----Guns exacerbate tense, confrontational
situations. There
are misunderstandings, people get angry, tempers explode and a moment that can
never be taken back often ensues. Instead of just a black eye and a broken
nose, the trigger is pulled and serious injury, death, prison, and a lifetime
of regret is the inevitable result.
----There has NOT been a drop in
crime in the US because more people own guns:
“But even as
the belief that we are all future crime targets has taken hold, violent crime
rates have actually dropped in the U.S. in recent decades. According to the
FBI, rates were a whopping 41 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1996. The
NRA attributes this decrease to the acquisition of more guns. But that is
misleading. What has increased is the number of people who own multiple guns—the
actual number of people and households who own them has substantially dropped.”
----Laws allowing people to defend
themselves with guns don’t work:
“Question: Did
the implementation of Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law have an
impact on homicide and homicide by firearm between 2005 and 2014?
“Findings: This study used an
interrupted time series design to analyze changes in rates of homicide and
firearm-related homicide. We found that the implementation of Florida’s stand
your ground law was associated with a 24.4% increase in homicide and a 31.6%
increase in firearm-related homicide.
“Meaning: The removal of
restrictions on when and where individuals can use lethal force was associated
with a significant increase in homicide and homicide by firearm in Florida.”
----Right-to-carry concealed handgun
laws have not curbed violent crime:
“States that
have enacted right-to-carry (RTC) concealed handgun laws have experienced
higher rates of violent crime than states that did not adopt those laws,
according to a Stanford scholar. Examining decades of crime data, Stanford Law
Professor John Donohue’s analysis shows that violent crime in RTC states was
estimated to be 13 to 15 percent higher – over a period of 10 years – than it
would have been had the state not adopted the law.”
----Guns
in the home significantly increase the likelihood of homicide and suicide:
Background: Research suggests that access to
firearms in the home increases the risk for violent death.
Purpose: To understand current estimates
of the association between firearm availability and suicide or homicide.
Conclusion: Access to firearms is associated
with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide.
“Firearms cause
an estimated 31 000 deaths annually in the United States. Data from the
16-state National Violent Death Reporting System indicate that 51.8% of deaths
from suicide in 2009 were firearm-related; among homicide victims, 66.5% were
firearm-related. Most suicides (76.4%) occurred in the victims’ homes.
Homicides also frequently occurred in the home, with 45.5% of male victims and
74.0% of female victims killed at home.”
----Guns make suicide too easy. Unlike
other forms, suicide attempts by gun are almost guaranteed to be fatal:
“Far more
people kill themselves with a firearm each year than are murdered with one. In
2010 in the U.S., 19,392 people committed suicide with guns, compared with
11,078 who were killed by others. According to Matthew Miller, associate
director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC) at Harvard
School of Public Health, ‘If every life is important, and if you’re trying to
save people from dying by gunfire, then you can’t ignore nearly two-thirds of
the people who are dying.’ Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the
U.S.; in 2010, 38,364 people killed themselves. In more than half of these
cases, they used firearms. Indeed, more people in this country kill themselves
with guns than with all other intentional means combined, including hanging,
poisoning or overdose, jumping, or cutting. Though guns are not the most common
method by which people attempt suicide, they are the most lethal. About 85
percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the
most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of
cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a
passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or
use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a
firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.”
----A child dies every second day
from an accidental shooting:
“The
Associated Press and the USA TODAY Network set out to determine just how many
others there have been. The findings: During the first six months of this year,
minors died from accidental shootings — at their own hands, or at the hands of
other children or adults — at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited
federal statistics indicate …… Using information collected by the Gun Violence
Archive, a nonpartisan research group, news reports and public sources, the
news media outlets spent six months analyzing the circumstances of every death
and injury from accidental shootings involving children ages 17 and younger
from Jan. 1, 2014, to June 30 of this year — more than 1,000 incidents in all
…. They most often happen at the children’s homes, with handguns legally owned
by adults for self-protection. They are more likely to occur on weekends or
around holidays such as Christmas.”
----Outdated and baseless statistics
are used to support defensive gun use. In 1992 two criminologists, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, conducted
a random telephone survey of 5,000 Americans, asking if in the last 12 months
they had used a gun in self-defence. Sixty-six incidences were reported. Kleck
and Getz then extrapolated this result to the entire country, and estimated
that there are 1 to 2.5 million defensive incidents with a gun annually:
“These sorts of biases, which are inherent in
reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several
crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more
than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense.
For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries,
according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys we
know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the
home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who
weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42
percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if
burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons
in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited
in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.”
---- With the overwhelming number of
police officers in any big city never firing their gun in their entire career,
it begs the question, what are the odds and where is the need for the average
person to carry a gun? They are always in relative safety while cops are frequently in
confrontational situations. The stats for New York City speak for itself:
“In
2015, the Department continued to experience a decline in discharge incidents. In
fact, 2015 was the lowest recording of discharge incidents since official recording
began in 1971. In particular, total discharges decreased 40% since 2007, when
the new reporting model began, and 15% since 2014. Likewise, the most serious
category of discharges (Intentional Discharge–Adversarial Conflict) also
mirrors this trend, down 27% since 2007, and 5.7% since 2014. Approximately
35,000 uniformed officers police the City’s 8.2 million residents; of
approximately 35,000 uniformed members, 55 Officers were involved in a total of
33 incidents of intentional firearms discharges during adversarial conflict,
resulting in 15 injured subjects, and eight killed.
“These
data are a testament to NYPD police officers’ restraint, diligence, and
honorable performance of duty. They also show that, over the past four decades,
attacks on both police and citizens have steadily declined. The drastic
reduction in violent crime over the past 25 years is sociologically reflexive:
as crime decreases, criminals and police enter into less adversarial conflict.”
2015 Firearms Discharge Scope
|
|
New York Population (U.S. Census, 2015)
|
8,175,133
|
NYPD Average Annual Uniformed Staffing
|
35,217
|
Total Radio Assignments
|
4,580,537
|
Radio Assignments Involving Weapons
|
66,477
|
Gun Arrests
|
4,924
|
Criminal Shooting Incidents
|
1,138
|
Adversarial Conflict: Total Number
of Officers Who Intentionally Fired
|
55
|
Adversarial Conflict: Total Number of Firearms Discharge
Incidents
|
33
|
Subjects Shot and Injured during ID-AC
|
15
|
Subjects Shot and Killed during ID-AC
|
8
|
Officers Shot and Injured during ID-AC
|
3
|
Officers Shot and Killed
|
2
|
----There in fact is,
or should be, very few differences between the two sides of the debate.
New York magazine and the non-profit group Narrative
4 recently collaborated on an experiment in radical empathy. Two groups of
people were brought to a hotel in New York City. One group was fervently
pro-gun, and the other group was anti-gun, primarily because of losing a loved
one to gun violence. They were randomly paired and spent time getting to know
one another. Each was then to tell the other person’s story to the group as if
it was her or his own. Two of the participants were Carolyn Tuft, whose
15-year-old daughter was killed in a mass shooting, and Todd Underwood, who
views people who want gun control as completely irrational:
“In that
moment, the commonality of experience, the universality of human vulnerability,
had been so obvious — and so breathtaking. Everyone in the room was separated
not by a deep canyon but by a thin line. The dividing factor wasn’t really
beliefs about gun control; it was about fear and how you respond to it. There
were those who held to their gun ownership as an instrument of power and
security in a world that too often seemed unsafe and uncertain, and there were
those who knew too well that nothing on earth can guarantee safety and
certainty for the people you love. They had lived through what the others so
desperately feared.”
Further Reading
What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html?emc=edit_ta_20171107&nl=top-stories&nlid=67734146&ref=cta
Photo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-w-austin/whats-wrong-with-god-and-guns_b_8712154.html
Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
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