{Yes, this is exceptionally long, so think of it as a reference, rather than a fun read.}
{Also I promise not to write anything else until I can write something fun.}
This person's facebook post was literally too long to screen shot and be legible, but the important point is that it is that it's really, really stupid. Even if you uncompromisingly support the second amendment, I beseech you to read this, so you don't sound like this:
For the most part, the weight of the comments was overwhelmingly against him, with people picking apart the numbers and arguments like velociraptors tearing apart a cow. Still, his statement had 371 likes, 72 loves, a slew of 'clapping' and 'thank you' memes, and responses like this:
Objective facts?
HISTORY?
Like I said, the original post is too long to screenshot the whole thing, but I address it line-by-line below, with the post's text in dark red.
"There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed."According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2011 there were 478,400 incidents of firearm violence. In that same year, there were 11,701 homicides using guns. That's just stone-cold case-closed completed murder - that doesn't count suicides, accidents, etc.
It also doesn't count attempted murder, which is an important distinction. Our healthcare arguably handles exceptional trauma better than day-to-day health, and may play very significant role in keeping the number of gun-related deaths as low as it is. Getting shot isn't always a death sentence; Most parts of the body can be hit by a bullet without resulting in immediate death, and provided one makes it to the hospital with a pulse, they have a 95% chance of survival. (This might also be part of the reason mass-shootings are so devastating - a large number of simultaneous victims strains the emergency services which would likely be able to save any one of them individually.)
So, how high is the rate of nonfatal firearm victimization? The DOJ puts the 2011 rate at 1.8 victims per 1,000 citizens age 12 and older, so even if your odds of being killed by a gun are slim, your annual odds of getting shot at in the U.S. were about 1 in 650 (which even surprises me) in 2011.
To convey a sense of scale, your odds of getting salmonella from a raw egg are 1 in 20,000 - so eat that raw cookie dough while you can.
"U.S. population 324,059,091 as of Wednesday, June 22, 2016. Do the math: 0.000000925% of the population dies from gun related actions each year."Actually, the percentage would be:
= 100*(30,000 / 324,059,091)
= 3,000,000/324,059,091
= 3/324.059091
= 0.00925%
Which is literally 10,000 times higher than what you say it is. Do the math.
"Statistically speaking, this is insignificant!"I don't think you understand how statistical significance works.
Let's work out if the gun-related violence in the United States is actually statistically significant!
We can test the impact of the second amendment on public safety by calculating the odds ratio, a statistical procedure that's commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness (or harm) posed by a health intervention (e.g., a particular type of medication). We can define the second amendment as the "treatment" which distinguishes two groups, and then compare the outcomes of the groups, to determine whether they are significantly different. For our groups, we'll use the United States, and Great Britain (which is essentially our closest cultural relative) - specifically, England and Wales. I chose those two because I found an article which presented numbers for England and Wales that are comparable (same year, similar definitions) to those presented by the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
If the Odds Ratio is less than 1, then the treatment is superior to the control (i.e., the 2nd amendment protects people from gun violence). If the O.R. > 1, the opposite is true (i.e., the 2nd amendment is responsible for gun violence). If the O.R. is close to 0, there is no meaningful difference (the impact of the second amendment doesn't matter).
The p-value provided by the program we use will effectively indicate whether the difference between the O.R. and 0 is meaningful (i.e., whether it is statistically significant). The lower the p-value, the less likely it is that the relative difference between the groups is due to chance. In psychology, the standard is for anything p < .05 to be regarded as statistically significant (the difference is probably real). SPSS - the most widely used stats program in the social sciences - doesn't even display p-values lower than .001, and would instead report this number as p = .000.
Variable: 2nd Amendment Protection
Control Group: England & Wales
Population (2011) = 53.01 million (England) + 3.06 million (Wales)
Criminal offenses involving firearms in England and Wales (2011) = 7,024 offenses.
Treatment Group: United States of America
Population of US (2011) = 311.7 million
Incidents of violence involving firearms in US (2011) = 478,400 (DOJ number)
Odds Ratio = (a/b)/(c/d)
N of Exposed Group = 311.7 million
a: # in exposed group with bad outcome = 478,400
b: # in exposed group with good outcome = 311,221,600
c: # in control group with bad outcome = 7,024
d: # in control group with good outcome = 56,692,976
O.R. = (a/b)/(c/d)
O.R. = (a*d)/(b*c)
O.R. = (478*56,693)/(311,222*7) {I rounded here due to UI limitations}O.R. = 12.4391
CI (95%) = 5.8978 to 26.2355, z = 6.621
p < 0.0001
In other words, the second amendment is associated with increased odds of being a victim of gun violence, and the increase IS statistically significant.
"What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:"Actually, we get told this every time there's a mass shooting, so pretty often. Gunviolencearchive.org also maintains a detailed breakdown of all of this information, and even keeps their homepage updated for the year-to-date. Numbers for 2014-2016 can be found here.
"65% of those deaths are by suicide which would never be prevented by gun laws"The CDC reports 21,386 completed suicides by firearm in 2014, which is 1.8 times the number of completed homicides by firearm in 2011. Gunviolencearchive.org simply notes these incidents as "22,000 annual suicides" and omits them from most of their numbers. By year, the incidence of deaths and injuries not-due-to-suicide has been:
2014 - 12,569 gun related deaths and 23,013 injuriesIt probably goes without saying, that if we accept the poster's claim that there are 30,000 gun related deaths per year, that means over half of the gun-related deaths in 2016 were not suicides.
2015 - 13,501 gun related deaths and 27,038 injuries
2016 - 15,079 gun related deaths and 30,614 injuries
As to the idea that suicides "would never be prevented by gun laws", let me put this in the most succinct of academic terms:
Bullshit.
Don't want to read the article? Then look again at that CDC page for suicides:
21,386 suicides were completed by FirearmEveryone has access to belts, plastic bags, etc., while surveys indicate about one third of respondents owned a firearm in 2013. Only a third of Americans own a firearm, yet the number of people who commit suicide by gun is almost twice the number of people who commit suicide by suffocation, and far more than the number of people who kill themselves by poisoning.
11,407 suicides were completed by Suffocation
6,808 suicides were completed by Poisoning
3,225 suicides were completed by literally everything else.
"15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified"Gun deaths due to law enforcement are less than half what the poster claims.
The poster claimed that there are 30,000 gun related deaths per year, and 15% of those are due to police officers, federal agents, etc. killing suspects. If 15% of 30,000 gun related deaths were due to cops shooting suspects, they would be killing 4,500 Americans annually. Here are the numbers gunviolencearchive.org gives for people shot by police officers:
1,775 People were shot or killed by police officers in 2014.And those numbers include nonfatal shootings by law enforcement.
1,915 People were shot or killed by police officers in 2015.
1,907 People were shot or killed by police officers in 2016.
1,572 people have been shot or killed by police officers 2017, so far.
It also bears mentioning that there are MANY Americans who don't believe that law enforcement is always "justified" in shooting someone.
"17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – gun violence"Given that we tend to retroactively declare anyone who shoots someone without monetary motive to be "mentally ill", it's a bit difficult to argue otherwise.
"3% are accidental discharge deaths"This number might be accurate, if you look specifically at deaths due to accidents. If there are 30,000 gun-related deaths per year, and 3% are accidental, then there should be about 900 accidental discharge deaths each year.
The number of gun accidents (fatal and nonfatal) is much higher than that:
1,607 accidents in 2014
1,964 accidents in 2015
2,200 accidents in 2016
1,530 accidents in 2017, to date
This year, however, only 500 of the 1,530 accidents to date have resulted in death (those accidents have killed 506 people). With roughly three months left in the year, we'll probably hit close to 900 accidental deaths.
That's not exactly a comforting number, though, is it? This is the reason I get nervous when people carry guns around in public or bring them to a store I'm at. For the same reason a responsible gun owner should assume all guns are loaded, I tend to assume all gun owners are irresponsible, no matter how respectable they look. While these accidents are not the result of "gun violence" they still fall in the scope of things many Americans wish to address with gun control legislation or a constitutional amendment.
"So technically, 'gun violence' is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100."This number seems dubious, but it's difficult to prove or disprove.
Going with gunviolencearchive.org's numbers for this year, 47,253 gun-related incidents have occurred this year. Assuming we've already endured 75% of our annual 22,000 gun related suicides, suicide probably accounts for about 16,500 deaths so far in 2017, but that is not counted in gunviolencearchive.org's numbers. What is counted are:
1,573 incidents in which people were shot by police officersIn other words, so far in 2017 we have had 42,613 incidents which cannot be categorized as accidental discharges, law enforcement "in the line of duty", self-defense, or completed suicides. So 90.18% of incidents could potentially be attributed to criminal activity.
1,537 incidents in which people were shot in self-defense
1,530 incidents in which people were shot by accident
Of 47,253 gun related incidents this year, 11,814 deaths were not due to suicide. Assuming criminals are not less deadly than everyone else, we might estimate deaths due to gun violence at 90.18% of 11,814 gun-related deaths. That makes for about 10,653 deaths due to gun violence. I am not confident in the exactness of this number, but it is more than twice what the poster estimated, so I at least feel comfortable saying that 5,100 is a major underestimate.
It also bears mentioning, again, that the 'gun control' debate is not solely about people using guns for crimes. The ready availability and insecurity of guns in America increases the risk of suicide and accident, and the possession of firearms by criminals - or at least the assumption that any suspected criminal is likely to possess firearms - contributes to self-defense and law-enforcement shootings.
"Still too many?"Yes.
"Well, first, how are those deaths spanned across the nation?
• 480 homicides (9.4%) were in ChicagoIf these numbers seem screwy, they are. The "25%" almost certainly comes from using the numbers for all homicides in 2015 (instead of gun-related homicides) and the 5,100 number he invented. To investigate this, I tracked down the numbers for last year. According to the FBI, the number of all homicides in each of these cities in 2016 was:
• 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore
• 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit
• 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)
So basically, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities."
765 homicides in ChicagoThat's 1,524 homicides, and that's all of the homicides - not just guns. In 2016, the nation as a whole had 17,250 murders, so all murder in all four cities accounts for 8.83% of all murder in the United States. His number depends, partly, on the assumption that all homicides are committed with guns - which is a humorous assumption given what he later says about Alabama.
318 homicides in Baltimore
303 homicides in Detroit
138 homicides in Washington D.C.
"All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause."It is oddly difficult to enforce a municipal gun ban when someone can drive across the city limits to purchase one like a Fourth of July firework. In fact, it's that has motivated people to clamor for federal, nationwide restrictions, rather than simply push for local restrictions.
"This basically leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others."It's certainly true that some states have higher murder rates than others. Louisiana had a 2016 murder rate of 11.8 murders per 100,000 citizens (554 murders in 2016) while New Hampshire had a murder rate of 1.3 murders per 100,000 citizens (17 murders in 2016).
"For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1."This is just amazingly stupid.
According to the FBI's report on crime in the United States, in 2016, Alabama's murder rate was 8.4 homicides per 100,000 residents, and California's murder rate was 4.9 homicides per 100,000 residents. And that's murder rate, not raw numbers, so that's accounting for the state's population.
Remember when I said the poster's numbers assumed every homicide involved a gun? In terms of raw numbers, Alabama had 407 homicides in 2016. While I'm sure all 407 homicides were not committed with a gun, I'm also certain that more than one did. I know that a lot of people tend to have a low estimation of Alabamans' intelligence, but I'm certain that their criminals can use firearms just as well as anyone else.
"Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand, so it is not guns causing this. It is a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states."Huh?
"So if all cities and states are not created equally, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths."If someone dies in a gun-related death, there was probably a gun involved, though.
"Are 5,100 deaths per year horrific?"Yes.
As are the 11,814 deaths deaths by guns this year so far, and the roughly 22,000 suicides that will probably have been committed by the end of the year.
"How about in comparison to other deaths?"Is it a competition?
"All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault all is done by criminals and thinking that criminals will obey laws is ludicrous. That's why they are criminals."Wow, how many tautological statements can you get into three lines?
If this line of reasoning were valid, every "criminal" would commit every sort of crime - and would never get caught doing so. The premise of law enforcement is to arrest and imprison people after they commit a crime. If someone commits a crime by buying a ridiculously large number of guns, then there's at least a chance that they will be detained and arrested before they commit the crime of killing people. This is the same basic reason we have laws against things like running red lights and driving down the sidewalk - we would rather detain and penalize a person before they kill someone.
"But what about other deaths each year?"What about them?
"40,000+ die from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!"Tragically, this is probably an understatement.
But, again, is it a competition? Also, what happened to the reasoning that 65% of gun-related deaths are by suicide "which would never be prevented by gun laws"? If there's no excuse for people killing themselves with drugs, how is there an excuse for people killing themselves with guns?
"36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths"In 1918 "the flu" killed more people than World War I. People don't generally cite that information as proof that the war had a trivial impact on the world. Also, if I could get my kids vaccinated against bullets, I wouldn't worry so much about guns.
"34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities(exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide)"There are more than a few reasons comparing guns and cars represents crap logic.
First, most people actually need cars to sustain their livelihoods. Remember, only a third of Americans own guns, and very few of those people depend on those weapons to sustain themselves. According to the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife services, only 13.7 million Americans aged 16 and older went hunting in 2011. If we discount bow-hunting and other forms of hunting that don’t involve firearms, and if we assume all of those hunters were gun-owners and discount the hunters who were under 18, we would estimate that only 16.5% of gun owners use their weapons for hunting. Now, out of that 16.5% of 33%, how many of those Americans were 'hunting to support their families' as is so often claimed?
Second, comparing the numbers of traffic fatalities to gun-related deaths doesn't account for the reality that in terms of man hours, cars see a lot more use than guns. Your odds of being killed in or by a car have a great deal to do with how many cars are on the road and how much time we spend using them. However, because we do interact with them so much, we take steps to protect ourselves - we invest time and money into developing safer cars, prefer to buy safer cars. We also have considerable legislation in place to control who can use a car, where they can take it, and what they can do with it. We track sales of cars, and not only do we have a comprehensive system for licensing drivers (with certain standards across all states) we have different licenses for different cars and different operators. We also require a car's operator to have insurance, and we tax the heck out of cars and their fuel.
Finally, I can be reasonably certain that my child isn't going to be run over by a car while sitting in her classroom, or watching a movie in a theater.
"Now it gets good:"Promises, promises, buttercup.
"200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors. You are safer in Chicago than when you are in a hospital!"People need medical intervention, but they don't need guns. The danger of a medical procedure is necessary, the danger posed by a gun is not.
And I have some measure of control over my risk of dying due to a preventable medical error. I don't go and hang out in a hospital just to kill time, catch up with friends, and blow off steam. I go to the hospital when I have to go to the hospital. When I'm not at the hospital, I don't have to worry about preventable medical errors; a surgeon isn't going to come up to me in the middle of a concert and inflict malpractice on me. And even when I am at the hospital, if I'm not a patient, I'm probably at no risk.
Unless someone comes in with a gun, of course.
"710,000 people die per year from heart disease. It’s time to stop the double cheeseburgers!"If putting a cheeseburger in your mouth killed you, we'd have some pretty tough laws pertaining to the sale of foods which combine cheese and burger. If we determined that cheeseburgers were the chief determinant of heart disease, we'd at the very least require some pretty distinctive labeling. Most of all, though, if someone else eating a cheeseburger could potentially kill me, and 57 other people in the process, yes, they'd probably be illegal.
"So what is the point?"You wanted to publicly demonstrate that you're a moron?
"If Obama and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease..."Obama? You know he's not the president, right? And that when he was, he did virtually nothing with gun control?
"Even a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc.). A 10% reduction in medical errors would be 66% of the total gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides..."Do you understand that cardiac deaths are the result of decades of long term lifestyle choices? That anything done to change them wouldn't be evident for many years to come? Moreover, do you understand that I cannot go out and kill 58 vegetarians with a cheeseburger?
"...Simple, easily preventable 10% reductions!"No. You have given no tangible suggestion for accomplishing either of those goals. Just because you say it's just a 10% decrease, does not make it simple or easy to achieve. Know what is "simple and easily preventable"?
Shooting yourself in the face.
And yet, "3% are accidental discharge deaths."
And it probably bears pointing out, that addressing heart disease or malpractice is not mutually exclusive with devising and implementing gun control.
"So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns?"Whose focus? We have three branches of government, and none of them seem to have any notable focus on doing anything about gun violence. Opposition to guns seems to primarily come from the the citizenry.
"It's pretty simple: Taking away guns gives control to governments."Oh, and that completely explains why the U.S. government has done little to nothing to control, let alone 'take away' your guns. Well, despite that, I trust the collective body of the U.S. government further than I trust the lowest common denominator of the U.S. population, so if I have to allocate the power over my life and death to someone, I'd honestly prefer they have it than you.
"The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace of the colonies."The founders of this nation knew that when your nation's biggest cities have populations on the order of 20,000 or so, the only way to hold off an Empire was to arm damn near every one. That's not really an issue anymore.
"It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace is a controlled populace."Fine, let's punch the elephant in the room.
How many American soldiers were killed in Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan? Remember Ben Ghazi? That whole thing you couldn't forgive the secretary of defense for not preventing? Who do you think is killing our men and women overseas? We aren't fighting wars with countries, we're fighting wars with their 'armed populaces' - militias terrorizing their neighbors with assault weapons in the name of freedom. When you talk about citizens rising up against their government, that's what it looks like - a half-organized mob of fanatics murdering their fellow citizens until they impose themselves as their country's tyrants.
"To that end, they protected the right of "the people" to "bear arms" as part of a "well regulated militia. Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S. Constitution."Where do you get the idea it was "proudly and boldly included"?
The second amendment was an amendment; the concept of the right to bear arms didn't make the first cut, so it was collected with other amendments in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution to assuage anti-federalists - it wasn't a unanimous statement by the founding fathers, it was the product of politics (because no, that's not a modern invention). The second amendment was one of many proposed to the House, of which seventeen made it to the Senate, of which twelve made it to consideration by the states themselves. Of those twelve, ten were supported by a two-thirds majority (10 out of 14) among the states. Not exactly a proud or bold inclusion.
Furthermore, Madison didn't author the proposed amendments from the founding fathers' creative unconscious. He specifically based the amendments on Virginia's (1776) Declaration of Rights (authored by George Mason), likely to appease one of the most powerful states in the union.
As evident from the year of publication, Virginia's Declaration of Rights was based heavily on preventing the American government from making the same mistakes the British had in the colonies. Inspired by the injustices of British rule, here is what Virginia's Declaration of Rights, the source of the second amendment had to say about the right to bear arms:
The VDR - a document written when the injustices of the British empire were still very clear in everyone's minds - did not guarantee or even endorse the individual right to bear arms; it states that there should be no standing army during peace time (missed that boat), and that peace should instead be kept by militias composed of citizens trained to fight - in other words, if we'd stuck to the spirit of the VDR - which was actually rooted in the American War of Independence - we'd have no standing military, your guns would probably be in an arsenal at the court house, and your high school civics class would have required you to learn basic combat skills. (We'd also probably have been conquered by another nation ages ago, because the no-standing-military thing just doesn't work.)
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be governed by, the civil power.
"It must be preserved at all costs."
At all costs?
Really?
Do you understand the costs we're talking about? How many people have to die because their nation's laws failed to protect them, before you start to question the point of that nation's existence?
The second amendment isn't God; it's a law that's supposed to protect people, and we've reached the point that it's not protecting them - it's putting them at risk. The second amendment may have been useful at some point, but it's cancerous now, and we don't get sentimental over tumors.
"So the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about saving lives, look at these facts"You probably don't want me looking at your facts any deeper.
"... and remember these words from Noah Webster:"Wow, you couldn't even quote an actual founding father to back you up. That's pretty sad.
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe..."People in Europe are doing pretty well right now without personal arsenals, so that's probably not your best measuring stick if you want to sell your point.
"... The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword..."I'm fine with swords. One man can't run into a mob and kill 58 people with a sword.
"... because the whole body of the people are armed and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."We do not "raise" troops. We have a standing army (much to George Mason's annoyance, I'm sure). We have multiple military branches, manned full time. The number of people armed doesn't matter anymore because we don't fight wars by lining up in columns to play (don't) dodge (the musket) ball.
In modern military strategy, the number of men carrying weapons is less important than the number of men a weapon can kill, and the most powerful weapons require highly trained and skilled personnel supported by a massive infrastructure to operate.
The body of the people - even if every person owned a rifle - does not and cannot constitute a force superior to the U.S. Military. Even if a citizen insurgent group could match the U.S. Army for boots on the ground and rifles in hand, you know who has the largest air force on earth?
The United States of America.
You know who has the second largest air force on earth?
ALSO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
And if you count the U.S. Army's helicopters, we also have the third largest air force on earth.
The U.S. military has tanks, battleships, fighter jets, and bombers. It has artillery weapons, fuel-air bombs, and nuclear warheads. The idea that your rifle has some meaning in that context is the most idiotic form of vanity. Even with a basement filled with small arms, you could accomplish nothing significant in opposition to the government if it 'turned on you', and if you come to the point that you think it has, it's probably because you're a fringe lunatic who doesn't like that the weight of democracy swinging against him, and you're probably going to use them in shopping malls, school buildings, and churches, because the only way to get what you want will be to terrorize the voters into submitting to your will.
"A military force at the command of Congress can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power."With all due respect to the Representative from Connecticut, CONGRESS DOESN'T EVEN COMMAND THE MILITARY.
"Remember, when it comes to 'gun control,' the important word is 'control,' not 'gun.'"You know what's really sad?
His whole post is actually plagiarized from a post Ted Nugent made on Facebook on June 6.
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