Research is unnecessary when writing an anti-gun column.

[friendly_iconoclast]

Examples given in indents:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/01/12/bay_state_sanity/

Home / News / Local / Mass. Brian McGrory
Bay State sanity
By Brian McGrory
Globe Columnist / January 12, 2011

....In Massachusetts, he wouldn’t have, not legally. In Massachusetts, he wouldn’t have been able to buy the high-capacity magazine that allowed him to fire 33 bullets from his Glock 19 in one swoop, because it is illegal, unlike in Arizona.....
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
It was illegal back in 2000, as well- but that didn't stop someone with one in MA from killing even more people than Loughner did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakefield_massacre
______________________________________________________________________________________________________


....Massachusetts law requires a prospective gun owner seeking a permit to apply to the local police chief, complete a gun safety training course, and submit three letters of recommendation....
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

No, the city of Boston does, the state does not. And in too many locales, a sufficiently large campaign donation will eliminate the need for most pesky requirements
___________________________________________________________________________________________________



....There’s more. Massachusetts then requires all guns to be registered in a state database;...
__________________________________________________________________________________

No, it doesn't. Any guns someone owned prior to 1994 are not required to be registered, and those moving to MA with guns do not have to register them.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

.... Arizona does not. Massachusetts requires all guns not in the immediate control of their owners to have a safety lock; Arizona does not.....
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

That's irrelevant. Loughner was actually "in the immediate control" of his gun, hence not violating MA law
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

....Back in 2004, the US House failed to extend a decade-old, street-proven ban on assault weapons, which would have continued to outlaw, among other things, the magazine that was used in the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords.....
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

No such proof has ever been given, and those magazines made beforehand were still legal to sell and own.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________


....“The system is too lenient,’’ Davis said. “If you pick up a gun, you need to be held seriously accountable for that. I mean some really serious time. This is up to the Legislature.’’....

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Why bother? You can have three life sentences and still get paroled:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/01/14/brother_of_killer_gave_robbery_tips_prosecutor_alleges/
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[frazzled]

1. And yet statistics show: AZ #5 in gun deaths; MA #50

Yes, statistics are a tough thing. See Firearms Death Rate per 100,000 (most recent) by state:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000

[slackmaster]

2. Yet DC which has very strict gun laws is #1 by a wide margin

Imagine that.

[frazzled]

3. The only aberration on that chart: NY, IL, MA all at bottom of death rates

All have stricter gun laws.

Admit it, your argument did not hold.

[friendly_iconoclast]

6. Care to discuss the actual OP? Or Maryland, for that matter?

Massachusetts also has better education and health care, and a higher per capita income than Arizona.

[DrDan]

4. not surprising - DC is mostly urban

[friendly_iconoclast]

8. And Chicago has a higher murder rate than the next city in size, Houston.

Are gun laws responsible?

[frazzled]

12. Do not compare cities, with their dense populations, to states

States pass laws. The highest gun rates per capita occur in the Western and Southern states, with the laxest gun laws; the Northeast, with its more urban populations in general, is at the bottom.

As I pointed out in another thread trying to make the same kind of specious pro-gun arguments using VT (lax gun laws), a whole host of states, including MA and NY have fewer gun deaths per capita.

Alaska is #2 for gun deaths in the nation.

Facts support gun laws.

[friendly_iconoclast]

15. I compared two megacities *with each other*. I daresay that's fair

It would seem prohibitionists have given up on defending cities with both high crime rates and restrictive gun laws.

Now we are apparently to look only at the murder and crime rates of states.

[hack89]

35. Cities are where the murders are concentrated

trying to ignore inconvenient data?

[DissedByBush]

37. Obviously we need to get rid of cities

That appears to be the common denominator for murder, not guns.

[MannyGoldstein]

18. NYC's murder rate is less than half of Houston's

So what were you trying to prove?

[friendly_iconoclast]

21. It's not gun laws, it's poverty, overall crime, and the corruption level of local government.

[slackmaster]

14. So the problem is really people

Not gun laws.

[DrDan]

34. obviously if the guns were simply lying around on the floor, we would have less crime involving guns

[Warren Stupidity]

36. DC is also the only city on the list.

Imagine that.

[krispos42]

32. How is the overall homicide rate?

And "gun deaths" includes suicides, which account for about 60% of "gun deaths".

It ain't better in Massachusettes if they've replaced guns with baseball bats

[lawodevolution]

5. Facts, research, scientific and intellectual integrity and honesty work against gun control

This is why they use lies, ignorance, deception, and sensationalism. Many of them know they are wrong based on the data but they view that their gun free utopia will be violence free (like gun free Nigeria) and the ends justify the means.

[Katya Mullethov]

19. Poor paranoid little nebbishes , nobody want to take your pop guns away

AAAAAAAAAAAAAhahahahahahahahahahaha !

Quite the roiling cauldron of piss and vinegar we ended up in this week eh ?
And it will all show up in Google searches for a long assed time .

[old mark]

7. What is really apalling to me is when supposed "liberals" are so adamant

about taking the rights of others, and in effect making choices for them...If people are so convinced they should be controlling the lives of others, they should be republicans, and go hang out with the teabaggers.
You are all free to not own guns if you don't want too, just as I am free to choose to own them.
Run your own lives and leave others to run theirs.

mark

[MannyGoldstein]

9. I believe a license is needed for all firearms in MA

From: http://www.goal.org/newsarchive/2008republicanstory.html

"Also, it is false to state that it is “generally illegal to possess a firearm without a license.” There is no “generally” about it, it is an unlawful act."

As to the rest of your piece: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Taking strong steps to stop bad uses of guns will never guarantee that they will never be used improperly, but it sure seems to have given our Commonwealth a very low gun death rate.

I like living in a safe state.

[friendly_iconoclast]

11. The fact remains Manchester NH is demonstrably safer than Fall River and New Bedford

All are about the same size, and all are economically depressed.

I leave it to the non-New Englanders to figure out which two of these three cities have stronger gun control laws...

[MannyGoldstein]

17. got a link?

Please include population density. That correlates highly with gun death rates.

[friendly_iconoclast]

20. Yes. the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. Found here:

(2009 is the latest complete year)

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

Uniform Crime Reports

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States.

Other annual publications, such as Hate Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, address specialized facets of crime.

Special studies, reports, and monographs prepared using data mined from the UCR’s large database are published each year as well. In addition to these reports, information about the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), answers to general UCR questions, and answers to specific UCR questions are available on this site



http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_08_ma.html

MASSACHUSETTS
Offenses Known to Law Enforcement
by State by City, 2009

City Population #of violent crimes

Brockton 96,471 1,194
Fall River 91,901 1,086
New Bedford 92,621 1,184

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_08_nh.html

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Offenses Known to Law Enforcement
by State by City, 2009

City Population #of violent crimes

Manchester 108,671 537



Personally, I'd say it's more a matter of poverty than gun laws...

[MannyGoldstein]

23. but what about gun deaths

Those could be fist fights.

[MannyGoldstein]

24. Gun death rate in NH is about twice that in MA

MA = 3.1 per 100,000, NH = 5.8

However, MA has 3x the murder rate, 2.6 per 100,000 vs. NH's 0.8.

So, it looks like almost all the firearms deaths in MA are due to homicides, while in NH there's about 6 people killed with guns by accident for every one person killed on purpose.

Wow.

I guess having lots of guns around results in a lot of accidental deaths.

[friendly_iconoclast]

25. OK, where are you getting the data on the rate of deaths by gun?

And check this out:

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html

Murder
by State, Types of Weapons, 2009

The first number is population (2009 Census Bureau estimate), the second is the # of all murders, and the third is murders by gun:

NH 1,324,575 10 4

VT 621,760 7 0

MA 6,593,587 169 93

Note that Vermont has a slightly higher murder rate than New Hampshire (but still lower than Mass.)- but none were committed by gun in 2009, in the state with the laxest gun laws in the country.

And the percentage of murders committed with a gun in MA (ca. 55%) is only a little bit higher than that of NH (40%)

[MannyGoldstein]

26. Here's the source:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000

Vermont has three times the rate of firearms deaths as does Mass.

[friendly_iconoclast]

27. That might be due to suicides. VT was ranked #15 in '07, MA ranked #47:

Figures are from 2007, the latest I could find:

http://www.afsp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&page_id=05114FBE-E445-7831-F0C1494E2FADB8EA

Mission and History
Mission
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is the leading national not-for-profit organization exclusively dedicated to understanding and preventing suicide through research, education and advocacy, and to reaching out to people with mental disorders and those impacted by suicide.

(ranking, state, total suicides, state population, rate)

15 Vermont 89 620,748 14.3
29 New Hampshire 158 1,312,256 12.0
47 Massachusetts 516 6,467,915 8.0

[MannyGoldstein]

29. Guns make suicide easier, too

And most suicides are by gun.

So, it would still reinforce my basic point that more guns = more deaths (even if they're not accidental).

But I've just had a glass of wine, so I'm now officially safer behind the wheel than I am on a spreadsheet - so no more stats for me tonight.

[friendly_iconoclast]

30. Not in countries like Japan and some European nations. They have higher rates than the US

[friendly_iconoclast]

31. In fact the US is 19th out of the 33 OECD countries rate's of suicide:

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


Suicides per 100,000 people per year: Rank , Country, Year of Data, Males, Females, Total
1. Japan 2007 35.8 13.7 24.4
2. South Korea 2006 29.6 14.1 21.9
3. Hungary 2008 37.1 8.6 21.5
4. Slovenia<5> 2008 32.1 7.9 19.8
5. Finland 2007 28.9 9.0 18.8
6. Belgium 1999 27.2 9.5 18.2
7. Switzerland 2006 23.5 11.7 17.5
8. France 2006 25.5 9.0 17.0
9. Austria 2007 23.8 7.4 15.4
10. Poland 2006 26.8 4.4 15.2
11. Czech Republic 2007 22.7 4.3 13.3
12. New Zealand 2007 20.3 6.5 13.2
13. Sweden 2006 18.1 8.3 13.2
14. Slovakia 2005 22.3 3.4 12.6
15. Iceland 2007 18.9 4.6 11.9
16. Canada 2005 17.9 5.4 11.6
17. Portugal 2004 17.9 5.5 11.5
18. Norway 2006 16.8 6.0 11.4
19. United States 2005 17.7 4.5 11.1

[Straw Man]

33. Same data...

...he references in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x360735

He is totally misreading the data. For one thing, he is claiming that a 3.1/100,000 rate for all firearms deaths and a 2.7/100,000 rate for all murders means that "almost all the firearms deaths in MA are due to homicides." This is a fundamental misreading of the data. His other conclusions are similarly flawed.

[RSillsbee]

10. No research needed

Just scream "well regulated militia" at the top of your lungs

[Upton]

13. Long on emotions, short on facts..

that seems to become a hallmark of the anti gun crowd..

[jody]

16. And uninformed anti-gun people seem to post on the Internet although ignorance is a curable disease

but stupidity is a terminal illness.

With the Internet available, why do so many fail to treat a curable disease and remain ignorant of the simple fact that self-defense is a personal responsibility?

Should we require people to pass a basic test about natural, inherent, inalienable/unalienable rights before they are allowed to vote?

[friendly_iconoclast]

22. The first step is to seek out accurate information about gun crime. There is a good source for that:

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. They go back to 1960, and are available online:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

Uniform Crime Reports

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States.

Other annual publications, such as Hate Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, address specialized facets of crime.

Special studies, reports, and monographs prepared using data mined from the UCR’s large database are published each year as well. In addition to these reports, information about the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), answers to general UCR questions, and answers to specific UCR questions are available on this site....

[friendly_iconoclast]

28. And it turns out that Massachusetts has a higher violent crime rate than Arizona!

I also included the other New England states, plus New York:

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_05.html

Table 5
Crime in the United States
by State, 2009

State, population, #of violent crimes, rate


MA 6,593,587 30,136 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 457.1

AZ 6,595,778 26,929 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 408.3

The others, by descending order:

NY 19,541,453 75,176 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 384.7

CT 3,518,288 10,508 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 298.7

RI 1,053,209 2,660 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 252.6

NH 1,324,575 2,114 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 159.6

VT 621,760 817 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 131.4

ME 1,318,301 1,579 Rate per 100,000 inhabitants 119.8

[shadowrider]

38. Dude

Don't you know the FBI/DOJ stats aren't good enough? If you want accurate stats, you have to go to the VPC/Brady Campaign.

:sarcasm: