The Gaming Den

Suicides are a human right. Better to shoot yourself than jump in front of a train and traumatize a driver.

PoliteNewb wrote:.

K wrote:I've literally had a bum try to bum rush me from behind and then turn around and run away when I put my fists up. Ruining the element of surprise is that effective.

And yet...you were just describing how the element of surprise is so awesome that a person with a gun has no chance to avoid it. Despite the fact that your own experience shows that you CAN avoid it. WTF?

If the criminals lack surprise, you don't need the gun because the crime doesn't happen. If they have it, your gun is no help.

I mean, if I'd had a gun I could have shot that bum in the back as he ran away, but the crime was already prevented so having a gun would not have made me any safer.

IF I hadn't seen him, he'd have slammed into me and probably knocked the crap out of me before I could even reflexively reach for a gun, much less aim and fire it in such a way as to not potentially kill someone in the neighborhood or get shot myself.

Fuchs wrote:Suicides are a human right. Better to shoot yourself than jump in front of a train and traumatize a driver.

Good thing that there are more than two ways to commit suicide and that argument is a false dichotomy.

The distance at which you can draw a gun and fire it at an attacker as a trained professional is surprisingly huge and it's something we've discussed before elsewhere. The number of random violent crimes that start outside of that distance is astonishingly small, and the number of people with guns who would be trained professionals is smaller, still.

What would actually happen is either A) you get the shit beat out of you without even knowing it's coming and they take your gun along with your wallet as a bonus, B) you mistakenly think that you can defend yourself from someone with a weapon who is within arm's reach, and you get yourself killed, or C) they are literally so far away that you have time to draw your gun, turn off the safety, aim, and fire without any professional firearm training and your crappy human surprise and thinking.

C doesn't happen. Not in any meaningful sense.

I got the feeling that many people are approaching the "gun" argument as "A free gun for each 100$ buy at Wal-Mart!" instead of, you know, the training and research that most pro-gun groups recommend.

So is yet another highly-emotional beating of strawmen.

EDIT: A funny take on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evr_tP9cJWY

the gun argument boils down to three things:

1. constitutionality
2. freedom
3. social control

if you are against firearms, you are against the constitution. if you are against firearms, you are against a free society. if you are against firearms, you are for social control

none of those things do I desire; therefore, I must err on the side of firearms

The training doesn't matter much in terms of self-defense, which is what we're talking about. A part of police officer professional firearms training is the distance at which it is effectively useless to draw your gun. That distance exists, and most crimes occur within it because people the people doing the crime want to be beating the shit out of you before you even know what's happening.

It takes ~3 seconds to pull a trigger. That's the time it takes for the fire command to go from your brain into you fingers. That's an eternity in a hand to hand fight. In my self defense classes, we practice all the time reacting to someone with a /drawn/ gun, and disarming them before they get to shoot. It's not easy, but it's surprisingly not that hard if you can keep the adrenaline in check. It was much harder to do once we started using cap guns that make noise when you pull the trigger.

That 3 seconds doesn't include little things like, "draw, safety off, finger on trigger, fire."

@sabs

In your self-defense classes they are bullshitting you because no self-defense expert will tell you to something besides "if he tells you hand the wallet, hand the wallet" if a criminal points you with a gun, which is likely prepared beforehand.

http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/weapondisarms.htm

GX you idiot who has no idea what he's talking about. You're making assumptions with no knowledge. So shut the fuck up.

The first thing we go over is, "hand your wallet over."
Then we talk about, "What to do if they point a gun at you and tell you to get in the car"

weapon disarms are /hard/ but they are not impossible. The training disparity is important. But so is distance, and acting quickly.

The first rule of weapon disarms:
Give him your wallet and walk away.
Second rule of disarms:
if he's got a knife, you're going to get cut.
Third Rule
If he has a gun, chances are good you'll get shot.

Then you train what to do if "sorry, here's my shit" isn't going to work out for you. Most people taken at gun point into a vehicle, are basically never heard from again. If your choice is, go meekly into the car, or make your last stand. You are almost always better off making your last stand.


I will add though, that the guy in that link is completely right.
He says very smart things. Disarming someone with a weapon is somethign you do when you have no choice, or if you're crazy. But this is in reference to regular citizens carrying guns for self defense.

Criminals are MUCH more motivated to learn how to disarm a housewife with her 22 in her purse, than said house wife is in learning how to combat draw and fire inside the 20 foot radius.


PS:
The type of disarms we learn, are basically of the, "move the weapon out of the way, and /break/ his arm, crush his throat, bury the knife into his body, instead of yours. They're mean, they're unfriendly, and they are completely last resort.

DSMatticus wrote:The distance at which you can draw a gun and fire it at an attacker as a trained professional is surprisingly huge and it's something we've discussed before elsewhere. The number of random violent crimes that start outside of that distance is astonishingly small, and the number of people with guns who would be trained professionals is smaller, still.

Yes, but I don't think that's an issue here. Odds are, the "trained professional" will determine who has guns and who does not and starts with those who do not first. This leaves the youthful idiots and the drugged deprived desperate and those are generally easy targets.

Unfortunately, they probably happen to be aquantences of your firends and relatives because that's how they found out about your gold coin/jewlery collection in the first place.

There is a big difference between having a gun in your house and taking a gun outside the house. The later has a whole plethora of potential problems and requires a lot of understanding of all those potential problems before you can reasonably make a call to draw that weapon.

@sabs

Well fuck you too.

Nobody is saying that weapon disarms are impossible. But the decision of carring a weapon is not one that can be made by the Goverment, is an individual one. Specially because it involves the concept of escalating the violence and that you MUST be ready to shoot if neccesary.

Also, note that I said "escalate". Is perfectly possible to be violent without throwing a punch. Just as is possible to put yourself on high risk situations.

Anyways, my thoughts on leftist social engineers spreading a pathological fear of guns just to keep the population in control aside, this discussion is pointless. It does boils down to what is legal and what it isn't.

PS: Criminals are more motivated to disable your capacity to defend yourself (like hitting you on the head) BEFORE putting you on a car. The one true way of self-defense doesn't exist.

regular people open carrying guns in public is a problem. We actually want to curtail open carrying, and conceal carrying in public.

Forget knowing how to combat draw, forget know how to defend yourself, or others with a gun.

The most important part, is knowing when NOT to. Being able to understand the nuances. Knowing when some gangbanger is pointing a gun at you, vs when some black kid is holding an ipod in his hand.

Cops spend significant amount of time learning to read people, to read cituations, and to learn how to recognize dangerous people, from innocent people. And they still mess it up. They make mistakes.

Example:
You see someone run towards someone else, and then you notice a knife in their hand, covered in blood, and the 2nd person falls to the ground. So you draw your gun, and you shoot the dangerous person with the knife.

Congradulations, you just killed the guy who was trying to save his friend.

An armed Citizenry is /not/ necessarily a better one. When more people carry weapons, there is a certain level of 'civility' that develops. But it also means, that when civility breaks down, instead of a fist fight, you end up with a shooting.

Compare Gang violence from the 60's and early 70's to now. It used to be that gangs would have fist fights, maybe with some chains and a bat or two. Now, they do driveby's with submachine guns, and automatic handguns.

What stops things like Virginia Tech, and Columbine is not citizens carrying weapons. It's /trained/ people carrying weapons.

To Frank (spoilered for length, addressing the studies he cited):

I can't speak directly to the Branas study, because I can't read it (they want me to pay for a membership). My immediate thoughts were "what methodology did they use?" and "correlation or causation?".

So I googled a bit, and found the following information that cause me to be skeptical of Branas's findings.

1.) According to the study, 53% of the shooting victims had prior arrest records. While they did attempt to control for criminal record, the NRA points out that they did not make distinctions about type and frequency of arrest...comparing someone who has a record for drug possession 10 years ago with one who has a record for assault from 1 week ago is not a very good control.

2.) The study did not account for differences in gun carry/ownership being lawful or criminal. Obviously, people carrying guns illegally and/or for illegal purposes are more likely to be shot.

3.) The study did not account for the possibility of reverse causation; one website says the study itself admits this, with a quote from p. 6 "We also did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault".

4.) The study did not account for differences in location and situation. From the study:

We assumed that the resident population of Philadelphia risked being shot in an assault at any location and at any time of day or night. This is an acceptable assumption because guns are mobile, potentially concealable items and the bullets they fire can pass through obstacles and travel long distances. Any member of the general population has the potential to be exposed to guns and the bullets they discharge regardless of where they are or what they are doing. As such, we reasonably chose not to exclude participants as immune from hypothetically becoming cases because they were, for instance, asleep at home during the night or at work in an office building during the day.

I, and others, believe this is an unreasonable assumption...some areas and situations are more prone to gun violence than others, and you are far more likely to be shot when buying drugs in a bad neighborhood than sleeping in your bed in a good part of town.

5.) Not everyone agrees with Branas's conclusions. Relevant quotes:

The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed J. Michael Oakes, a professor of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. “There are some sketchy things going on here,” he said.

“The foundation of the case control study is the sense that those who are the cases are exactly the same as those who are in the control group,” Oakes explained. The Inquirer summarized Oakes’ observation that, “Branas is assuming the people who were shot were no more likely to have guns than a group of controls of the same gender and racial mix.”

“It’s a big stretch,” Oakes said.

University of Chicago Economist Jens Ludwig is one of the most experienced, and most intellectually rigorous, academic supporters of restrictive gun policies. Yet he, too, was skeptical of the conclusion.

“They can’t tease out whether guns are contributing to assault or assault risk is contributing to gun ownership,” Ludwig said.

In other words, people who are especially at risk of being attacked might be more likely than other people to carry guns, rather than the other way around.

Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck put it succinctly: “It is precisely as if medical researchers found that insulin use is more common among persons who suffer from diabetes than among those who are not diabetic (something that is most assuredly true), and concluded that insulin use raises one’s risk of diabetes.” Or as Jacob Sullum quipped on Reason.com, it’s like discovering that people who are wearing parachutes are much more likely to suffer injuries from falling than people who don’t wear parachutes--the risk comes from jumping out of a plane, not from wearing a parachute.

The Penn article, Kleck wrote, “is merely a reflection of the fact that the same factors that place people at greater risk of becoming assault victims also motivate many people to acquire, and in some cases carry away from home, guns for self-protection . . . For example, being a drug dealer or member of a street gang puts one at much higher risk of being shot, but also makes it far more likely one will acquire a gun for protection.”

(all quotes from http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/R ... &issue=023, which I'm sure K will disregard as propaganda. The former 2 quotes were also quoted here, however...http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.s ... you_s.html)

tl;dr...while interesting, I do not find the study compelling or conclusive, nor do others in the academic world. Even Branas admits his study has shortcomings, and that it is only a first step, not a final conclusion.

Kellerman's study I don't even care about...the flaws in his methodology are clear, and it has been debunked multiple times.

K, I'm going to try to address this point by point, to avoid vague generalities.

K wrote:Guns won't protect you from random crime. That kind of thing relies on speed and surprise, so in most cases they've got the drop on you and pulling a gun means you get shot in the face.

So, if I am reading you correctly, you are stating:
a.) Random crime relies on speed and surprise...it is never the result of other circumstances (escalating confrontations, face-to-face intimidation, etc).
b.) If someone has the drop on you, pulling your gun means your attacker will always strike first and decisively, so you will never be able to successfully use a gun in such a situation.

Claim a. ignores reality, which Fuchs already pointed out...there are plenty of incidences of random crime that do not involve a surprise attack.

Claim b. also ignores reality...here are some things that actually happened:

An 82 year old man, after being shocked with a stun gun, pulled a pistol and shot his attacker

A jewelry store owner, facing an armed man already pointing a gun at him, pulled his own gun and shot his attacker

When robbers pointed a gun at a pawn shop employee, the owner produced a weapon and shot one, causing the other to flee.

A man being robbed in his home by a knife-wielding thug, managed to acquire his gun and shoot at his robber, who then fled.

All of these cases (and many more like them) disprove utterly both of your claims. Attacks are NOT always by surprise. Even if your attacker has the drop on you, you CAN successfully fight back with a firearm.

That being said, having a gun on you when you are surprised is just an invitation to get shot with your own gun.

Still waiting? Frank pointed out the difficulty of providing this information, but if you're going to make a claim that is so full of shit, I'd expect at least an attempt.

Lago wrote:If gun control advocates are to get anywhere we first need to make people aware that even if you're all up in the gun safety bizness, four times out of five that gun is going to be used on one family member against another as opposed to some burglar.

Citation needed.

sabs wrote:The most important part, is knowing when NOT to. Being able to understand the nuances. Knowing when some gangbanger is pointing a gun at you, vs when some black kid is holding an ipod in his hand.

Cops spend significant amount of time learning to read people, to read cituations, and to learn how to recognize dangerous people, from innocent people. And they still mess it up. They make mistakes.

I actually agree with this 100%. In fact...the cops mess up and shoot unarmed people by mistake a LOT more than private citizens.
The biggest factor is not even training. It's that a citizen with a gun HAS to be careful about how he uses it, or he will end up in prison. Even in cases where his shooting is entirely justifiable, he will probably still be charged and (at least) go before a grand jury, if not a full-fledged murder trial where he will be required to ADMIT he shot someone, and then provide a defense of justifiable homicide...in short, the burden of proof is actuall on the SHOOTER to prove his shooting was righteous.

Cops, on the other hand, are often given a complete pass on shooting unarmed people, facing no more than an internal investigation which quickly clears them, and is under no civilian or judicial oversight. Cops are also trained to suspect everyone of being dangerous, and that "officer safety" is so important they should resort to force any time the perceive a threat, or in some cases even feel their authority is threatened.

The problem isn't training. The problem is who is given carte blanche to use lethal force without having to face a judge and jury.

An armed Citizenry is /not/ necessarily a better one. When more people carry weapons, there is a certain level of 'civility' that develops. But it also means, that when civility breaks down, instead of a fist fight, you end up with a shooting.

Compare Gang violence from the 60's and early 70's to now. It used to be that gangs would have fist fights, maybe with some chains and a bat or two. Now, they do driveby's with submachine guns, and automatic handguns.

To some extent, I can agree with this too. I honestly don't like the Heinlein quote, and it really isn't true in modern societies...Heinlein was speaking of a society where you can literally call someone out in a duel for dissing you.

However, regarding the "escalation" from knives and chains to guns...this cuts both ways. In "the good old days" when people fought with hand weapons, it meant that people who COULDN'T fight with hand weapons (women, the elderly, the handicapped, nerds, etc) got killed and beaten up with impunity by bigger, stronger dudes. Guns are a force equalizer, which make it easier for people to defend themselves. I'm not claiming that firearms are a universal positive...only that they are not a universal negative, and may in fact be a net positive when you take all factors into account.

regular people open carrying guns in public is a problem. We actually want to curtail open carrying, and conceal carrying in public.

nobody cares what you want you chucklefuck

It's not as if you get incapacitated right away when someone attacks you. You often have the time to draw a knife, seen that in my case files often enough when dealing with assaults where the attacker ended up on the ground when his victim turned out to be armed.

Also, it bears saying: Guns are the big equalizer. Without guns, the stronger one wins all the time.

I'd rather not live in a society where physically strong can bully the weak.

@sabs

Define "we".

Fuchs wrote: I'd rather not live in a society where physically strong can bully the weak.

I would! I'm tired of being pushed around and losing mates to smaller, weaker men because they have more in their wallet (but less in their briefs). If it wasn't for guns and cops, I'd be chieftain! Stupid society stopping me from acting like a barbarian. Fie, I say!

PoliteNewb wrote:
So, if I am reading you correctly, you are stating:
a.) Random crime relies on speed and surprise...it is never the result of other circumstances (escalating confrontations, face-to-face intimidation, etc).
b.) If someone has the drop on you, pulling your gun means your attacker will always strike first and decisively, so you will never be able to successfully use a gun in such a situation.

Claim a. ignores reality, which Fuchs already pointed out...there are plenty of incidences of random crime that do not involve a surprise attack.

Claim b. also ignores reality...here are some things that actually happened:

An 82 year old man, after being shocked with a stun gun, pulled a pistol and shot his attacker

A jewelry store owner, facing an armed man already pointing a gun at him, pulled his own gun and shot his attacker

When robbers pointed a gun at a pawn shop employee, the owner produced a weapon and shot one, causing the other to flee.

A man being robbed in his home by a knife-wielding thug, managed to acquire his gun and shoot at his robber, who then fled.

All of these cases (and many more like them) disprove utterly both of your claims. Attacks are NOT always by surprise. Even if your attacker has the drop on you, you CAN successfully fight back with a firearm.

That being said, having a gun on you when you are surprised is just an invitation to get shot with your own gun.

Still waiting? Frank pointed out the difficulty of providing this information, but if you're going to make a claim that is so full of shit, I'd expect at least an attempt.

I can find five articles where people fall out of airplanes without parachutes and survive. Does that prove that people should jump out of airplanes without parachutes?

Clearly, it doesn't. By the same token, finding a few cases where people actually used guns to fight off attackers doesn't "prove" dick.

I mean, in any situation where you have the drop on your attacker, you could probably also just locked yourself in a room and call the police. The actual cases where armed victims turned the tables on their attackers are so rare that news stories are written about them.

But, since you demand citations, there was some easy-to-find news of people getting shot with their own guns.

Man shot with own gun by intruder.

Even off-duty cops get shot with their own guns. It's about halfway down the page.

Sometimes both cop and suspect get shot.

@K

"Your articles are invalid, my articles say it so"

Come on dude. Try harder.

Indeed, "always strike first and decisively" is fundamentally disproven, repeatedly, and yet he keeps going...

Gx wrote:"Your articles are invalid, my articles say it so"

I don't think you understood the point, anecdotes are meaningless. Both sets of articles are equally useless. Because they're "hey, this can happen!" and we don't care what can happen, we care about the net effect over all cases. See K's "people can survive terminal velocity falls; parachutes unnecessary" bit.

PoliteNewb wrote:Random crime relies on speed and surprise...it is never the result of other circumstances (escalating confrontations, face-to-face intimidation, etc).

You could totally diffuse the situation of "escalating confrontation" and "face-to-face intimidation" with a gun. You know what else diffuses those? Walking away. Calling the police. Lowering your voice. If it's not yet a fight, you have a ridiculous number of options. Since when did your bruised pride give you the right to shoot someone, even if they are committing a misdemeanor with their asshole-ishness? We don't design laws to satisfy testosterone-driven pissing contests, we design them so that people can survive testosterone-driven pissing contents. And giving both sides guns is a good way to make sure someone dies because they were either drunk, stupid, or prideful and that's super-terrible policy.

Fuchs wrote:Also, it bears saying: Guns are the big equalizer. Without guns, the stronger one wins all the time.

They aren't. Surprise (and friends) beats weapon every time. Until criminals are declaring their intent and you're measuring off at 10 paces to turn and fire, guns have equalized nothing. If one guy sneaks up behind you and hits you over the head with a brick, your gun will not equalize that situation. If a guy and his friends surround you, your gun will not equalize that situation. If someone (or a group) marches into a store you're working at, gun drawn and pointed at you, your gun will not equalize the situation. His negligence might, but your gun won't because you still have to draw and prepare it before that situation is equalized.

This is just action hero bullshit. The person choosing to perpetrate the crime always has the advantage because he is dictating the terms of the encounter before you even know there's going to be an encounter, so you are always caught with your pants down and the only question then is "can I manage to pull my pants up?" If you think the answer is yes, and it turns out to be no, you lose, action hero. There are totally cases where you think the answer is yes, and it turns out to be yes, and you win. PoliteNewb pointed out some. Congratulations. Nobody cares.

What we're actually interested is not "hey, it works! Sometimes..." What we're actually interested in is what effect does arming people have?

1) It doesn't appear to have any significant effect on crime. The "all we need to stop crime is bigger sticks" camp rarely produces any meaningful results. Frank listed a bunch of countries that were alternatively great and shit with high gun ownership. Texas isn't enjoying low crime rates, despite being Texas.
2) It's pretty obvious that petty confrontations like the one PoliteNewb pointed out in defense of his position become a humongous fucking danger to the participants and everyone else in the immediate vicinity because bullets don't care who your target was and most people in stressful situations aren't very good shots. You'd better hope giving everyone guns makes those confrontations stop altogether, because if it doesn't you've made things a fuckton worse.
3) If it doesn't reduce crime, then what it will do is make crime more violent. The perception that your victim might be armed will necessarily change the way you go about the crime. "Ask, then stab if problem" is a pretty reasonable methodology for a mugger. That's the kind of methodology we want, as a society, because nobody gets hurt. If there's the chance the victim has a gun, "ask, then stab if problem" goes out the door. They might pull it during the confrontation; they might hide it and not hand it over, then try to shoot you as you're leaving. The smarter move is now "stab, then take," because that doesn't put your life in danger. We've made that worse.
4) There's absolutely nothing to suggest that guns contribute meaningfully to successful self-defense attempts to begin with except some anecdotes that go both way.

Basically, "arming everybody" banks on the hope that if we make crimes more dangerous, people will stop committing them! Unfortunately, that 'dangerous' bit goes both ways so who's to say we just won't end up with more dead people, victims and criminals alike? Because the criminals didn't magically lose their guns when we armed everyone else. And criminals aren't stupid; if the status quo is "victim has a decent chance of having a gun," they will act like "victim has a gun" and now we're putting victims in more danger.

Doom wrote:"always strike first and decisively"

There's your problem right there! When you take an opponent's general claim and pretend it's universal, of course it doesn't make any sense. I think it's got its own specific name, though you could also classify it as a strawman easily enough.

K wrote:I can find five articles where people fall out of airplanes without parachutes and survive. Does that prove that people should jump out of airplanes without parachutes?

Clearly, it doesn't.

It also doesn't prove that people using guns to fight off attackers is as rare as falling out of an airplane without a parachute and surviving.

Now proof would be if you took an honest look at how many people fall out of planes without parachutes, and see how many survive and how many don't. THEN, you take a look at how many people carry guns on a regular basis, and how many have them taken away and are shot with them.

So let me know when you're ready to do that. Until then, you have just compared an apple to an orange.

By the same token, finding a few cases where people actually used guns to fight off attackers doesn't "prove" dick.

It proves your statement, which was an absolute, is shit. And since you cannot provide any evidence whatever about the frequency of people defending themselves with guns (or failing to do so), your statement (even taken as a hyperbolic generality) remains a completely unsubstantiated claim.

I mean, in any situation where you have the drop on your attacker, you could probably also just locked yourself in a room and call the police. The actual cases where armed victims turned the tables on their attackers are so rare that news stories are written about them.

This is laughable on 2 fronts.

1.) Do you believe that in any of the situations I linked to, the person could have locked themselves in a room and it would have turned out just as well?

2.) You are seriously asserting that news stories are only written about very rare events? God, I had no idea corrupt politicians were so rare.

K wrote:But, since you demand citations, there was some easy-to-find news of people getting shot with their own guns.

I never claimed that people are NEVER shot with their own guns (as you claimed that people never successfully defend themselves with guns). So your stories only tell me what I already knew; that people ARE sometimes shot with their own guns.

The citation I wanted was not that it happened "ever", but how often it happened...y'know, proof of your statement that...

K wrote:having a gun on you when you are surprised is just an invitation to get shot with your own gun.

Not to mention...your news stories don't even prove your point. Let's look at them:

Story 1: The story says he was shot with his own gun, but not that it was taken from him...he could have been in another room when the intruders found his gun and subsequently shot him with it. But let me add...this story sounds like a guy who accidentally shot himself and made up a story. 3 guys, but he is nonfatally shot, AND they leave the gun behind? No suspects apprehended?

Story 2: The story clearly says that the guy was drunk, AND the gun was taken from a shelf, not from the officer. This is clearly a case of an accidental shooting, NOT self-defense turned against the gun owner.

Story 3: The story describes an officer already in a hand-to-hand scuffle with a criminal who is then disarmed by the perp. Congratulations, you have found ONE actual story about someone having their gun taken away and used against them...though I would add that despite the title you put on that link, neither cop nor perp was shot! The gun went off accidentally while they wrestled, and even after gaining possession of the gun, the guy fled without firing another shot (he was then struck by the pursuing officer's car). AND, I already mentioned that police are required by their job to wrestle with dangerous people, thus increasing the chances of having their guns taken away.

Did you even bother to read those stories?

DSM wrote:I don't think you understood the point, anecdotes are meaningless.

Not quite. My anecdotes were intended to prove that an event K scorned as impossible does in fact actually occur.
But if K wants to prove the assertions he made, I expect him to produce some actual, statistical evidence. I haven't made any claims, other than that his are unsupported bullshit.

DSM wrote:You could totally diffuse the situation of "escalating confrontation" and "face-to-face intimidation" with a gun. You know what else diffuses those? Walking away. Calling the police. Lowering your voice. If it's not yet a fight, you have a ridiculous number of options.

You know what doesn't work when someone is trying to rape you? Walking away. Calling the police. Lowering your voice. Seriously, your advice to people who are being threatened by violent criminals is "do what they want"?

DSM wrote:They aren't. Surprise (and friends) beats weapon every time.

Are you incapable of reading? I presented situations where people were surprised AND outnumbered, and those did not beat the weapon!

Seriously, I'm not making a ridiculous claim that guns are magic wands that solve all your problems...but you and K literally are making the idiotic claim that guns are completely incapable of ever being used to defend yourself.

DSM wrote:If someone (or a group) marches into a store you're working at, gun drawn and pointed at you, your gun will not equalize the situation. His negligence might, but your gun won't because you still have to draw and prepare it before that situation is equalized.

You mean, like what happened to the jewelry store owner that I JUST DESCRIBED in my last post? That never happened, right? It's completely impossible?
How do you reach your level of self-delusion?

DSM wrote:What we're actually interested is not "hey, it works! Sometimes..." What we're actually interested in is what effect does arming people have?

You're right, I am interested in that.

1) It doesn't appear to have any significant effect on crime. The "all we need to stop crime is bigger sticks" camp rarely produces any meaningful results. Frank listed a bunch of countries that were alternatively great and shit with high gun ownership. Texas isn't enjoying low crime rates, despite being Texas.

I don't deny this. You likewise should not deny that gun control ALSO has no significant effect on crime, which is admitted by just about every study that's examined it.

2) It's pretty obvious that petty confrontations like the one PoliteNewb pointed out in defense of his position become a humongous fucking danger to the participants and everyone else in the immediate vicinity because bullets don't care who your target was and most people in stressful situations aren't very good shots. You'd better hope giving everyone guns makes those confrontations stop altogether, because if it doesn't you've made things a fuckton worse.

Please provide some shred of evidence that lawfully owned, carried, and used firearms create any danger whatsoever to bystanders or other people.

3) If it doesn't reduce crime, then what it will do is make crime more violent. The perception that your victim might be armed will necessarily change the way you go about the crime. "Ask, then stab if problem" is a pretty reasonable methodology for a mugger. That's the kind of methodology we want, as a society, because nobody gets hurt. If there's the chance the victim has a gun, "ask, then stab if problem" goes out the door. They might pull it during the confrontation; they might hide it and not hand it over, then try to shoot you as you're leaving. The smarter move is now "stab, then take," because that doesn't put your life in danger. We've made that worse.

You seem to be attributing an enormous level of personal bravery to muggers. If there's a chance the victim has a gun, the answer is not "stab right away", it's "go somewhere else", or even "don't mug people".

4) There's absolutely nothing to suggest that guns contribute meaningfully to successful self-defense attempts to begin with except some anecdotes that go both way.

There's plenty...starting with the fact that people without guns are demonstrably less capable of defending themselves at all, particularly in the cases where they are physically inferior to the aggressor. Your claim is similar to saying that "there's nothing to suggest that cars contribute to personal travel".

DSM wrote:There's your problem right there! When you take an opponent's general claim and pretend it's universal, of course it doesn't make any sense. I think it's got its own specific name, though you could also classify it as a strawman easily enough.

Uh, K claimed it was universal. He made an absolute statement, not a qualified one. When you use your opponent's actual words, that isn't a strawman.

Or K could just admit that sometimes, gun are useful for self-defense. It's hardly an outrageous admission.

PoliteNewb wrote:Seriously, your advice to people who are being threatened by violent criminals is "do what they want"?

If that means the person walks away physically unharmed? Yes. There are plenty of bank robberies where people walk in with a slip of paper that says "cash plz" and wait in line to hand it to the teller. Then leave. That is so awesome. That is how we want all crimes to go. Exactly zero violence.

Now, you've pointed out examples where that can't actually happen. Where the violence IS the crime (rape, murder, whatever). There are cases in which being armed will help you there (successfully pull gun), and cases where being armed will hurt you (unsuccessfully pull gun), and cases where it won't make a bit of difference (for whatever reason, not pull gun). And then it's just a question of does letting people have guns to protect them from this event outweigh all the downfalls of giving people guns?

PoliteNewb wrote:I'm not making a ridiculous claim that guns are magic wands that solve all your problems...but you and K literally are making the idiotic claim that guns are completely incapable of ever being used to defend yourself.

Okay, so let's get on the same page: your actual point (as stated in like three different places in that post) is that we said something obviously hyperbolic, and you decided to take that literally, even though when you do that it leads to (by your own admission) a completely stupid and obviously fallacious claim that probably should have made you second guess your interpretation.

Point duly noted. Protip: you're going to see hyperbole occasionally. It is neither meant nor should be taken literally.

PoliteNewb wrote:You mean, like what happened to the jewelry store owner that I JUST DESCRIBED in my last post? That never happened, right? It's completely impossible?
How do you reach your level of self-delusion?

I don't think you understand what "equalizer" means. Was the jewelry store owner at a disadvantage when the criminals walked in prepared and he did not have his gun in his hand? If so, then that gun's existence didn't equalize shit, so claiming guns as some great big equalizer is just flat out wrong. What actually 'equalized' that situation or swung it the other way was the criminals not paying enough attention to him to notice him going for a gun.

When the default assumption is "all victims have a gun," they're a lot less likely to make that mistake. Self-defense is one of those strategies that works best when your opponent doesn't expect it. The more we encourage self-defense, the more aware criminals are of the possibility of self-defense and the more they will do to prevent it and the less effective it becomes.

PoliteNewb wrote:Please provide some shred of evidence that lawfully owned, carried, and used firearms create any danger whatsoever to bystanders or other people.

This is a well-hidden bullshit response: lawfully used firearms by definition don't create a danger to bystanders or other people (or else your laws suck). When you do that, the use stops being lawful. The point is that letting people lawfully carry firearms provides a lot more opportunities for their unlawful use. Like getting pissed over bullshit at somebody and instead of escalating to a fight in the street it escalates to gunshots.

PoliteNewb wrote:You seem to be attributing an enormous level of personal bravery to muggers. If there's a chance the victim has a gun, the answer is not "stab right away", it's "go somewhere else", or even "don't mug people".

This contradicts this:

PoliteNewb wrote:

DSM wrote:1) It doesn't appear to have any significant effect on crime. The "all we need to stop crime is bigger sticks" camp rarely produces any meaningful results. Frank listed a bunch of countries that were alternatively great and shit with high gun ownership. Texas isn't enjoying low crime rates, despite being Texas.

I don't deny this.

You cannot both admit that it does not reduce crime and claim that we will successfully scare people away from committing crimes. These are literally two opposing claims, because if it does successfully scare people away from committing crimes, then we have less crime.

Or if they have some group to go commit crimes against ("go somewhere else") who is less likely to be armed, and I don't think we've accomplished anything there except changed victims. That's individually desirable, but from a social engineering perspective not a whole lot.

United States Statistics:

All murders combined: 4.8 per 100,000 residents.
All Suicides combined: 11.1 per 100,000 residents.
Suicides performed with a gun: 53%
Suicide attempts per suicide: 11
Overall Suicide success rate: 9%
Gun Suicide success rate: 90%

NEJM wrote:The empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling.3 There are at least a dozen U.S. case–control studies in the peer-reviewed literature, all of which have found that a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of suicide. The increase in risk is large, typically 2 to 10 times that in homes without guns, depending on the sample population (e.g., adolescents vs. older adults) and on the way in which the firearms were stored. The association between guns in the home and the risk of suicide is due entirely to a large increase in the risk of suicide by firearm that is not counterbalanced by a reduced risk of nonfirearm suicide. Moreover, the increased risk of suicide is not explained by increased psychopathologic characteristics, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts among members of gun-owning households.

The increase in suicide successes caused by guns being better at taking your life away than jumping off buildings or eating a bunch of pills is actually by itself more deaths than all forms of murder combined. Self shooting is less than one twentieth of all attempts and more than half of all deaths!

The gun proponents meanwhile have no statistics in their favor at all. Gun ownership, gun carrying, gun use, and gun proximity all correlate very strongly with increased rates of wrongful death. Depending on how the study is conducted, your relative risk goes up by twice to ten times. And so the gun proponents claim that correlation is not causation and bring up various anecdotes. Note: this is exactly what the proponents of replacing chemotherapy with prayer do, and for the same reason.

You can rant about anecdotes or causation speculation all you want, but the fact is that not owning a gun is safer for you, your family, and the people who live and work around you than owning a gun is. That's just a statistically demonstrated and repeatedly confirmed fact. The argumentation in the literature is not whether being a non-gun owner is safer, it is by how much.

-Username17