Gun violence research
facebook.comGood work, more info definitely needs to be researched.
I (the author) cross-posted this to medium, since apparently comments on facebook notes are not public: https://medium.com/@sbuss/gun-violence-research-f20b2adc18cb
Here's my initial reply, especially since Medium looks really awkward for commenting:
Add McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) where the Supremes incorporated the 2nd Amendment against the states, forcing Chicago and its suburbs to allow gun ownership, and the case law WRT to states and the RKBA is clear.
It’s very doubtful the number of households that own guns has decreased since 1960, when the latest round of gun control was just starting to get strong (I came of political age in the late '60s, so I directly remember this). Responses to anonymous telephone callers asking if you own a gun roughly tracks how successful gun controllers are at the time.
When I did a back of the envelope calculation about the claims by the usual suspects that existing gun owners were buying all the new guns as of late, it would have us owning about $100K worth of them on average.
The increase in ownership for self-protection no doubt tracks the nationwide sweep of “shall issue” concealed carry laws in the states starting with Florida in 1986, which went from less than a handful to 42 now, covering most of the population. If you don’t live in Illinois, this state level political effort is is the single biggest change since 1968, and the biggest change of the facts on the ground since the early 20th Century.
Without looking at [13], obviously you can turn around the implied causation to “For every 0.9% of firearm homicides, there is a 1% increase of people in a community owning guns.” Although simply being allowed to legally carry them outside your home drastically increased their utility. Handgun sales in total and of their type track this.
In the US, gun buybacks are an opportunity for savvy gun owners to sell junk for more than it’s worth, and to work the line looking for valuable guns about to be turned in for a nominal payment, and buy them for much more like what they’re worth.
You no longer believe strongly that "Gun ranges have a net positive impact on gun safety because inexperienced people are taught by people who know how to handle weapons." and you're right from my anecdotal study. Going further, I'm beyond amazed at how well poorly or not at all trained and experienced people responsibly use firearms in self-defense. Chalk it up to centuries of improving ergonomic design in guns, reaching perfection for handguns a century ago, a healthy gun culture, perhaps even Hollywood (although the gun handling on screen is generally awful), and informal training, which I've done my share of.
"Has concealed carry successfully stopped shootings?" Well, it's certainly stopped the wrong people from getting shot, now even in Chicago after the Federal courts forced shall issue concealed carry on Illinois.
"Lock up your safety" laws like California's has definitely killed people. We in the gun community of course encourage locking up most of your guns most of the time, but I doubt you'll get good statistical evidence on anything about this.
America has way too much "empty" space to make restrictions on using guns only at formal firing ranges.
While I can't prove it to you (should you even believe my personal pledge?), such restrictions, or an Australian style gun confiscation, would turn our current cold civil war into a hot one, and a lot of people would die on both sides. The most recent evidence for this is the small fractions of people in the Bluest of Blue states of Connecticut and New York who registered their evil "assault weapons" (a purely political term) after Sandy Hook inspired legislation. If you can't succeed there....
ADDED: you have to be very careful interpreting the "research" some people and outfits do. Best example is the infamous Kellerman study in the once prestigious NEJM which, even before you get into all the lower level problems, scores a "success" for a gun owner only as killing a home invader. Needless to say, out of the 2.5 or so million gun self-defense incidents per year, only a small fraction even involve a gun being fired, let alone hitting, let alone killing an assailant.
(As a rough metric some time ago but after trauma centers were established, I've read that one handgun round into someone's torso has a 1/4th chance of killing them. Mostly anecdotally, as many as 1/2 of all assailants stop attacking after being hit once, even if the hit is not immediately disabling).
While I didn't look at all your sources, or closely at the ones I glanced at, I didn't see any notorious howlers like Kellerman's.
ADDED: for someone apparently completely uneducated on the subject, you did a fantastic job for a few hours of effort.
Thanks for the reply and references, I'll try to integrate them into the post soon!
You're very welcome. Feel free to ask any other questions, I've been researching this since the early-mid '70s when the gun press started realizing the ATF was terrorizing the community.
Why? The ATF (BATFE) was in the Treasury until the creation of the DHS because in 1934 the government felt a fiction of using its taxing powers was required to make full auto and handgun ownership too expensive except for the rich, requiring a $3,500 transfer tax in 2015 dollars. So it ended up with the same bunch as Elliot Ness's G-men.
But a sad thing happened to them not long after the Gun Control Act of 1968, sugar price supports made moonshine uneconomic, so they had all these agents used to busting stills and all that brutal drama with nothing to do, so they turned to this shiny, new law. Imagine a black legal gun dealer being coerced into selling guns to what he thought was the mob on pain of his family being killed, and Federal judges thinking this was just dandy....
Lots more where that came from, and for statistics, I'd suggest looking up the surveys on self-defense uses per year. Critically, the first data set was collected by gun controllers, and it demonstrated over a million uses per year. But it didn't ask participants how many times per year---most will probably be in high crime clusters---so later surveys by the pro-gun side, along with I'm sure an increased population, came up with figures as high as 2.5 million times per year.
Ah, here's the statistic I came up with: in the same period where both the population and number of guns owned by it increased by very roughly 50%, the number of fatal gun accidents per year decreased by 25% (800 to 600). I've heard this was largely due to mandatory hunter safety classes, but have no data on that except that the classes did indeed come into existence. If I was somewhat younger, I'd have had to take one when I retired to my home town back in Missouri.
ADDED: one other statistic you won't hear elsewhere: 5% of the age eligible, 19 and above population of Jasper Country, MO, has Missouri's very expensive concealed carry licence (note any state's will do). I gather we're not the only locality with such numbers, and per http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/15/jeb... Pennsylvania has an amazing 9% + whatever's in the 18-20 age bracket. Florida has the most total, but with the smallest youth percentage and larger population it's slightly lower before factoring in the 18-21 population.
Ah, I knew there was a particularity good self-defense case in Chicago: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-dr...
Uber driver stops a mass shooting (in a city in which a few years ago he couldn't own his gun, let alone legally carry it). That happens a lot, but it doesn't get reported because it would counter the narrative and obviously "citizen stops nutcase before he can shoot very many people" is much less newsworthy than a lot of people getting shot in one incident.