The Right Way to Keep Bare Gubs

[kladner]

I am not surprised that it is Heinlein. I've almost certainly read the book, but something like 50 years ago. The line did not pop out as Heinlein, but it certainly fits.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kriesel

It's commonly used [the figure of 33,000 gun homicides] by American gun control advocates to inflate the numbers as a way of alarming people, by conflating suicide, justifiable homicide, accident, and even organized crime. <snip>

Could you please cite a reference? I usually don't have much trouble tracking things like this down, but in the present case the only person I could find online actually saying this was Jiang Zemin, talking to Bill Clinton in 1993(*). It's requoted in a few places, with attribution, but no gun-control advocacy sites turned up asserting it as fact. I found a few statements like "33,000 gun deaths" and "33,000 gun homicides or suicides," though.

(*) In The long view from China, for example, we find

"Look," Jiang told him. "It's wonderful that you have all this freedom, and all this money, but what do you do with it? You have 33,000 homicides by guns. Your cities are uninhabitable. Your schools don't work. You have rampant drug use, and you can't control your population. Who is to say that your freedom is worth it?

[kriesel]

"[the figure of 33,000 gun homicides]" Oops, looks like I accidentally conflated homicide (one causing another's death) with suicide (one causing one's own death) myself there. I'm usually more precise than that. The combination is usually expressed as gun deaths. (Meaning deaths of humans caused by humans using firearms as the instruments.) I think these figures exclude combat deaths of or those caused by US military personnel, but inlclude law enforcement activity. The CDC recent (2016) figures give about 22,900 for firearms suicide, and 14,400 for firearms homicide including the full spectrum from accident through criminal activity for profit or profession to self defense or defense of others to law enforcement stopping active mass shooters or presumably the rare court ordered execution. Second table; https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

The numbers are going down or up depending on the sampling period. (Down overall over the past 50 years.) The total population is going up.

Finding references to 33000 gun deaths is duck simple, literally.https://duckduckgo.com/?q=33000+gun+...&t=ffnt&ia=web
This one came up as fourth: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...die-each-year/
Discrediting the number, an article by Breitbart, was third. https://www.breitbart.com/live/third...led-guns-year/

Note that all the CDC numbers omit and gun control numbers pale in comparison to the annual death toll due to abortions. Various sources put that number between a half million and a million in the US annually currently, or nearly 50 to 100 times as many as firearm homicides.

"you can't control your population." I'm not sure if he was referring to population total or restrictions on individual behavior, but in either sense, it seems to me that's a feature, not a bug (in most cases).

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by wombatman

Take out the one aberrant data point and you could draw a straight line through that dataset, indicating that gun murder rate is not tied to gun ownership at all. As for Illinois, do you even bother to consider that people can purchase guns in neighboring states where gun laws are less restrictive and, say, bring them into the state (which is legal)? Of course not. Same for all your John Lott "data". This defense is laughable.

Cherry pick another data point to delete (Hawaii, lower left, very atypical because it has a huge moat and extreme ownership restrictions among other factors) and the program generated regression fit shifts in the opposite direction, toward even higher reduction in gun murder rate with increasing ownership. But I rejected all cherry picking and gave the results for fit to all the data then available to me. Seems you don't like the results of the data.
Illinois has a rate considerably higher than some adjacent states. It's dominated by Chicago and its criminals with little to fear from the locals. A large part of its murder rate is criminals shooting at other criminals. I'd expect Illinois to be lower not higher than its neighbors if restricting general availability of the instrument was effective. The data set is from 2010, before Heller vs. DC or McDonald vs. Chicago struck down some rather comprehensive bans in certain locations, so driving to another state to bring them home would have been breaking the law. Funny how you dismiss Lott's careful research, peer reviewed and revised to address the minor procedural objections that was all the opposition could justify, and anyone else who is guided by the data. Note Lott was initially in favor of gun control, until he did the research and what he found changed his mind. Comparing US to UK or AU etc is worse than useless. US citizens don't change into Aussies by adopting laws like the Aussies have. What matters is what can be changed while other things are fixed or relatively fixed (like population, culture, personalities, urban density, established large crime organizations), and whether the proposed change is helpful, ineffective, or harmful. The CDC did some similar research, during the Clinton administration. It did not get published or even disclosed, because it didn't support their anti-gun political position. Kopel found the data recently while looking for something else.

Since you proposed it, I subtracted out the DC data. The regression fit for the 50 states still is negative; more guns less crime, not flat or positive. Note I did not have access to the data for the highly restrictive US territories, so they have been omitted.
Also, for IL and its immediate neighbors, plus MI, similar holds. (Without MI, also.) Iowa is an outlier in the group. What's special about it? Not few guns per capita. Density and demographics.
Each state's statistics are blends of low density, high gun ownership rural and suburban areas and high density high crime low ownership urban areas. If we could separate them out, the difference becomes more stark. That's what looking county by county did.

Kennesaw Georgia conducted an interesting experiment, passing an ordinance requiring homeowners to own firearms, absent a religious or conscientious objection. Criminals took note and crime dropped in Kennesaw, perhaps displacing somewhat to other areas.

I come from a research university and engineering training. Data, and conclusions drawn from it, often don't match a priori theories or expectations. Perfection is not available. There are always tradeoffs. Consider the possibilities in all directions. The death rate and the ownership rate are poorly correlated (an 8.5 to one variation in gun murder rate per gun owner across IL and neighboring states). Much of the death is created by a small fraction of the population that is violent and criminal and does not obey restrictions or bans. Even in nations that essentially ban private firearms ownership, they smuggle them in or steal them from police or military, or have someone in those groups participating. Eliminating firearms access by criminals at large is not practical. Taking them off the street for extended periods as a result of their proven crimes is effective. Releasing them early can be deadly to unsuspecting citizens.
You seem to be advocating doubling down again on what has been shown to not work very well (disarming the intended target population that criminals prey on).
I like though that you classified DC as an aberration, because it is in general. What does DC produce that's useful?

[Uncwilly]

Homicide is a human causing a human's death. Suicide is a subset, as is manslaughter, murder, or dispensing the wrong medication.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by wombatman

Take out the one aberrant data point and you could draw a straight line through that dataset, indicating that gun murder rate is not tied to gun ownership at all.

There was already a straight line fit through the data, created by Open Office Calc's built in regression fit capability. I think you might mean horizontal line. But take out DC, and it's still got the same sign of slope.
And if it had been level, "not tied to gun ownership at all" makes a better case for leaving people their constitutional rights than depriving them.
I happen to believe, based on nontrivial study, that how many guns are in the hands of people too moral to misuse them has positive effect, as a deterrent to those who would misuse them otherwise.
Local law enforcement results over many years supports the stance that leaving noncriminals alone and dealing with the criminals is very effective.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Homicide is a human causing a human's death. Suicide is a subset, as is manslaughter, murder, or dispensing the wrong medication.

I looked it up in a reputable dictionary, before posting what I did, and that source (Merriam Webster) separated them as I did; suicide not included in homicide, by definition. For your convenience, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homicide
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suicide

[retina]

Making guns illegal won't stop people possessing guns, but it will make identifying the bad actors with guns really easy.

[Uncwilly]

I looked it up in several dictionaries (at Onelook.com) and you are correct. I had always understood it to be the broadest case (death of a human directly caused by an act of a human) without regard to the causative agent and the acted upon agent. My understanding was that it included suicide, but because it was such a special case that it was almost always accounted for differently, and usually not included. But say at an autopsy and in the death report, homicide included the possibility of suicide, until the later was specifically proven.

This is predicated on the latin roots. Homo meaning mankind.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Who are you to be dictating what would have been "appropriate" security, after the fact of an attack that was unprecedented, and could not reasonably have been anticipated? "Criminally shameful?" That doesn't even make sense.

I can only imagine the response if you took your notions of "appropriate" security to the organizers of events in open-air venues "beneath multiple high rises." If they're in a good mood, they might ask, "And who's gonna pay for this -- you?"

You might also try going to the people who actually attend such events, and tell them they're idiots for putting themselves in such terrible danger. But only if you are very fleet of foot...

Your basic premise here seems to be, one should expect an armed attacker bent on killing as many people as possible, at any and every large gathering of people. In other words, you think such attacks should be considered "normal." If that's the case, I guess in your mind, the terrorists have won.

A tendency to commit violent crime seems to be inconveniently common in our species. I wish it were not so, but we know otherwise. A prudent response is to be to some measure aware of and prepared for it to surface unpredictably. Get enough people together in one event or municipality, and the averages and statistical variations will emerge. The probability is what it is, and many people feel it's higher than they'd like. Some people understand the probability is lower than many other ways of dying, including driving there or back. All of that's reality. Let's deal with reality.

The nearest village to my home has a population about half that of the Harvest 91 concert attendance and a law enforcement roster of dozens. You can bet some go about well equipped at any given time. As far as I've read, such as the previously posted 60 Minutes material, no one responded from the LV concert venue. Hotel security responded solo and got shot in the hallway. Further response waited for LVPD to arrive from 9 miles away. What does that tell you about the concert venue's preparedness or lack of?
In this area, it's routine for events to have sheriff's deputies or village or city police roaming through even much smaller events in uniform and armed, some occasionally on horseback, bike, etc. I think they may view it more as departmental PR than hazardous duty, but if something starts, they're already there and can call in more immediately. Some are ex military and can handle and already have handled a wide range of situations. Such staff could and would respond effectively and briskly.
Also the organizers do not prohibit lawful concealed carry in such events as http://www.mononafestival.com/rules/ although others may.
They've also successfully managed much larger events (~300,000 attendance) in this area and without security checks at a perimeter for disarmament of attendees.

In general the attendees pay for the security, through ticket or concession purchases.

It's illogical to decry the numbers of deaths at the concert and a number of other occasions on the one hand and claim it can't be predicted as a possibility on the other.
It's not the first time someone used a tower as a sniper nest on civilians or officials. Whitman, 1966 in Texas as I recall. Kennedy assassination, 1963. Perhaps others I don't recall.

https://www.buildings.com/news/indus...tival-security

I think a lot would change, for the better, if event organizers and venues knew that making people helpless, they assumed personal responsibility for them, and could be sued or charged for creating more death. Such businesses would look differently at protecting their customers and guests. I view them as accessories to mass murder for creating killing field scenarios from which the would be mass murderers can choose from a menu of locations. As Paddock did. As Holmes did. Instead such venues have ticket purchase include a waiver of liability, which their owners attorneys and insurance companies love.

There are other things one can do to help. Israeli bandages are inexpensive. Having some in the parking lot already in your own vehicle could save someone if you share. Someone there will have the knowledge and nerve to use them. May they be never needed. But there's no problem of having too many supplies on scene, while temporary local shortages could be fatal for someone.

The 61 page after-action report indicates some of the preparations were inadequate even for a more common scale, not record setting, mass casualty event. https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=814668
A pertinent point was the closest officers were separated from their equipment by hundreds of yards when the event came under fire. Another was an officer spotted the sniper platform but was unable to communicate its location to others.

[Dr Sardonicus]

There are four mutually disjoint legal classifications of "manner of death" -- suicide, homicide, accident, and natural causes.

The term "justifiable homicide" includes killing someone in self-defense, which means you "reasonably" believed you (or another person) was in imminent danger of death or grievous bodily harm at the hands of the person you killed. It also includes legal executions, in which the homicide of the condemned person is legally justified in that it is pursuant to a sentence imposed by a court of law, and court order setting the time at which that sentence is carried out (executed).

It also seems that, in many cases, especially when the killer is a peace officer, the victim having been black is deemed sufficient justification -- either by no charges being pressed, or by a trial jury reaching a verdict of "Not Guilty," even if the victim was repeatedly shot in the back from a distance of 20 feet or more.

Abortion statistics are not germane to US death statistics, because -- in the eyes of the law -- unborn fetuses are not persons. Frozen embryos being stored in a lab are generally considered to be property. Someone who rips a fetus from a pregnant woman and causes its death can't be charged with homicide for killing that fetus, but rather "Unlawful termination of a pregnancy." Of course, if the woman dies from the attack, that's a homicide.

There have been efforts to write a definition of human life as beginning at conception into the constitutions of various states, via referendum. These so-called "person-hood amendments" have not fared well at the ballot-box. It would be difficult to overstate the legal nightmare that could ensue from such a definition. For example, many zygotes are aborted spontaneously. If the aborted zygote is detected (now this might be done is more than I can say), would there be an investigation to determine whether it died of natural causes, or was the victim of a homicide? If a pregnant woman suffers an injury that causes her to abort, would that require an investigation to determine whether it was an accident or murder? And what about identical twins? Did their lives both begin with the single zygote of which they are clones?

As to "controlling the population" in terms of numbers, the population of the USA might be decreasing, were it not for immigration.

But this is getting away from the topic of guns. So, perhaps we have to provide fetuses with guns, so they can defend themselves against abortionists.