[Politics]The Right to Arm Bears in a Crowded Theater

[DSMatticus]

Also, Do you agree people should be able to freely commit suicide? Do you agree they should be able to use a gun to do that? If they use a gun to commit suicide is that a gun control issue?

The appropriate response to you here is "read the fucking thread." This is basically the first thing covered in the suicide discussion.

It turns out that lots of people who attempt suicide and fail do not go on to keep trying until they die, but rather they go on to live ordinary lives, because they were actually just depressed and bummed out about something terrible in their life at that moment. So when they attempt suicide and succeed, that's a god damn tragedy - that's someone who could be living an ordinary life right now, but is not because they were depressed and they had a gun nearby instead of a bottle of pills or a rope.

If gun ownership raises the success rate of suicides, that's bad, because most suicide attempts are a result of transient depression; i.e. it is a problem that can be fixed if they fail, so we want them to fail.

[Username17]

So, how does the rate of suicide attempts in the US compare to that in other countries?

We have about the number of attempts per capita as England, but we have almost twice the number of successes. Tussock's conspiracy theory that people in the United States who attempt to kill themselves just "want to kill themselves more" and take actions that are significantly more likely to succeed than people in any other country in the world is not accepted by credible Psychiatric research. At all.

But you didn't answer the question. You found one country with data that supported your thesis. Or you already did all the math but are not showing your work? Something like Canada with a gun access rate approximately equal to the US might be more interesting and address the question?

How did I not answer the question? Norway has almost twice as many suicide attempts as the United States (per person) and almost the same number of suicide successes. The United Kingdom has almost the same number of suicide attempts (per person), and slightly more than half the number of suicides.

UK - about 130 suicide attempts per 100k, about 6.5 suicide deaths per 100k.
Norway - about 250 suicide attempts per 100k, about 12.4 suicide deaths per 100k.
United States - about 130 suicide attempts per 100k, about 12 suicide deaths per 100k.

I mean yes, you can go through countries one by one and scrutinize the shit out of them. But the global success rate for suicide is 5% and the US success rate for suicide is 9%. That is a really big difference, and that difference is one hundred percent explained by our high rate of gun suicides. American Exceptionalism is a stupid doctrine at the best of times, but when you're making it to claim that Americans are simply magically more serious about taking their own lives than people in any other country, you've gone straight of the rails on the crazy train.

Also, Do you agree people should be able to freely commit suicide? Do you agree they should be able to use a gun to do that? If they use a gun to commit suicide is that a gun control issue?

No. People have a right to euthanasia, but as previously noted the number of people for whom that is appropriate is extremely low compared to the number of people who commit suicide because they are transiently miserable. Putting little guard rails that people could easily climb over onto bridges reduces suicide number significantly. Because the vast majority of people who think they want to die at any given moment will think better of the idea if given even a few minutes to think about it.

Suicide is a public health problem. It is a complex problem, reducing GINI is not a panacea as evidenced by the sky high suicide rates in Finland (roughly five hundred attempts and twenty five successes per hundred thousand people per year). And we should absolutely do things about it. Things. Plural.

And in the United States, one of the very easiest things we can do is to put a lot more restrictions on firearms. Because people who have a gun in their home are no more likely to have a family member attempt suicide, but are five times more likely to actually lose a family member to suicide.

-Username17

[tussock]

Tussock's conspiracy theory that people in the United States who attempt to kill themselves just "want to kill themselves more" and take actions that are significantly more likely to succeed than people in any other country in the world is not accepted by credible Psychiatric research. At all.

Fuck you, show your data, mine's those wikipedia links. Where can I even find suicide attempts by country, by US state? My google-fu is lacking.

Hey, US women are twice as likely to attempt suicide, but men are four times as likely to succeed, that's an eight-fold increase for success rates in men. My suggestion is that men are much more likely to want to succeed, subconsciously and shit, your suggestion seems to be that women are just grossly incompetent at everything they try and don't even know how to find the gun in their own house. Or did you miss that implication?

I mean yes, you can go through countries one by one and scrutinize the shit out of them.

No, Frank. You can drop all the data in a spreadsheet and it'll tell you if it's correlated or not. Split up the US states too, if you have the data.

Here, let me.
Correlation by US state for rate of households with guns vs rate of suicide. r=0.68.

Again, I can't find suicide attempts. But it's not a bad argument I found for you there. That's 6/100k + 1/100k per 6% gun ownership (+-6/100k by state, +-1/100k over time). Now, US-state gun ownership is correlated with things like republicanism and hate crimes, so that's not a sole factor, but it's a great start.

Doesn't work internationally, does work internally. A few notes I find here and there also suggest it's better geographically correlated in the US than by gun ownership, but that's hard for me to measure on a spreadsheet, and guns and geography aren't independent anyway.

Because people who have a gun in their home are no more likely to have a family member attempt suicide, but are five times more likely to actually lose a family member to suicide.

Where are you getting that from? I can barely find anything about attempts, are you claiming ... I don't even understand ... people with a gun in the house must also be at least twice as likely to kill themselves by means other than guns for that to be true.

Maybe that's even true? Making you twice as likely to hang yourself or poison yourself, as well as being able to shoot yourself to death. Guns do seem associated with the more conservative states and families, and not many women shoot themselves regardless.

[Username17]

Fuck you, show your data, mine's those wikipedia links.

Yeah. I gathered that. Mine is a massive pile of peer reviewed medical research I had to go through for my Psychiatry rotation last year.

Because people who have a gun in their home are no more likely to have a family member attempt suicide, but are five times more likely to actually lose a family member to suicide.

Where are you getting that from? I can barely find anything about attempts, are you claiming ... I don't even understand ... people with a gun in the house must also be at least twice as likely to kill themselves by means other than guns for that to be true.

That particular alarming fact comes from:
Kellerman AL, Rivara FP, Somes G et al. “Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership.” New England Journal of Medicine, 1992;327:467-72

But in any case, how are you not getting this? Firearms represent more than half of all suicide fatalities in the US, but they don't represent more than half of all attempts. Not even close. Even people who have a gun in the house are just as likely to jump off a cliff or huff carbon monoxide or slit their wrists or something. The reason that firearms figure so high in the final tally is because of their 92% success rate (Wintemute, et. al., “The Choice of Weapons in Firearm Suicides,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol 78, No. 7, July 1988, p. 824), as opposed to other methods that average a success rate of a bit less than 5% (note: there are other methods that have very large success rates as well, such as jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but less than 30 people do that a year so it doesn't factor large in overall suicide numbers).

I mean yes, there are "hard" and "soft" suicide attempts and in most countries men are more attracted to "hard" methods and they tend to have higher rates of success and lower rates of attempts than do women. But researchers do in fact correct for that sort of thing. You really really aren't going to get a surprising insight by cherry picking data off wikipedia that was overlooked by the multi-decade multidisciplinary international effort to understand and cope with suicide as a psychiatric public health issue.

Guns are a real problem. Really. There are studies and shit. Wikifacts are not going to overturn that actual scientific fact. We can go about this any way you want.

-Username17

[Koumei]

So what's the main reason the NRA really wants everyone to have guns? Is it the same "so selfish and irresponsible it's evil" reason as their supporters, the "My right to own this cool thing trumps everyone else's right to not be murdered"? Or is it the more typically American "We own massive stock in firearms manufacturers, so when people go buying guns and ammo, we get loads of money. Please, shoot each other more! The fear generated boosts sales!"?

[Ancient History]

The NRA is the leading voice of the gun lobby - not just promoting the legislation and putting out the media materials that firearm manufacturers, retailers, and owners want, but acting to draw the ire and attention away from the people that actually own the companies. Every time the NRA says stupid shit to the media, you get angry at them instead of the guys building and selling assault weapons.

[/edit]And yeah, they want everyone to have guns because then everyone is complicit in gun violence. There are nine guns for every ten Americans, that doesn't mean nine out of ten Americans owns a gun. If you do have a gun, you have a personal, vested interested in whether or not it becomes illegal - and the NRA wants you to own a gun to play off that fear.

[Username17]

The NRA is run by a consortium of gun manufacturers and vicious nutcases. Remember that guy who stole a .50 caliber anti material rifle from the same store that the Lanzas got their weapons of terror? Well, the inventor of the .50 caliber anti material rifle is named Barrett, and he is on the board of the NRA.

Here's the list:

Joe Allbaugh (Board Member)
Graham Hill (Board Member)
Scott Bach (Board Member)
Steve Hornady (Board Member)
Buster Bachhuber (Board Member)
Roy Innis (Board Member)
Carol Bambery (Board Member)
Joaquin Jackson (Board Member)
Bob Barr (Board Member)
David Keene (Board Member)
Ronnie Barrett (Board Member)
Tom King (Board Member)
Clel Baudler (Board Member)
Herbert Lanford (Board Member)
Ken Blackwell (Board Member)
Wayne LaPierre (Executive Vice President and CEO)
Matt Blunt (Board Member)
Karl Malone (Board Member)
John Bolton (Chairman of International Affairs Subcommittee)
John Milius (Board Member)
Rep. Dan Boren (Board Member)
Buz Mills (Board Member)
Bob Brown (Board Member)
Cleta Mitchell (Board Member)
Pete Brownell (Board Member)
Grover Norquist (Board Member)
John Burtt (Board Member)
Chuck Norris (Celebrity Spokesperson)
Dave Butz (Board Member)
Oliver North (Board Member)
Harlon Carter (Former NRA Executive Vice President)
Ted Nugent (Board Member)
Richard Childress (Board Member)
Johnny Nugent (Board Member)
Jim Porter (First Vice President)
Chris Cox (Executive Director)
Jay Printz (Board Member)
David Coy (Board Member)
Todd Rathner (Board Member)
Larry Craig (Board Member)
Kayne Robinson (Executive Director of NRA General Operations Division)
Wayne Anthony Ross (Board Member)
R. Lee Ermey (Board Member)
Ron Schmeits (Board Member)
Manny Fernandez (Board Member)
Tom Selleck (Board Member)
Sandy Froman (Board Member)
John Sigler (Board Member)
Jim Gilmore (Board Member)
Linda Walker (Board Member)
Marion Hammer (Board Member)
Maria Heil (Board Member)
Rep. Don Young (Board Member)

You'll notice walking through that some familiar names. Yes, it's that Oliver North, the guy who did gun smuggling to terrorists for the Reagan administration. Yes, it's that Ted Nugent, who threatened to kill Hilary Clinton with a machine gun. But there's also a bunch of people you don't know. Most of those people are arms manufacturers or their lawyers.

The days when the NRA was a mouthpiece for gun owners is long over. Now they are a mouthpiece for gun manufacturers and also international terrorist organizations. That should be hyperbole, but it's not.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Wow. So we take the more pessimistic and cynical of my guesses, and then go a step further because some of them just need people to be killed in order to maintain an erection.

[tussock]

Fuck you, show your data, mine's those wikipedia links.

Yeah. I gathered that. Mine is a massive pile of peer reviewed medical research I had to go through for my Psychiatry rotation last year.

Quoted for truth. I am digging around elsewhere, but it's not easy.

Because people who have a gun in their home are no more likely to have a family member attempt suicide, but are five times more likely to actually lose a family member to suicide.

Where are you getting that from? I can barely find anything about attempts, are you claiming ... I don't even understand ... people with a gun in the house must also be at least twice as likely to kill themselves by means other than guns for that to be true.

That particular alarming fact comes from:
Kellerman AL, Rivara FP, Somes G et al. “Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership.” New England Journal of Medicine, 1992;327:467-72

Thanks. Good stuff. Handy hint that ~5/6 of gun-homes die by gun (actually less for those dying outside the home, but it doesn't say how much), and a few non-gun homes too, which changes my per-state US scatter plots to 5.5/100k base rate +1/100k per 5% gun ownership. Or 5:1 for 100% vs 0%, which hits their ratio pretty well.

r= 0.68, a good few high outliers up in the north-west, where the sun don't shine, and low clusters in New England where the armed country folk are wealthy as.

The only possible issue I can see with that is they're assuming that owning a gun is not associated with wanting to commit suicide, which they discuss. Where I imagine there's totally things in the US that make you simultaneously more likely to own a gun and more likely to kill yourself, like predicting the future by its most negative possibilities (aka, watching Fox News, where Obama is a secret Muslim out to destroy Christian society).

Having said that, nothing's going to increase your odds by 400%, is it.

But in any case, how are you not getting this? Firearms represent more than half of all suicide fatalities in the US, but they don't represent more than half of all attempts. Not even close. Even people who have a gun in the house are just as likely to jump off a cliff or huff carbon monoxide or slit their wrists or something. The reason that firearms figure so high in the final tally is because of their 92% success rate (Wintemute, et. al., “The Choice of Weapons in Firearm Suicides,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol 78, No. 7, July 1988, p. 824), as opposed to other methods that average a success rate of a bit less than 5% (note: there are other methods that have very large success rates as well, such as jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but less than 30 people do that a year so it doesn't factor large in overall suicide numbers).

Hanging works, sitting there at #2 in the US. It's how the Lithuanians are doing it. In Hong Kong they all jump, because everywhere's a skyscraper.

I mean yes, there are "hard" and "soft" suicide attempts and in most countries men are more attracted to "hard" methods and they tend to have higher rates of success and lower rates of attempts than do women. But researchers do in fact correct for that sort of thing.

Right, good on them. So, basically, it's thought people are little more likely to attempt suicide when the method is a lot less likely to kill them, but not so as to even things out. Thus guns do make for much fewer attempts as I suspected, just not enough.

You really really aren't going to get a surprising insight by cherry picking data off wikipedia that was overlooked by the multi-decade multidisciplinary international effort to understand and cope with suicide as a psychiatric public health issue.

But I can eventually reach the same conclusion for the same subjects using different data, which is nice. There's still nothing like a correlation across Europe or the world in general. Perhaps gun ownership elsewhere is demographically distinct, or the countries which allow more guns are sufficiently better places to live, where gun ownership across the US works the other way.

It is odd that's there's no correlation internationally. Europe has good data, and no trend at all. There's a different story there, somehow.

Guns are a real problem. Really. There are studies and shit. Wikifacts are not going to overturn that actual scientific fact. We can go about this any way you want.

Meh, you got me. A gun in the house in the US is a predictor of an in-home suicide, because there's no known causative factor of suicide that raises gun ownership rates to match the data. And it's hard to think of something that makes folk that much more likely to kill themselves, in all fairness. Yay science.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Unrelated question:

Was the link between alcohol and crime/maladaptive social behavior pretty firmly established or denied? I'm aware that Correlation Does Not Equal Causation, but, my dim recollection of two separate Health/Sociology textbooks says that in no uncertain terms people commit suicide / cause car accidents / hurt themselves in household accidents / drown / beat on other people more when they've been drinking.

But I am willing to accept evidence to the contrary.

[Username17]

It is odd that's there's no correlation internationally. Europe has good data, and no trend at all. There's a different story there, somehow.

One of the problems is that Europe is a lot more genetically sorted than the US is. Finnish and Hungarian people are genetically more likely to kill themselves. You can send them halfway around the world and even raise them in adopted families and they still have elevated suicide risk.

There's also cultural factors. We're pretty sure that Japan's suicide rate has something to do with the fact that they have a long and storied tradition of writing poetry about how awesome various forms of suicide are. That can't possibly help things, and the statistics seem to show that it doesn't.

But there's still economic factors. Japan's suicide rate went from "pretty high" to "very high" when their lost decade started and it's pretty much stayed there ever since. What's interesting there is that it isn't so much the actual economic level, but the lowered expectations that seem to drive the suicides. Japan has been on a reduced growth and elevated unemployment regime for about fifteen years now, and suicide levels have stayed high. Compare to say anywhere in Africa, where they would literally sacrifice their first born to have an overall level of prosperity that was half of what the Japanese enjoy. And yet, there are no African countries that can touch Japan's suicide rate with a pole. The highest suicide rates in the whole world are former Soviet countries Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (followed shortly by Japan and Guyana). Those countries had considerably lower suicide rates before the Soviet Union collapsed. In the late 80s, suicide in the Soviet Union was merely "tragically common" rather than "a public health disaster" like it is today (though Lithuania was still the leader there, possible genetic factors?).

The UK recently announced that they think about a thousand extra people killed themselves in the UK because of the economic crisis. Greece's situation with economic suicides is proportionately way worse. Given what we've seen in Japan and Russia, we have lots of reason to believe the increases in suicides will get "baked in" and last a long time.

-Username17

[Winnah]

I touched upon a correlation between Australian gun control and the decline in suicide rates earlier in the thread, back when the discussion was focussed on those theater-goers getting shot and killed.

now I'll post some links

Australian Institute of Criminology

Trending increase in violent crimes such as assault. Decrease in Homocide, armed robbery and firearm related crimes post gun control.

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Suicide 2000-2009

Medical Journal of Australia; meta-analysis of rates and methods of suicide between 1988 and 2007

Basically, since gun control, suicide rates by firearm dropped by 65%, overall suicide rates decreased. Make of that what you will.

[erik]

There are physiological affects for drinking alcohol, short term ones being delayed reaction times and impaired motor control among others. So yes, drinking makes you a shitty and more dangerous driver/operator of heavy machinery/blades.

But social affects are mostly psychological. Tell someone they drank something highly alcoholic when in fact you have given a non-alcoholic beverage and they are much more likely to behave as though they are "drunk", and conversely give someone some really strong alcohol and tell them it is non-alcoholic and they are likely to behave normally/sober.

So people behaving violently after drinking are usually doing so because they have a psychosomatic excuse.

[sabs]

[sarcasm]
Gun Ownership should be protected at all costs.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/24/us/new-yo ... ?hpt=hp_t1
[/sarcasm]

fuck you, Christmas Eve.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But social affects are mostly psychological. Tell someone they drank something highly alcoholic when in fact you have given a non-alcoholic beverage and they are much more likely to behave as though they are "drunk", and conversely give someone some really strong alcohol and tell them it is non-alcoholic and they are likely to behave normally/sober.

I am going to demand a cite for this before I buy it, sorry.

[erik]

But social affects are mostly psychological. Tell someone they drank something highly alcoholic when in fact you have given a non-alcoholic beverage and they are much more likely to behave as though they are "drunk", and conversely give someone some really strong alcohol and tell them it is non-alcoholic and they are likely to behave normally/sober.

I am going to demand a cite for this before I buy it, sorry.

No problem, that's fair.

This page and this page have handy citations for various studies. They're from the same base site because the layout and references were better than most I found.

Basically studies have been done as I described, where people are given alcohol and told they were given non-alcoholic beverage, and the reverse, and of course controls, and the people who were told they were given alcohol behave similarly and those who were told they were not given alcohol behave similarly, regardless of whether they were actually given alcohol. Point being that people behave how they think they are supposed to behave when drinking.

This is of course to a certain extent, since there are obvious physiological changes that occur when intoxicated.

I have found studies like this one that disagree with behavior under the influence as well. So oy. It is not clear cut.

It sounds like there may be a greater tendency towards self-injurious behavior when intoxicated, and alcohol is a depressant so I would not rule it out for making someone more likely to commit suicide. I haven't found any studies conflicting unlike on the more mundane behavior side of things.

[...You Lost Me]

[sarcasm]
Gun Ownership should be protected at all costs.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/24/us/new-yo ... ?hpt=hp_t1
[/sarcasm]

fuck you, Christmas Eve.

Wargl.

[virgil]

From this place

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence."....
The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

[Whipstitch]

Aaaand here we get to the part where conservatives think that gun deaths only count if it's in the course of committing a crime. Again.

[Username17]

Aaaand here we get to the part where conservatives think that gun deaths only count if it's in the course of committing a crime. Again.

Also we get to the point where if you just total up the number of owned guns, then you'll find that richer people own more guns because they own more things. And because richer countries have less homicide in them, you're going to find that countries where people own lots of guns have less murder than countries where people have less guns. That's pretty much a given.

The comparison that would make any sense would be countries of comparable wealth where the restrictions on gun ownership were higher or lower. Their comparison is stupid on many levels. For one thing, Monaco is a fucking country that has thirty five thousand people, nearly a hundred thousand guns in collections, and literally zero murders most years. On account of it being essentially a single gated community full of rich people and if you wanted to kill someone you'd do outside the borders in France or Spain. Also in that we track murders "per hundred thousand inhabitants" and Monaco is only a third of that, meaning that on the years it does have "a murder" the murder rate spikes up to twice that of Canada.

It would make even more sense to compare countries within a region that had similar wealth levels. So you might compare Northern European rich countries and see that Finland (highest gun ownership and weakest controls in the group) has nearly twice the murder rate of the United Kingdom (lowest gun ownership and strictest controls in the group). But yeah, if you just say "People don't own anything firearms in Russia and the murder rate is high, but people own lots of everything guns in Monaco and no one was murdered there last year", you are cherry picking statistics so laughably that it isn't even worth going in-depth on the "study". They are literally comparing Finland to Lithuania and claiming that it proves guns make us safer.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

http://www.theledger.com/article/201212 ... a-Gun-Laws

Florida gun laws are wacky to begin with. As Chuck Sheppard puts it:

With NRA approval, the F State firearms laws “unequivocally aim to prevent gun ownership by convicted felons,” wrote the Tampa Bay Times. However, in the first 11 months of 2012, cops made 3,479 arrests for felons-in-possession--more than 10 per day. “Private” sales are legally free of background checks (which apply only to federally-licensed dealers); buyers and sellers are not required to keep records of sales; maintaining any list of firearms owners is a felony in Florida; there is no limit to the number of guns per sale. The Republican Party of Florida, though, has been leading a major crackdown this yr on felons who try to punk this law on felon gun-possession. No, actually, they spent all their felon-punking-prevention energy on alleged illegal voting by felons (since everybody knows that felons are Democrats). Problem: GOP would have been more credible if it had found anywhere close to 3,479 illegal voters.

[RobbyPants]

But social affects are mostly psychological. Tell someone they drank something highly alcoholic when in fact you have given a non-alcoholic beverage and they are much more likely to behave as though they are "drunk", and conversely give someone some really strong alcohol and tell them it is non-alcoholic and they are likely to behave normally/sober.

I am going to demand a cite for this before I buy it, sorry.

On a related note, the highly scientific site Cracked.com says that merely looking at alcohol can make people more racist. The only citation I found for that was from the University of Missouri, linked in the article.

[Koumei]

Oh snap! School shooting halted without heavily armed security guards.

[sabs]

What's best, is that CNN interupted their report on a meeting between Biden and an NRA guy, talking about gun violence, to report on said HighSchool shooting.

[nockermensch]

Oh snap! School shooting halted without heavily armed security guards.

Oh well, time to shelve those all those proposed gun control laws.