Perversely, the gun industry claims that research by private and academic interests — which it can’t block — is untrustworthy. Expect that argument to be invoked in reaction to alarming research about the Missouri General Assembly’s repeal eight years ago of background checks for gun buyers that required people to appear in person at the local sheriff’s office.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Fun With Math
In a stupid unsigned editorial in the NYT today, Republicans are attacked as fearing gun facts (it's the title of the editorial). Here are some facts:
1. Nearly two thirds of gun deaths in America are suicides, the rest are gun homicides and accidents and many of the gun homicides are justified by self defense.
2. The confiscation and destruction of 1/5 of the guns in Australia in 1996 had no long term effect on the rate of suicide, it merely changed the method of suicide (hanging replaced diminishing gun suicides). The Australian suicide rate surged after the gun confiscation and then declined but by 2012 the rate of suicide was again higher than before the gun confiscation, and still is higher.
3. Since their peak in 1993, gun homicides have declined by 49% here in America.
Now I can do simple math; so in the 22 years since 1993 the rate of gun homicides has fallen 49%, so that's 2.23% per year--on average across differential state rates. Some states have higher gun homicide rates than others and lower gun suicide rates and vice versa. Let's look at the NYT anti-gun screed de jour.
Maybe I'm being too literal but doesn't the CDC research and help prevent diseases? And gun violence is in no way a disease, right? So preventing the CDC from wasting time and money researching non diseases is a good thing. Most if not all of the viral diseases are pretty much incurable once you have them, and all doctors do is treat the symptoms until you die or get well. And there are no vaccines for many diseases yet so it's not as if the CDC has nothing else to do.
And of course the legislators who are preventing the CDC from wasting time and money on non-disease projects are not doing what they think is right, they are mere minions of the evil gun industry. Man, the dark side is strong with those corporate entities!
So if you're talking about gun control legislation, which at its core is an attempt to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people in order to prevent gun murder and assault, adding in the suicide numbers to make the problem seem worse than it is would necessarily be anti-fact. Let me be more blunt. In order to make the problem (actual gun violence) seem worse, the NYT board is lying to us while it calls those against unreasonable gun control "afraid of facts." Hello, pot? This is kettle. You're black.
The facts are indeed the legislature changed the law slightly (but purchasers from gun dealers, where nearly all gun purchases take place, still required the federal instant background check) and gun violence went up. What's missing from the study is a finding that the change in legislation caused gun violence to rise in Missouri. The guys doing the study warned the people reading it that correlation is not causation. Yet the NYT appears to assume that the study indeed found causation. Liars. It get's worse.
OK, here is where I step in with math so bear with me. From 1995 to today is 20 years. 20 times 2.23% (the rate gun homicide has been dropping on average per year since 1993) is 44.6%. One would expect a 44% drop during this time but the Connecticut rate of gun homicide only dropped by 40% (less than the expected rate), but the NYT falsely holds out this statistic as proof that background checks prevent gun homicide when they do no such thing. Liars.
This is utter bullshit. Wyoming has about 570,000 people and a gun homicide rate less than 1 per 100,000. That's not a lot in direct expenses for emergency or medical care for 5 people each year. Certainly not $642,000,000 which is what the NYT says. $1,400 times 570,000 is nearly 2/3 a billion dollars. Complete and utter bullshit. The reason the NYT can say Wyoming has the highest rate of gun deaths is because it has the highest rate of gun suicides in the nation. The rate of all suicides is 23.2 per 100,000 and 80% of those are with guns. But it has one of the lowest gun murder rates. Who's not dealing in facts about Wyoming's problem with gun violence? Nearly everyone has a gun and its gun homicide rate is one of the lowest in the nation. In what way is that fact helpful to the gun haters who want to confiscate your guns, America?
OK, we know that gun legislation has been ever more pro-self-defense in the past 20 years or so. More and more states have relaxed rules against concealed carry while gun ownership has increased by a little over 1/2 (from under 200,000,000 to over 300,000,000). Yet despite "weakened gun laws" and increased gun ownership, the crime of gun homicide has fallen by nearly half. Yeah, let's do a study on those facts and see if there is any causation.
So having failed to mention the precipitous fall in gun homicides in the past two decades, and having dishonestly added gun suicides to the numbers bandied about when gun suicides is not the problem the gun haters are talking about (mass shootings is the current subject, the fact that they are less than 2% of gun homicides is lost on them), does anyone believe the NYT would support a study that could actually find that the so called weakened gun laws have caused a drop in gun homicides?
Wait, who is afraid of the facts, exactly?
1. Nearly two thirds of gun deaths in America are suicides, the rest are gun homicides and accidents and many of the gun homicides are justified by self defense.
2. The confiscation and destruction of 1/5 of the guns in Australia in 1996 had no long term effect on the rate of suicide, it merely changed the method of suicide (hanging replaced diminishing gun suicides). The Australian suicide rate surged after the gun confiscation and then declined but by 2012 the rate of suicide was again higher than before the gun confiscation, and still is higher.
3. Since their peak in 1993, gun homicides have declined by 49% here in America.
Now I can do simple math; so in the 22 years since 1993 the rate of gun homicides has fallen 49%, so that's 2.23% per year--on average across differential state rates. Some states have higher gun homicide rates than others and lower gun suicide rates and vice versa. Let's look at the NYT anti-gun screed de jour.
For nearly two decades, Congress has banned needed research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, Congress, doing the bidding of the gun industry, quietly killed a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would have reversed that ban.
Maybe I'm being too literal but doesn't the CDC research and help prevent diseases? And gun violence is in no way a disease, right? So preventing the CDC from wasting time and money researching non diseases is a good thing. Most if not all of the viral diseases are pretty much incurable once you have them, and all doctors do is treat the symptoms until you die or get well. And there are no vaccines for many diseases yet so it's not as if the CDC has nothing else to do.
And of course the legislators who are preventing the CDC from wasting time and money on non-disease projects are not doing what they think is right, they are mere minions of the evil gun industry. Man, the dark side is strong with those corporate entities!
In so doing, it left intact an anti-science smoke screen that has helped the industry and its lobbyists deny and dispute the facts of the gun violence that takes more than 30,000 lives a year.No one who likes guns or values the Constitution (and amendments thereto) is denying any fact about gun violence. It's the other side which is sloppy with the facts. Like the editorial today. Let me explain: To my thinking, gun violence is an assault by another person using a gun which gun use wounds or kills the person assaulted. But that's only about 11,000 per year and falling or 3.257 per 100,000 which is not much (could be better and it's getting better). So the NYT inflates the gun death numbers with suicides (even though suicide is not a problem the left cares about; they are in fact pro-suicide and work to pass laws to get feeble people help in killing themselves--a prospect we on the right generally find dismaying).
So if you're talking about gun control legislation, which at its core is an attempt to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people in order to prevent gun murder and assault, adding in the suicide numbers to make the problem seem worse than it is would necessarily be anti-fact. Let me be more blunt. In order to make the problem (actual gun violence) seem worse, the NYT board is lying to us while it calls those against unreasonable gun control "afraid of facts." Hello, pot? This is kettle. You're black.
A study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the repeal, gun homicides rose within the state by 16 percent, while the national rate declined 11 percent.
The facts are indeed the legislature changed the law slightly (but purchasers from gun dealers, where nearly all gun purchases take place, still required the federal instant background check) and gun violence went up. What's missing from the study is a finding that the change in legislation caused gun violence to rise in Missouri. The guys doing the study warned the people reading it that correlation is not causation. Yet the NYT appears to assume that the study indeed found causation. Liars. It get's worse.
By contrast, it also found that Connecticut, which has maintained its 1995 background check law, registered a 40 percent drop in gun homicides across a decade.
OK, here is where I step in with math so bear with me. From 1995 to today is 20 years. 20 times 2.23% (the rate gun homicide has been dropping on average per year since 1993) is 44.6%. One would expect a 44% drop during this time but the Connecticut rate of gun homicide only dropped by 40% (less than the expected rate), but the NYT falsely holds out this statistic as proof that background checks prevent gun homicide when they do no such thing. Liars.
One study estimated that gun violence annually costs $8.6 billion in direct expenses for emergency and medical care. Wyoming, the state with the highest rate of gun deaths, also has the highest per capita costs for gun violence — about $1,400 per resident per year, which is twice the national average. A new area for investigation is the fact that gun deaths have begun surpassing motor vehicle deaths in some states.
This is utter bullshit. Wyoming has about 570,000 people and a gun homicide rate less than 1 per 100,000. That's not a lot in direct expenses for emergency or medical care for 5 people each year. Certainly not $642,000,000 which is what the NYT says. $1,400 times 570,000 is nearly 2/3 a billion dollars. Complete and utter bullshit. The reason the NYT can say Wyoming has the highest rate of gun deaths is because it has the highest rate of gun suicides in the nation. The rate of all suicides is 23.2 per 100,000 and 80% of those are with guns. But it has one of the lowest gun murder rates. Who's not dealing in facts about Wyoming's problem with gun violence? Nearly everyone has a gun and its gun homicide rate is one of the lowest in the nation. In what way is that fact helpful to the gun haters who want to confiscate your guns, America?
Private research is valuable, but in-depth federal studies are crucial for discovering the full patterns of crime and death fed by the relentless weakening of gun laws in recent decades.
OK, we know that gun legislation has been ever more pro-self-defense in the past 20 years or so. More and more states have relaxed rules against concealed carry while gun ownership has increased by a little over 1/2 (from under 200,000,000 to over 300,000,000). Yet despite "weakened gun laws" and increased gun ownership, the crime of gun homicide has fallen by nearly half. Yeah, let's do a study on those facts and see if there is any causation.
So having failed to mention the precipitous fall in gun homicides in the past two decades, and having dishonestly added gun suicides to the numbers bandied about when gun suicides is not the problem the gun haters are talking about (mass shootings is the current subject, the fact that they are less than 2% of gun homicides is lost on them), does anyone believe the NYT would support a study that could actually find that the so called weakened gun laws have caused a drop in gun homicides?
Wait, who is afraid of the facts, exactly?
Labels: NYT idiocy; Gun Control, Who is Avoiding Facts?
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Strike Four
Why won't the Republicans talk about things we think are important? whines the NYT editorial board today here. I can answer that one; because your proposals about gun legislation are not worth talking about. But let's look inside the whining.
Of course the NYT editorial board members have to blame someone for not listening to them or taking their silly legislation recommendations seriously. They constantly attack the lobbyists, as if they were doing something nefarious rather than exercising their first amendment rights to petition the government for redress of grievances. Of course for the NYT the first amendment stops after "freedom of the press." That part they like.
So, the Republicans are talking how to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks and the NYT would rather they discuss how to disarm law abiding citizens. Someone has no sense of priority and it ain't the Republicans.
Of course the NYT (cough, the paper of record, cough) inflates the gun violence stats it uses with suicide numbers. That's a different problem, guys.
All in all a very weak effort to shame the Republicans.
We already have laws to prevent mass murders with guns, the murder statutes. If that doesn't stop the mass murderers, gun legislation isn't going to do the trick.
Instead, the nine Republican rivals spent much of their time dwelling darkly on potential threats from Islamic State terrorists. And when they brought up the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., this month, carried out by a couple found to be inspired by Islamic State violence, the discussion never veered to the easy gun access that enabled those killers — and many others — to commit swift and horrific slaughter of innocent people.I'm not sure why the NYT obsesses over the imagined power of a fully functional death star gun lobby. It isn't a powerfull lobby at all. I can't find its ranking in expenditures towards swaying legislators, but I do know it's not in the top 20. It's not in the top 68. The NRA is not concerned with the gun industry but with individual second amendment rights. There's a huge difference there.
That would have complicated their pitch, and more important, would mean thinking about gun violence in ways that would displease the gun industry and its political lobby.
Of course the NYT editorial board members have to blame someone for not listening to them or taking their silly legislation recommendations seriously. They constantly attack the lobbyists, as if they were doing something nefarious rather than exercising their first amendment rights to petition the government for redress of grievances. Of course for the NYT the first amendment stops after "freedom of the press." That part they like.
So, the Republicans are talking how to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks and the NYT would rather they discuss how to disarm law abiding citizens. Someone has no sense of priority and it ain't the Republicans.
Of course the NYT (cough, the paper of record, cough) inflates the gun violence stats it uses with suicide numbers. That's a different problem, guys.
All in all a very weak effort to shame the Republicans.
We already have laws to prevent mass murders with guns, the murder statutes. If that doesn't stop the mass murderers, gun legislation isn't going to do the trick.
Labels: NYT idiocy; Gun Control, Why Won't They Listen to Us?
Monday, December 30, 2013
The NYT Entrely Loses the Point, Again.
Fresh off the paper's failed triumph trying to rewrite the history of the Benghazi attack ("We failed to find any evidence of al Quaeda influence because we totally didn't look for it") the NYT editorial board goes back to the well, once more backing serious infringements on our right to keep and bear firearms here. First paragraph.
Many lawmakers don't support any gun control laws (now called 'gun safety measures') because none of them are effective; that is, as Thomas Jefferson, quoting Beccaria, wrote, because gun control laws only succeed in disarming the law abiding.
We never lose our 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th or 8th Amendment rights no matter what we do. For example, if we lie under oath (like President Clinton) or defame someone (like the Daily Mail did to Kiera Knightly), we still can talk about anything we want the very next second. There can be no prior restraint of our speech absent extraordinary (and so extraordinary as to be largely mythical) circumstances.
We can lose our 2nd Amendment rights and the list of things that can cause this loss, which list used to be two items long, is now low double digits long. That said, I'm OK with completely, floridly psychotic people, who are a danger to themselves or others, not being able to own a gun legally. What dodge is it, political or otherwise, to seek to enforce already existing laws that prohibit just such a thing? This editorial starts fuzzily and then falls totally off the table.
The editorial talks about a few crazy people apparently not adjudicated mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution (the legal criteria on the BATFE form) who were crazy and did crazy things but did not lose their 2nd Amendment rights. I just couldn't see what those examples meant to the thesis of the editorial. Are they for taking guns from crazy people or is that merely a political dodge of the real problem? To say this thing fails to hang together logically is being very kind in criticizing it. It's like the authors were schizophrenic about guns and madness, or something. Here's the big finish.
The common denominator in gun violence is not easy access to assault rifles. Rifles used in gun violence is the opposite of a common denominator, it is a rara avis. In 2012, of the 8,855 murders where a firearm was known to have been used, there were only 332 cases where a rifle of any kind was known to have been used. That's 3.74%. Many more people were stabbed, beaten to death with clubs, etc or with hands and feet. Use of assault rifles to murder someone is even rarer, as most rifles in America do not fit the definition of assault rifle. The statement about a non-existent common denominator is just plain stupidity, a non-sequitur stupidity at that.
The common denominator for the recent, tragic mass murders seems rather to be crazy people with a gun, usually in a gun free zone. I'm thinking of Cho at Va Tech, Loughner in Arizona, Holmes in Aurora, Lanza at Newtown and Alexis in the DC Navy Yard, but I'm sure there are plenty more I've forgotten. Of these, only Holmes and Lanza used an AR 15 type rifle, the rest used a shotgun or one or two handguns. 2 out of 5 is not my idea of a common denominator. It's no one's idea of one except to the super geniuses at the NYT.
Also, and sorry to have to repeat this, again, an assault rifle by definition shoots a smaller bullet in a smaller case with less powder than a high powered rifle, or a full sized bullet with a reduced amount of powder in the smaller case than a high powered rifle (and there is no such thing as a high powered handgun). Assault rifles are in no way high-powered. More ignorance.
If you don't know squat about guns, don't try to lecture me on what we need to do about them.
Lawmakers who refuse to support effective gun safety measures often prefer to talk about better screening of the mentally ill to identify deranged would-be perpetrators before they can carry out mass shootings. This is, of course, a political dodge. Even in the handful of states where law enforcement agencies are trying to confiscate the guns of unstable individuals, state and federal laws too often enable the mentally ill to reclaim their guns as a right under the Second Amendment.
Many lawmakers don't support any gun control laws (now called 'gun safety measures') because none of them are effective; that is, as Thomas Jefferson, quoting Beccaria, wrote, because gun control laws only succeed in disarming the law abiding.
We never lose our 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th or 8th Amendment rights no matter what we do. For example, if we lie under oath (like President Clinton) or defame someone (like the Daily Mail did to Kiera Knightly), we still can talk about anything we want the very next second. There can be no prior restraint of our speech absent extraordinary (and so extraordinary as to be largely mythical) circumstances.
We can lose our 2nd Amendment rights and the list of things that can cause this loss, which list used to be two items long, is now low double digits long. That said, I'm OK with completely, floridly psychotic people, who are a danger to themselves or others, not being able to own a gun legally. What dodge is it, political or otherwise, to seek to enforce already existing laws that prohibit just such a thing? This editorial starts fuzzily and then falls totally off the table.
The editorial talks about a few crazy people apparently not adjudicated mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution (the legal criteria on the BATFE form) who were crazy and did crazy things but did not lose their 2nd Amendment rights. I just couldn't see what those examples meant to the thesis of the editorial. Are they for taking guns from crazy people or is that merely a political dodge of the real problem? To say this thing fails to hang together logically is being very kind in criticizing it. It's like the authors were schizophrenic about guns and madness, or something. Here's the big finish.
Most mentally ill persons are not violent, though The Times’s analysis of 180 confiscation cases in Connecticut (dealing with people posing an imminent risk of injury to themselves or others) found that close to 40 percent of those cases involved people with serious mental illness. The common denominator in gun violence, however, is not deranged individuals; it is the easy access to assault rifles and other high-powered weapons afforded all Americans. A few determined states are attempting to deal with this issue, but real solutions must involve federal legislation and national standards, which are nowhere in sight.
The common denominator in gun violence is not easy access to assault rifles. Rifles used in gun violence is the opposite of a common denominator, it is a rara avis. In 2012, of the 8,855 murders where a firearm was known to have been used, there were only 332 cases where a rifle of any kind was known to have been used. That's 3.74%. Many more people were stabbed, beaten to death with clubs, etc or with hands and feet. Use of assault rifles to murder someone is even rarer, as most rifles in America do not fit the definition of assault rifle. The statement about a non-existent common denominator is just plain stupidity, a non-sequitur stupidity at that.
The common denominator for the recent, tragic mass murders seems rather to be crazy people with a gun, usually in a gun free zone. I'm thinking of Cho at Va Tech, Loughner in Arizona, Holmes in Aurora, Lanza at Newtown and Alexis in the DC Navy Yard, but I'm sure there are plenty more I've forgotten. Of these, only Holmes and Lanza used an AR 15 type rifle, the rest used a shotgun or one or two handguns. 2 out of 5 is not my idea of a common denominator. It's no one's idea of one except to the super geniuses at the NYT.
Also, and sorry to have to repeat this, again, an assault rifle by definition shoots a smaller bullet in a smaller case with less powder than a high powered rifle, or a full sized bullet with a reduced amount of powder in the smaller case than a high powered rifle (and there is no such thing as a high powered handgun). Assault rifles are in no way high-powered. More ignorance.
If you don't know squat about guns, don't try to lecture me on what we need to do about them.
Labels: NYT idiocy; Gun Control
