Two recent Gallup polls showed that there has been a remarkable attitude shift in America in regards to gun ownership.
1. Do you think there should a law that bans the possession of handguns?
76% oppose a ban on handguns, while 23% are for a ban. This opposition to a handgun ban is higher than ever polled.
2. Are you for or against a law which would make it illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles?
61% said they did NOT want an assault weapons ban; while 36% said they wanted the ban. Again, this opposition to a ban is higher than ever polled.
These polls show that we are winning hearts and minds for the long term, and that the concept of self-defense as a natural right has gained more followers.
The poll numbers nationally are important, because the Democrat party is now rolling out their plan to introduce total assault weapon bans at the State level--proposed recently in MA, MI and WA. The polls are ammo to refute these State level attacks.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...and those are pretty good odds.
Brett Maverick, gambler on TV (also used by Progressive leaders everywhere)
I don't think it is "us" winning, I think it is simply people observing the facts before them and coming to reasonable conclusions. 2+2=4, and guns are tools that are occasionally misused by scumbags.
The moments I was censored was the moment that I won. That's twice, now.Thanks jwbaker, et al, for my victories.
When people try to argue guns and murders with me, I give them this lil tid-bit:
You have a 0.00000143% chance of getting killed in a mass shooting.
While you have a 1 in 25 chance of contracting a lethal infection when in the hospital.
100,000 people die in the US, every year, from an infection they get while being at the hospital for something else. And that's just how many people die.
T-Rex wrote:When people try to argue guns and murders with me, I give them this lil tid-bit:
You have a 0.00000143% chance of getting killed in a mass shooting.
While you have a 1 in 25 chance of contracting a lethal infection when in the hospital.
100,000 people die in the US, every year, from an infection they get while being at the hospital for something else. And that's just how many people die.
Sounds about right.
Think of this. Most Americans will live their entire adult life without being a victim of violent crime.( I used to know a statistic, but it's too old to be really relied on.) Most people live their whole lives in this country that is said to be rife with "gun violence" without ever seeing anyone get shot, or even knowing anybody who dies of murder. Compare that to people dying in the hospital of an infection that they caught there. That's by no means scientific, but if you talk to people about their own anecdotal observations, they often see the underlying truth. The truth is, death by gun is something most Americans will only see on tv. Death from staph infection, not so rare.
I got into the spirit of arguing over in the Yahoo comments sections prior to their basic format being changed.
We've all seen the big pie-chart of how people die, and guns are teeny-tiny slice of that... but I wanted a different thing: # rounds which kill a person in the US / # of rounds fired.
In a best case scenario, the closest I got was an approximation for number of rounds purchased, and then I just had to assume that rounds-purchased = rounds-fired in a given year... IE; no ammo-hoarding.
Anyway, that was some time ago and I don't feel like trying to re-work the math. But I ended up with ~9 billion rounds manufactured in the US per year (or something like that), and in a year where the ammo shelves are empty due to panic buying, I assumed that all ~9 billion were fired. Then I figured the number of people killed by shooting, and it turned out that only 1-in-525,000 will end a human life.
The math is bad for a number of reasons, mostly due to assumptions that had to be made since there is no way to determine the number of rounds fired in a year. It seemed logical to base it off of either manufactured rounds, sold rounds, purchased rounds (which should be the same but isn't (??)) etc.
It was mostly an exercise for fun in that the data wasn't particularly useful, but still, it's telling... even despite the mathematical assumptions being made.
While I do agree with certain aspects of the hospital analogy/statistic, I don't care for that one at all... mostly because I don't find it analogous at all. For one, people who go to the hospital have something wrong with them first, and blaming a doctor for failing to adequately treat Stage IV pancreatic cancer is hardly logical. Second, medicine is necessarily hands-on, where as bullets-on-a-human is often either illegal, or is necessarily tied to an illegal act such as lawful self-defense. There are a number of other ways in which the two aren't comparable, but ultimately, if the thrust of the point is that what is perceived as safe is actually less so... and what is perceived as dangerous is statistically less so, then yeah... I get it. I won't use the analogy myself, but I won't refute the heart of it.
Anyway, just a couple of cents worth of contribution to a matter in which I actually did a minor amount of (what I think is) original statistic compilation regarding firearms.
---- ETA ----
I'm going off of memory from several years ago. I do NOT remember the specific math, but it wasn't 1-in-525,000 ... but it was something like that... 1-in-hundreds-of-thousands.
Feel free to quote that, but know that it isn't exactly correct.
My point is to make it clear that there are more important, and real, things to worry about than being a victim of a mass shooting.
As jlwilliams hinted to, the vast majority of people would never know of or hear of any being killed by firearms, if it wasn't for media. On the other hand, it's far to common to bump into an old friend, ask how an acquaintance is doing, and hear that they passed after a stay in the hospital. I can honestly say that within the past 10yrs, I know of about a half-dozen people that have died from a hospital born infection. Just this summer, my cousin contracted MRSA when he visited the hospital for a bee sting. He, then, spread it to his wife and 2 children. None of them died, thankfully, but the mortality rate is as high as 50%.
Maybe I should point-out that you are twice as likely to be killed by someone riding a bicycle then a gunshot.
Totally agree with your point. If a person is interested in minimizing their odds of premature external death (not a disease or organ failure), then it would only make sense to focus their attention on higher risk scenarios.
Total agreement.
We had to do a number of linear regressions for a statistics class, and I ended up doing some nonsense for calculating fuel-economy of "unknown Car X" if you knew several other data points about it... HP... curb-weight... number of cylinders... etc. To construct the model, I hand-jammed 35-40 other cars with those known variables into Excel, then built a confidence interval, blah, blah, blah. The punchline of the joke is that I could predict, with 95% accuracy, the projected fuel-economy of the professor's unknown (unknown to me) car within some tiny range.
Great.
What I wanted to do was to construct a linear regression of shooting victims. But the scope of that project would've been time-prohibitive. I would've included several data points from known shooting victims, then built a model to predict the effect of removing certain variables.
For example -- and I'm making up data here for the sake of discussion -- 94% of all murder victims know their killer's first and last name. 70% of all murder victims are killed between 3 PM and 3 AM. 80% of all murder victims have an arrest record. Etc, etc, etc.
Just utilizing the above three variables, a person who remains indoors from 3 PM - 3 AM... who has never been arrested... and who doesn't know a killer by name, has a 0.36% chance of being one of those 5-in-100,000.... or their practical murder rate would be ~ 0.018-per-100,000...
Keep in mind that I made up those variables, and if you can see the pattern developing, then you'll know that adding additional high-impact variables will only serve to reduce that effective murder rate for the average Joe Citizen.
I wanted to arrive at a particular predictive number which I could then match against the totality of solved murder cases. As in, how many people were murdered last year that did not know their assailant, had no criminal enterprise, etc... ? I realize that to an extent, it could easily look as though I'm "blaming-the-victim".... and to an extent, I suppose I am. But then, the odds that are being quoted of ~5-per-100,000 murder rate make it sound like we're all walking around with the same probability of being randomly murdered, and that just isn't so.
WHERE you go... WHO you know... WHAT you're up to... WHEN you're up to it... It's those variables that seem to have the greatest predictive power in determining whether or not you'll be a murder victim. And those variables are, for the most part, completely within your own control. The only one I'd give some pause to is the "Where" you go. If you're born into the projects of the most violent neighborhoods of Chicago, then in practical terms, you can "get-up-and-leave"... but that's not realistic. And this bears out the stats anyway -- even among the violent neighborhoods, if you check off just that one negative box but none of the others, you'll still have vastly improved your odds of surviving.
Two things: first, it's tempting to add the demographic of race, but you'll get a lot of "cross-pollination" with "who-you-know", since statistically, people tend to have friends of the same demographic.
Second thing: you get a lot of cross-pollination with arrest record, since a lot of the crimes that will get you killed tend to take place in the same crime areas and crime times.... you just don't see a lot of drive-by shootings in the rural area at 7:15 AM.
Ultimately the project was completely abandoned due to simple time constraints, non-specific resource constraints (mostly data), and the fact that -- at least to some degree -- other people have seen depth of this concept, and mined it sufficiently so that even if I did do the work, it would add very, very little to what they've already done.
At any rate, the police started looking at murder victims in places like Milwaukee, Chicago, or New Orleans, and they've already discovered stupefying trends: that 80% up to 90% had an arrest record... or were felons... or any of the other things that you would figure. The rest of the details kind of fail to the wayside, since realistically, a white person NOT interested in any criminal enterprise likely wouldn't go into the "bad neighborhoods" for any reason, let alone to randomly wander around past midnight. So when that does happen, it almost always ends up being such a small sample that it's scarcely more than either a statistical outlier, if not actual anecdotal evidence.
Still, if I were to try to ever take this concept out of theory-and-planning into an actual mathematical model, it would be simply to prioritize the weight of the variables. As in, "what's more important? What you're doing at the time of murder or where you're doing it? Who you know or when you get killed?"
That said, even without the math backing this up, I feel confident in saying that whether or not you're engaging in a crime is the single most important factor in determining if you get murdered. And because of that, almost all of the others become irrelevant... only because if you're not in the middle of committing a crime (or about to be, or just got done) then you probably won't be associating with a murderer, or around a murderer, or anything else that's likely to contribute to your untimely demise.
If it's not too late to have a point, then I would also say that because of this, and because of the profound effect that being honest has on your survival, the murder rate is essentially negligible as a variable in trying to live longer. I say that mathematically, not heartlessly. So yes, some honest, good people do die directly from violence, and I truly do empathize with them. But statistically speaking... get your flu shot. If you didn't do that, you have noroom to complain about anything gun-related, since an honest person is so much more likely to die from the flu than from a bullet.
I personally don't know anybody that wants to ban guns so I'm not sure who these people are. I don't know anybody thats a victim of guns. Every time there's a news story about a shooting it's the family shouting for gun control like that would have stopped what happened to there son being shot by a rival gang. They want legal gun owner's to suffer because there children get killed before they had a chance to kill someone themselves. It's a joke. My state banned assault riffles and mags over 10 rounds because somehow that's going to help. I can fit 10 10 round mags quite easy in my jacket pockets and go on a spree doing serious damage so nothing was accomplished other than making me a criminal if my high cap mags leave the house that I a legal gun owner purchased legally. I wonder if way back when people commonly carried there peacemaker openly did people feel unsafe and was the thought of an individual doing a killing spree even a worry.
I know people that want to ban all guns. Their heart is in the right place they're just either idiots, or they were raised with the incorrect belief that a guns only purpose is to kill people and killing people is bad, therefore guns are bad. I wish it were that simple that we could ban all semi autos and crime would just stop and we could trust our government to never become too corrupt.
300 blackout form 1: http://www.silencertalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=137293
5.56 form 1:
http://www.silencertalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=141800&p=955647#p955647
Without trying to insult you, Zombie1969, if you haven't heard of anyone expressing their desire to ban all guns, then frankly you just haven't been listening.
Add to this the silliness of the Wikileaks email where Clinton says that it's important for politicians to have two stances: a private one, and a public one. Crunch the numbers and you end up with a sad reality: whatever she says in public -- she means the opposite of it. So if she isn't saying she wants to ban guns, then she wants to ban guns.
That's kind of the thing with liars -- their words mean literally nothing.
