of for God Sakes... Just look at this chart comparing gun ownership and gun homicides

[busterbrown]

to the rest of the world. How do you pro guners have the gonads to consistently sit in your homes and dispute these facts..The shit you come up with in order to make your case against control looks obvious and distorted..

Its hard to accept we live in the same world..

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list

[Skittles]

1. don't you get it? their fear and paranoia TRUMPS ALL

the occasional massacre is just collateral damage

[gopiscrap]

26. No it's fucking money (NRA, Koch Brothers etc) that bastardize the political process

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. We don't

And there is no communicating or changing views. The US is a very fractured society, as far as guns go, it does have a small, loud, scared, minority that does not live in the same reality the rest of us live in.

Some in this minority will pick up arms if their way of life is a threat. That I now believe.

But the short of it, is no, we don't.

[blue14u]

4. I know you are

right.. I don't want to live to see another massacre.

We must try again and again to change this...

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. That does not mean we should not try

They are a well armed, paranoid minority. Operative word, minority. But when talking to gun cultist we do indeed inhabit a different reality.

[blue14u]

7. Yes, we do need to try..

Please don't judge me for what I'm about to tell you...

I live in the south, not born here, but now I'm here.

Gun nuts rule here. When the battle for stricter gun laws was

being debated, I could NOT convince ONE person to at least

have better background checks. I also think an age limit for

when you can purchase one is a good ideal. How do we fight the

constitution, and people willing to die before they give up their gun, and the NRA?

We had what? 91% in favor last time and the congress said no.

They did not listen to us. Only when, (and this is a maybe), one of their family is involved

in homicide will it change one mind..

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. I know.

I just got the book reviewed here

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/14/1044801/-Book-Review-American-Nations

I thnk we do live in different "countries."

[blue14u]

9. I will bookmark it for later..

Time for sleepy town for me. Thank you for the link..

[blue14u]

3. I only saw a couple of places on the chart

where there are NO GUNS...

This issue has got to be taken care of here in America..

We are no longer safe from homicide

Its so sad... ..

[Recursion]

6. That's the interesting thing about regressions

If it were the guns driving it, by definition we'd be on that line; in fact we're far, far above it. If that linear best-fit is the actual relationship between guns and violence, it contributes very little to our murder rate. According to the international comparisons, if we get gun ownership as tightly restricted as France we still have far and away the highest murder rate in the world.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. If you restrict the countries to developed ones, the USA is the clear end of the line

Here's a chart of developed countries:



And with both axes in logarithmic form, so that we can easily read everyone else while keeping the US on the same chart:



So, among developed countries, there is a line, and the US is at the far end - high gun ownership, high gun homicide.

[Recursion]

11. Now, do a linear best-fit on those

The line hits our gun ownership rate at about 1.7, and we're over at 3.

Seriously. De-label the axes, hand this to somebody in the life sciences, and tell them the vertical axis is the independent variable (since we're saying guns cause murder, not that murders causes people to buy guns).

Her question will not be "why is that point so far up?" but "why is that point so far to the right?"

This regression does establish that gun ownership is correlated with homicide rates. It also shows that our homicide rate is too high to be explained by our gun ownership rate, nearly double, going from the same data.

EDIT: also, there are pretty visibly two skews there, and we're between them. I don't know how to read that other than that it's odd.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. If you want a linear trend, it is roughly y = 24x + 10

(with, as I plotted, y as guns/100). Or, as a power relationship, y = 33x^0.75

putting in the US homicide rate to those, you'd expect an associated ownership rate of about 81 (linear) or 75 (power relationship). Or, going the other way round from the ownership rate as you did, a gun homicide rate of 3.3 (linear) or 3.7 (power relationship).

I have no idea how you arrived at '1.7' - just fitting a straight line to your screen, I suppose, which would not be very accurate, especially if you're trying to use the non-log chart to get a linear relationship. I had the advantage of getting a computer to use the actual data.

The data actually shows the US gun homicide rate is a little bit below the trend, given the number of guns. We can argue about the countries I included as 'developed' - I put Macedonia in, for instance, because it's been pretty quiet there, but left Serbia out, because I thought that might contain Kosovo in the figures, which could be a bit of a special case. Perhaps the smallest countries out to be left out as too random (I left out Iceland because in the year given, it had 0 gun homicides, which would screw up any attempt at a logarithmic scale; I did put in Singapore, but now that I look, I see that it only had 1 gun homicide, so I expect their 'rate' varies widely from year to year)

[Recursion]

14. I still have the dataset I used somewhere if I can dig it up (this is from last year)

I used Octave, FWIW....

[BainsBane]

13. Their rights trump our dead

They celebrated a speech in which a veteran argues for his gun rights by arguing--in CT--"My rights trump your dead." He then went on to talk about how the dead children of Sandyhook were't nearly as important as he was because he had served in the military. His army buddies had died in Iraq and Afghanistan for the right to bear arms (talk about delusion ) and that was infinitely more important than dead children. Parents didn't have the right to organize politically in the memory of their children. They should shut the fuck up because they just don't count. His rights trump their dead.

The gungeon crowd proclaimed it as the best speech on the Second Amendment in history. It conveys their ideology perfectly. Our lives and those of our children are inconsequential. The only thing that matters is their guns, and the hell with everyone else. Big fucking deal if people die. It does't matter because we don't count. All that matters is their guns.

That more than anything else conveys exactly what the Gungeon crowd is.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1172&pid=126744

[marew]

15. OMG!

Your post actually made me sick. I am nauseous. I cannot comprehend anyone saying those things let alone celebrating them.
Whomever made that speech is delusional and has lost all perspective. With that loony idea that 'my gun is more important than your children', he is one of the last people who should have a gun. These people are extremely dangerous.

[BainsBane]

16. Indeed

You can search for it in the gungeon. It was probably three or more months ago, but it left an impression on me, that's for sure.

[pintobean]

17. Since you're making the claim

you should provide links. Telling others to do a search doesn't cut it.

Your reply here doesn't give me a lot of confidence in that being an accurate description:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023672445#post175

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. The link is there now, and BainsBane's summary looks pretty accurate to me (nt)

[dreamnightwind]

18. The way to stop this

is to give poor black people as many guns as they want, same for hippies, give firearms away as the bonus gift for making your 100th purchase of medicinal cannabis. Unemployed? Getting foreclosed upon? Firearms for you. Recently incarcerated? They get one too.

Do this, and TPTB will pass restrictive gun legislation quicker than you can say Weathermen.

I don't advocate this policy, just saying it would certainly work. The NRA and the good people behind Stand Your Ground legislation don't want "those people" to have guns.

[telclaven]

20. Not very familiar with the history of the NRA, are we?

Might want to look it up before passing judgement on what the NRA would say about handing guns to 'those people'. You might be unpleasantly surprised.

[truebluegreen]

22. Just out of curiosity, what do you think

the "history" of the NRA has to do with the reality of what it is now?

[tblue37]

24. When the Black Panthers wanted to exercise their right to own guns,

because they felt (quite reasonably) that their communities needed protection, they became the object of intense LEO and federal scrutiny.

[bluedeathray]

19. I'm not disputing those facts.

I just believe that cherry picking statistics and overlooking at least some reality doesn't lead to a real solution.

How many millions of guns are illegally on the streets?

How much psychosis is induced by chemical or sociological means in America?

I believe in better data tracking/registration. I also believe that we need to invest in serious research into the mental states of killers.

But if you expect gun owners to give up their means to defense while those other real problems exist, you're going to hit a wall of protest.

This is an American problem. Comparing data with the rest of the world proves what? That we have a problem?

No shit Sherlock.

[Laelth]

21. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be.

Our 2nd Amendment is both a blessing and a curse ... but it is still the law.

-Laelth

[sufrommich]

23. Its sickening. I can't believe the amount of people who

will continue to believe the fantasy that it's anything other than our lack of gun control.

[libodem]

27. There is a current

Article floating around about the differences in the conservative brain wiring and ours. They are hot wired for fear. They are naturally irrational.


Look at those goobers in the House of Representitives. FFS.

[Iggo]

28. American Exceptionalism.

Boo-yah!

[geomon666]

29. We're just fodder for bullets at this point n/t