If guns kill people

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Do cars drive drunk?

Do pencils misspell?

Do shoes kick people?

Do belts give spankings?

Do matches commit arson?

Guns are killing machines. They are inherently violent and immoral. They are devices that make it extremely easy to kill very quickly and efficiently. This is NOT something that serves any positive purpose. This is something that is a causes tremendous problems within society. The point: Giving people free and easy access to killing tools is like putting boxes of rat poison, or even bottles of sleeping pills into play pens. It is NOTHING BUT a recipe for disaster that could be EASILY avoided otherwise by simple good sense (i.e. eliminating them, their sale and manufacture, ownership,etc.) WHY would anyone want to make killing EASY and efficient? Doing this is insanity. For this reason the flippant assertion that guns are completely neutral, and that people should have free access to them, is really disingenuous and offensive.

Guns are killing machines. They are inherently violent and immoral. They are devices that make it extremely easy to kill very quickly and efficiently. This is NOT something that serves any positive purpose. This is something that is a causes tremendous problems within society. The point: Giving people free and easy access to killing tools is like putting boxes of rat poison, or even bottles of sleeping pills into play pens. It is NOTHING BUT a recipe for disaster that could be EASILY avoided otherwise by simple good sense (i.e. eliminating them, their sale and manufacture, ownership,etc.) WHY would anyone want to make killing EASY and efficient? Doing this is insanity. For this reason the flippant assertion that guns are completely neutral, and that people should have free access to them, is really disingenuous and offensive.

The point is you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis without looking at the benefits. So what are the benefits of guns? Well, how about two lives saved by DGU[1]s for each life taken by a CGU[2]? Don’t believe me? Well, here are the facts.

According to the Kleck-Gertz study from the early 1990s, there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million DGUs annually. Now there are a lot of people out there who deride this number as ludicrous. They’re unable or (more likely) unwilling to accept that Dr. Kleck is not a shill for the Gun Lobby™. This, despite the good doctor disclosing in his 1997 book Targeting Guns (quote from GunCite.com):

The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

But skeptics will always be skeptical and antis will always prefer their own “reality” so let’s go ahead and throw the K-G number out in favor of a more conservative one.

Let’s use the numbers from the study which was commissioned by the Clinton DoJ shortly after the K-G study came out (to refute the K-G numbers maybe? If so: Oops!). That study, conducted by Drs. Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig (who both have a long record as very strong proponents of very strict gun control) concluded that there were 1.46 million DGUs per year.

I imagine that some may find even this lower number dubious, probably preferring to rely on the numbers from the National Crime Victimization Surveys which show between 50,000 and 100,000 DGUs per year.

Unfortunately for those hopeful doubters, the way the NCVS is structured means that it seriously undercounts the number of DGUs. I’ll let Tom Smith explain:

First, it appears that the estimates of the NCVSs are too low. There are two chief reasons for this. First, only DGUs that are reported as part of a victim’s response to a specified crime are potentially covered. While most major felonies are covered by the NCVSs, a number of crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief are not. DGUs in response to these and other events beyond the scope of the NCVSs are missed.

Second, the NCVSs do not directly inquire about DGUs. After a covered crime has been reported, the victim is asked if he or she “did or tried to do [anything] about the incident while it was going on.” Indirect questions that rely on a respondent volunteering a specific element as part of a broad and unfocused inquiry uniformly lead to undercounts of the particular of interest.

There’s another problem with the failure to directly inquire about DGUs: the DGU question is only triggered by someone saying they were the victim of a crime. If someone came towards me with a knife saying “Gimme your wallet,” and I put my hand on my weapon and replied “I don’t think so, Skippy,” causing the assailant to retreat, was I actually the victim of a crime?

Before I started researching these issues I would have told the NCVS interviewer that no, I hadn’t been the victim of a crime so they never would have learned of my DGU.

So to try to figure out how many lives were saved, I turn once again to Kleck and Gertz’s article Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun[3]. They found that 15.7% of people involved in a DGU believed that they “almost certainly” saved their life of someone else’s.

That might strike some people as an awfully large percentage, but if you take into account the fact that most locales regard the mere act of pulling a gun as using deadly force and combine it with the fact that most places also require someone to be in “reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm” before he or she can lawfully use deadly force, the number seems more feasible.

In addition to the “almost certainly” pool, The K-G study also found that 14.6% of respondents believed that someone “probably would have” been killed if not for their DGU.

Because I want my numbers to be distinctly conservative let’s say that 9 out of 10 of the “almost certainly” folks were wrong, and let’s say that 99 out of 100 of the “probably” people were also incorrect. That means we can state with a fair degree of certainty that at least 1.716% of the 1.46 million DGUs saved a life.

Doing the math that translates to over 25,000 lives that are saved annually by guns.

So we’ve determined that at least 25,000 lives per year are saved by DGUs, and according to the CDC, between 1999 and 2009 there were an average of 11,800 gun-related homicides annually, which means that for every criminal homicide with a firearm there were more than two lives saved by DGUs.

Keep in mind, however, that this statistic is completely irrelevant since the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right — subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.[4]

Here's a fun little piece:

Guns are killing machines. They are inherently violent and immoral. They are devices that make it extremely easy to kill very quickly and efficiently. This is NOT something that serves any positive purpose. This is something that is a causes tremendous problems within society. The point: Giving people free and easy access to killing tools is like putting boxes of rat poison, or even bottles of sleeping pills into play pens. It is NOTHING BUT a recipe for disaster that could be EASILY avoided otherwise by simple good sense (i.e. eliminating them, their sale and manufacture, ownership,etc.) WHY would anyone want to make killing EASY and efficient? Doing this is insanity. For this reason the flippant assertion that guns are completely neutral, and that people should have free access to them, is really disingenuous and offensive.

Oh, please. It's semantics, or something. Disingenuous BS for sure - arguing in bad faith.

Someone without a gun who wants to kill is going to have a much harder time killing people (or anything) than someone with a gun. There's a whole load of social/economic/cultural stuff, sure.

The sole reason for the existence of guns is to kill, and perhaps make up for some sort of lack. Seeing as it's usually men waving the guns around, maybe some sort of mass counselling/testosterone boost/penile enlargement program would sort all this out.

The sole reason for the existence of guns is to kill, and perhaps make up for some sort of lack. Seeing as it's usually men waving the guns around, maybe some sort of mass counselling/testosterone boost/penile enlargement program would sort all this out.

If I have a knife I can cut you a piece of cake or stab you,I'm what's evil not an object.

Sometimes, killing is the right thing to do. Also, guns can be used for sport and very often are. I live very near a gun club. No human being has been shot by a gun where I live (a city of about 50 thousand) in about ten years (excluding suicides). In fact, it could be more than ten years.

Also using the fact that most gun owners are men is not relevant to whether being allowed to own a gun is a good thing or a bad thing.

Many gun owners are women. Not most, but many. I do not think hormone levels would be correlated with gun ownership...I think cultural associations or circumstances would make more sense. For example, I think people in Montana would be much more likely to own guns than people in London, but I don't think the men or women of Montana are more likely to have hormone problems.