[kenberg]

 PassedOut, on 2015-June-21, 17:51, said:

I am one of those "responsible gun owners" that he pokes fun at, but I laughed a lot watching his routine. I do like to go to the range with my sons when we get together, and we always have a good time.

On the other hand, we do have a terrible problem with gun violence in th US, and we've got to put the brakes on that somehow. Australia did have that problem, and they did manage to put the brakes on (and their government was conservative when they accomplished that).

Growing up, I had a shotgun. It came about like this. I was with my father and with his friend Len out for hunting. I was told to bring my bb gun but I "forgot" it. I knew I wasn't killing a pheasant with a bb gun and I was embarrassed to look as if I did not understand this. So I was given a gun, an old one of Len's, a 12 guage, and I was taught how to properly use it. I was 10, or maybe 11. It would absolutely have never crossed my mind to use this gun for anything other than hunting. That's the part that sometimes somehow goes wrong. I think a credible case can be made that, in fact, being given a gun early and being taught how to use it properly can be something of an inoculation against turning to guns improperly, but I dunno. Anyway, all of this was in 1950 or so. It was simply a different world.

[PassedOut]

 mike777, on 2015-June-21, 20:46, said:

1) what was the problem in Aust?
2) did they solve it?

This has never been a secret. This is what happened when Australia introduced tight gun controls.

Quote

What happened in Australia? Gun violence was bad. A decade of gun massacres had seen more than 100 people shot dead. The last straw was an incident at a popular tourist spot at Port Arthur, Tasmania, in April 1996, when a lone gunman killed 20 people with his first 29 bullets, all in the space of 90 seconds. This "pathetic social misfit," to quote the judge in the case, achieved his final toll of 35 people dead and 18 seriously wounded by firing a military-style semiautomatic rifle.

What happened next? Only 12 days after the shootings, in John Howard's first major act of leadership and by far the most popular in his first year as Prime Minister, his government announced nationwide gun law reform.

...

In the years after the Port Arthur massacre, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia fell by more than 50% -- and stayed there. A 2012 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University also found the buyback led to a drop in firearm suicide rates of almost 80% in the following decade.

[mike777]

I only wish posters would quote me in full and answer in full....silly

part answers are ok...this problem is tough

[hrothgar]

 mike777, on 2015-June-21, 22:19, said:

I only wish posters would quote me in full and answer in full....silly

I agree! "if so ok, if not sure ok..." brings such nuance to the conversation.
How dare anyone make an editorial decision to remove these lines.

Such are the dangers when we caste pearls before swine.

[billw55]

 PassedOut, on 2015-June-21, 22:08, said:

This has never been a secret. This is what happened when Australia introduced tight gun controls.

It is an interesting article. But is it conclusive? Looking just at the graph they present, one can reasonably argue that gun suicides were already trending down, and that gun homicides didn't move all that much if one looks at 1996 as an outlier.

[kenberg]

The article quotes Howard as saying "Today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate.".

Looking at the graph, this appears to be a bit of spin. Replacing "not only" wit "primarily" would appear to be right. Unless I am misreading the graph, I gather that the suicide rate was far higher than the murder rate. Looking at the graph, it appears that the suicide rate did indeed drop by about 80%. from (eyeballing it) about 3.1 per 100K to maybe 0.7 per 100K. It also looks as if the homicide rate dropped from 0.4 to 0.2 per 100K. This is good, of course. But the dramatic drop is in suicides.


Of course I am in favor of reducing the number of suicides. Nonetheless, I also favor being clear about whether the Australian actions have greatly reduced the number of people killing other people with guns or whether the actions have mostly been effective in preventing people from killing themselves with guns. For that matter, it would be interesting to know if reducing the number of gun suicides by 80% leads to an 80% reduction in the number of suicides., If you want to kill your neighbor, a gun can be useful. If you want to kill yourself, you can find many ways to do it with at least as much certainty of success as using a gun. Putting a gun to your head sometimes works. It also sometimes leaves you alive and paralyzed.

The article, and the quotation from John Howard. really do seem slanted. Whatever we argue, we want our arguments to stand up to scrutiny. Whatever we do, we want it to work. I don't own a gun and I strongly favor having more stringent gun laws. But I am skeptical about the article. Perhaps I in some way misread it. The way it appears to me, Australians were much more likely to kill themselves with a gun than to kill someone else, and the new policy has greatly reduced this self-killing, at least by gun.

Not that I would mind cutting the homicide rate in half.


Here is, in a nutshell, the problem: If i have a problem, it does not occur to me to solve that problem with a gun. That was true growing up, it is true now. There are places where this is not the case. I solve that problem for myself by staying out of such places. Problem solved, for me. But problem not solved for the country as a whole.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2015-June-22, 07:11, said:

The article quotes Howard as saying "Today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate.".

Looking at the graph, this appears to be a bit of spin. Replacing "not only" wit "primarily" would appear to be right. Unless I am misreading the graph, I gather that the suicide rate was far higher than the murder rate. Looking at the graph, it appears that the suicide rate did indeed drop by about 80%. from (eyeballing it) about 3.1 per 100K to maybe 0.7 per 100K. It also looks as if the homicide rate dropped from 0.4 to 0.2 per 100K. This is good, of course. But the dramatic drop is in suicides.

So why do you think he should have said "primarily reduced the gun-related homicide rate" if the bigger effect was on suicides.

Not also that at the time of the reform (the dashed line in the graph), the suicide rate was down to about 2.2. There was a significant drop-off right after, but by 2001 it looks like it was back to the same trend that was already in progress before the reform. Homicides, on the other hand, were pretty steady before the reform, then dropped a bit, but it wasn't until 2004 that they dropped significantly.

I think what Jefferies said in his act was that the number of mass shootings dropped to 0 after the reform. The effect on one-on-one shootings was apparently less dramatic, but still significant.

Quote

Here is, in a nutshell, the problem: If i have a problem, it does not occur to me to solve that problem with a gun. That was true growing up, it is true now. There are places where this is not the case. I solve that problem for myself by staying out of such places. Problem solved, for me. But problem not solved for the country as a whole.

It's not the reasonable people like you that we have to worry about, it's the crazy ones. Like he said, "they ruin it for everyone."

[kenberg]

While complaining about his phrasing, maybe I should have looked at my own. Maybe I try again.


The graph shows a dramatic drop in suicide by gun. Whether this means that there was a dramatic drop in suicides is not shown.

For homicides, the Australian rate of homicide by gun was low and is now lower. How this compares with trends in other countries I don't know.

At any rate, surely we in the Us could do better.

Why don't we do better? The point I was making when I brought my own safety was meant to be relevant to that. If I made a list headed "Things that present a danger to my well-being", the gun problem in the US would hardly make the list. It would come in well behind "snakes in the nearby woods". So the discussion tends to get monopolized by the very very uncompromising. There are the "pry it from my cold dead hands" folks. There are the people in the gun business. (Yes, I know there is some overlap here). And, on the other side, there are the peolpe who have no interest in hearing any argument why anyone anywhere should have a gun, or at least why the choice should be his. The result is that we do nothing, or at least we do too little.

[kenberg]

It gets interesting. Rates

It appears that the overall suicide rate in Australia has gone down substantially.
They break it into age groups and gender, but at teh bottom there is a total for men and a total for women.

Unfortunately the time span is from 1997 to 2013 but that still overlaps with the 1990 -2006 graph from the article on gun suicides

From 1997 to 2013 for suicides from all causes we see

Men: 23.3 to 16.4, a drop of 5.9 (per 100K)
Women 6.2 to 5.5. a drop of 0.7
men and women 21.9 to 6.8, a drop of 6.6.

Turning to the graph from the article, 1997 looks like maybe 1.7 or 1.8 . By 2006 it may have hit around 0.7 but appears to be leveling or perhaps, very slightly, rising. So the drop is about 1.

You can slice and dice these numbers in various ways, but it looks to me as if the overall suicide rate in Australia has been in substantial decline, and the suicide by gun rate in Australia has been in substantial decline.

Bottom line: I would be willing to provisionally buy the idea that laws that made suicide by gun more difficult has some role in reducing the suicide rate in Australia. i wouldn't stake my life on that being correct, but it seems likely. But other factors seem to have had an important role in reducing overall suicides in Australia.To get even a rough idea of how much of a role the new laws played in this would be, i think, very tough.

[barmar]

I'm not sure where, but I think I read that trends related to other forms of homicide/suicide did not change significantly -- so when guns became unavailable, perpetrators did not all switch to other weapons (undoubtedly some did, but not enough to make the gun ban inneffective).

And other than bombs and plane hijackings, there's pretty much no other type of weapon that can be used effectively in mass killings.

[MrAce]

You do not need big guns for home defense. A 12 gauge Shotgun is more than enough.

Here is a tip for cheap home security surveillance : Put an ISIS and/or Al Qaeda flag in front of your house, and your house will be 24/7 under surveillance/monitored by CIA- FBI-ATF-DEA and Homeland Security.

[billw55]

 barmar, on 2015-June-23, 08:55, said:

And other than bombs and plane hijackings, there's pretty much no other type of weapon that can be used effectively in mass killings.

Train passengers in Tokyo might disagree.

But in general, looking at frequency, guns do top this list by a wide margin.

[hrothgar]

 barmar, on 2015-June-23, 08:55, said:

And other than bombs and plane hijackings, there's pretty much no other type of weapon that can be used effectively in mass killings.

Tell that to a million or so Rwandan who were slaughtered with machetes.

If we want to go a bit further back, the mongols massacred 10s of millions of people. (You did NOT want to live in a city that fell to the mongols)

If you prefer to look at individuals trying to kill crowds:

Cars work pretty well, so long as you aren't that discriminating about just who you're going to kill.
Poison has the potential to be even better. (I'm surprised that no one has ever started dishing strychnine from a food truck)
There have been plenty of nasty mass killings involving arson.

[mikeh]

 MrAce, on 2015-June-23, 09:20, said:

You do not need big guns for home defense. A 12 gauge Shotgun is more than enough.

Here is a tip for cheap home security surveillance : Put an ISIS and/or Al Qaeda flag in front of your house, and your house will be 24/7 under surveillance/monitored by CIA- FBI-ATF-DEA and Homeland Security.

You'd also be dead very quickly, shot by a 'patriot'.

[MrAce]

 mikeh, on 2015-June-23, 10:00, said:

You'd also be dead very quickly, shot by a 'patriot'.

This ain't Canada Mike, we are civilized people here in Texas.

[barmar]

 hrothgar, on 2015-June-23, 09:47, said:

Tell that to a million or so Rwandan who were slaughtered with machetes.

A single person went on a machete rampage and killed millions of people? I doubt it.

"Mass killings" doesn't include when there are massive numbers of perpetrators (like an army or militia). It also doesn't include serial murders (e.g. the Unabomber). It's one person killing multiple people at about the same time, like Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon, and last week.

[kenberg]

Laws and attitudes interact of course, and somehow we have to change both. Take everyone's favorite example, George Zimmerman. What sort of moron follows someone around if he thinks that person is, or might well be, dangerous?

Answer: A moron with a gun who has bought into the idea that the gun will keep him safe.


I have known people like this, probably most everyone, at least here in the US, has known someone like this. They are by no means prepared to defend themselves without a gun and they way overestimate their ability to defend themselves with a gun. Even if they are successful in their defense they are apt to go to jail.

Me, if I saw someone who I thought was dangerous, maybe because I think in stereotypes, maybe because I know something about him, maybe a lot of reasons, I would not follow him. I sure as hell would not get out of my car and follow him down a path. Not carrying a gun makes you smarter. A guy carrying a gun does not have to act stupidly, but it seems to be a good deal more tempting.

I gave up hunting in my early 20s. I came to the remarkable conclusion that I was not really a re-incarnation of Daniel Boone and I looked a bit silly pretending that I was. And I am not Matt Dillon either. Not even Clint Eastwood.

As mentioned, many of the things in the comedy routine occurred to me and no doubt to others. A guy breaks into my house. I tell him to hold on for a bit while I go unlock my safe, get the gun out and load it. No, it doesn't work that way. Mostly if you really want to use a gun for protection you first have to load it and then go out and do something so stupid that you need to fire it in self-protection.

Anyway, we need to find some way to deal with this. Not for my safety, I can pretty much avoid the problem, but it can tear neighborhoods apart.

I'm off to the West Coast tomorrow, so do your best to work this out in my absence. I expect a full solution on my desk when I return.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2015-June-23, 13:36, said:

I'm off to the West Coast tomorrow, so do your best to work this out in my absence. I expect a full solution on my desk when I return.

A homework assignment during summer break? Sigh...

or

"What I did on Summer Vacation: I solved the problem of racial tension in America. Oh, I also went to the beach, that was fun!"