Gun Control & RKBA

Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2016, 12:35 PM - Edit history (1)

beevul's signature line: 99.9 percent of gun owners do not shoot or kill anyone. Focus on the .1 percent who misuse guns, and leave the rest of us who don't, and our guns, the hell alone. Member of the 99.9 percent.

beevul: Yup. That's my sig. The astute reader will note that theres a context set by me, to the words "misuse guns", which I set by using the words "shoot or kill anyone".

Beevul argues an expedient. So we should just focus on gun owners who wound or kill with their guns & leave other gun wielding violent crime offenders 'the hell alone'?
An armed robbery with a gun does not constitute misusing a gun? Shooting up property is not misusing a gun? Poaching is not misusing a gun? negligent gun handling is not misusing a gun? To think any reader with half a brain would think that 'misuse guns' pertained only to gunshot murder & injury is nutty. If you insist upon your expedient, more proof your sig line is absurd and a LIE.
In 2007, 385,178 total firearm crimes were committed, including 11,512 murders, 190,514 robberies, and 183,153 aggravated assaults

beevul: Gun ownership grows at an annual rate that is higher than the number of gun deaths. Drastically higher.

If you mean new gun owners annually total more than approx. 30,000 gundeaths yearly, that's likely usually true, but a red herring. You claim 99.9% of gun owners do not shoot or kill anyone with a firearm. Over a year that is believable but collapses over time, even 5 years is enough to make your sig line a lie:

Hypothetical - note non fatal shootings & gundeaths combined are closer to 100,000 today.
80,000,000 gun owners - 2000 ------ 80,000 shootings & gundeaths (0.1% x gunowners)
81,000,000 ..... " ........ - 2001 ------ 81,000 ..... "
82,000,000 ..... " ........ - 2002 ------ 82,000 ..... "
83,000,000 ..... " ........ - 2003 ------ 83,000 ..... "
84,000,000 ..... " ........ - 2004 ------ 84,000 ..... "
........................................ total = 410,000

After 5 years, estimate approx 100 million applicable gun owners over 5 yrs allowing for new gun owners & deaths, vs. 410,000 shootings or gundeaths.
410,000 / 100 million = 0.41%, which is 4 times higher than your 0.1%, and uses today's figures rather than those from the 70's thru 2000, when they were up to twice the current rate. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/
Looking back 50 years, the US gun homicide rate began rising in the 1960s, surged in the 1970s, and hit peaks in 1980 and the early 1990s. (The number of homicides peaked in the early 1990s.) The plunge in homicides after that meant that firearm homicide rates in the late 2000s were equal to those not seen since the early 1960s

When you take gundeath & gunshooting figures from the 70s, 80's, 90's, you could not contend 99.9% of gun owners did not shoot or kill anyone over a year, it would've been maybe 99.7% or so, creating more shooting gun owners.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0764212.html --- gundeaths 1979 - 2010
non fatal gunshot injury: 1993 104,200 .. some years near 200,000
Overall Firearm Gunshot Nonfatal Injuries and Rates per 100,000 2003 - 2013, United States All Races, Both Sexes, All Ages Disposition: All Cases 799,760 {over 10 yrs} http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html

beevul: The rate of gun ownership growth being higher than the rate of firearm misuse resulting in death, which you have most studiously ignored, factors into those numbers too. For every year you count the ones that did, you also have to count the ones that didn't, but you're only counting the ones that did. For (hypothetical) example: In 2021 there were 100 million that didn't and 11 thousand that did, and in 2022 there were 101 million that did and 10 thousand that didn't.'
You'd count that as 101 million vs 21 thousand, tallying up the deaths, while pretending that the 101 million was the exact same static group as the 100 million. Your problem (in this case) is that it isn't the same static group after 1 year, let alone 75 years, but you know that and you're just playing games. Dishonest, disingenuous, and misleading ones, at that.

You speak of total number of people who have owned guns in the past 75 years, of course it will be much higher than the current 'living' yearly estimate of approx. 80 million gun owners. But you use current death statistics, during 80's & 90's the murder rate was 1.5 - 2 times higher than it is now, as well as gunshot injuries being a couple times higher.
I cited death statistics only to show that by using them alone, it would deflate your signature line. When you include gunshot injuries your signature line becomes more untenable, and more of a big fat lie over the years.

However, these high numbers of firearms are concentrated in an increasingly small minority of households. Data from the General Social Survey, found that American household gun ownership peaked in 1977, when more than half of American households (53.7%) reported having any guns. By 2014, only 32.4% of American households had a gun in the home — less than a third. From 1985 to 2014, the percentage of Americans who reported personally owning a gun dropped by more than a quarter, down to 22.4%. http://smartgunlaws.org/category/gun-studies-statistics/page/14/