicide by your very own logic.
Also for that matter, you would also have to argue that suicide in the handgun free UK is part of a culuture of suicide too because their suicide rate is ALSO much higher than the OVERALL (including non-firearms related) suicide rate in America.

If you could think for yourself and check on some simple facts, you might be intelligent Major Major.
Too bad you choose to follow a one location, severely partisan and biased source to do your thinking for you.

I am a liberal, and probably a much liberal than you liberal, and I approve of this message.

“Public health research has shown that firearms violence is directly related to firearms availability and density.”

Sorry, but no.  The public health literature is full of politically-motivated fraud. 

http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html

“The abysmal quality of the anti-gun health advocacy literature may be explained by six conceptually discrete factors: intellectual and locutional sloppiness; intellectual confusion; ignorance of criminological or other facts; fraudulent omission of material fact, or statement of part of the fact calculated to deceive by the suppression of the whole;[63] overt misrepresentation of facts; and what we call gun-aversive dyslexia--a reading disability engendered by a fear and loathing of guns so profound that health advocate sages who encounter adverse facts may be honestly unable to comprehend them.”

One recent example of how the anti-gun advocates in the public health community engage in fraud is David Hemenway, Deborah Azrael , and Matthew Miller’s �Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearms Deaths, Suicide, and Homicide among 5-14 Year Olds.�

They claimed to have found a strong correlation between the rate of firearms deaths, suicides, and homicides, among 5-14 year olds in a state, and the rate of gun ownership in that state. They work for the Harvard School of Public Health, published in the Journal of Trauma, issued press releases that were breathlessly repeated by the New York Times and the other major media.

And their study wasn’t just sloppy, or biased. It was an intentional fraud.

You see, nobody really knows what the rates of gun ownership are for every state.  Homicides and suicides can be counted, from the public records.  But how do we compare them against rates of gun ownership?  Sales records?  Surveys?  The former are out of date, and there aren’t any surveys.  Not of gun ownership in every state, for every state.

So they used a proxy. Something they could measure that they believed to be correlated to the rate of gun ownership in every state. Statisticians do this thing all the time, and with care you can usually pick a proxy that closely approximates what you are trying to measure without unduly distorting the results.

That’s not what Hemenway et al. did.  They picked a proxy called “Cook’s Index”.  Never heard of it?  Never had the few reporters who bothered to read the details of the report.

Cook’s Index is an estimate of the rate of gun ownership in a community measured by taking the average of two rations - the number of firearms suicides divided by the total number of suicides, firearm, and the number of firearms homicides divided by the total number of homicides.

In other words, it’s a measure of exactly what it is that they’re comparing it against.

Their study’s real findings was that the number of firearms homicides and suicides in a state was directly correlated to the number of firearms homicides and suicides in that state.

In other words, their study “proved” a tautology.

Or rather, it proved nothing at all.

And the authors understood enough statistics to know that, before they started.  They didn’t care, because their goal wasn’t to find the truth, but to pursue a political agenda.

Right, Doo-, er, Novus.  Thirty thousand Japanese suicides per year for the last ten years, and not one American manufactured pistol to profit from their loss.  No wonder Smith and Wesson went bankrupt.. But don’t despair.  We still have high hopes for our junior Japanese partners.  After all, they’ve only just begun to understand that suicide can be painless.  Scrap your traditional corporate policy of lifetime employment and wait for the returns on your investment to roll right in.  Another twenty years of American sponsored corporate productivity and they, too, can dispose of their surplus population with American ingenuity.

It’s not a “culture of suicide.” It’s a culture of competition, American style.

American roulette.

Give us your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
And we’ll throw them on the streets and sell ‘em the guns to kill each other.

For those who may think that only violent people believe they should be armed.

��Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.��
� Mahatma Ghandi, “Gandhi, An Autobiography”, page 446

M/M said”

Suicide in Japan is a culturally accepted practice, regrettably, and almost completely irrelevant to the issue of gun ownership, and like homicide would be much higher if firearms were as endemic to the Japanese as they are to Americans.”

For a person who likes to make reference to the Canadian Firearms Act S/he should also be well aware that it was suicide stats that Cukier, Rock and the gun grabbers here kept referring to when quoting the total number of people killed per year by Firearms. 1200 deaths of which 1000 were suicides is hardly justification for following the German design of gun control.  While Hitlers regieme is commonly credited with that , it was actually the former Government that started it in the early 30’s It was a useful tool for Hitler, however , when he began to exterminate people.  A ready made shopping list for a Government bent on eliminating all but pure bred Germans in their country.
While politicitians here along with the Coalition for Gun Control like to point out that suicide by firearm has declined ,they fail to finish the sentence.  The overall suicide rate remains unchanged, which begs the question, why to gun grabbers feel that it is more acceptable to hang yourself or use any of the other methods of committing suicide.  Before you get all self righteous and remind me that guns are often used to take someone with you , consider the number of persons who, because of a history of mental illness, that prevents them from legally owning firearms yet hold a valid driver’s licence and a motor vehicle.  Now think of the number of multiple vehicle “accidents” in which many persond are killed including all those in the original car or truck that started the chain reaction.  Seldom does anyone look at these as possible suicides.  We could not have them look too close at a person’s past mental history there now could we?  Perhaps it is because too many of us may have a past that could be cause for worry or even current work or marital problems that would remove our driving priviledges.

Major Major,
If the logic that the prevalance of handguns affects the suicide rate is true, and because there are no handguns in Japan, nor legal ones in the UK, then more legally owned handguns in Japan should save thousands of lives every year.

Now of course to suggest that more handguns in Japan will stop suicides is ridiculous.....just like it is it is preposterous to suggest more handguns in the US leads to more suicides.
The people who did the “study” with the intent to find the conclusion they already determined before the “study” even started, ignored some perspectives they chose not to see.
Ideation is a part of suicide and it can progress to an actual attempt. Some people with suicide ideation will stop daydreaming about it when they are confronted with an actual opportunity early on such as standing on a tenth floor balcony, or standing curb next to fast moving traffic, or standing on a Japanese bullet train platform, or having access to a gun. For some of these people actually having an available means when suicide ideation had begun, the ideation ceases because it is easier to imagine and then dismiss instead of the ideation continuing and leading to deeper depression which can lead to actual suicide.

Suicide in Japan among children is many times higher than in the US and the Japanese are no longer teaching a culture of suicide to their young so your “culture of suicide” theory falls apart.
In the UK the suicide rate went up in the years following the total handgun ban, so it can be argued using the VPC “study” logic that handgun bans leads to more suicides.......remember, this is using the anti gun group VPC’s logic.

When guns are banned, then the law abiding will have none and the criminals will have these: http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/introduction.shtml

In inner cities where the law abiding minorities are banned from owning handguns, they are made defensless from the still armed criminals. Gun control laws have a history steeped in racism.
http://www.blackmanwithagun.com/site/dbpage.asp?page_id=140000780&sec_id=140 0000845

Smith & Wesson’s bankruptcy had nothing to do with lack of sales in Japan.  It had more to do with their climbing into bed with the anti-gun nazis in an effort of appeasement in order to avoid lawsuits from cities bent on trying to break their backs in court.  Prior loyal Smith & Wesson fansserved them notice of their displeasure by cancelling orders, notifying the company that since they wanted to bed the Brady crowd et al, that they would take their business elswhere.

Please.  Spare me your tortured rationalizations with respect to the fundamental causes of suicide and homicide.  Healthy, employed, educated people, with strong social ties to family and community, don’t kill themselves or their relatives or their neighbors.  Even the chronically unemployed and uneducated victims of pathologically dysfunctional families and neighborhoods are less inclined to kill themselves or anyone else than those with easy access to firearms, which is why the highest rates of homicide and suicide occur among the ranks of white, rural Southern males.  Farmers who lose their farms, bankrupt ranchers, loggers and small, family businessmen, who lack the education or the health to obtain comparable employment to support themselves and their families, but own a veritable arsenal of arms and ammunition, are the people most likely to resort to homicide or suicide as the only imagined alternative to their loss of pride or self-respect.  People who would otherwise reach out for a helping hand, if one was available to them, reach instead for a gun to terminate their sorrow and shame.  And what’s even more obscene than all of this is the fact that the rest of us simply shake our heads and mutter, “Aint it a shame.”

Now you are just shamelessly making crap up Major Major.

If there was any truth to the idea that the access to guns leads more people to commit suicide, or that they would not kill themselves if they had no access, then explain the UK, Japan and the Ukraine which all have no handgun ownership, yet much higher suicide rates than the US.

The link source you cited earlier claimed the handgun and firearm regisration in Canada has had great success at reducing suicide or something like that, but my Gawd man, the suicide rates are higher in Canada than in the US as WELL as being higher in strict gun control countries like Australia and the handgun free UK than it is in the US.
To make the more-suicide-to-gun-availability claim in the face of these facts is extraordinarily bizzare and ridiculous.

Want to know why the gun control nuts are losing in the public information game? Because they have been using bogus information, comparisons and facts for decades, but now with the internet anyone can discover their lies within moments.
That is of course if people WANT to open their eyes and fact check they will see all the lies and mischaracterizations of figures the gun control nuts have been using.

Be a liberal like me Major Major, think for yourself. Double check the “facts” the gun control nuts propaganda machine has fooled you into repeating for them.

I am a liberal and I approve this message.

I’m full of crap?  I can’t believe any of you idiots are actually arguing that throwing more guns into an already socially volatile environment will do anything other than increase the rate of injury or death among the people who possess firearms.  Even the hunters occasionally kill or maim each other, as our Fearless VP has so dramatically demonstrated for us.  You survey your selective “facts” and conclude that we live in a culture of “suicide” when in fact it’s just another hyper-competitive shooting gallery, populated by people who would rather kill or die than surrender their “superior” status and the property (including their wives and children) which embodies that status for them.  You’re the living proof to Mao’s cynical testament that “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.”

About more people kill themselves without a gun than do using a gun in this country. Even if all guns were removed from socitey and even if all those people who used a gun did not find a way to kill themselves without using a gun, then we would still have a rampant suicide rate in this country. Guns do not cause suicide, mental illness does and the inflicted will find a way if they have a gun or not. There is no way for you to prove otherwise without looking like a fool.

Guns are used between a low estimate of 108,000 times a year to a high estimate of 2,500,000 times a year by law abiding citizens defending against criminals in this country. Guns save lives and much more than criminals use them to murder.
Of the number of murderers, it is estimated that over 80% had previous felony conviction and therefore could not own a handgun to begin with if they weren’t already disqualified for other reasons. So it is true that only an infintessimally small percentage of lawful gun owners murder anyone with a gun or without.
Now, some gun murders are committed by previously law abiding citizens but most, if not all, would have found other ways to commit their crime. Now compare a few murders by previously law abiding gun owners compared to 2,500,000 times the law abiding have used their guns to stop a violent crime or attack.
LAWFULLY POSSESED guns in America SAVES lives and more LAWFULLY possessed guns saves more lives!!!
Law abiding minorities possessing a gun are incredibly many more times as likely to use a gun to save their lives or their familiy’s lives than their gun would be used by them to commit suicide, to murder or accidentally kill someone all combined.
Using the fake reasoning that guns cause suicide, cause murder or that accidental gun related death is more than a few hundred a year in order to disarm millions of law abiding minorities in this country is dispicable and makes one’s motivations very suspect.

I am a liberal and I approve this message.

Foolish me.  I was under the naive impression that protracted unemployment, chronic ill health, inadequate education, mortgage foreclosure, business failure, spousal and child abuse, racial discrimination (including the playful deposition of symbolic representations of mob rule), to name just a few, all contribute to the collective apprehension of a progressively paranoid population.  Making more guns available to the general public is tantamount to throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire.  Criminals steal their weapons from an increasingly larger pool of legal owners, or they buy them from disreputable dealers who fail to register their entire inventory.  The unemployed and divorced seek to avenge themselves for real or imagined grievances.  Children play with unlocked and loaded guns, despite their parents’ prohibitions.  What you call “mental illness” is commonly endemic to a deliberately, continuously frightened public, where the media and politicians pander to our collective insecurities to further their own economic and political agendas.  Killing yourself or someone else is not an easily accomplished event, either psychologically or physically.  Guns make it that much more easily, irrevocably, possible.  Guns do, in fact, kill people.

Doom and gloom and scary claims means nothing nowadays coming from the anti gun ownership crowd. All the fears of yesteryear of what will happen if we have more guns not only did not come true, but the OPPOSITE often actually happened.
Accordin to ATF estimates, since 1993 there have been about 70,000,000 more legally owned guns in the United States. According to the FBI the murder rate is almost half of what it was about fourteen years ago. More guns did not make a smouldering fire blaze up as your analogy claims and the fear is more than unwaranted and disproven.

According to the CDC, the number of children (children are pre-pubescents usually under the age of fourteen) dying in 2004 from unintentional firearms deaths was 64.
While 64 children dying is a tragedy, it is far from a pandemic problem. More kids died an unintentional death from suffocation (963 in the year 2004), more died from unintentional drowning (761), more died from walking (171), and more died while walking and being hit with a car (406).
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html

As far as the ease of suicide, it is as easy as walking out the front door and stepping in front of a bus, a truck or an SUV. It is MUCH easier than shooting oneself because it takes nerve to pull the trigger and with walking in traffic one just has to close the eyes and wait for the bus to hit them.

No gun has murdered anyone, ever. It requires someone to pull the trigger and by that the person committed the murder.
If you are so fearful of guns and the prevalence of guns in our society, then what in blue blazes makes you think criminals won’t be making their own more dangerous guns in their basements?
In Baltimore a few years ago a white supremacist was arrested and when they searched his house they found a dump truck load of modern firearms he made in his row house.
Ted Kazcinsky, the Unabomber, made his own pistol that they found in his cabin made out of scrap parts.
In the Philipines they have a huge problem with home made shotguns used by criminals. In WWII they even made their own ammo out of brass curtain rods to fight the Japanes with.
In Pakistan they make full auto AK47s from scratch using scrap and no power tools using charcoal furnaces to smelt, weld and braze (called Khyber Pass guns).
For about fifty dollars in parts and handtools a criminal can make a fully automatic submachine pistol. http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/introduction.shtml
In the friggen UK they have a huge problem with people making handguns. Just where in the Hell do you think all the handguns used in handgun crime in the UK came from if there are no handguns to steal from gun owners (as you put it)? Some are smuggled in, the rest are made by the criminals.

Disarming the law abiding will do no more than make us defensless against a still armed criminal element. The nation’s demographics are that minorities overwhelmingly live in poorer areas with the highest violent crime in those areas. To disarm the law abiding minorities of handguns which are the ones that need them the most, just because some people have an unreasonable fear of an inanimate object, while the criminals still have knives, bats, fists and guns is criminal and racist.
Even during the civil rights movement in the South there was a need for the minorities to be armed to defend against the local government supported KKK. Ever hear of the Deacons for Defense and Justice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Benjamin Disraeli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

Let me ask you major major. If I or another of the gun nuts posting to this never ending morass promise to teach you to shoot and over come your fear of guns will you promise to commit suicide?

Just tell me where you live and I’ll even travel to see ya’ if you do.

When guns are outlawed I’ll be an outlaw and I hope I get to see you when “Liberal” season is in full swing.

Don’t you ‘pro gunners’ see that a percentage of these creatures will still be lying when hell thaws out again? Telling the truth to a “Liberal” freak is like Dorothy pouring water on a witch. Well I wish it was. But I guess that would make it too easy.

Study the front page of this rag. Have they changed? Will they change? Authoritarianism is their drug. They can’t imagine a world in which they don’t control every aspect of their neighbors’ lives.

It’s about Liberty, not guns. And those who seek to decide who amont their neighbors has ‘too much’ so their wealth can be ‘redistributed’ will eventually get around to you.

“I was under the naive impression that protracted unemployment, chronic ill health, inadequate education, mortgage foreclosure, business failure, spousal and child abuse, racial discrimination (including the playful deposition of symbolic representations of mob rule), to name just a few, all contribute to the collective apprehension of a progressively paranoid population.”

Yep.  There it is again.  Bigotry and prejudice.

Guns have killed more people during the last century than all the “knives, bats and fists” combined throughout the preceding nineteen centuries.  Stop trying to obfuscate the issue with your selective reliance on misleading statistics (check out the previous citation to Disraeli).  Your cute reference to “prepubescent” children “dying...from unintentional firearms deaths” doesn’t factor in the thousands of children dying from intentional gang-related deaths, which are typically the result of a pandemic spike in the ownership of guns.  According to your logic, the solution to urban gang-related homicide, which occurs primarily among the gang members themselves, is to provide them with even more guns to “defend” themselves against each other.  Moreover, you would provide everyone else in the neighborhood with additional weapons.  Forget about genocide.  You’re an advocate of auto-genocide.

Guns kill people.  Get rid of them.

My, my, my Major Major, I knew you would try the exageration of children dying by being murdered. According to the CDC it was not “thousands” of children that die every year by being murdered by someone using a gun, it was 279 in 2004 and that includes non-gang related murders.
You have no shame.
The total combined children deaths a year where a firearm was involved, including being murdered by criminals that were not even allowed to own a gun legally in the first place (which is the majority) is in the low hundreds (358 in 2004).
The number of children dying when a firearm was involved including by murder in 1993 was 957. The number of firearms in the US in 1994 was 195,000,000. In 2004 when only 358 children died when a gun was involved (including being murdered by criminals) there were a 100,000,000 more guns in this country (about 290,000,000 firearms in 2004) with millions more housholds with firearms in them. Once again your claim that more firearms leads to more children, or any, deaths is proven to be bogus.

Whenever the gun control nuts use figures and stats, and then their stats are exposed to be misrepresentations or just simply false, they alsways then make the claim that stats mean nothing and anyone can twist them to their argument. It is as guaranteed that the antis use this desperation tactic as it is for people to use Godwin’s law. If you do not trust any stats, then why did you trust the ones from the anti gun VPC?
My so called “selective” statistics was in direct response to the VPC’s selective and misrepresneted stats. I was simply revealing the rest of the stats the VPC selectively chose to exclude because it would disprove their choice stats.

Guns have killed no one. It takes a living human being to pull the trigger to kill.
Half of all murders are committed with a method other than a handgun and much less before the 1960s in the US.
At between 108,000 and 2,500,000 times a gun was used defensively to stop a violent crime or attack a year in the US, the number of lives saved by a law abiding person is probably in the tens of millions in the past two hundred years in the US.

The gun cannot be uninvented and as long as we have criminals in our society criminals are just going to make them or smuggle them in. No one ever has advocated arming criminals and it is a common tactic of desperation by the gun control nuts to claim anyone is advocating selling violent criminals firearms.
No, we only want the law abiding be armed so they can defend themselves from the violent criminals.

All gun prohibition will do is to disarm the law abiding and innocent making them targets. The vast majority of the minorities living in the poor communities are law abiding and it is also where the most violent criminals dwell. To disarm the masses of law abiding minorities in most need for protection based on the actions of a few criminals is bigoted at it’s core.
Innocent minorities living in inner cities have a human right to self defense and people like you are trying to make them defensless. You are advocating the slow meticulous genocide, not me.

I am a liberal and I approve this message.

“Guns have killed more people during the last century than all the �knives, bats and fists� combined throughout the preceding nineteen centuries.”

Guns are inanimate object.  They have no volition.

All those millions killed, in the last century, were killed by people. The majority by their own government.

xmountie,

Thanks for the info on registration up there. I remember reading stories both ways � refusal and “success” � we get the same kind of mythical anti-gun stats down here.

A few years ago we had a “buy back” locally, sponsored and financed (thankfully) by those who think crime began with the invention of gunpowder. They paid $50 per gun in any condition (2 gun limit per person) and then bragged about how many were “taken off the streets.”

Of course being folks to whom any firearm is of the devil � they knew nothing about what they had bought. A friend who owns a gunshop was able to have all his relatives and friends cash in his wall hangers and junk for a nice piece of change.

Everybody was happy…
and some of us are still laughing about it all.

MM,

If stats should determine what we do away with perhaps you should consider that between 40,000 and 50,000 die in auto accidents annually.

I don’t know how that compares per capita with horse drawn deaths prior to the car’s invention — but I wouldn’t be surprised if you do.

Hi

looks like MM is off on another spin.

Suicide:
perhaps MM can explain to us why countries like Lithuania and Bealarus have the highest suicide rates (aroungd 70 / 100,000/ year) and no handgun ownership?

There is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide rate, go google the WHO suicide stats and see whether Switzerland with about the highest firearms ownership in the world has a significantly higher suicide rate than its more controlled neighbours, France, Germany and Austria?

I left Italy out of that, as a Mediteranean country, it enjoys the same low suicide rate as its mediteranean neighboursdo, something about sunshine and good food.

What is correlated is firearms ownership and suicide with a firearm.

again, the hard of thinking get hung up on this, but are unable to offer any explanation of the benefit to society of the suicides occuring by say asphyxiation, electrocution or poisoning… Go on MM, I know you like a challenge, you still haven’t told me what “progress” is, have a go, I’m waiting.

Why does gun ownership not impact on total suicide rate?

Is the presence of a gun going to cause a normal person to decide to end it all?

Nope

Is the absence of a gun going to persuade someone who really can’t face another day, that perhaps life really is worth living after all?

I really don’t think so!

MM brings out another oft repeated half truth:
“Murderers know their victims”

I think the statistic is titled “Known to”:

This includes:
Members of a rival street gang / drugs gang
A prostitute and his / her “client” who met 5 minutes earlier
Rival dealers / pimps / protection racketeers
....and of course their “customers”

I addressed a componant part of the myth way back near the top of page 1:
Normal people just don’t commit murder. About 90% of murders are commited by people with 3 or more previous convictions for violent offences. Those mutants are well known to the justice system and really should be behind bars until they no longer pose a risk to society.

Oh, incidentally, violent fellons are not legally allowed to own a firearm, but since when have violent fellons obeyed a law.

Motoring
Car registration is for taxation purposes, any law enforcement benefit is incidental.

The US has a v high motoring death rate compared to simillarly developed nations. At least 1 reason is poor driver training and testing. The answer to that is with you the people.

The lack of “car control” comes down to one of the founding principles of socialism:

“of course i would gladly give you something that I do not have, but you’re certainly not getting anything i actually own”

come on progressives, what does progress actuall mean?

and how about answering some of the very good points the “People of the Gun” have been putting up here, but answer with facts figures and analysis, not bleeding heart half baked emotion.

Isn’t it rather absurd to let a ‘criminal’ out of prison who society feels can’t be ‘trusted with a weapon?’

That’s what “LIberal” freaks like. A ‘Justus’ system that doesn’t work so they have an excuse to pass more laws, taxes, control.

They have infiltrated everything on every level. That’s the ‘everything’ that’s in the dictionary. That’s probably what’s wrong with the NRA.

They have sleeper agents in most or all organizations, with one assignment.

We are at war. Make no mistake about that. Unless we value our Liberty as much as they value their ‘revolution’ we will be their slaves.

Want to know the “Liberal” version of a ‘criminal?’

“Anyone with a gun should be in prison.” - Rosie O’Donnell. (paraphrase)

Better get ready for the inevitable. Supply, train, target.

Hi Waypast,

Looking at the broader “creed” of the “left”, it does look a lot more like a religion than a rational and logical set of policies to govern by.

I’ve touched on the “progress” thing which Laura seems so keen on mentioning in the editorial.

None of the critters has been able to tell me what the left means by “PROGRESS”!

What is “PROGRESS”? and what is the process by which an Idea, action or person gains this mysterious property of “PROGRESS”?

Laura is very keen on spouting about opinion polls. One factor which repeatedly comes out in opinion polls, is the general public’s distrust of politicians (they normally rank somewhere close to journalists).

Why then, does the “creed” of the left insist that even the most basic human right, that of self defence, should be surrendered to a monopoly controlled by those whom the public trust least?

Actually, the creed of the left looks more like a recipe for producing the sort of chaos from which a Bolshevik revolution can succeed in seizing power and holding it, than a recipe to actually govern a country by for the long term.

For the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to hang onto power, it needs to eliminate any armed oposition. Is that us?  Is that what the people of the gun stand in the way of? ( as the Finns did in their war of independance).

Perhaps the “left” should have a long hard look to see what their ideas actually mean and where they came from.

What is quazi religious Victorian bullshit?

What came out of Com-Intern agents working for Stalin’s GRU / KGB in the 1930’s and was all to do with allowing world communism (by Stalin) to take over and nothing about making life better for people?

What was the first attempt at subjective analysis of a problem, which has now been thoroughly dis-credited by later research but is still held too as an almost religious truth?

Perhaps the likes of MM would like me to put them in touch with some people who actually lived under the dictatorships that called themselves “communist” to tell them about the violence, the shortages of the basics of human existence, the massive useless and self serving bureaucracy.

The massive criminality in the former Soviet Union is nothing new, people don’t learn those skills so fast,the criminality was an intrinsic part of Communism.

Come on MM and your friends, some reasoned answers for “the people of the Gun” please?

As a matter of fact, it would be more reasonable to assume that tens of thousands of children have died over the last thirty years after you factor in gang-related intentional firearms deaths, which you carefully avoided by restricting your data to children under fourteen and unintentional deaths.  Knowing your distaste for liberal exaggeration, I gave you the conservative benefit of the doubt and limited my estimate accordingly.

As for Lott’s conclusion that between “108,000 and 2,500,000 times a gun was used defensively to stop a violent crime or attack a year in the US”, well, that’s a huge interval clustered about a mean of 1,304,000, and implies the existence of either a very small sample size or a very large variance in the data, or both.  In fact, Lott has yet to verify to anyone’s satisfaction that he actually did conduct the survey, as compared to, say, simply cooking the data.  One of you bozos once stated that his “studies were peer-reviewed.” Well, you’re right (no pun intended).  They were peer-reviewed and rejected.

“Guns have killed no one. It takes a living human being to pull the trigger to kill.”

It takes a brain dead moron to believe that arming an entire population of “law-biding citizens” will do anything other than accelerate the social pathology of fear, hatred, hostility and paranoia that currently afflicts the people of a country obsessed with terrorism, unemployment, eroding standards of education, inadequate health care and the insurance required to finance it, home foreclosures and business failures.  Every “criminal” was once a “law-abiding citizen”.  Your dumbass reactionary “solution” simply ensures that all of us will eventually become criminals.

But, hey.  It’s a great wedge issue to divide the electorate for the next election.  Karl Rove must be rolling in his political casket.

New Harvard University Study Shows Direct Link Between Gun Availability And Gun Death Among Children

Louisiana Among Top Five in Nation in Gun Ownership�Louisiana Children More Likely to Die by Firearms Than Children in Low Gun Ownership States

WASHINGTON, DC�A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) shows that children, five to 14 years old, are dying at dramatically higher rates in states with more guns. The article, “Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, Suicide, and Homicide among 5-14 Year Olds,” appears in the current February 2002 issue of The Journal of Trauma.

The study shows that children living in the five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were 16 times more likely to die from unintentional firearm injury, seven times more likely to die from firearm suicide, and three times more likely to die from firearm homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership. Additionally, children in the top five gun ownership states were twice as likely to die from homicide and suicide overall as children in the five lowest gun ownership states.

VPC Executive Director Josh Sugarmann states, “This illustrates the pivotal role played by firearms and disproves the false claim that if guns were not available, shooters would simply employ other means. Most importantly, this study proves what common sense would dictate, a greater availability of guns has dangerous and deadly consequences. Firearms in the home pose an enormous threat to the well-being of our nation’s children.”

According to the study’s authors, there are large differences in states’ violent death rates among children, and these rates are closely tied to levels of gun ownership. The elevated rate of violent death among children in high gun ownership states cannot be explained by differences in state levels of poverty, education, or urbanization.

The five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia. The five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership were: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware.

Matthew Miller, MD, MPH, ScD, associate director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at HSPH and lead author of the study, states, “In states with more guns, more children are dying. They are dying in suicides, in homicides, and in unintentional shootings. This finding is completely contrary to the notion that guns are protecting our children.”

The Violence Policy Center is a national non-profit educational foundation that conducts research on violence in America and works to develop violence-reduction policies and proposals. The Center examines the role of firearms in America, conducts research on firearms violence, and explores new ways to decrease firearm-related death and injury.

Yes, major marxist, things may well get worse. In fact they likely will. It will take a brain dead moron to turn its weapons in to the govt. when the cities are burning at the hands of the third or fourth or fifth generation of young men raised without fathers because the ‘great society’ paid their mothers to have them.

It will take a moron to sit by and hope ‘it doesn’t happen to me,’ as many European Jews did in the 1930s.

It will take a brain dead moron to pretend that “Liberal"ism isn’t evil enough to eventually have people digging ditches and at the last moment, when the machine gun bolts slam home, realizing the ditches weren’t for the other guys this time.

It will take a brain dead moron to do anything but hunt your cowardly pitiful kind when it elects someone to hire someone to stick a gun in its neighbors’ faces and demand they render themselves defenseless in the face of rampant crime and government tyranny, all brought about by your ‘progressive’ ideology.

I may wind up dead, in fact I don’t expect to live through the first day or maybe even the first firefight, but at least I will not be like you, or like those who pretend that you are not evil and can somehow be converted by any means other than a healthy application of hemp or lead. But at least I won’t have lived my life as a brain dead moron.

That sir, is what they mean by ‘progress.’

Major Major, your obsession with Lott has rotted your brain . Not one of my figures has come from Lott and he did not conduct any of the surveys I referenced.

The low estimate of 108,000 defensive gun uses a year was conducted by the United States Department of Justice........they funded another study that estimated 1,500,000 defensive gun uses a year.

The 2,500,000 defensvie gun uses a year estimate came from a survey Gary Kleck, a well respected researcher for Florida State University, conducted. Gary Kleck is a card carrying member of the ACLU by the way, and a liberal too.

There have been other studies which actually estimated over three million defensive gun uses a year, but they are not often cited. Out of about a dozen studies, the lowest is 108,000 defensive gun uses a year and I hear even the Brady Campaign has accepted that figure.

Lott cited the USDOJ and Kleck studies, but he did not conduct these. You are obsessed with the man.

My oh my Major Major, once again you failed to double check the “facts” you copy and pasted.

“The study shows that children living in the five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were 16 times more likely to die from unintentional firearm injury, seven times more likely to die from firearm suicide, and three times more likely to die from firearm homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership....

....Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia. The five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership were: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware. “

A quick, easy and simple check of the figures shows how you fell for the misrepresentation of figures....once AGAIN!

Overall causes of suicide rate among 5-14 year olds in Virginia in the time period of 1999-2002 is 0.66 per 100,000
In Hawaii it was 0.74 per 100,000

In Lousianna the rate was 0.44
In Delaware the rate was 0.90

Suicide rate among that age group by using a firearm during those years in Virginia was 0.25 per 100,000
In Delaware the rate was 0.45

WOW! A simple fact check that took me five minutes to look it up and type it here proved the figures you cited to be lies.

Shameful lies Major Major, and you fell for them.

The internet is your friend. Use it and stop letting yourself get hoodwinked by fear tactic propaganda that uses the line “but think of the children”.

Oh, and let me stop you before you make yourself look foolish. I got the figures from the Centers for Disease Control and not John Lott.
I got them from here: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html

There is something drasticly wrong with people who believe that keeping track of persons who own inanimate objects such as firearms is a good thing if they have never violated the law..  We are not allowed to change addresses without notifying the Canadian Firearms Center.  To do so would be a violation of our two billion dollar farce.  Yet for some strange reason , it is considered a violation of a persons rights if a convicted felon is required to do the same thing.

Go Figure MM, live out your entire life without so much as a speeding ticket and be required by law to notify the police or CFC of your change of address.  Molest some child, rape and kill a young woman, serve a couple of years and get out of prison and be allowed to freely move about the Country without being required to notify anyone at all!

I am beginning to wonder if MM is that FF Michael Moore given his total lack of knowledge and willingness to put whatever spin he likes on this issue.

“Every “criminal” was once a “law-abiding citizen”. Your dumbass reactionary “solution” simply ensures that all of us will eventually become criminals.”

Let us apply your “logic” to women.  Given that all prostitutes were once innocent young girls, should we ensure that this does not happen by locking them all up at a young age before they become prostitutes?

‘

“New Harvard University Study Shows Direct Link Between Gun Availability And Gun Death Among Children”

Yep.  That’s the one I was talking about. The one that used gun death as an estimate of gun availability, and then “found” that there was a link between gun availability and gun death among children.  What the study really found was that there was a link between gun death and gun death among children.

It’s impossible for anyone who understands the slightest about statistics to read the details of the methodology used and to not conclude that this was an intentional fraud.

http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?id=3208
Cooking the Numbers
Why the Harvard “Study” on Kids and Guns is Bunk

http://www.haciendapub.com/faria6.html
Statistical Malpractice --- ‘Firearm Availability’ and Violence (Part I): Politics or Science?
Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD

“The five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia.”

Except, of course, that they weren’t.  The states with the highest level of gun ownership are Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Vermont, and South Dakota.  Unfortunately, all have very low rates of deaths involving firearms. So Hemenway invented a measure of “gun availability” that discarded them in favor of states with lower levels of gun ownership and higher rates of firearm-related death.

Using death by shooting as a measure of firearms availability while trying to study the effect of firearms availability on death by firearms....

That, unfortunately is about the level of some of the studies we have to put up with,

Then some bright spark finds 10 studies, 8 of which support an anti gun argument but all 8 of which contain that type of bullshit flaw, trouble is that piece of vital info on the flaws is not passed on to the decision makers.

An example of this was evidence presented to the Cullen enquiry in Scotland (1997) on firearms availability and suicide. Trouble was the vital paper did not control for firearms availability…

some of the better current papers are available at :

http://www.garymauser.net/papers.html

No doubt some will only read filtered and distorted snippets available from the sources that MM is so fond of posting.

In answer to MM’s comment:

“It takes a brain dead moron to believe that arming an entire population of “law-biding citizens” will do anything other than accelerate the social pathology of fear, hatred, hostility and paranoia that currently afflicts the people of a country obsessed with terrorism, unemployment, eroding standards of education, inadequate health care and the insurance required to finance it, home foreclosures and business failures.  Every “criminal” was once a “law-abiding citizen”.  Your dumbass reactionary “solution” simply ensures that all of us will eventually become criminals.”

Actually, that population (most states in the US) has been armed, and murder, armed crime and total crime all fell.

Contrast that with most of the rest of the developed world, where generally firearms restrictions have increased, but violent crime, armed robbery and murder rate have increased.

The points which set the US aside are:
Increased issue of concealed carry permits
Increased length of jail sentences
increased use of execution.

I’m personally against the death penalty, but those appear to be the key differences which have lead to falling crime in the US, dis-entangle them if you can.

oh, yes, Laura, MM & the rest of the anti crowd, what does “PROGRESSIVE” mean? no one has explained it to me yet.

Harvard Injury Control Research Center

Guns and homicide (literature review).
We performed a review of the academic literature on the effects of gun availability on homicide rates.
Major Findings: A broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries.  Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Publication: Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David.  “Firearm Availability and Homicide: A Review of the Literature.” Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal.  2004; 9:417-40. 

Gun availability and state homicide rates, 1988-1997
Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period.
Major findings: After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David.  “Household Firearm Ownership Levels and Homicide Rates across U.S. Regions and States, 1988-1997.” American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.

Gun availability and state homicide rates, 2001-2003
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003.
Major Findings: States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide.  This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Submission: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. “Homicide Victimization of Americans in Relation to Household Firearm Ownership, by Age and Gender.” Social Science and Medicine. in press..

Homicide followed by suicide in Kentucky.
We analyzed data from the Kentucky Firearm Injury Statistics Program for 1998-2000.
Major findings: While less than 7% of all firearm homicides were followed by a firearm suicide, in two-thirds of the cases in which a women was shot in an intimate partner-related homicide, the male perpetrator then killed himself with the firearm.  Few of these female victims had contact with the Department of Community-based Services. 
Publication: Walsh, Sabrina; Hemenway, David. “Intimate Partner Violence: Homicides followed by Suicides in Kentucky.” Journal of Kentucky Medical Association. 2005; 103:667-70.

Homicide in Jamaica.
We read the police narratives for every homicide in Jamaica, 1998-2002.
Major findings: The murder rate has been increasing steadily in Jamaica, and most of the murders are with firearms.  The principal motives are disputes and revenge.  Drugs, gangs, and political killings are no longer the main factors associated with murder.
Publication: Lemard, Glendene; Hemenway, David.  “Violence in Jamaica: An Analysis of Homicides 1998-2002.” Injury Prevention. 2006; 12:15-18.

Maybe it was the availability of children which was the problem. How about a push for government enforced infanticide to lower the stats in those states?

More government = less freedom.

Stats without knowing how the question was posed is useless.

Oh my Major Major, you are following the persistent pattern the antis always have. They never think for themselves and they just repeat what some gun prohibition group repeated some extremely anti gun biased doctor group claims.

Think for yourself and do some basic and extremely simple research on your own.
For instance, your unchallenged by you link mentions himicide using guns in Jamaica in the years of 1998-2002.
News flash oh unthinking one, firearms have been prohibitted in Jamaica since the 1970s and so every single person with a gun in Jamaica that is not a cop is a criminal and by the very nature of committing a serious crime just having a gun, they are violence prone criminals.

Now, think for a minute. How many homicides in Jamiaca were committed by a law abiding gun owner? The answer is NONE because only criminals have guns in Jamaica.
Where in the US about 80-90% of all murderers using a gun were priorly convicted felons or persons prohibitted from owning a gun making them UNLAWFUL to own a gun and NOT lawful gun owners, the one thing we know with absolute completness about the murderers who used a gun in Jamiaca is that they were ALL prohibitted from using a gun and NONE were LAW ABIDING gun owners.
Since the Gun Court Act of 1974 in Jaimaica, one can get up to life in prison for violating the gun or ammunition prohibition laws.

How many law abiding handgun owners in the UK have committed homicide with a firearm in the past ten years? the answer is NONE because only the criminals have handguns in the UK.....and since the handgun prohbition handgun murder and handgun violence is much higher.
Remove guns from law abiding hands and gun violence goes up. The “studies” you have cited are specifically skewed. They have the conclusion before they start the study and they seek the results they want while ignoring the data contradicting their predetermined conclusions, and that is junk science. The comparisons they use themselves actually disprove their assertions when looked at with an impartial mindset....like the Jamaica reference does.

If you only trust doctors and doctor studies, then read what these Psychatrist and medical doctors have to say about gun control. http://www.dsgl.org/Articles/flick2.htm

The reason the gun control nuts are losing ground in the arena of public opinion is because we are no longer as trusting of figures fed to us and America has quick access to alternative information to fact check the lies and misrepresentations that have been fed by the gun control nuts and prohibitionists for many decades.
Your side is losing because people are discovering the truth. Some day you will look beyond the fear mongering and hysteria inducing anti gun ownership propaganda for the truth too.

I am a liberal because I research facts for myself and I am for protecting lawful gun ownership because I am not a mindless, trusting fool. Educating oneself is the key to enlightenment and to purposely remain ignorant letting others think for you will only hurt the liberal causes and allow demagogues to lead our party into the ground.

While there may be, or may not be a reduction in crime with more lawfully owned guns, the one thing we do know after decades of social experiments in a number of countries is that complete gun prohibition has done nothing to eliminate, or even reduce gun violence and overall violence and suicides actualy goes UP!
The great gun prohibition experiments have failed, it is time for a complete rethinking of the gun control logic, is it not?

Harvard Injury Control Research Center

Guns and suicide (literature review).
We performed reviews of the academic literature on the effects of gun availability on suicide rates.
Major Findings: The preponderance of current evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for youth suicide in the United States.  The evidence that gun availability increases the suicide rates of adults is credible, but is currently less compelling.  Most of the disaggregate findings of particular studies (e.g. handguns are more of a risk factor than long guns, guns stored unlocked pose a greater risk than guns stored locked) are suggestive but not yet well established.
Publication: Miller, Matt; Hemenway, David.  “Gun Prevalence and the Risk of Suicide: A Review.” Harvard Health Policy Review. 2001; 2:29-37.

Gun availability and state suicide rates, 1988-1997 (cross sectional analysis)
Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership rates, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and suicide across 50 states over a ten year period.
Major Findings: After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, across the United States, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of suicide, particularly firearm suicide.
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David.  “Household Firearm Ownership Levels and Suicide across U.S. Regions and States, 1988-1997.” Epidemiology. 2002; 13:517-524.

Gun availability and state suicide rates, 1999-2001 (cross sectional analysis)
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and suicide across states, 1999-2001.
Major Findings: States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide.  This relationship held for both genders and all age groups.  It remained true after accounting for poverty, urbanization and unemployment.  There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm suicide.
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Lippmann, Steven; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. “Household Firearm Ownership and Rates of Suicide across U.S. States.” Journal of Trauma. in press.

Gun availability and state suicide rates, 1981-2001 (time series analysis)
Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and suicide over time, 1981-2001.
Major Findings: Changes in the levels of household firearm gun ownership was significantly associated with changes in both firearm suicide and overall suicide, for men, women and children, even after controlling for region, unemployment, alcohol consumption and poverty. There was no relationship between changes in gun ownership and changes in non-firearm suicide.
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David; Lippman, Steven.  “The Association between Changes in Household Firearm Ownership and Rates of Suicide in the United States, 1981-2002.” Injury Prevention. 2006; 12:178-82.

Gun availability and suicide in the Northeast
We analyzed data on suicide and suicide attempts for states in the Northeast
Major Findings: Even after controlling for rates of attempted suicide, states with more guns had higher rates of suicide. Case fatality rates ranged from over 90% for firearms to under 5% for drug overdoses, cutting and piercing (the most common methods of attempted suicide).  Hospital workers rarely see the type of suicide (firearm suicide) that is most likely to end in death. 
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Hemenway, David; Azrael, Deborah. “Firearms and Suicide in the Northeast” Journal of Trauma. 2004; 57:626-632.
Publication: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. “The Epidemiology of Case Fatality Rates for Suicide in the Northeast.” Annals of Emergency Medicine. 2004; 723-30.

Gun availability and regional suicide rates (cross sectional analysis)
We analyzed the relationship of gun availability and suicide among differing age groups across the 9 US regions.
Major Findings: Levels of gun ownership are highly correlated with suicide rates across all age groups, even after controlling for lifetime major depression and serious suicidal thoughts. After controlling for divorce, education, unemployment, poverty and urbanization, the statistically significant relationship holds for 15 to 24 year olds and 45 to 84 year olds, but not for 25 to 44 year olds.
Publication: Birckmayer, Johanna; Hemenway, David.  “Suicide and Gun Prevalence: Are Youth Disproportionately Affected?” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior.  2001; 31:303-310.
Publication: Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. “The Association of Rates of Household Handgun Ownership, Lifetime Major Depression and Serious Suicidal Thoughts with Rates of Suicide across US Census Regions.” Injury Prevention. 2002; 8:313-16.

Major Major said. “Stop trying to obfuscate the issue with your selective reliance on misleading statistics (check out the previous citation to Disraeli).”

....and then he goes and dumps a bunch of figures he copied and pasted directly from the anti gun VPC websight without checking on a single one to see if they are guilty of being selective and/or misleading.

You talk about discreditting Lott because he supposedly used a small sampling size, and here you go repeating studies that did what you accused Lott of doing.

You are either fooled, or a hypocrit thinking everyone who sees what you are doing is a fool.

Hi,
I think I might look up some of those “studies” which MM quotes for a game of “spot the fraud”.

I think Laura and every one else (’cept for MM) has probably got the message by now that far from legal gun owners being the problem and consisting of an industry funded rent-a-mob of child killing, racist, knuckle dragging bubbas…

we are individuals, and capable of winning all of the arguments on the facts, and without sponsorship by a bunch of multi billionaires (Soros, Bloomberg et al).

We are unfairly denied access to the mainstream media, who also grossly under report defensive use of firearms (e.g. reporting of the Appalachian law school shootings without mention of the two ccw holders who confronted and disarmed the mutant)…

- but what the hell, we’re still winning, and we will win, internationally as well. you’ve probably noticed the Irish flag (Irish murder rate up 24% on last year and very few legally held firearms).

I’m a Brit by birth, I lost 2 legally held pistols following the children being shot at Dunblane, only to see “gun crime” double in the 10 years since then.

This IS an international fight.  we’ve a lot of work to do in Britain and Ireland, but we’ll do it, persuading one individual at a time.

So, see you guys for choir practice along with the other “People of the Gun” at the gay gun nut’s place?

Why, that’s mighty neighborly of you, Pilgrim.  Twenty-four per cent?  Between the Brits and the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland, Ireland’s been awash with firearms for at least the last century.  But most of those weapons were hidden and cached in Ireland and used by the IRA in Northern Ireland.  Now that British military and Irish paramilitary operations are terminated or reduced, some significant share of those weapons are being circulated among the public.  There’s your 24% increase in the murder rate right there.  Peace breaks out in Northern Ireland and all hell breaks loose in Ireland.  That’s one of the reasons nations wage war to begin with: to unite an otherwise mutually antagonistic population and focus their combined hostility on some suitably, socially appropriate opponent.  That strategy was applied by the British for several centuries, at the expense of the Irish, among many others.  In fact, it’s a universal, all-purpose strategy employed by the leadership of every nation that ever existed, in order “to ensure domestic tranquility...” and secure the legitimacy of the leadership which employs it.  The transition to peace is necessarily correlated with a sufficiently comprehensive confiscation of weapons.

Guns kill people.  Get rid of them.

Major Major, I will tell you once again what the British have learned the hard way.
The gun cannot be uninvented.

Disarm the law abiding and the criminals will still have guns, but now the law abiding are defensless.
To disarm law abiding minorities in the inner cities will cause more death, rape victims by armed rapists and maiming attacks by armed robbers infictied upon American minorities.

Once again, the gun cannot be uninvented. It used to be zip guns and sawed off shotguns and cut down rifles, but now with the internet and/or a few entenpreneurial criminals, they will have these in short time.
http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/introduction.shtml

Try defending your family with a baseball bat against a rapist/robber with one of the home made, full auto maching pistols in that link.

This is all that is needed to make one:

A HOMEMADE .32/.380 CALIBRE MACHINE GUN
The whole firearm was constructed by hand from steel tubing, shaft lock collars and a few nuts and bolts!

TUBE SIZES

The tube sizes shown below are those required to construct the major component parts for the expedient machine pistol, i.e. receivers, barrel, magazine and breech block etc.

1. 30x30x2mm UPPER RECEIVER
2. 30x30x1.6mm LOWER RECEIVER
3. 25.40x12.70x1.6mm + 12.70x0.91mm MAGAZINE
4. 14.29x3.25mm BARREL
5. 12.70x2.03mm BREECH BLOCK
6. 15.88x34.93x1.6mm MAGAZINE WELL
7. 40x20x1.6mm GRIP
8. 50.80x1.6mm TRIGGER GUARD

The ERW (Electric Resistance Welded) tubing is very useful for the construction of receivers and magazine, or as sleeving to reinforce or increase the diameter of another tube. It should not be used as gun barrelling - unless nothing else is available - due to its welded-seam construction. The SMT (Seemless Mechanical Tube) is ideal for improvised gun barrels. Because of the many different tube sizes available, it is possible to construct a barrel to suit almost any calibre of firearm. Where possible, heavy-gauge tube should be used for barrel or a lighter gauge suitably reinforced with a second tube or steel collars. While many tubes will be of perfectly adequate strength on their own, it is only common sense to make the tube as strong as possible, providing the design of the gun will allow it.

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If you ban handguns from law abiding hands, then what next? A ban on scrap yards and harware stores?

MM and others may be interested in the following link and its information on defensive use of firearms at school shootings.

http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/04/when-mass-killers-meet-armed-resistance e.html

I have been aware of the Pearl incident for quite some time now and despite evidence, the media refuses to print truth.  They prefer to print their version of any incident involving firearms rather than admit that firearms can actually be and are used as a benefit to society.  Given this fact, it calls into question any article involving firearms printed by any person in the employ of a newspaper.

Novus wrote:

“If you ban handguns from law abiding hands, then what next? A ban on scrap yards and harware stores?”

Yes. There is no end to “:Liberal” insanity. They will seek to control every aspect of our lives. The eco-commies want us all corralled into the cites and ‘villages’ with many areas returned to ‘wilderness’ and no human contact allowed. Don’t believe me? Look up the “Wildlands Project.”

Now the nutbars are working on smoking bans, even in tiny Podunks like our county seat. Later it will be fast food, soft drink machines, bubble gum, red meat, and on and on.

A decision must be made as to when enough will be enough and that line in stone is crossed, then filled with “Liberal” blood.

“If you ban handguns from law abiding hands, then what next?”

Good grief, Goofus.  It’s like, I say that 9+7=16 and you say no, dummy, it’s 10, and then you accuse me of using a base ten number system.  If you ban handguns from general circulation, then you reduce the number of weapons available to the criminals.  No one’s talking about “uninventing” the pistol; we’re talking about drastically reducing the production and distribution of pistols.  Legitimate manufacturers churn out millions of them every year.  If you think some cottage industry of criminal craftsman can pick up the slack, then you’re wrong.  Throw in some severe restrictions on the production and purchase of ammunition and your local thugs will eventually resort to less lethal methods of intimidation.  It’s not the best of all possible worlds but it beats the hell out of your “pistol in every pot” model of political organization.

Waypasthadenough,
A good portion of the conservatives are also for radical control of all our lives. For instance, the right to die by euthanasia if terminally ill has been attempted to be denied on a national level by the theocons as one example. Or the continuing illegalization of personal drug use is another.
In my experience it is the Libertarians that are for personal freedoms with minimal government involvment and it is the far left as well as the far right that want to impose their opinions of how we should all live by increasing government controls and power.

I sincerely hope, major marxist, whomever or whatever you are, that a superior physical specimen of a criminal, whether from the govt. or the street, provides you with an opportunity to learn first hand and personally, very slowly and painfully, what kind of ‘less lethal methods of intimidation’ can be applied to morons such as yourself.

The best of all possible worlds will exist when the general population, or at least the real patriots left among us, subscribes to the statement: “The only good “Liberal” is a dead “Liberal"."

You are right Novus. But I can live in a world with fewer playboy magazines and less liquor and a few more churches. I will not exist in “Liberal” hell on earth. I will hunt them first.

Major Major......the UK.
I repeat, the UK.
Got it? The UK tried your experiment and it failed proving your theoretical ideas and assertions are wrong....very well proven to be wrong as a matter of fact. Can’t argue with the blaringly obvious failure of incredibly higher gun crime in the UK ten years after a ban.

In 1996, the year they started the handgun ban there were 200,000 legally owned handguns either destroyed or deactivated.
According to studies, in 2006 there are now extimated to be from 200,000 to 2,000,000 illegally owned firearms in the UK.
Remove all handguns from society and a few years later there are more than before. (i.e. it failed to work!)
Where did the handguns come from? It is estimated about half were smuggled and about half were MADE!!!

Fer cryin’ out loud, I am not a gunsmith and I even made my own handgun!
Ted Kaczinski, the Unabomber made his own handgun in his cabin in the woods.
Pakistani sheep herders make fully operational AK47s from scratch out of scrap metal with no power tools.
A white supremacist in Baltimore made a dumptruck load of firearms in his rowhouse a few years ago.

You mention the “slack”. Newsflash! While many, or even most guns were legally purchased at one point, according to the BATF the average time from legal purchase to being recovered in a crime is over ten years on the national average. There are a crapload of handguns alrready illegally possessed out there.
There will be a heck of a long time before any “slack” occured, but in the meantime, even if your assertions were correct about the supply, millions of law abiding Americans will be immediately defensless whileat least the ten years goes by where the majority of violent criminals are STILL armed.
Combine this with smuggling and illegal manufacture, and that will negate any supposedly good effect you claim will occur.

Only an incredibly small fraction of legally owned firearms in this country will ever be used in a crime. However you want to remove all the legally owned firearms to decrease violent crimes using guns by how small of a fraction? You will only disarm the victims.
Just how easy do you think it is for an unarmed 110 pound woman to fend off a 210 pound rapist? Would you really rather see her raped because you think a few people a year “might” be saved by making us citizens unarmed?

Your experiment will result in many law abiding and innocent people suffering while your experiment is being conducted.....and looking at the UK it has been proven your experiment will fail!
YOur good intent to save lives will only result in greater human strife and more deaths of the innocent because it is the wrong approach.
It is time we stopped striving for that which has been proven to be false. You are chasing a pie in the sky that is really a path to demise and you want to take millions of minorities and the rest of us down with you.

“Ireland�s been awash with firearms for at least the last century.  But most of those weapons were hidden and cached in Ireland and used by the IRA in Northern Ireland.”

Exactly.

Guns in the hands of the criminals and the thugs.

It’s a very different thing from guns in the hands of the average citizen.

Ireland hasn’t had an armed citizenry since, well, forever.

“If you ban handguns from general circulation, then you reduce the number of weapons available to the criminals.”

The number of weapons available to the criminals so greatly exceeds the number they need that no conceivable reduction in their number will make any difference.

It’s not like there aren’t places where guns aren’t banned.  Jamaica is a wonderful example.  It’s an island.  A small island.  With no gun factories.  And with the strictest gun laws in the world - at one time prison without trial for being caught with a single cartridge.

There hasn’t been a legal gun on the island for 30 years - yet the level of violent crime is astonishing.

Despite the laws, and the draconian punishments, the criminals still manage to find all the guns they need.

They always will.

Major Major, you poo pooed the idea that between 108,000 and 2,500,000 times a gun is used by the law abiding in self defense. It is estimated that only about 8% of all defensive gun uses (DGU) resulted in an injury or the attacker, so for every DGU seen in the news, there are more than ten more DGUs you will most likely never see in the media.
Here are a few recent DGUs:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/23/07
An employee of a Stone Mountain nonprofit association that helps war-torn refugees shot and killed a robber who forced his way into the office Tuesday evening around closing time, authorities said.
The robber collapsed and died near a rear door of the World Relief, an immigrant resettlement agency at 655 Village Square Drive, according to DeKalb County police spokesman Marcus Hodge.
as two male employees, described as older men, were preparing to leave and lock the front door.
Both robbers were armed with handguns, and one of them acted as a lookout, Hodge said.
The other demanded the victims’ wallets, then put his gun to one employee’s head and ordered him to open a safe, Hodge said.
When the robber turned his back, the other employee grabbed a gun from his desk and fired several shots at the robber, Hodge said.
Hodge said he did not know how many times the robber was struck, or where he was wounded.
Both robbers ran, though the wounded robber did not make it far. Police were still searching for the second robber late Tuesday.
charged late Tuesday, Hodge said, because the shooting appears to have been in self-defense.
World Relief, which is the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals in the U.S., has resettled more than 200,000 refugees for nearly 30 years and helped thousands of immigrant families across the country, according to its Web site.
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/metro/dekalb/stories/2007/10/23/robbershot_1 1024_web.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=13

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Though he was slashed several times, a retired pastor who lives in Greenville County managed to shoot and kill an intruder Tuesday night, deputies said.

Deputies said they were called to the home on Lake Shore Drive, just down the road from the Donaldson Center Airport, at about 11:30 p.m. The homeowners, 70-year-old William Willis and his wife Judith, were at the home when they arrived. They said Judith Willis was sitting on the side porch in her nightgown, her arms covered in blood.

Investigators said Judith Willis told them that she woke her husband after she heard a noise in another room. William Willis grabbed a gun that he kept in the bedroom and went to investigate.
Willis said he confronted a man that was in another room. Deputies said Willis was cut several times during the scuffle, the most serious wound to his arm.
Deputies said Willis shot the intruder several times.

http://www.wyff4.com/news/14046962/detail.html

SPARTANBURG, S.C.—Spartanburg County deputies said two home invasion robbers were shot early Tuesday morning by the homeowner they tried to burglarize.
Deputies said that the men forced their way into the home on Harley Court about 4 a.m.
Lamont Dawkins, the homeowner, said that he heard glass break and someone kicking at his back door.

Dawkins told WYFF News 4 that the men were shouting that they were from the “Spartanburg County Police.”
Spartanburg County does not have a police force. Dawkins said that he grabbed a pistol gun and hid behind his refrigerator.
When the men came into the home, Dawkins fired what he says was about five rounds. There was a bullet hole in the fence outside the home.
The men ran away.
“I was scared at first, but now I feel good, I just didn’t want nothing to happen to me,” Dawkins told WYFF News 4�s Mike McCormick.

http://www.wyff4.com/news/14400848/detail.html?rss=gs&psp=news

According to police reports, Lewis told police he was embalming a body when a man entered the business through a back door and demanded money. He had his face covered by a piece of white clothing, with only his eyes showing, Gault said, and white fabric wrapped around his hands. The man then told Lewis he had a gun and would