Deltoid

Orion writes:

Statscan tells us that of all violent assaults that are not immediately fatal your odds of survival are better if you are shot rather than stabbed (some people aren’t even immediately aware that they have been shot!). Knife wounds tend to be large, ugly and tough to repair ass opposed to neat little bullet entry wounds, depending on location, calibre and other factors..

Perhaps you could tell us more about what your source says and how it came to that conclusion.

I looked in Medline for studies on gun shot and stab wound mortality and it turned up dozens. There was a consistent pattern across different countries and wound locations — gunshot wounds were far more lethal. For example a study in The Journal of Trauma (36:4 pp516-524) looked at all injury admissions to a Seattle hospital over a six year period. The mortality rate for gunshot wounds was 22% while that for stab wounds was 4%. Even among patients that survived, gunshot wounds were more serious — the mean cost of treatment for these patients was more than twice that for stab wounds.

Repairing a large entry wound (like from a knife) or a small entry wound (like from a bullet) is not very difficult in either case. What is difficult is repairing vital organs. Large low-velocity things like knives tend to push them out the way, while small high-velocity things like bullets plow right into them.

C. D. Tavares writes:

Go check out the effect of your lovely gun controls on your suicide rate. Suicide by gun went down. Suicide by other means went up precisely enough to compensate.

Not true. See Am J Psychiatry 151:4 606-608 (1994).

Abstract: ” To assess the impact of the 1978 Canadian gun control law on suicide rates in Ontario, the authors compared firearm and non-firearm suicide rates for 1965-1977 with those for 1979-1989. There was a decrease in level and trend over time of firearm and total suicide rates and no indication of substitution of other methods. These decreases may be only partly due to the legislation.”

T. Mark Gibson writes:

As the saying goes, “If it saves only one life…”

I think that something like 1/6th of people who use guns in defense believe that they saved an innocent life by doing so. So even if we were to accept the gross underestimate of the number of times people use guns in self-defense, we could still be talking about over 13,000 lives saved each year by armed citizens.

Except that 16% of violent crimes do not result in the victim’s death. In fact, only 0.35% of assaults result in death (Kleck table 5.8). 0.35%*80,000=300 lives saved with guns each year. This is an overestimate since it assumes that guns are 100% effective and that all of the 80,000 crimes that guns were used to defend against were assaults when in fact some were robberies and burglaries (which have lower fatality rates than assaults). Correcting for these would give an estimate of more like 200.

The NCS undercounts crimes like domestic assault, so the 80,000 could be too low, possibly even by a factor of two. This possibility does not affect the estimate above, since the undercounting will cause a compensating overestimate in the lethality of assaults.

If we accept the well-supported estimate of 1,000,000 incidents where citizens use guns to protect themselves each year, we could be talking about almost 170,000 lives saved.

If this 1M estimate is true we cannot estimate the number of lives saved since we do not have enough knowledge of the nature of the incident to estimate the chance of death.

If Kleck’s latest results are are correct, and there are over 2.4 million incidents where people use guns defensively each year, there could be as many as 400,000 lives saved.

Reductio ad absurdum. Since 400,000 lives saved is a ridiculous number (roughly half of US households have guns — how come there aren’t 400,000 dead bodies amongst the half of the population with no gun access?) you have proved that some significant number of Kleck’s respondents did not tell the truth. Congratulations, Mark, I knew you had it in you.

If only 10% of the people who think they saved an innocent life were actually correct and we use Kleck’s latest estimate, it still leaves about 40,000 lives saved by armed citizens each year.

Which is also impossible.

Dennis O’Connor writes:

The issue of wether Dutch Naval Lt. Van Muers is actually a foriegn agent illegally operating under the guise of a student visa will be resolved by the FBI and State Department. It is not relevant to the charter of talk.politics.guns.

I had considered Dennis to be a paranoid loon or an agent provocateur, but two documents somebody emailed me have caused the scales to fall from my eyes. I now realize that Dennis is a true patriot who speaks the Truth. The first document, “The Protocols of the Elders of the Hague” is the Dutch secret plan for world domination. The second, “None dare call it Gouda”, shows how they are spreading their tentacles throughout society. Some highlights:

• the Truth about Dutch Elm Disease
• Tulips: genetically engineered to produce mind control drugs
• why the UN HQ is in New Amsterdam
• the Brady bill is really the Brajdy Bill and was translated from the Dutch
• 8086 architecture secret Dutch plan to cripple computer industry.

Don’t let Pim van Meurs, the Dutch James Bond, pull the wool over your eyes! Don’t wait till you hear the sound of wooden jackboots and the ominous shadow of a windmill falls across the land! Act now!

Dennis, you have my utmost support. Be warned: the State Department is riddled with Dutch sympathizers. Make sure that the person you talk to doesn’t have a name like “van Rijn” or “Rembrandt”.

P.S. See April 1973 “National Lampoon” for more details of the Dutch master plan.

Richard A. De Castro writes:

So, in addition to getting the (perhaps, perhaps not) Dr. Van Meurs thrown out of the country png (persona non gratia), which means that he would probably never (ever) be allowed back in, another tactic would be to get him banned from the NSF-net side of the internet.

The possibilities are endless.

All right!! Someone else who prepared to publicly come out against free speech in order to preserve our liberties. Dennis, you’ve started a movement!

I suggest we call ourselves CREEP - Club to REmovE Pim. Dennis can be president. I came up with a club song:

Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for banning Pim? D E N, N I S, C O N E R.

I had to change the spelling of O’Conner to fit the song, but maybe he could have his last name officially changed to match?

I came up with a better plan than deporting Pim: we should intern him and all other Dutch nationals and all of the gun grabbers. Pim will be laughing on the other side of his face when he’s in the concentration camp, chained up to Ann Landers and Sarah Brady.

The study found that having a gun in the home was not associated with any increased risk of non-gun homicide, only with gun homicide.

Dan Day writes:

Gun homicide in the home of the victim, Tim, which is what the study examined.

So now we have the totally unremarkable finding that if you get shot in your own home, there’s likely to be a gun in the home. And drowning victims are usually found near water. Big deal.

The study found that overall homicide was associated with gun ownership, not just gun homicide. There are two plausible mechanisms to explain this:

1. Guns make violence more lethal

2. People at risk of homicide acquire guns for defence.

If 2. is true we would expect non-gun homicide to be just as strongly associated with gun ownership as gun homicides are. It isn’t, which suggests that 1. is the more probable explanation.