http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine-features/guns-and-suici...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/1...
Your point about CA having the most gun deaths falls flat: CA has far and away the most people in the US. Gun deaths per capita is the interesting, relevant statistic. California is actually pretty high here too; it has more gun deaths per capita than Texas, though gun ownership rates are far lower in CA. Anyone know why? My best guess is that the gun ownership rates rely on legal sales, but gun homicide rates don't. So California, because of strict rules, has proportionately more illegal guns (perhaps purchased in lax states, like Texas).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffic...
It doesn't show that.
You linked to a page that specifically had per capita murder rates (link [1]) and intentionally ignored it to make a point (since your point makes no sense if you look at per capita rates).
Two thirds (2/3) of all gun related deaths in the United States are suicides. That's roughly 20,000 gun related suicides annually. The odds of being killed in a mass public shooting are about 1 in 7,800,000[1]. Compared to your chances of being struck by lighting (about 1 in 1,000,000)[2], this is exceedingly rare.
Legal gun ownership is not our problem. Suicide clearly is, and we cannot be so naive to believe reducing the number of guns in the country will have any real effect on reducing the number of suicides.
Sure, we'll see a decrease in gun related suicides... but the suicides will still occur, just with an alternate method.
These people need help, yet we're ignoring them because it's far easier to get riled up about people owning guns than it is to care about some faceless person committing suicide.
[1] http://www.psychlawjournal.com/2013/01/school-shootings-what...
[2] http://discovertheodds.com/what-are-the-odds-of-being-struck...
Suicide attempts by any method might be practically constant; alternate methods of suicide tend to be less successful however, so the rate of completed suicides would likely go down.
I don't see how that could be measured as a success. You still have mass amounts of people attempting to end their life every year.
Essentially we're all busy trying to treat the obvious symptoms, but we're ignoring the real cause of our problems.
Reducing legal gun ownership merely shifts the problem to another metric, but does not solve it.
Solve our suicide problem in the United States, and we've solved our gun problem (among others). (this hinges on the fact that there is some level of annual deaths that society considers reasonable and acceptable, as-is with any activity)
Legal firearm ownership isn't the real issue, yes. The problem that we just have so god damn many firearms and we continue to crank them out en masse whilst stoking fears of a tyrannical government instilling martial law and rounding people up into concentration camps(and by extension, our firearms are the only thing stopping this from happening). A sizable portion of the population all but worships firearms.
The fact that we are basically overflowing with firearms plays a huge part. Guns routinely go missing from gun stores. One of the rifles used by the Beltway snipers was amongst around 150 guns that went missing from one store in WA. Where do you think the black market guns(that bad guys will get their hands on anyways) come from in the first place? They were produced under legitimate pretenses that they were going to sell.
as established here: (HSPH site)
Item 2: data well over 20 years old
Item 3: data 18-27 years old
Item 4: data 12-14 years old, and guns in circulation have more than doubled since then
And, ironically, all of this dates from when the Feinstein bans were still in effect.
Citation needed; that's not the evidence I've seen.
Mass shootings are extremely rare, but non-mass crime is not; guns are also a big factor in whether disputes over e.g. property (particularly drugs) become lethal.
Most of the victims of guns are not particularly sympathetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent their deaths.
These days we've done most of the easy/cheap things we can do to prevent human deaths; there are few low-hanging fruit left. So anything we can do to save lives will be expensive and/or involve sacrificing useful things. IMO gun laws are one of the cheaper ways to save lives that remain available (I'd also advocate making driving tests stricter, repealing jaywalking laws and adding an assumption of liability when a driver injures a pedestrian).
As to suicide rates, there are a lot of 'unsuccessful' suicide attempts. And many people do back out after taking pills for example. Which is why access to a gun does increases the risks of successful suicide.
IMO, this does not say much about the gun debate. But, https://xkcd.com/386/
It's about whatever level is acceptable to society.
We currently accept about 57,000 annual deaths caused by the common flu[1], a totally preventable and treatable illness. Heart disease claims over 600,000 lives annually in the US. [2]
Compared to other top killers, if we could reduce gun related deaths to ~10,000 annually, that's a huge victory. That equates to about 0.001% of our population annually, and at that rate it would take about 33,000 years to kill us all.
In no reality are we going to be able to make that number be zero. There must be some level that is acceptable (and arguably we've crossed that acceptable threshold currently).
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
I agree, you can see the US ranks fairly low on these statistics which may be good enough or a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... My point is saying something bad is at a tolerable level is different from saying it's not bad.
Spending more money promoting gun safety would likely save lives. As far as I can tell the cost benefit on that is simply money and would not impact freedom so the NRA may even approve. But, it's easy for people to look at things emotionally and say that's a waste of money because there is no problem.
PS: Your flu statistic is off. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,979 Just Pneumonia is listed at 53,282 So Influenza is much lower than 57,000 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm
Though many of these deaths are complications not direct causes, you can die from AIDS and Pneumonia.
This is something I could fully get behind, and I believe it would have real positive effects for the general population.
I had the privilege to have grown up in a military family, and was active in Cub Scouts and then later Boy Scouts -- so I grew up around guns and was introduced at a very early age.
Gun safety needs to start early. In scouts, we had it beat into us how to treat a weapon, and how to be safe with one. It was taught the weapon was to be respected and treated as loaded even when you knew it was not.
Unfortunately, many gun owners don't have such training, and are unknowingly careless with their firearms. This includes people leaving loaded firearms in places where children can gain access, or showing off for their buddies, etc. Too often I've been at the local gun range and witnessed a new gun owner looking down the barrel or casually walking around with the gun's action closed and barrel "sweeping" bystanders. It's not their fault, they literally don't know any better... it's the lack of mandatory safety training (and at most ranges, you'll find staff and customers alike harshly coming down on these offenders in attempt beat into them some core safety rules).
Gun ranges are actually good examples of gun safety done right (most of the time). In the rare occasion where I've felt unsafe around a fellow shooter, the range staff have taken quick action. In general, even with all the guns at a gun range, it's one of the safest places to be around firearms.
The gun murder rate is in the top half, but solidly middle of the pack.
Legal gun restrictions may not affect homicides much (I'm skeptical of this view, but it is an obvious fact that criminals don't always obey the law) but I would think that they would affect suicides a lot.
As for banning burgers and the rest, that's a totally separate question. One of the major problems with the American gun control debate is that all sides completely fail to separate questions of fact from questions of principle. The question of what effect a particular gun law will have is completely separate (although it may inform) the question of whether enacting that law is the right thing to do.
To say that it's better not to certain gun laws even though it would save lives, because the freedom is more important, is perfectly reasonable. But we have to actually figure out the "it would save lives" part first to get to that point in the discussion. If the law doesn't even work then you might as well not bother with the rest.
Gun related suicides are the real problem (~20,000 out of the total ~30,000 annual USA gun related deaths). Nobody is focusing on that issue.
If the US had the same amount of gun violence in a day that the UK experiences in a year, it would be worldwide news.
It is not applicable to nation-states which demonstrate considerable effect in reducing gun-related homicides. Even more so when discounting individual lone-wolf attacks of a terrorist nature (Brevik, Norway).
I could post sources but they are beyond dispute at this stage. (United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and most of the Western world).
Evidence is also lent by the nation-states with lax gun control legislation which dominate the league table of gun-related homicides, of which, the USA is one.
It just goes to show (in part) that legal gun ownership isn't really the main issue we have.
We forget to include the 2/3 of national gun related deaths that are suicides [2]. These people need help; surely many of those victims would still have committed suicide had they not obtained a firearm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...