Guns and 2nd Amendment continued: open carry backlash?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

39 minutes ago, alguien said:

Hell, I would love to see any kind of neutral Federally-funded study done at all. The fact that Congress has prevented the CDC from doing so with threats to cut funding is one of the most ludicrous and shameful things I've ever heard of.

I was about to type this nearly word for word, so thanks for saving me the time.

[Free Northman Reborn]

Well, Wikipedia summarizes the available information on this issue probably as well as one could hope to find in one place. According to Wikipedia:

Quote

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary wildly, depending on the study's definition of a defensive gun use, survey design, population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Low-end estimates are in the range of 55,000 to 80,000 incidents per year, while high end estimates reach of 4.7 million incidents per year. Discussion over the number and nature of DGU and the implications to gun control policy came to a head in the late 1990s.^[2][3]

Estimates of DGU from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than those from other studies. A 2000 study suggested that this may be because the NCVS measures different activities than the other surveys do.^[4]

The National Self-Defense Survey and the NCVS, vary in their methods, time-frames covered, and questions asked.^[5] DGU questions were asked of all the NSDS sample.^[6] Due to screening questions in the NCVS survey, only a minority of the NCVS sample were asked a DGU question.^[7]

Lower-end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, which estimated approximately 55,000–80,000 such uses each year.^[8][9]

Another survey including DGU questions was the National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, NSPOF, conducted in 1994 by the Chiltons polling firm for the Police Foundation on a research grant from the National Institute of Justice. NSPOF projected 4.7 million DGU per year by 1.5 million individuals after weighting to eliminate false positives.^[7] Another estimate has estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.^[1]:65[2] 

End quote

So, whichever way you look at it, the number of non-suicide gun deaths per year is significantly lower than even the lowest of the above estimates for defensive gun usage, in the order of 13000 non-suicide gun deaths per year in 2013, also as per Wikipedia. So you have anything between 80,000 and 4.7 million defensive gun uses per year, at the cost of 13000 gun homicides per year.

 

EDIT

Furthermore, around 50% of homicides affect the 13% black population of the USA. So if you are a white gun owner, a representative study of your risk of death by gun would result in a significantly lower risk than for the population as a whole -which is heavily skewed upwards by the much higher incidence of gun deaths in the relatively small 13% subset of the black population. So your personal risk assessment would result in a significantly lower figure than that of the average calculated for the whole country.

Which is very relevant to your individual decision making process.

 

 

[Kalbear]

Gotcha, fnr. So you would logically support every black person openly carrying and having a gun of some kind then?

[Kalbear]

Also why is the cost of 20k suicides per year not factored in?

[BloodRider]

1 hour ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Well, Wikipedia summarizes the available information on this issue probably as well as one could hope to find in one place. According to Wikipedia:

Quote

<snip>

That tells us nothing on how to enact effective policy.  You are conflating "Defensive Gun Use" (a loaded term if I ever heard one) with "I would have died were it not for a gun" (a concept fraught with bias anyway).  The two are not the same.  

The 4.7 million defensive gun uses per year is particularly stupid.  It is a self reporting survey, which is about the same reliability as an internet survey.  But just to prove a point, according to that survey 34% of the time a gun was used in self defense, the offender was committing a burglary. So according to their own estimates, in 1992, a gun was used by defenders for self-defense in approximately 845,000 burglaries. But guess what!  There were fewer than 6 million burglaries in 1992.  There are other examples where their results just do not match reality.  (One particularly illustrative example is they survey responders claim they shot over 200k offenders in their DGU.  Yet in 1992, there were barely 2k GSW's that were unexplained or not resolved.  Basically these guys think they are Marshal Dillon, and they are more like Commander McBragg.)

So what would be more effective is to get out police reports involving weapons discharged, or sighted, and go through those.  I do not see where that study was ever done.  Even then, you would still not really get at if the gun actually saved a life.  That's a little more tricky, but this would come closer.

Here's a good number.  The FBI estimates the number of justifiable homicides as running about 400 / year.  Still doesn't take into account if the killer could have survived the situation via other means, but it gets a hell of a lot closer to an accurate estimate. 

Here's some more numbers that show that a mere 0.8% of violent crimes and 0.1% of property crimes are instances of DGU.  That is based off crime reports, not calling up some numb-nuts and asking how big his dick is.  Now that still doesn't tell us if the DGU was appropriate, or justified, but it does show how seldom people even have the opportunity to use their gun in defense when they are a victim.  

As for your edit, do you even realize you are asking that studies "adjust for co-founding variables?"; because you declaimed it as magical thinking earlier.

[Free Northman Reborn]

Bloodrider

If the vast majority of defensive gun uses where a shot was not fired are never reported, crime stats will not pick those up. Also, we are arguing from vastly different philosophical points of view, to the extent that it becomes almost pointless to continue the debate. You obviously come from the position that gun use is only justifiable if it prevents a victim dying, whereas many, many gun rights activists come from the position that it is entirely justifiable to use a gun in defense of your property, not just your life.

So in your frame of reference, a defensive gun use that did not demonstrably save the life of a victim, is irrelevant, whereas to millions of Americans defensive gun use is worthwhile in a much broader range of circumstances.

As I said, our positions are just too far apart to result in any useful outcome from a never ending debate.

 

 

[BloodRider]

1 hour ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Bloodrider

If the vast majority of defensive gun uses where a shot was not fired are never reported, crime stats will not pick those up. Also, we are arguing from vastly different philosophical points of view, to the extent that it becomes almost pointless to continue the debate. You obviously come from the position that gun use is only justifiable if it prevents a victim dying, whereas many, many gun rights activists come from the position that it is entirely justifiable to use a gun in defense of your property, not just your life.

So in your frame of reference, a defensive gun use that did not demonstrably save the life of a victim, is irrelevant, whereas to millions of Americans defensive gun use is worthwhile in a much broader range of circumstances.

As I said, our positions are just too far apart to result in any useful outcome from a never ending debate.

And if the vast majority of UFO abductions and anal probes never leave a mark, then medical exams won't pick them up either.

Anyways, no matter what you think my position is, it is not an excuse to ignore the information as presented. 

 

All I am asking is that you compare apples to apples.  If you want to compare defense statistics to total gun deaths, then you should compare justifiable gun deaths to total gun deaths.

If you want to discuss gun defense of any crime, then you need to look at total crimes, which is what the second chart looks at.  And btw, it doesn't even discuss if the use of a gun was justifiable.  It just shows that a direct comparison of crimes to how the victim responded, they used guns 0.8% of the time.   One can assume the number of justified uses of guns has a cap of the number of times guns were actually used.

What you would have us do is compare crimes where the victim used a gun (aka DGUs) to crimes where someone died, which makes the numbers nice for you, but is not an apt comparison.

[Free Northman Reborn]

11 minutes ago, BloodRider said:

And if the vast majority of UFO abductions and anal probes never leave a mark, then medical exams won't pick them up either.

Anyways, no matter what you think my position is, it is not an excuse to ignore the information as presented. 

As for your "worship of adjusting for confounding variables", my issue was not with the concept thereof, but rather that the authors of the study did a piss poor job of doing that "adjustment". As they admit themselves, under the limitations of their study. To quote:

A number of study limitations deserve discussion. Our control population was more unemployed than the target population of Philadelphians that it was to intended to represent. Although we did account for employment status in our regression models and our control population was found to be representative of Philadelphians for 5 other indicators, having a preponderance of unemployment among our control participants may mildly erode our study's generalizability. It is also worth noting that our findings are possibly not generalizable to nonurban areas whose gun injury risks can be significantly different than those of urban centers like Philadelphia.⁶⁴

Certain other variables that may have confounded the association between gun possession and assault were also beyond the scope of our data collection system and, therefore, were not included in our analyses. For instance, any prior or regular training with guns was a potentially important confounding variable that we did not measure and whose inclusion could have affected our findings (although the inclusion of other confounding variables possibly related to training may account for some of this unmeasured confounding).

We also did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault. Although our long list of confounders may have served to reduce some of the problems posed by reverse causation,⁶⁵ future case–control studies of guns and assault should consider instrumental variables techniques to explore the effects of reverse causation. It is worth noting, however, that the probability of success with these techniques is low.⁶⁶

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[BloodRider]

40 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

As for your "worship of adjusting for confounding variables", my issue was not with the concept thereof, but rather that the authors of the study did a piss poor job of doing that "adjustment". As they admit themselves, under the limitations of their study. To quote:

A number of study limitations deserve discussion. Our control population was more unemployed than the target population of Philadelphians that it was to intended to represent. Although we did account for employment status in our regression models and our control population was found to be representative of Philadelphians for 5 other indicators, having a preponderance of unemployment among our control participants may mildly erode our study's generalizability. It is also worth noting that our findings are possibly not generalizable to nonurban areas whose gun injury risks can be significantly different than those of urban centers like Philadelphia.⁶⁴

Certain other variables that may have confounded the association between gun possession and assault were also beyond the scope of our data collection system and, therefore, were not included in our analyses. For instance, any prior or regular training with guns was a potentially important confounding variable that we did not measure and whose inclusion could have affected our findings (although the inclusion of other confounding variables possibly related to training may account for some of this unmeasured confounding).

We also did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault. Although our long list of confounders may have served to reduce some of the problems posed by reverse causation,⁶⁵ future case–control studies of guns and assault should consider instrumental variables techniques to explore the effects of reverse causation. It is worth noting, however, that the probability of success with these techniques is low.⁶⁶

End quote

Yup.  That's great science work on their part.  Acknowledge the limitations of the conclusions you can draw, and suggest further studies.

Now show me where they discuss how they didn't adjusting for confounding variables on all that other shit you brought up, that you said invalidate the study.