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MmeGigs -> RE: Another church shooting (7/28/2008 4:12:11 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Thadius
You didn't answer my question though. Would the removal of all legally owned firearms from the world, put an end to gun violence?
To be fair, some of these idiots would go back to using bombs and other things to carry out whatever twisted agenda they have.
Banning guns would not put an end to gun violence any more than Prohibition put an end to drunkeness.
I am not in favor of banning guns. I like to shoot guns. I have a target hanging on my bulletin board at work - a momento from a blind date who taught me to shoot muzzle-loaders. I have friends who hunt. I'd hunt if I liked the flavor of game meats well enough that I was willing to butcher what I shot, but I don't and I'm not, so I only shoot animals like possums and racoons that tear up my garbage and shit on my deck. My sister used to go to work at 3AM in a bad part of a big city and had to park blocks away, and I completely understood and supported her going to gun safety class and getting a concealed carry permit and a handgun.
The thing that really bothers me about about the position that many gun-rights folks hold is their steadfast belief that people who own guns legally are in no way connected to deaths and injuries from guns, thus there is no reason to regulate gun ownership by "upstanding citizens". That's just nuts. It is a simple, observable fact that more guns out there means more people are going to get hurt or die. There have been stories about this recently. A kid got grandma's legal, permitted handgun out of grandma's purse while they were shopping and shot itself in the chest. The kid didn't die and charges aren't being filed against grandma, but it's pretty clear from this story that the fact that a gun is legal and registered doesn't mean that no one but the bad guys will get hurt.
We've studied this and we know this, but the facts are inconvenient.
quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/30/guns.suicides.ap/ "Public-health researchers have concluded that in homes where guns are present, the likelihood that someone in the home will die from suicide or homicide is much greater. Studies have also shown that homes in which a suicide occurred were three to five times more likely to have a gun present than households that did not experience a suicide, even after accounting for other risk factors."
It's not that more people try to commit suicide in households where there is a gun, it's that they're much more likely to be successful. Folks who attempt suicide by other means often fail, and they survive and go on to get the help they need. Folks who try this with guns are often successful - they don't get a second chance.
I thought this was interesting and really pretty sick and sad -
quote:
The CDC traditionally was a primary funder of research on guns and gun-related injuries, allocating more than $2.1 million a year to such projects in the mid-1990s.
But the agency cut back research on the subject after Congress in 1996 ordered that none of the CDC's appropriations be used to promote gun control.
They've cut funding for this research down from $2.1 million - that boggles me. $2.1 million is less than chump change in the federal budget.
Estimates are that there are about 30,000 gun related deaths in the US every year. Suicides account for way more than half of these - 17,002 out of 30,694 gun deaths in the US in 2005. To put the CDC's spending and cuts in spending in perspective, the current statistical value of a life in the US is $6.9 million. That's the figure the EPA uses to determine whether it's worth spending the money to mitigate a particular risk - if the cost of mitigation is more than $6.9 million per person who might die, it's not worth the money. We're not willing to spend a thousandth of a percent of what these 30,694 lives that are lost to gun violence are worth - not even willing to spend a third of what one of these lives are worth - to try to understand the effect that gun violence is having on our society and how we might save these lives, because the pro-gun contingent is afraid that the facts and statistics will make it easier to argue in favor of limiting access to guns.
It's just sick and sad that so many of us are willing to ignore facts - even life-and-death facts - because they don't fit in with our ideology.
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