[glenra]

In other words, you didn't even look at the details of your own study and whether it related to the post you were responding to, you just did a keyword match to see that it reached "the right conclusion". Got it.

If you never look at anything the other side is saying about your side, you're doomed to talk nonsense. Like Kellerman's "43-to-1" claim.

Pro-gun people consider it a win if a gun deters a murder, deters a rape, deters a theft or other nastiness. But anti-gun researcher often run studies that assume the only benefit of guns is if they actually kill a bad guy. (They also have been known to occasionally interpret "the victim knew the attacker" as "the person shot was a family member or loved one".) Given those sort of assumptions, it's trivial to generate "some hard numbers" that are useless, like a 4-to-1 or 12-to-1 or 43-to-1 ratio between "bad" things happening and "good" ones happening to those who own a gun.

The study you gave also assumed a dubious direction of causality - if people who know they are in danger of being attacked tend to go buy a gun, that alone could adequately explain the discovered correlation between being shot and carrying a gun.

(A nice orthogonal issue is that most murderers and most murder victims have multiple prior violent felony convictions, so this Philly study is probably telling us mainly what happens within and among the criminal class. If you aren't a violent felon and don't know any violent felons, the chance of you being killed goes waaaay down.)

[jacquesm]

In a dysfunctional society, one where there is no law and where you have to take matters into your own hands to get a modicum of safety guns have their place. That was America a few centuries ago. If you still feel that unsafe than you have another problem than the one you're trying to solve with your guns.

Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer. And be sure to ask the women there too if they feel safe or not.

Fear is an incredibly powerful motor behind a lot of stupidity, if you're so afraid that you can't walk around for fear of being robbed or raped if you're not 'packing heat' then why don't you do something about that problem, rather than to go around and compound it by escalation?

And yes, I read those studies, and quite few besides. The consensus is very clear (outside the NRA and their stooges, that is): guns in large numbers in society make that society a more dangerous place. Period.

So you can talk until the cows come home, the facts simply don't support your conclusions.

[glenra]

> Try living in a country with gun control laws for a bit and see where you feel safer.

You mean like the UK? The UK has a horrendous violent crime rate - four times that of the US. So if people were "afraid" in proportion to actual risk, they should be more afraid there than in the US, no?

(random news story about that: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-... )

Or do you mean like Sweden? Sweden's reported rape rate is about twice that of the US.

I actually do live in a country with gun control laws. I live in New York City. And I don't own a gun. But that doesn't mean I have to accept unfounded claims about how bad guns are.

The truth is that the statistics are ambiguous. Every time gun laws change in the US, partisans claim it'll have a huge effect but the actual effect is hard to measure. Florida didn't become "the gunshine state" when they liberalized CCWs. (Rape rates did somewhat decrease there, but it's hard to connect that reliably to the change) On the margin, neither tightening NOR loosening gun laws is a panacea.

I'm not sure whose "consensus" you're referring to, but it's not the consensus of criminologists. The gradual loosening of CCW restrictions nationwide came only after very careful study repeatedly determined there's no significant increase in violence when more people are carrying hidden guns. You're free to believe there's some sort of "threshold effect", that if we got gun ownership levels below some magic number X, that suddenly everything would be better then, but at this point that's just an article of faith - there's no math supporting it.

[jacquesm]

You pick the worst from a huge region and then use that to argue the case for the whole region (EU).

Just homicides:

http://chartsbin.com/view/1454

Intentional homicides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Using Sweden as an example to argue high rape incidence is ridiculous because Sweden classes things as rape that are not counted as rape in any other country in the world. See also: Julian Assange, aka the trouble of travelling unprotected in Sweden.

Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.

And if you have nothing better to do, a nice bit of reading on the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries:

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/Compiling-an...

[glenra]

> You pick the worst from a huge region and then use that to argue the case for the whole region (EU).

It only takes one counterexample to disprove a rule. If you meant to say "try living somewhere in the EU...but not the UK", you should have said that.

> Check out the statistics on Australia pre and post the gun laws.

Yeah, not so much. This is a fine example of seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than what's actually there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Conte...

> the trouble with flatly comparing the crime figures from various countries

Hey, I'm with you on that one - I only mentioned a couple specific countries in response to you bringing the subject up as if it meant something important.