Somebody came up with this variation to an old saying: Guns don't kill people--gun owners do.

[NobodyInParticular]

Hearing this I scratched my head and wondered about the truth of this. Anybody have an idea how many deaths, intentional as well as accidental, were the results of gun shots from legitimate gun owners as compared to deaths by the guns of gun thieves?

[The Magistrate]

1. You Change the Terms, Sir

Adding 'legitimate' alters the phrase appreciably.

Since there are roughly twice as many suicides by gun as homicides by gun, you face heavy sledding in any case, in trying to press a line that 'legitimate' gun owners put few lives in danger --- they certainly endanger their own lives.

[NobodyInParticular]

5. On the contrary,

My hunch is that the majority of gun deaths result from bullets coming from weapons of legitimate gun owners, whether fired by themselves or by their family members.

[PoliticalBiker]

12. Family members vs. Theives

Just because it's a family member doesn't mean they aren't a theif.
Sandy Hook was a family member that stole his mothers' guns.

[JoePhilly]

15. But I thought guns were supposed to deter thieves?

[PoliticalBiker]

31. According to the NRA

But, like the republicons, no evidentiary proof to back up the claims

[quaker bill]

22. Sir, I think I would not question the legitimacy

of a person with a gun in his/her hand pointing in my general direction. In this case, I think possession is a tad more than 9/10s of the law, sir. However they came to possess it, the fact that they have control of it and can pull the trigger makes them legit enough for me.

[Kalidurga]

2. Change it to people who are in the possession of a gun..

Doesn't really roll of the tongue, but it is accurate and it eliminates the need to distinguish from the purchaser whether legal or not and a person that might have borrowed or stolen the gun.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. ATF says only 10-15% of guns used in all crimes are stolen.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/guns.html

[rightsideout]

4. Then many gun owners kill themselves

Most gun deaths are suicide.

I imagine many of those fatalities are gun owners or family members.

[NobodyInParticular]

6. I wonder if there is info available on how many

of the shots that have taken lives came from guns owned by members of the NRA?

[JoePhilly]

16. That would be an interesting stat.

[JDPriestly]

7. K&R

When someone says "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." We should immediately say, "Guns don't kill people. Gunowners kill people."

Agreed. True, people can kill people without guns, but when it comes to gun deaths, gun owners and people who get their guns from gun owners are the ones who kill people.

[awake]

8. It is not the gun it is the bullet

We may have a right to bear arms but the constitution say nothing about bullets. Since it is the bullet that does the killing what about focusing on regulating the sale of bullets.

[zipplewrath]

9. Bullets are "arms"

As many folks on the other side of the issue will point out to you, when the colonials said arms, they also meant small cannon and shot. It's what the British were looking for in Concord.

[JoePhilly]

17. So let's use the commerce clause and regulate their sale and purchase.

The 2nd amendment does not say you can "buy and sell" arms. It says you can "keep and bear" arms.

We should be able to regulate the sale and purchase.

[zipplewrath]

19. We can

And we do. We need to do so more aggressively.

We should probably start with size and velocity, and move on to those specifically designed to pierce body armor.

[JoePhilly]

20. YUP ... and I'd add "kill potential".

What you do is define a specific space ... a kill zone.

And then you measure how many people a given weapon, with a given set of ammo, can kill in a specific amount of time.

An AR-15 with ammo X, can effectively kill N people, within a Y radius, in one minute.
A standard revolver, with ammo X, can effectively kill N people, within a Y radius, in one minute.

How fast a weapon can kill, using specific ammo, in one minute, over expanding ranges of fire.

Make something like this an objective measure ... and then draw the lines.

In what home defense scenario do I need to be able to kill 100 attackers in under 1 minute, from a range of up to 50 yards?

[zipplewrath]

25. Sawed off shot gun

It's very ironic, but along the line of what you are saying, I've had several "combat specialists" suggest that the best "home defense " weapon is the sawed off shotgun. Technically a short barreled shotgun with a pistol grip. It has a very short effective range. It won't particularly penetrate walls or doors with any lethal velocity. And one doesn't have to be very accurate. Plus, it will tend to stop the forward motion of an attacker. Make this the technical standard for home defense weapons and measure everything against that. Because the flip side of a such a weapon is that it is LOUSY for mass killing.

[JoePhilly]

26. I like it. I think wepaons experts could develop a set of objective

measures.

The gun-absolutists use what I'd call the "pluto problem", or the "penguin problem".

Every classification system has a pluto or a penguin. An object that doesn't not fit perfectly into any single class.

Pluto, which was a planet for all of by life, was recently downgraded to "dwarf planet" status. Meanwhile penguins tend to be one of the odd variations of birds that don't fly. But they have enough in common to be classified as birds.

No classification system is perfect because in the end, the classification is different from the actual instance objects. Its a way of understanding many items.

The gun nuts try to use the inherent ambiguity in classification systems as a way to deny that any classification system could be constructed.

But clearly it is doable, humans have been building very effective classification systems for a very long time. And yes, while sometimes there are anomalies, those become recognized exceptions, and you then determine a reasonable approach to dealing with the exception.

[otohara]

10. Wise Words from Ozzy Osbourne

If guns don't kill people, why do we give people guns when they go to war?
Why not just send the people?

1998

[DallasNina]

13. People could kill people without guns

But guns couldn't kill people without people. What is the common variable between these two equations?

[otohara]

14. Okay DN

what ever you say.

[JoePhilly]

27. The number of dead people is the dependent variable.

So, one person, without a gun, can't kill 20 people in one minute. They might be able to kill 4 or 5 in a minute (like Chuck Norris would given the opportunity), but the others will probably escape.

However, armed with a gun, or better, an AR-15, Chuck can kill lots and lots of people in that one minute.

So what we see here is that the number of people killed is heavily dependent on the weapon used.

Our goal here is to reduce the number of people killed quickly by an individual. The weapon they have is what will determine the number of dead people.

[FleetwoodMac]

11. Based on CDC's 2010 report, Deaths: Final Data

♦ Deaths from accidental discharge of firearms: 606 / 0.2%
♦ Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms: 19,392 / 6.3%
♦ Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms: 11,078 / 3.6%
♦ Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent: 252 / 0.1%

• Injury by firearms 31,672 / 10.3%

Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/deaths_2010_release.pdf


♦ One ATF study found that over 10,000 crime guns traced in a year were connected to gun shows – about 30% of all crime guns traced that year.

Source: http://gunvictimsaction.org/fact-sheet/fact-sheet-gun-show-loophole-arms-criminals/

[JoePhilly]

18. How many by terrorist attack?

Currently, we have about 3,000 gun deaths a month. That is the equivalent to a 9/11 every month.

We passed LOTS of laws for that. Even started an unneeded war.

[JDPriestly]

21. Good point.

[lancer78]

24. Don't you mean about 1,000 a month?

The 19,000 who commit suicide are going to kill themselves with or without a gun. Considering the huge amount of firearms in this country, 11,000 a year is a very low number.

[NobodyInParticular]

30. Don't mean to be a stickler, but

suicide by gun is so much easier because it can be executed by the flick of a wrist, or better, by the twitch of a finger. Other forms, like slashing wrists, crashing a car off a cliff or poisoning stretch out the time frame of the process so that a lot can happen to keep the suicide from being completed. In all these alternatives the would-be suicider has potentials of indecision or factors of luck working against his plan that would be highly unlikely with a self-inflicted shot to the head or the heart.

[FleetwoodMac]

29. A valid argument

[Cactus Jack]

23. A subtle flaw

Sometimes, as in Sandy Hook, it isn't the owner of the gun who does the damage.

If you were to leave your car running with the keys in the ignition and a drunk were to take it and cause multiple deaths you would be prosecuted, leave your gun loaded in an unlocked drawer and you're good to go.

[kestrel91316]

28. No one is allowed to research that data, so no one knows. Gun nutters and the NRA want us

kept in the dark about it.

But teh Evil Obama is trying to change that with his Evil Executive Orders.