
Gun violence research - jobeirne
https://www.facebook.com/notes/steven-buss/gun-violence-research/10153868811660955?qid=6225394813009542563&mf_story_key=-4859608285680246835
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gravypod
Good work, more info definitely needs to be researched.

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buss
I (the author) cross-posted this to medium, since apparently comments on
facebook notes are not public: [https://medium.com/@sbuss/gun-violence-
research-f20b2adc18cb](https://medium.com/@sbuss/gun-violence-
research-f20b2adc18cb)

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hga
Here's my initial reply, especially since Medium looks really awkward for
commenting:

Add _McDonald v. Chicago_ , 561 U.S. 742 (2010) where the Supremes
incorporated the 2nd Amendment against the states, forcing Chicago and its
suburbs to allow gun ownership, and the case law WRT to states and the RKBA is
clear.

It’s very doubtful the number of households that own guns has decreased since
1960, when the latest round of gun control was just starting to get strong (I
came of political age in the late '60s, so I directly remember this).
Responses to anonymous telephone callers asking if you own a gun roughly
tracks how successful gun controllers are at the time.

When I did a back of the envelope calculation about the claims by the usual
suspects that existing gun owners were buying all the new guns as of late, it
would have us owning about $100K worth of them on average.

The increase in ownership for self-protection no doubt tracks the nationwide
sweep of “shall issue” concealed carry laws in the states starting with
Florida in 1986, which went from less than a handful to 42 now, covering most
of the population. If you don’t live in Illinois, this state level political
effort is is the single biggest change since 1968, and the biggest change of
the facts on the ground since the early 20th Century.

Without looking at [13], obviously you can turn around the implied causation
to “For every 0.9% of firearm homicides, there is a 1% increase of people in a
community owning guns.” Although simply being allowed to legally carry them
outside your home drastically increased their utility. Handgun sales in total
and of their type track this.

In the US, gun buybacks are an opportunity for savvy gun owners to sell junk
for more than it’s worth, and to work the line looking for valuable guns about
to be turned in for a nominal payment, and buy them for much more like what
they’re worth.

You no longer believe strongly that "Gun ranges have a net positive impact on
gun safety because inexperienced people are taught by people who know how to
handle weapons." and you're right from my anecdotal study. Going further, I'm
beyond amazed at how well poorly or not at all trained and experienced people
responsibly use firearms in self-defense. Chalk it up to centuries of
improving ergonomic design in guns, reaching perfection for handguns a century
ago, a healthy gun culture, perhaps even Hollywood (although the gun handling
on screen is generally awful), and informal training, which I've done my share
of.

"Has concealed carry successfully stopped shootings?" Well, it's certainly
stopped the wrong people from getting shot, now even in Chicago after the
Federal courts forced shall issue concealed carry on Illinois.

"Lock up your safety" laws like California's has definitely killed people. We
in the gun community of course encourage locking up most of your guns most of
the time, but I doubt you'll get good statistical evidence on anything about
this.

America has way too much "empty" space to make restrictions on using guns only
at formal firing ranges.

While I can't prove it to you (should you even believe my personal pledge?),
such restrictions, or an Australian style gun confiscation, would turn our
current cold civil war into a hot one, and a lot of people would die on both
sides. The most recent evidence for this is the small fractions of people in
the Bluest of Blue states of Connecticut and New York who registered their
evil "assault weapons" (a purely political term) after Sandy Hook inspired
legislation. If you can't succeed there....

ADDED: you have to be very careful interpreting the "research" some people and
outfits do. Best example is the infamous Kellerman study in the once
prestigious NEJM which, even before you get into all the lower level problems,
scores a "success" for a gun owner only as _killing_ a home invader. Needless
to say, out of the 2.5 or so million gun self-defense incidents per year, only
a small fraction even involve a gun being fired, let alone hitting, let alone
killing an assailant.

(As a rough metric some time ago but after trauma centers were established,
I've read that one handgun round into someone's torso has a 1/4th chance of
killing them. Mostly anecdotally, as many as 1/2 of all assailants stop
attacking after being hit once, even if the hit is not immediately disabling).

While I didn't look at all your sources, or closely at the ones I glanced at,
I didn't see any notorious howlers like Kellerman's.

ADDED: for someone apparently completely uneducated on the subject, you did a
_fantastic_ job for a few hours of effort.

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buss
Thanks for the reply and references, I'll try to integrate them into the post
soon!

~~~
hga
You're very welcome. Feel free to ask any other questions, I've been
researching this since the early-mid '70s when the gun press started realizing
the ATF was terrorizing the community.

Why? The ATF (BATFE) was in the Treasury until the creation of the DHS because
in 1934 the government felt a fiction of using its taxing powers was required
to make full auto and handgun ownership too expensive except for the rich,
requiring a $3,500 transfer tax in 2015 dollars. So it ended up with the same
bunch as Elliot Ness's G-men.

But a sad thing happened to them not long after the Gun Control Act of 1968,
sugar price supports made moonshine uneconomic, so they had all these agents
used to busting stills and all that brutal drama with nothing to do, so they
turned to this shiny, new law. Imagine a black legal gun dealer being coerced
into selling guns to what he thought was the mob on pain of his family being
killed, and Federal judges thinking this was just dandy....

Lots more where that came from, and for statistics, I'd suggest looking up the
surveys on self-defense uses per year. Critically, the first data set was
collected by gun controllers, and it demonstrated over a million uses per
year. But it didn't ask participants how many times per year---most will
probably be in high crime clusters---so later surveys by the pro-gun side,
along with I'm sure an increased population, came up with figures as high as
2.5 million times per year.

Ah, here's the statistic I came up with: in the same period where both the
population and number of guns owned by it increased by very roughly 50%, the
number of fatal gun accidents per year decreased by 25% (800 to 600). I've
heard this was largely due to mandatory hunter safety classes, but have no
data on that except that the classes did indeed come into existence. If I was
somewhat younger, I'd have had to take one when I retired to my home town back
in Missouri.

ADDED: one other statistic you won't hear elsewhere: 5% of the age eligible,
19 and above population of Jasper Country, MO, has Missouri's very expensive
concealed carry licence (note any state's will do). I gather we're not the
only locality with such numbers, and per
[http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/15/jeb...](http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/15/jeb-
bush/which-state-most-gun-permits/) Pennsylvania has an amazing 9% +
whatever's in the 18-20 age bracket. Florida has the most total, but with the
smallest youth percentage and larger population it's _slightly_ lower before
factoring in the 18-21 population.

Ah, I _knew_ there was a particularity good self-defense case in Chicago:
[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-
dr...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-driver-
shoots-gunman-met-0420-20150419-story.html)

Uber driver stops a mass shooting (in a city in which a few years ago he
couldn't own his gun, let alone legally carry it). That happens a lot, but it
doesn't get reported because it would counter the narrative and obviously
"citizen stops nutcase before he can shoot very many people" is much less
newsworthy than a lot of people getting shot in one incident.

