Monday, December 23, 2013

Who gets shot?

The Orlando Sentinel has an interesting survey of who gets shot in Florida, based on emergency room visits:

4 in 10 in ER, hospital after being shot are gun-accident victims, Florida data show

As the story goes on to demonstrate, "accident" is hardly the right word. More usually, it is the result of moronic irresponsibility. As the NRA likes to say, guns don't kill people, responsible gun owners kill people.

Sometimes themselves.

(Darwin Award alert; the 2013 winners are out:
Here Is The Glorious Winner:
1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.)

The Sentinel's examples are not nearly so edifying. The paper starts with the boy who was playing basketball while his "friend" was "playing" with his .380-caliber pistol.  The boy, now 17, is paralyzed from the ribs down.

There's a cost of an armed society that you will live a loooong time without ever hearing about from the gun nuts.

Well, except this:

Marion Hammer, former president of National Rifle Association and the group's chief lobbyist in Florida, said she was wary of the Florida numbers because gunshot victims sometimes lie about how they were hurt. Data from hospitals, she said, may be unreliable.
While data from Marion Hammer's butt is totally OK.

The Sentinel did not bother to record the number of gunshot victims who were shot by proud Florida gun nuts who were either standing their ground or fighting off Obama's jackbooted thugs because, you know, there aren't any unicorns. Really. There aren't.

UPDATE

From my son-in-law (a military man), two links about guns and gun nuts.The second one raises urgently my earlier question about how one recognizes a responsible gun owner.

Obviously, it cannot be done.

UPDATE 2

Then there's this:

A 14-year-old Colorado girl was shot and killed by her stepfather early Monday morning after he mistook her for a burglar entering their house.
As commenter Katina Cooper mordantly puts it, "The NRA is getting an early Christmas present."

15 comments:

  1. As is often the case, we draw exactly opposite conclusions from the data. If 100% of all weapons injuries and deaths were accidents, I would conclude that there's absolutely no case for limiting use.

    After all, pretty much 100% of table-saw injuries are accidents, virtually 100% of automobile deaths and injuries are accidents, the vast majority of burns are accidents, yet no-one in their right mind would suggest outlawing tools such as table saws, automobiles, and fire.

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  2. Damn few table saw injuries happen to bystanders. And you are assuming a point not in evidence, that firearms are useful tools. Certainly for the uses claimed by the gun nuts -- self- and national defense -- the evidence is vanishingly thin.

    With cars, table saws and fire, there is a clear net positive utility. For firearms, it's negative. After all, the Sentinel considered only survivors, and as the gun nuts always say, the vast majority of gunshot wounds are suicides, with a survival rate under 10%. So no way can even a modest fraction of shootings come under any conceivable 'usefulness' category.
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  6. Lot's of automobile accidents happen to bystanders.

    By definition, there's a net positive utility for firearms, or nobody would by them. Just because they have no utility to you, doesn't mean that they have no utility to anyone else.

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  7. Net positive utility to A firearm, perhaps. To ALL 300 million? No way. Millions of innocents done to death. Number of innocents saved, maybe a few hundred.

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  8. And tens of millions of innocents killed by automobiles. So what? Injuries and deaths are one factor of many.

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  9. Two points: Autos serve a useful function.

    We regulate autos so that the carnage has been reduced. We could do the same with guns except for the nut factor.

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  10. Guns also serve useful purposes: sport (hunting and shooting competitions) and providing a feeling a security to the owner.

    Guns are more regulated than automobiles. I can drive down the street but I can't walk down the street with a gun, for example.

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  11. Net positive utility to A firearm, perhaps. To ALL 300 million? No way. Millions of innocents done to death. Number of innocents saved, maybe a few hundred.

    In no mathematical or logical universe I can think of does it make sense to equate an instantaneous quantity to a sum going over a significant and completely unspecified time span. And that is before getting to your baseless assumption that all the deaths that were suicides over that period wouldn't have happened anyway.

    Unfortunately for your argument, removing math abuse and affronts to logic kill it.

    That Esquire essay you linked to is a festival of legal ignorance, substantiated by nothing more than some very dubious credential waving. That's bad enough, but in his subsequent blathering, he shows himself to be a flat out liar.

    To wit: Personally, I think a little bit less of an organization like the NRA, which incites their members to threaten rape and murder and the abduction of babies.

    I read the NRA response, and it does no such thing, nor even does anything even more remotely similar to that libelous charge than soup is to nuts.

    That Bateman is a fool is bad enough. On top of that, you seemingly approve of flagrant lying. Wonderful.

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  12. (Further reconstructing vanished comments)

    Adding to what Bret said at the top. Essentially 100% of all injuries and deaths involving swimming pools are accidents. Therefore …?

    Alcohol causes far more mayhem than guns, and, so far as I can tell, has nothing like a “clear net positive utility”. Yet I hear of no cries for banning alcohol. There are undoubtedly two reasons for this: it wouldn’t work, and progressives like to drink. Which means there is only one difference between your tirades against guns and your silence on alcohol.

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  13. Skipper and Bret miss the point. If 40% of wounds were accidents, then they were not shootings in defense of whatever guns are supposed to defend against.

    The number of shootings done for reasons given by gun nuts for making firearms unregulated boil down to a) defense against government tyranny, 0.00000%; b) defense of self or innocents against predators, way less than 1%, probably less than 0.1%.

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  14. Skipper and Bret miss the point. If 40% of wounds were accidents, then they were not shootings in defense of whatever guns are supposed to defend against.

    The number of shootings done for reasons given by gun nuts for making firearms unregulated boil down to a) defense against government tyranny, 0.00000%; b) defense of self or innocents against predators, way less than 1%, probably less than 0.1%.

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  15. Skipper and Bret miss the point. If 40% of wounds were accidents, then they were not shootings in defense of whatever guns are supposed to defend against.

    The number of shootings done for reasons given by gun nuts for making firearms unregulated boil down to a) defense against government tyranny, 0.00000%; b) defense of self or innocents against predators, way less than 1%, probably less than 0.1%.

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