> overall gun deaths and gun suicides

Most gun deaths are accidents, where the person who died knew they were entering a dangerous situation. I'm pretty sure the people who die in gun accidents wouldn't want guns to be banned, or else they probably wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Also, accidental gun death rates have been declining almost monotonically since 1903. For scale, almost 8 times as many people died of choking than of gun accidents in the US in 2011.

America's suicide rate is not bad at all. It's actually pretty low compared to many other developed countries.

So what, exactly, are you getting at? Should we ban guns to prevent accidents, presumably against the wishes of those who are the victims of such accidents? Should we ban guns to maybe prevent a few suicides, with no evidence that doing so would decrease the suicide rate and not just cause people to use other methods?

There are also considerations beyond safety. Cars are very dangerous, but we use them anyway because they have tremendous utility. Fatty meat and smoking (anything) are very dangerous, but we allow those things anyway because they are enjoyable and people deserve the right to expose themselves to dangerous things if they so desire.

Most gun deaths in the U.S. are not accidents, they are suicides. Then homicides, then accidents.

And I'm not proposing banning guns, I'm challenging the commonly-held narrative that guns "keep us safe." The statistics are unequivocal that they do not.

Sometimes I think the "keep us safe" line, though, is really just an attempt at trying to have a more respectable-sounding defense than "I think they're pretty neat!"

Gun owners are constantly on the defensive (except, of course, when their lobbying groups are being rather offensive), and constantly required to justify their existence, so of course they're going to go with something that sounds more noble than "but it's a cool hobby!"

It's probably been parroted so much that a lot of people who say it actually believe it.

Full disclosure: I've never owned a gun, but I do think they're pretty neat.

Speaking of justifying hobbies... I wonder how many people with cars that go faster than 75 mph (which I believe is the highest speed limit found in the US) have to justify why they need to go that fast. Cars are dangerous and Speed Kills after all.

Full disclosure: I've never owned a really fast car, but I do think they're pretty neat.

That's unsubstantiated. The fact is, guns keep us safe AND they are a risk. Risk because they are a favored route for suicide (not really the gun's fault) and so on. Safe because, you know, folks who own and use guns properly are victimized less. That's an important statistic, and its disingenuous to ignore it.

> Safe because, you know, folks who own and use guns properly are victimized less.

That's pretty much an empty tautology, since any use of guns that doesn't provide this effect can be dismissed as "improper".

If you like. Or you can talk about training and facility with a firearm. Regular things with known meanings.

Countries with looser gun laws also have lower gun crime rates. So banning guns doesn't seem to be the answer.

Maybe you got the relationship backwards. Maybe the countries that have lower crime gun crime rates just don't feel the need for gun laws.

One thing I've tried and failed to find on this subject is a breakdown by kind of guns. The vast majority of gun crime uses handguns, so I've been interested in finding data on handgun ownership rates and seeing if there's any relationship. But all the data I can find comparing gun-ownership rates to gun-homicide rates includes both handguns and long guns (rifles, shotguns), which have very different crime characteristics. For example Sweden actually has quite a few guns, but they are almost all rifles in the rural far north, not handguns in Stockholm or Malmö, which I suspect makes a big difference.

I'm not sure the data I'm looking for would actually show anything interesting either, but it's kind of odd that I can't find it at all.

Correlation does not equal causation.

Lack of correlation is evidence of lack of causation.

It points out a pretty well established effect that repeating the same story in the news several times is internalized by people has several different instances. So when a plane crash is covered again and again, and then you ask people if plane crashes are up they will assert that they are. Similarly with child abductions and other "high impact" stories.

Given the past year of revelations on just how corrupt and shitty the government can be, I think that many people probably support gun ownership for reasons beyond mere crime prevention.

I've always been curious what sorts of scenarios people envision where their guns can actually protect them from government.

In the vast majority of cases, the moment law enforcement becomes aware that you are armed, they will respond with overwhelming force. And if you do actually injure or kill one of them, congratulations, you are now in much deeper shit than you started with (and will indeed be lucky to get out of the situation alive to serve time in prison).

I have a question: Who would win, a citizen with an AR-15 or an Apache gunship? What about 30 citizens or an Apache gunship?

You can't win a gun battle with the United States government. What you can do is to be armed and force the government to kill you (and risk being killed). While Bundy shouldn't have been anyone's poster child for the 2nd amendment, when armed men rallied around him, the government backed down (and gave him his cattle back) rather ran risk a showdown. When the government faces a group of 30 citizens with AR-15's, the government has a choice to make: fight, and a lot of people die, or back down. That's the inherent value of the 2nd Amendment as a balance to government power.

Since you don't seem to understand much about guerilla warfare, let me pose to you a few hypothetical questions, which should also reveal to you why revolutions always end up being absurdly bloody affairs, and why I want no part in one.

Who would win, unarmed or lightly armed apache pilots at a bar, or a group of guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, a supply convoy full of apache parts guarded by a few soldiers or a roadside bomb followed up by an ambush by guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, the families of an apache pilot off-base for the day, or a guerilla with an AR-15?

It depends. It's a very simple view of armed conflict that would result in such a question.

It's an even simpler view of politics that ignores the dimension of the .gov having to explain to everybody else why it thought it was necessary to shoot 30 of its own citizens.

There's a very good discussion to be had about the role of government and monopoly of force and all of these things, and I respect both outcomes if argued properly; silly comparisons between gun size though are only distractions.

There aren't /that/ many Apache gunships / the Taliban are still hanging on despite their opponents having them.

The taliban were (effectively) a national government before 2003. Before that, they were part of a civil war to become the national government. They're hardly a couple of unorganized gun enthusiasts.

So? They don't have an air force, tanks, radar installations, anything really besides guns, rpgs, and improvised explosive devices.

It's at least as naive to believe that our government will always be benevolent as it is to believe that the armed civilians of the USA could rebel against the military. I would argue that the second is much more plausible.

Do you see becoming guerilla fighters barely eking out an existence to be a desirable outcome?

Revolutions don't work. America just romanticises one that gave them an illusion of freedom for a time.

How do you define 'work'? Iran, Cuba, Russia, France, etc...

I think a better question concerns all the gun owners vs. said military hardware. That is, if you could convince all of the gun owners to fight, which is another issue entirely.

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

The situation would be a lot more complicated even if it came to that. What's your point? If we're going to suggest a hostile government takeover I would rather have the gun and I don't know who wouldn't.

This sort of response always make me laugh.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that you're not a member of a well-regulated militia? You know, that thing the 2nd amendment specifically mentions?

I'm totally okay with private gun ownership, but if you're going to justify it with "we're going to have to rise up against our evil government!", do you really think you're going to be able to mount a hollywood-style one-man stand against "the evil government"?

"we're going to have to rise up against our evil government!"

This stance, and your criticism of it, miss the mark. In my view, legitimizing private gun ownership should not be based on whose are bigger, or "who would win in a fight" arguments. Instead, private gun ownership is a simple question of property rights. I see private gun ownership having much more to do with the right for you to defend your private property. In this context, I'm in favor of private gun rights, even if taken as a symbolic gesture to the importance of private property.

So, the argument isn't "Hurr durr I'm gonna shoot me dem gubbament boys if'n dey come 'round the house ah tell you hwut"--as many others have pointed out they have tanks, and artillery, and drones, and what could charitably referred to as "enterprise solutions".

The argument is that if everybody is known to be disarmed, the government (or other actors) may consider courses of action that previously would've been obviously a bad idea, and do so with impunity. It also means that it is more easy to paint and propagandize the people who have guns or who do defend themselves, because they are now an "other" and the .gov then gets to use all of the criminal language to describe them (with the same ill effects as seen with, say, potheads).

I'm not advocating for armed rebellion--there are a long and lengthy list of issues with such a thing, and honestly I'm quite certain that the quality of life we enjoy today would disappear indefinitely--and anyone who is is trying to sell you something.

The fact that people cannot seem to connect the dots between "if we are disarmed the government will do terrible things to us if it seems like a good use of their resources" and "the government actively does shitty things to us even knowing we're armed" and "the government has the largest and most capable surveillance network and information control scheme in the history of mankind" is baffling. It's almost like they want to lose all of our nice things.

One, our government has robots that kill people from the sky.

Two, this sounds like some kind of libertarian fantasy that being armed makes you "freer". Government provides law enforcement which is the only reason you get to enjoy any semblance of civilization.