[SkepticX]

Originally Posted by Miisa

But is the answer to have people arming themselves order to make them feel more safe, when, in reality, it turns out they are more likely to be injured by their own weapon than have it prevent injury to them?

Whether or not that's actually true is highly individualized, and the research the idea is based upon is highly result-oriented. Protection or Peril: An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home by Arthur Kellermann, published in NEJM back in the '80s was the first big study to pose this claim ("big" in terms of perceived stature). It's based solely on deaths, as if non-kills don't count as self-defense, and as if suicides are pertinent to a tactical issue and a concern for all who would consider getting a gun. That's just not reality at all, and it accounts for well over 90% of the study's numbers. So it ignored any defensive gun use (DGU) that didn't result in death (a very high percentage unless you don't count presenting a firearm and getting the perpetrator to bug out post haste, which is the best scenario, or if you only count instances in which the gun is fired), and suicides accounted for the vast majority of it's mortality data. So well over 90% of the numbers are irrelevant to the large majority who might be considering a gun for self-defense.

The study was set up to produce the result it got, a result which has been dubbed the "43 Times Fallacy" by skeptics because the "finding" is that keeping a gun in your home is 43 times more likely to result in the death of you or a loved one (including friends/neighbors, and almost entirely meaning suicidal people) than it is to be used to kill a home invader (remember, scaring one away or injuring one without killing him doesn't count).

In short, it's a myth that keeping a gun in your home is more dangerous to you than to a "hot" home invader ("hot" home invasion meaning it happens when people are there in the home, which is the real issue). Burglaries when no one is present aren't going to result in a violence.

Unfortunately if you Google "43 Times Fallacy" you're going to get almost all pro-gun apologetics, but some of them are pretty critical, many others ... not so much. You have to go by the merits of the arguments rather than what you want to see (which isn't about you from what I can tell, but is pretty clearly about most participating in this thread).

Originally Posted by Miisa

And are there really that many psychopaths out there who enjoy hurting people and don't do crimes for gain? If so, that should be a major focus of preventative action now, so that there would be fewer of them 25 years don the line.

I agree. When did psychopaths come into play here anyway? In any case, if the violent crime statistics are significantly lower 25 years down the line it will then be less advantageous to own a gun for self-defense, but the risk still won't be anywhere near the dramatically inflated numbers put out by research that counts only deaths and/or includes especially suicides as part of a self-defense cost-benefit/risk-reward analysis.

Originally Posted by Miisa

And I think it is amazing naive to think that crime will somehow stop happening because of gun proliferation amongst the population ...

I do too. The idea makes no sense at all, unless you're talking about a fully militarized society, but even then you're going to have crime, just as there's crime in the military. No one's made this argument. Some argue that widespread gun ownership and carrying (packing heat, as the kids say) tends to make a society significantly less violent, but I'm not making that argument myself. I don't think it's an argument about reality, so in some versions of the theory it would work great, but just like political theory it's all well and good until people get involved. Then the model world of the theory just gets trampled under foot.

But yeah, it's an absolutely absurd idea that guns will fix society's problems. Guns are about self-defense in the mean time--choosing a weapon to manage a violent assailant rather than relying on the remedy of the social ails that produce the assailants. When someone is actually in the process of trying to harm or kill you, hoping that society gets past the whole violence thing before you're seriously hurt or killed isn't a terribly practical approach.

Originally Posted by Miisa

... as if reaching some sort of level of mutual assured destruction, if that could even be achieved.

Mutually assured destruction isn't the goal of self-defense. For some more naive and hostile types it may be the destruction of the violent criminal(s) (presumably) unfortunate enough to encounter them, but the rational posture is merely what self-defense implies. Once the violence has been ceased or prevented, you're done (which should generally include no longer being in the proximity of the violent criminal--i.e. if you can just bug out and escape, that's ideal, and that's the second most important ability in terms of tactical capacity behind area awareness).

Originally Posted by Miisa

My point is not that crimes will not happen if there are no guns, merely that lethal crimes are rarer. There will be robberies, there will be drunken fights, there will be feuding neighbours. But it will not be as easy to kill someone, be it in anger, fear or by accident, just because the gun was right there.

Yeah, I understood that, and that's what my response addresses. I never suggested you argued anything but that the proliferation of weapons creates an arms race, and that criminals won't need to engage in this arms race if others don't either. My response stands.

Originally Posted by Miisa

Oh, you are preaching to the minister's wife here. Half my life I have been surrounded by guns, married to someone who is an active shooter and a former professional. I agree that guns are NOT the problem. The attitudes that allow guns to be seen as "just a tool" are fine in a frontier society where snakes and bears and dragons lurk behind every bush, but when they are carried in plain view to intimidate fellow people because they are acceptable weapons to use against humans you are in a frightening place. That is the point a firearm goes from a "tool" to a "weapon".

I don't think you have to be in a frightening place though. A defensive weapon is a form of emergency equipment--a violence extinguisher. Just as with any other emergency equipment you keep it "just in case" and hope you never need it, and just like other emergency equipment you don't wring your hands over the possibility of needing it all the time. It's there and (ideally) you have a basic, functional idea of what to do with it, so in the unlikely event it's needed, you're as prepared as you can reasonably expect to be. With guns you can train to be more prepared, which is a good idea, but how far one takes that is a very individual thing. But as I expect you know given your experience, they're not the tremendously difficult to wield weapons many seem to like to think they are--they're very simple machines--not difficult to use at all (in principle or in practice--though when the psychology of actual violence comes into play that can change things dramatically in very individualized ways of course, but likely not only in the ways many will choose to presume).

Originally Posted by Miisa

Um, I can't vouch for the UK ...

My bad. I must have gotten something you posted mixed up with some UK types (or rather something you didn't post).

Originally Posted by Miisa

... but I understand it has a rather violent criminal subculture yet surprisingly few murders. Also, the violence doesn't seem to bleed over onto the general population as much as you might expect. I am in Finland, where there are statistically a LOT of guns, but they are seen carried by hunters (in the forest) or sports shooters (at the range), never in public, I had never even seen a gun until I was in my 20's. Any infringement, such as even displaying your firearm in an inappropriate place or storing them outside of a safe, will lead to at least fines and a loss of licences, and this is actually enforced, not just a lip service law. The gun culture in society is completely the opposite here to the frontier mentality, despite the numbers of guns and the proximity of wildlife. I believe Canada has a similar situation.
Laws have been tightened further due to unfortunate isolated incidents such as school shootings, but I think all reasonable people agree that having school personnel armed and thus risking turning any given classroom into a range is not the way to prevent such relatively rare occurrences.

Good stuff. Sounds similar to most of the US, actually, though I gather you don't have a prevalent fear of violent crime in spite of relatively non-violent society like we do. I guess your media is overall a hell of a lot more responsible and information rather than purely market driven. I'd also guess your society values the quality of information they consume in their media a lot more than pure entertainment, which is another significant difference. If I could take my friends with me I'd head for Scandinavia in a heartbeat, and I expect I'd have to do so gunless. That would be fine by me. I've given some thought to that, actually. The gun issue is something I've noted, but it's never been an issue in that consideration. The main problem is that I couldn't really get all of my friends and family to come along--and money of course. I think most of us have skills that would earn us the green light to immigrate.

Originally Posted by Miisa

This is precisely the corner you are in, painted there actively (and I think maybe intentionally) by certain interest groups.

I agree at least to a large extent. I think it's pretty much inevitable, but the NRA (et al) and the gun industry (branches of the same beastie) have just been dumping rocket fuel on the fire by the metric tonne.

Originally Posted by Miisa

And you know that guy desperate for a fix is going to rob someone to pay his dealer, is it really socially acceptable to just keep passing the victim buck to more vulnerable members of society? Is that really the broader plan, that everyone will need to be armed or assuredly be robbed? I mean, really, the lawless Wild West?

It's nowhere near as violent here at that seems to suggest, and no one is arguing that guns are the way to fix society's ails--they're about self-defense (and hunting and target shooting and such, but I'm not concerned with sport shooting here). Maybe you could rephrase that in a more clinical way? I'm not really sure what you're on about there. The basic idea is obvious of course, but there are a lot of unspoken premises in play, and it seems they're bringing you to argue about a society that doesn't exist here. We likely don't disagree here, but I can't tell--is your point perhaps a bit overstated there?

Originally Posted by Miisa

I know there are people who haven't fallen for the fearmongers and gun salesmen, who know that keeping the guy from robbing is better. Let him get help, or better yet, intervene ten years ago when he was still just a member of a risk group.

I'm confident the large majority of gun owners would agree that preventing violent crime from happening in the first place is far better than having to use violence in self-defense. Hell, even the NRA would. But I'd also argue, with few reservations, that most gun owners would also agree that gun ownership aren't a social program or a means of addressing the underlying issues, but rather in the context of self-defense, that's the limit of their effects--very individual and purely defensive (i.e. defense against violence).

Originally Posted by Miisa

Outsourcing ones' security to the government is a critical feature of all societies as they develop. An army rather than militia, police and law proceeding rather than witch hunts and lynchings, fines and incarceration rather than an eye for an eye.

It's a nice ideal, and most of us do just fine with that, but the police aren't there to protect individuals, they come by after the fact and try to prevent further crimes. That's great for society overall, but not for those who are, in fact victimized.

The fact is significant violent crime happens here. Most of us are at relatively low risk and area awareness and mobility can make it a lot less likely we'll be victimized (as individuals of course), but still the risk does in fact exist, we can't be vigilant all the time, we all make mistakes even when we're generally conscientious, and we all have to roll the dice we have (which we can manipulate to a significant degree, well pre-violence). More importantly in terms of this discussion though, the risk to individuals and society overall inherently imposed by gun ownership is very low.

The real issue is violent crime (and arguably suicide). Stupidity and carelessness and risky behavior all certainly play a role as well of course, but it's not reasonable to presume that we all take on the same degree of risk regarding much of anything as do the violent, the suicidal, the careless and the stupid. Those are valid issues for policy, but not a reasonable part of a personal assessment ... well, of most personal assessments anyway. If you're any or some of those things, or even all of them somehow, then you need to include that thing/those things in your own assessment. None of them are reasonably part of mine or of most peoples' however.

Originally Posted by Miisa

As for the thread title, I always read it as "Mormons with guns". Which would be actually interesting.

I frequently do the same thing.