"Firearm-related injuries and deaths have devastating health consequences for individuals, families, and communities. In addition to these individual, familial, and community effects, public mass shootings have huge consequences for the larger society as it attempts to respond to such tragedies. All these events occur in the context of a civil society that has millions of guns lawfully owned by citizens who use them for protection, hunting, sport, or work. There are also an unknown number of guns in the hands of criminals and others who are prohibited by law from possessing them."
I agree with this.
"Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)"
I also agree with this.
"The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use."
I'm about 95% sure I've read this study. I'm not entirely sure what you're asking me to agree with here, because there are several different statements here. The first sentence I agree with. The second sentence is true but rather vague. The small number of responses in the studies they are talking about is about 4,000 to 6,000 responses per study (at least for the ones I've looked at). The third sentence seems to indicate that the study may have underestimated the total number of defensive gun uses because they didn't specifically ask about them.
Off-topic but you did bring it up.
Leah is former atheist turned catholic and doesn't have a wiki.
Carl is well I don't have enough information. To this I say Fox having Shepard Smith is an outlier to the right leaning organisation. Leah alone discredits this being a left leaning authored read so I reject it.
Firstly, this is a complete non sequitir. Simply because she's Catholic doesn't mean that she's on the right. Nancy Pelosi is a Catholic, but no one would say that means she isn't on the left. Secondly, even if she is on the right, that doesn't discredit the article. The Left does not have a monopoly on truth.
Read the first quote that I gave earlier and do tell me how this person doesn't lack nuance.
Firstly, even if she "lack[s] nuance," I don't see what that proves. Secondly, the answer to your question is extremely easy. Lives lost to individual homicides are just as important as lives lost to mass shootings. Yes, mass shootings cause more trauma, but they don't kill more people. Statistically speaking, mass shootings are an outlier. According to this rather anti-gun biased source, there have been 941 lives lost to mass shootings in the US since 1999.
https://www.axios.com/deadliest-mass-shootings-common-4211bafd-da85-41d4-b3b2-b51ff61e7c86.htmlSince there have probably been a few more since the article was written, I'll do this math assuming 960 lives lost. Over 20 years, that's 48 a year. Yes, that is "a small fraction of the roughly 8,000 gun murder incidents in the U.S. each year." You are being quite disingenuous here.
If we look at this
link we find out the last mass shooting was in 1996. Now this might not mean firearms act worked but something did for the UK to literally have no mass shooting in 24 years when the US had one in
December 10 2019.
Actually, if we follow that link we find that there was a mass shooting in Cumbria in 2010 that killed 12 and injured 11. That same source also lists several other mass murders committed with weapons other than guns. However, this focus on mass murder is misguided. The goal is to save as many lives as possible. Even if a country succeeds in eliminating mass murder, if their overall murder rate hasn't gone down, they haven't saved any lives. They've just swept the problem under the rug because the media doesn't report on instances of individual homicides as much as they do on mass murders.
Literally no one uses a
counter-factual because no one can test it.The more I read the more it looks like this person doesn't know what she is talking about.
Firstly, this is an overgeneralization that you haven't supported. Secondly, the author is correct in saying that we don't know how many mass shootings there would have been otherwise. She actually shows awareness that the counter-factual can't be tested in the very sentence you're criticizing when she says "It's hard to calculate." Thirdly, this is nitpicking taken to an extreme. No one uses 100% good logic 100% of the time. Having one minor statement that you don't like does not discredit everything else in the article. Fourthly, your opinion that "she doesn't know what she's talking about" is based solely on the author "lacking nuance" and using a counter-factual. That is really, really thin.
All that Leah gave here was conjecture. Nothing to support her claims only possibilities.
Oh really? Let's examine the quoted passage.
In parts of Great Britain, there isn’t strong evidence the ban and buyback saved lives.
This is stating a conclusion that she is about to support.
After the new gun law was implemented in 1996, the number of crimes involving guns in England and Wales kept rising through the 1990s, peaking in 2003 and 2004 before subsiding. This right here is sufficient to dismiss your assertion that there is "[n]othing to support her claims only possibilities." The authors link to a CNN article that directly substantiates their claim. The article states:
According to bare statistics, the ban initially appeared to have little impact, as the number of crimes involving guns in England and Wales rose heavily during the late 1990s to peak at 24,094 offenses in 2003/04.
In addition to directly contradicting one of your later claims, this is clear substantiation of the 538 authors' claims.
The post-2004 drop is hard to credit to the buyback and possibly occurred because of an increase in the number of police officers.
This sentence states a fact that can be independently verified - that there was an increase in the number of police officers. Because it is known that greater numbers of police officers leads to an decrease in crime, it is clear that "the post-2004 drop is hard to credit to the buyback" because there was another important factor that would drastically change the results.
It’s possible that any effect of the ban, positive or negative, was swamped by other factors affecting gun violence.
This is the only sentence of which your dismissal is true. It does just state a possibility without direct substantiation.
There has been one notable mass shooting in Great Britain since the law was passed, making it hard to judge whether the law has been a success in that respect. This sentence also provides clear substantiation for its claims and is sufficient to dismiss your dismissal, as well as proving wrong your earlier assertion that there were no mass shootings in the UK since 1997. All in all, your dismissal that "All that Leah gave here was conjecture. Nothing to support her claims only possibilities." is clearly contradicted by the facts. She did in fact substantiate her claims.
Muted results? Here is a quote from the link: "In the 18 years before the ban, there were 13 mass shootings, whereas in the 20 years following the ban, no mass shootings occurred, and the decline in total firearm deaths accelerated." 13 to 0 is a big decrease because mass shootings are small plus there has been no mass shootings. That is not muted results.
Yes, it is muted results. As I pointed out earlier, "Even if a country succeeds in eliminating mass murder, if their overall murder rate hasn't gone down, they haven't saved any lives. They've just swept the problem under the rug because the media doesn't report on instances of individual homicides as much as they do on mass murders." Australia's buyback failed to reduce the murder rate, so it didn't save any lives. Yes, that is very much muted results. Lives lost to individual homicides matter just as much as lives lost to mass murders.
There wasn't an increase. Look at your
graph it was trending down as in a decrease in gun related deaths. Please look at your
link.
Yes, there was. In 1997, there were about 11.8 homicides per million people. In the following years up to 2004, there were 11.6, 12.8, 14.4, 15.2, 17.9, and 14.6. Those numbers are directly from the graph (which does mean that all of them could be 0.1 off in either direction). That is a clear increase, followed by a return to a downward trend. Even the CNN article from earlier in this post acknowledged there was an increase.
Note: Your quote says "gun related deaths" but links to a graph showing the overall homicide rate. This could account for the discrepancy if you accidentally linked the wrong graph. The point, however, remains the same. The homicide rate increased after the gun ban. Whether or not the criminals used guns is quite irrelevant.
A medication might not work but it doesn't mean we throw out medication entirely. We just need to find one that works.
I'm aware of that. The HuffPo article was never intended as an argument. I'm sorry if including it confused you.
You can still compare. You can compare apples and oranges as both fruits with different tastes like how you can compare UK and US are both developed countries with different gun-related deaths.
So we can only compare things if they are exactly the same?
No, they don't have to be exactly the same. However, because the UK's murder rate was lower than the US's even before the gun ban, the comparison is invalid. The difference in murder rates can't be attributed to the gun ban because the difference existed before the gun ban did. To use an example, it would be like arguing that Jeff Bezos is richer than I am because he played poker and I didn't (making the poker up for sake of demonstration). However, the poker can't be responsible for the difference in our net worths because he was already richer than I am before he played poker (unless I am Jeff Bezos being anonymous. I'll never say.).
