not just a bad person problem - a gun problem
in Politics

linate · April 2019

this is the strongest piece of info in my argument... ive never seen a good refutation:
-You can tell this is a gun problem, not just a bad person problem as the gun lobby says, also by comparing non-gun homicides of similar countries as the USA, and then adding guns to the mix: non-gun homicides are slightly on the higher side but within normal range, while gun homicides go wildly higher. If this was a bad person problem at its core, there would be a wildly higher amount of non-gun homicides as well, but that's not the case. Included is an article describing this phenomenon and a link with a picture.
https://i.imgur.com/skcT8qr.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/71n1u2/gunnongun_homicide_rates_in_oecd_countries_for/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/canada-gun-control-debate/566102/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2018-07-28T09:00:12

here is some more gun control science that points to guns causing society problems:

-where there is more gun control, there is less murder. this is the scientific consensus, as shown with the literature review. being a literature review makes this a lot more informing than just being a single study; we see the consensus forming. also included is a link to a poll of scientists but a literature review itself makes the claims even stronger.
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11120184/gun-control-study-international-evidence
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-hemenway-guns-20150423-story.html
-where there are more guns, there is more murder, across geographic regions from localities and larger. this is also a lot more informing because it a literature review of lots of studies. what's more, people are shown not to kill with other weopons instead of guns, as is often argued, because if they did there would be no correlation here.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
-women are five times more likely to be killed if their significant other has a gun. this is a practical point in illustration of the guns v murders correlation. same in individual lives as general trends
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/
-you are more likely to be murdered if you have a gun, as well as those close to you
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858
-States with more gun control have fewer mass shootings
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/433017-states-with-stricter-gun-control-regulations-have-fewer-mass?fbclid=IwAR0f5l5eW7d-rX4ZoE8R2MOe6VBvLJVrfQQRFwd2b7anlBIM_wgsYYx-uQk
-only around two hundred and fifty killings are done in the name of self defense per year. people like to pretend defense is such a huge thing, but the odds of being murdered is is closer to forty times higher. the odds of being shot and not necessarily killed are upwards of four hundred times higher.
-we have half the worlds guns in the usa but a small percent of the worlds population
-Police are more likely to kill unjustifiably in low gun control and high gun areas due to their increased fear, and police are more likely to be shot themselves in those areas.
http://justicenotjails.org/police-shootings-gun-problem/
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/more-guns-more-dead-cops-study-finds-n409356
-Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the United States' gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-u-s-gun-deaths-compare-to-other-countries
-High school kids in the USA are eighty two times more likely to be shot than the same kids in other developed countries.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767
-it is claimed that most murders are gang related, but this looks to be factually incorrect in the link. even if higher numbers floating around on the internet are true, our murder problem still there if you take out the gang murders from consideration. the numbers here can be arrived at with basic math.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-gang-problem_b_5071639.html
-this really isn't just a mental health problem. we don't have more people with mental health problems than other countries.... just more people with guns. the study controls for mental health factors v other factors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
-we dont have more crime than the rest of the world, just a lot more people getting shot and killed. you aren't more likely to be mugged here, for instance, but you are more likely to be mugged and shot in the process. again a gun problem. showing it's not just deviants being deviants as some suggest but an emphasis on the gun problem.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe
-people like to say assault rifles are not that dangerous, because there are only a few hundred murders with them per year out of only around ten or so thousand of gun murders. the thing is though, the percent chance an assault rifle will be used to kill someone is significantly higher than the chance other guns will be used to kill someone. /// you can do the math yourself. there are 2.5 million assault rifles in circulation. 374 rifle deaths per year. there are 11000 gun homicides. there's a gun for every person in the usa, 340 million. what's the math say? 374 divided by 11000 is 3.4 percent of deaths are from rifles. 2.5 milliion divided by 340 milliion is less than a percent. so what does this mean? despite rifles being less than a percent of guns, they cause 3.4 percent of deaths. that is, a rifle has a higher percent chance of being used to murder than a non rifle. most guns that are used in murder are hand guns, but assault rifles are more likely to be chosen over a hand gun when faced with that choice. just like, as an analogy, people are more likely to speed in a sports car, but most cars that speed are not sports cars.
-people like to throw around number of defensive gun use. the idea is that not all defensive gun uses result in a killing. the most common number in literature is tens of thousands, though the number vary wildly. the only thing is, even if you are more likely to use a gun in self defense than being murdered, you are still more likely to be murdered than someone who doesn't have a gun. also, a lot of those thousands of defensive uses are not all that critical.... downplaying their significance. and, a lot of those 'defensive' uses were actually situations that were people instigating and escalating a situation that wouldn't otherwise exist, as the link below illustrates. even if we used the higher numbers, is it all that convincing that there are tens of thousands more near murders in a nation with already a globally disproportionate number of murders? it holds true, that we could give lots more people guns, and that may increase defensive use... but it would come at the cost of more murder, too.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/

not just a bad person problem - a gun problemin Politics

not just a bad person problem - a gun problem
in Politics