Are the media finally getting it?

[Jackson1999]

I was surprised to see two fairly balanced articles on guns and crime from two news sources that historically been all too eager to present only one side of the gun issue.

The first is from the Christian Science Monitor, "More guns equal more crime? Not in 2009, FBI crime report shows."

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2009/1223/More-guns-equal-more-crime-Not-in-2009-FBI-crime-report-shows.


The second is from the AP, which puts some historical perspective on the "more cops killed by gunfire in 2009" story.


http://www.kval.com/news/national/79131907.html

[no limit]

1. You can't possibly think that short term gun sales will also affect gun violance in the short term?

Other countries have less guns and as a result a lot less gun violance. Just because a bunch of idiots run out earlier this year to buy guns because they though Obama was coming after them doesn't really have any meaningful effect on the stats.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[eqfan592]

4. Claiming something as fact without providing evidence.....

...is not "info." That's what you've never understood, baldguy.

[baldguy]

5. See post #3 for an example of what I'm talking about.

[eqfan592]

6. Lol, oh really?

Asking him to provide evidence to back up his statement is an "example of what you're talking about?" I know you just HATE it when people ask you to back up your bull shit, bald guy, so you must hate it when people ask the same of others who share your warped opinions.

As for my statements about the UK, the point has been made about the UK and their combination of extremely strict gun control measures and high levels of violent crime many times here on this forum.

In case you missed it, here's a very good article.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

[GreenStormCloud]

9. Post #3 is a rational argument. Yours is mere sloganeering. N/T

[eqfan592]

3. Ummm, what?

Please provide evidence that nations having less guns also have, automatically, less violent crime? You should also provide evidence that the ONLY or even MAIN reason they have less violence is because of the fewer number of guns.

I think you'll find your statement isn't nearly as clear cut and true as you seem to think it is. Take a good, long look at the UK for a good example. Violence has many factors at play, and the prevalence of one particular implement that people may choose to inflict violence does not appear to be among them.

[no limit]

10. You really need me to provide you with evidance? Google would have helped you get this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Murder in the united states for every 100,000 people is 5.4. In the UK it is 2.0. Canada 1.8.

You can try to pretend this trend doesn't have anything to do with guns; I am simply poiting out the obvious to you. That countries with a lot less guns naturally have a lot less murders, and not by a small fraction.

And of course my larger point here is that judging crime stats based on what a bunch of idiots scared of Obama did is a little disingenuous.

[eqfan592]

15. This is not the original premise in the least.

You never mentioned anything about murders, simply violence (or, more specifically, gun violence) in your original posting.

Secondly, take a look at gun ownership rates in nations such as Switzerland, Canada and Israel. Not low by any stretch. Yet they have very low murder rates. Then there are nations with low ownership rates but high murder rates (such as Brazil and Russia).

Ultimately, you are attempting to demonstrate a correlative relationship without proving a causal relationship. It's causation that is the key, not correlation. There is too much contradictory evidence when running a comparison between gun ownership rates in various areas and their associated murder/violent crime rates to even point to a solid correlative relationship, much less a causal one.

This has nothing to do with "pretending" that these "trends" have nothing to do with guns. So far, you and others before you have totally failed to actually establish a causal relationship between firearms ownership and crime (you've even failed to prove evidence of a solid "trend"), which points to there being other far more important factors involved in the causes of crime than private gun ownership rates.

[TheWraith]

17. You know that Canada has a shitload of guns, right? Almost as many per capita as we do.

I dare say that you'd find a much greater correlation if you wanted to map the homicide rates of western countries to their prominence in the international drug trade. On that, we beat Canada and the UK all hollow.

[no limit]

18. Canada has a 3rd of the guns we do per capita, Just cause Michael Moore said it doesnt make it true

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership

But the point you make about it correlating to the countries in the drug trade is a good one, never really thought about it.

[taurus145]

20. There's the rub

never really thought about it

You need to start thinking.

[no limit]

22. Edit, wrong person. Sorry

[eqfan592]

23. Ummm, exactly what "shit" did he "make up?" (nt)

[no limit]

24. He didn't, mistake on my part. My apologies.

[TheWraith]

21. You should think about it.

First off, dueling sources don't necessarily mean one automatically wins out. I don't know how accurate the "Small Arms Survey 2007" is. Moore is usually pretty good about his sources, since he has to being a documentarian, but regardless: Canada is hardly the gun-free wonderland people claim it is.

But to the meat: the people shooting and getting shot in this country aren't a random cross-section of society the way you'd expect if guns really just caused random violence. In fact, the large large majority are young men from inner cities, raised in poverty, for whom drug running--and the gang lifestyle that comes with it--is seen as the only possible escape from an existence in poverty. We're one of the top consumer nations in the world for drugs, and we've actively gone out and created a lucrative and lawless black market for them with the ridiculous prohibitionist policies of drug war. No surprise then that we have more gangs delivering drugs, and fighting over the existence of their market, than any other country would except those even more involved in the drug trade: Colombia and Mexico.

Remember alcohol prohibition in the '20s? The prohibitionists insisted that if it were ever repealed, the murder rate would skyrocket. It didn't--in fact, it dropped by two thirds almost overnight, because ending the black market broke the backs of the gangs that controlled it. You want to eliminate violence in this country? Do something to end the drug war and combat poverty. If you look down that list of yours, Switzerland has a truly vast number of guns--and many of them are the fully automatic machine guns handed out like candy by the Swiss military. But they have next to no poverty, meaning no recruiting pool of people who have nothing left to lose.

[GreenStormCloud]

8. How about a 30 year span?

Over the past 30 years the violent crime rate in America has come down by about half, and is still trending downward.

Over the past 30 years about 100,000,000 new guns have been purchased by citizens, and more are being bought.

In the past twenty years, about four million citizens have gotten CCWs permits.

[no limit]

11. Which stats are you looking at?

Clearly not these ones: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

[X_Digger]

14. Try the FBI..

This link only covers 1989-2008, but you see the trends..

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_01.html

year   murder    violent crime  aggravated assault   robbery
1991   9.8       758.2          433.4                272.7
2008   5.4       454.5          274.6                145.3
2009*  -10%      -4.4%          -3.2%                -6.5%

* preliminary 2009 numbers here-
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/2009prelimsem/table_3.html

so 20 years, rather than 30

[benEzra]

12. Gun sales increased sharply in 1994 and haven't subsided much since.

Also between 1994 and 2004, there was a marked shift toward more modern-looking carbines (AR's, civilian AK's, Kel-Tecs) and smaller pistols (though the latter trend has reversed somewhat since 2004). Since 1994, the number of lawfully owned guns in the United States has increased dramatically, yet the crime rate did not increase.

The number of guns in the hands of the law-abiding does not necessarily correlate with the number of illegal guns in the hands of those prohibited from possessing them (hence the high rates of gun violence in D.C. and Chicago).

[no limit]

13. And that's fair enough, if you want to look at the stats for the past 15 years good

but judging something based on a year driven by political fear of Obama taking your guns is absurd.

I am a supporter of gun rights. But I can not pretend that the amount of guns we have in this country don't directly relate to the high murder rate compared to other stable western democracies. When there are 90 guns for every 100 households in the US buying more guns won't be able to push the crime rate much higher. But that doesn't mean that the amount of guns in this country don't directly correlate to the amount of murder we see.

[eqfan592]

16. It doesn't mean it does directly correlate, either.

Honestly, it's more fantastical to promote the idea of a correlative relationship between firearms and crime than it is to believe such a relationship does not appear to exist (and we aren't even touch on a the establishment of a causal relationship). You can't simply look at a couple of nations with lower crime and lower gun ownership and say with such certitude that there is a distinct correlative or causal relationship between gun ownership and crime rates. There's far too much contradictory evidence available that show factors other than the prevalence of firearms play much larger key roles in the creation of violence.

[taurus145]

19. "Less" and "fewer"

Please look them up and use them properly. (It's a pet peeve induced from cohabitation with a Grammar Nazi for many years.)

Now for something completely different.

How can you immediately discount this impact, or any impact for that matter, out of hand because of its relatively recent notice? If you do a bit of research, you'll find that this trend has been going for a while.

It is annoying when people flatly refuse to see obvious, statistic driven correlations between things simply because the end result came about, at least partially, because of a method, practice, or event with which they disagree, yet will scream, "Victory!" from the rooftops because of the sale or development of a single thing that works toward a project they hold dear.

[SteveM]

7. You may be right: CSM & AP are virtual house organs for the gun-controllers ...

The problem MSM has is holding onto an old shrinking audience while gaining, perhaps, a new one. In any case, they can't to it by preaching the same thing they used to. With regards guns and gun-control, they must realize that millions now use the I-Net to find other sources which DO NOT comport with the old view of MSM, places like DU Guns Forum. In short, they realize they have been found out. To pump the same old gas would only further discredit MSM when they can least afford it.