Gun Control is ridiculous

CFLarsen said:
Yes, you are. But that aside, it isn't a nice thought to think through, is it?
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I was pointing out the ludicrousness of the statistics.

And, of course, crime can go up again. It isn't a natural law that it will drop.
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No, but whatever is being done to prevent violent crime is obviously working, and it's certainly not by banning firearms.
 
Jaggy Bunnet said:
Who is "we" that have never done this?
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Read the whole of my post: I am talking throughout history.

Jaggy Bunnet said:
Then where is your evidence to challenge the default position in the US which is guns reasonably freely available?
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Does availability mean the default position? Because then, Creationism is the default position in some quarters of the US. A lot.

Do you really feel it is your task to prove Creationists wrong?
 
CFLarsen said:
Why?

Rights? Someone in the past said you have a right to X, and suddenly that becomes the default position?

When slavery was allowed in some states in the US, was that the default position? If slavery was allowed in your state, and you opposed slavery, do you think you should be the one arguing against slavery?

How can slavery ever be the default position?
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Slavery was the default position of American society in that time period. Some people came up and provided evidence that slavery was wrong. It was countered, but eventually the abolitionists won through. And, at one point of time, it was common knowledge that if blacks were freed, then blacks would overtake society and destroy it; hence, the idea of colonization, or sending all the blacks back to Africa, in Liberia. That didn't work out none too well.

Eventually the viewpoint that blacks should be freed altogether won through, namely through a change of feelings in the religious and throughout the Civil War.

Slavery is not the same as owning a firearm, however.. Slavery, by definition, involves the taking of freedom from another individual. That's by definition.
 
CFLarsen said:
Huh? Why are they ludicrous?
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Because I am not 180% likely to be struck by a car, nor am I 800% likely to be injured in my lifetime. Further, as mentioned earlier, those statistics change as you become more specific with individuals. C'mon, man, you're a self-proclaimed skeptic, act like it.

Guns are not related to gun crime?
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Are you purposefully not getting what I'm saying?

ALL violence is going down, including gun violence. <--- true.

This is not a result of gun bans. <--- True. No new gun bans have been set in place.

Therefore, crime is changing in the United States, but not as a result of gun bans. <--- True.

Wherein did I say that guns do not effect gun violence? I said that whatever is affecting gun violence (and all violence) in the U.S. in modern times is unlikely to be a result of a gun ban, as no heavy gun bans have been in place.
 
Lonewulf said:
That also means that I have an 80 in 10 chance of getting injured, period, or an 800% chance, if you start multiplying the chance by age.

...

I must be doing some bad math somewhere.
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Yes, you're assuming odds of 8:1 is actually 800% risk (impossible) when in reality it's 88% risk.
 
CFLarsen said:
Does availability mean the default position? Because then, Creationism is the default position in some quarters of the US. A lot.

Do you really feel it is your task to prove Creationists wrong?
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Whether or not I feel it is my task is not relevant to whether or not it is the default position.
 
baron said:
Yes, you're assuming odds of 8:1 is actually 800% risk (impossible) when in reality it's 88% risk.
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8:1

8:1 means "8 out of every 1", or 8 times in 1 instance (I.E., 800%)

800% of 1 = 8. 88% of 1 = .88, which is not the figure that I uncovered. If it was, then the rate of firearms assaults would have gone down proportinately.
 
Lonewulf said:
8:1

8:1 means "8 out of every 1", or 8 times in 1 instance (I.E., 800%)
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No it doesn't. It means 8 for every 1.

If there are 8 people are killed for every 1 that isn't, that makes 9 people in total.

Your chance of being one of the ones that is killed is therefore 8/9 = 88.8%
 
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baron said:
No it doesn't. It means 8 for every 1.

If there are 8 people are killed for every 1 that isn't, that makes 9 people in total.

Your chance of being one of the ones that is killed is therefore 8/9 = 88.8%
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Actually... I don't consider it a major point, but if it's an 88.8% chance that you'll be injured by accident, then the number of gun injuries goes down by nearly a power of 10 as a result, as I used the same process for them all. However, I didn't extrapolate "8 out of 1" from some website and then come to a conclusion, I did my own math to come up with the result, so I'm pretty sure that I know what I'm saying when I say "800%". However, let me try to go over it step by step, then I'll need to work on an essay for World Literature, due tomorrow (I got carried away with forum discussions. :( )

Chance of an injury by assault is 17 in 100,000, or %0.016. This is not adjusted for location, economic status, etc.

22 in 100,000 (including accidental injuries), if I read the survey right (there's a possibility I did not), That's a 0.022%.

Now, include basic firearms training, a non-alcoholic drug habit, lack of mind-altering substances taken, living in a safe neighborhood, not being a gangster member, etc., and the chances drop considerably.

Your chances of being injured, period, are nearly 1 in 10. This is nearly 1 in 4500 chance, if I did my math correctly. Once more, the latter is a general assumption, with no specifics such as age, race, disposition, location, whether you're in a gang or not, etc.
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Okay...

Your chances of being injured by accident is %9.1, I believe was the number I figured out.

Your chances of being injured by a firearm, by accident or on purpose, is %0.022.

Now, what I did was I assumed an average lifespan, and then mulplied the number by 80 (I believe). Obviously, the '1 in 10" I mentioned earlier is going to be off as a result... I rounded when I should not have. My apologies. I ran through that too quickly! Sloppy sloppy.

Okay, so I multiply the percentage chance by 80. 9.1*80 = 728%

80*0.022 = 1.76%

If I multiply odds... 1 in 9, multiply the 1 by 80: 80 in 9. Divide by 80 by 9, and you get 8.8 in 1. ... ? That can't be right. Can it?

1 in... uh... whatever 0.022% is. 4500! I divided 100 by 0.022 -- that gets me around 4500. However, that leads up to an 80 in 4500 chance, or an 8 in 450 odds, or 1 in 56 chance... which is about the same as 1.76%.

Naturally, estimates are not precise as I did some rounding.
 
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baron said:
Your chance of being one of the ones that is killed is therefore 8/9 = 88.8%
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Oh, you're also mistaken here: I meant non-fatal injuries, as I'm still working with the website that Darat posted. (http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html)

It only gives non-fatal rates, and in 2001 (I think). It's been 6 years since then, so crime rates have dropped since then. This doesn't involve your chances of actually dying, just being injured.

In that respect, being injured 7 times in your lifespan may seem about right. But obviously, it isn't true that everyone is going to be injured 7 times exactly in their lifetimes. I may indeed be injured 2 times, and you injured 12 times. (Well, okay, not you, 'cause you're not within the United States).
 
Lonewulf said:
Actually... I don't consider it a major point, but if it's an 88.8% chance that you'll be injured by accident, then the number of gun injuries goes down by nearly a power of 10 as a result, as I used the same process for them all. However, I didn't extrapolate "8 out of 1" from some website and then come to a conclusion, I did my own math to come up with the result, so I'm pretty sure that I know what I'm saying when I say "800%". However, let me try to go over it step by step, then I'll need to work on an essay for World Literature, due tomorrow (I got carried away with forum discussions. :( )



Okay...

Your chances of being injured by accident is %9.1, I believe was the number I figured out.

Your chances of being injured by a firearm, by accident or on purpose, is %0.022.

Now, what I did was I assumed an average lifespan, and then mulplied the number by 80 (I believe). Obviously, the '1 in 10" I mentioned earlier is going to be off as a result... I rounded when I should not have. My apologies. I ran through that too quickly! Sloppy sloppy.

Okay, so I multiply the percentage chance by 80. 9.1*80 = 728%

80*0.022 = 1.76%

If I multiply odds... 1 in 10, multiply the 1 by 80: 80 in 10.

1 in... uh... whatever 0.022% is. 4500! I divided 100 by 0.022 -- that gets me around 4500. However, that leads up to an 80 in 4500 chance, or an 8 in 450 odds, or 1 in 56 chance... which is about the same as 1.76%.

Naturally, estimates are not precise as I did some rounding.
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Your chances of being injured by a firearm, by accident or on purpose, is %0.022.
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So I presume the original figure was 22 in 100,000 for firearm injury, per year

So in 80 years,

80*22=1760 injuries can be expected, for which the odds are

1760 : 100000

So based on this your lifetime chance of firearm injury is

1760/(100000+1760)=1.73%

The reason you got 1.76% is that you forgot to add the 1760 to the divisor, because those 1760 injured are still part of the total number of people.

In low risk calculations this cause a small percentage error. In larger risk calculations, like the overall injury stats, you get totally wrong results, like 800%
 
Where are we getting these 8:1 numbers? If we are getting them from somewhere accurate, why are we limited it to assault? If we are limiting it to assault, why are we including all kinds of assault, not just with guns. The only place I see these number's coming from is the post at 1:48pm where lonewulf gives the chance of being injured in an assault at .016%, but I don't see a source.

There are 231,000 injuries or deaths a year from firearms. :http://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/pr...rms/index.html

This is the risk of being injured by a gun.

Roughly 231000 people out of roughly 300000000 are injured or killed by a firearm each year. Assuming even risk and a 70 year lifespan that's a .0539 percent chance over your lifetime. Upon recalclating this I realize I dropped a decimal place when I did this before.

You have to balance that by considering 62200 people use guns to defend against violent crime. That number gets cut by 2 thirds if you only count violent crime with armed criminals. But even using the high figure that's a .0145 percent lifetime chance. If we go with the low figure we get a .0051% chance.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt

This tells me that it is so staggeringly unlikely that you'll ever use your gun to defend yourself that you don't realisticly need it given that there's a 4 to 10 times higher risk of injury or death given the current level of firearm ownership.

eta:ok, link with new #'s posted while I was typing this. recalculating

ok, yearly chance for combined fatal and nonfatal gunshot injuries for the most recent years with an averaged population is (29569+69825)/[(296410404+293656842)/2]=.0003689041, arbitrarily rounding. If we're using an 80 year lifespan then we muliply by 80 to get .026951, which is a signifigantly lower figure than from the hospital source I used earlier. I'll accept this as the cdc is probably a more reliable source. This changes the odds to 2 to 5 times as likely to be injured by a firearm then as to use one in self defense. I'd still come to the same policy decision, but it's not quite as ridiculous to disagree given these numbers.

Anyone find a problem with the way I'm doing this?
 
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Working with the overall injury stats for that website, your chance of injuring yourself once in a lifetime of 80 years is

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv] 80*29,258,834 : [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404 =
2,340,706,720 : [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404=
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]2,340,706,720/([/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404+[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]2,340,706,720)%=
88.76%
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
 
quixotecoyote said:
Where are we getting these 8:1 numbers? If we are getting them from somewhere accurate, why are we limited it to assault? If we are limiting it to assault, why are we including all kinds of assault, not just with guns. The only place I see these number's coming from is the post at 1:48pm where lonewulf gives the chance of being injured in an assault at .016%, but I don't see a source.
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I posted the link, and the 8:1 was done with the mathematics that I used. However, I used it incorrectly, and I thank Baron for correcting my methods.

I posted a source up there previously in the thread. Here it is again:

http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html

From: http://www.cdc.gov/

There are 231,000 injuries or deaths a year from firearms. :http://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/pr...rms/index.html
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"Not found". Website link is broken.

This is the risk of being injured by a gun.

Roughly 231000 people out of roughly 300000000 are injured or killed by a firearm each year. Assuming even risk and a 70 year lifespan that's a .0539 percent chance over your lifetime. Upon recalclating this I realize I dropped a decimal place when I did this before.

You have to balance that by considering 62200 people use guns to defend against violent crime. That number gets cut by 2 thirds if you only count violent crime with armed criminals. But even using the high figure that's a .0145 percent lifetime chance. If we go with the low figure we get a .0051% chance.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt

This tells me that it is so staggeringly unlikely that you'll ever use your gun to defend yourself that you don't realisticly need it given that there's a 4 to 10 times higher risk of injury or death given the current level of firearm ownership.
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That's a lot more than the 12 factor that was touted about later. The numbers keep changing.

What are we talking about defending against, however? Does that include protecting against rape, for instance? And how do you account for all the numbers of incidents that may have been prevented thanks to the existance of a firearm?
 
baron said:
Working with the overall injury stats for that website, your chance of injuring yourself once in a lifetime of 80 years is

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv] 80*29,258,834 : [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404 =
2,340,706,720 : [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404=
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]2,340,706,720/([/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]296,410,404+[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]2,340,706,720)%=
88.76%
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Helv]
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
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My eyes! OMG my eyes!

Well, that works out then.
 
Quad4_72 said:
I have placed NO RESTRICTIONS on the right to bear arms.
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you have placed restrictions....no course attendance...no gun. How is this not a restriction?? Do people have to pass this course you advocate? Or can they turn up and sleep.

Believing that people should be more educated about their guns makes me a gun control advocate? Whatever helps you sleep at night.
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you are misrepresenting what I said.
Advocating gun controls makes you a gun control advocate. You can "believe" anything you like but you are advocating a control not a belief. No course...no gun. You are simply another Gun control advocate trying to push your gun controls as the most appropriate. Some other gun control advocates who want even less controls as you would describe you as anti-gun, you are just going to have to get used to it.
 
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