[clairity]

to clarify, yes, you're right that background checks are largely useless at reducing firearm deaths, but no, intentional homicides are not a major category of firearm death, and to worry about "career criminals" is a non-sequitur.

your (as in anyone's) chances of successfully defending your property and friends/family from a "career criminal" using a gun is basically zero, both because it's exceedingly rare to encounter such situations and because it's even rarer to have the necessary skill (i.e., intense training and practice) and the necessary presence of mind to mount such a successful defense, so that doesn't matter to the argument at all. it's generally a bugaboo brought up to generate irrational fear.

edit: i should add that while reducing homicides is often used as a justification for background checks, it's a poor policy because it doesn't achieve that aim, as you point out. to have much impact, we need to focus on accidental shootings and suicides principally.

[DuskStar]

I'm pretty sure that gun suicides outnumber gun homicides by ~2:1, and gun homicides outnumber accidents by ~30:1. Estimates for accidents are in the 500/year range, while homicides are closer to 15,000/year.

[clairity]

my apologies, i was confusing/misremembering mass shooting deaths, which are tiny, with gang/homicide gun deaths. indeed, refreshing myself on the stats indicates that homicides are about 1/3 of (american) gun deaths and suicides are ~2/3, while unintentional deaths are estimated at 1-7% (depending on year).

with that said, most people who own guns are still very unlikely to encounter gang violence (because most people with guns are not in a gang), and even less likely to defend themselves successfully with a gun when encountering gun violence of any sort. guns escalate injury and death rather than having a preventative effect. we really should stop glorifying guns as a culture (particularly for self-defense) and soberly understand them as the specialized and limited tools that they are.

[aksss]

Most people (gun owners or not) are unlikely to encounter gang-related violence, that’s true. Another side of that stat is that most criminal violence using guns is confined to a chronically small percentage of zip codes, many (most?) of which already fall under some of the strictest gun regulation in the country.

The fact is, 95-8% of this country is a really, really safe place to live statistically. You’re as likely to be in a mass shooting as you are to get struck by lightening. You are far, far more likely to die from a drunk driver. With that said, I can point to more than a few mass shooting incidents where a law abiding gun owner put a stop to it. You are unlikely to be in such an event, and you are even less likely to be the guy that stands up to it, but it happens and it has saved the day for many people.

So people are unlikely to defend themselves with a gun like people are unlikely to put out a fire with a fire extinguisher. Doesn’t negate their value. Given a choice, I’d rather have a means to protect myself against stronger and/or more numerous assailants, especially if at risk. Guns are a force leveler. Without them, it’s simply bigger person (often a man) wins. You might be surprised how frequent defensive gun use actually is. There is a bit of data emerging on this, but it’s damn difficult to tally the way dead bodies are counted (often there are no bodies, often nothing gets reported. DGU does not necessitate somebody getting shot).

Agree that we need to stop glorifying violence (not just guns). I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard some actor spout off about “gun violence” and then go make money on a film in which he heroically breaks all kinds of laws running around with guns blazing. We also need to stop sensationalizing it when it does happen. I saw some stat that over half of people surveyed in US were worried they’d be in a mass shooting. I chalk that up to a news industry focused on keeping us all afraid of something, all the time.

What constitutes gun safety in my book is education. It’s no different than the logic behind sex ed, and what I see the gun control groups advocating is abstinence. In a country whose origin story revolves around guns, whose resistance in the Jim Crow South frequently depended upon guns, it’s understandable that guns are part of our culture. If people are as likely to encounter guns as they are in this country, knowing how to use them safely seems a better approach than political groups preaching fear and movies being the only source of (bad) information.

[clairity]

yes, the risks here are tricky to think about, which is why conversations like this are more fruitful than partisan or ideologically-driven ones.

while guns are force levers, they're not really 'levelers', as differences of skill and perception still abound, to more serious consequence. what they definitely are, are risk multipliers. it's unclear that they are effective deterrents (that is, reduces the overall risk of a situation) in the various cases commonly believed, because those situations are rare (how rare is debatable), and, as you point out, the research is difficult (hard to prove a negative).

also, force escalation as represented by (offensive or defensive) gun proliferation is generally anti-social. hypocritical hollywood (and other media) certainly add fuel to that fire needlessly. whereas guns for hunting, farming, sport (which in many cases is basically advanced training), and even anti-oppression (from tyrannical government) are not generally anti-social. as such, i generally support the latter but not the former.