Are you afraid of guns?

[newyorkguy]

...Considering she also made efforts to ban handguns in CA and San Francisco (except her self of course)...

Have you run her permit recently? Do a stop-and-frisk on her? Because Diane Feinstein has said she gave up her hand gun and hand gun permit about thirty years ago.

She described finding an unexploded bomb outside her San Francisco home, the lives of her family members saved only by a rare overnight freeze that disarmed the weapon's mechanism. Shaken from the scare, and another incident in which the windows of her beach house were shot out, Feinstein obtained a revolver that she kept in her purse. "I thought if they were going to take me out, I wanted to take a few of them with me," she told the audience with a laugh.
But after witnessing the assassination of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, Feinstein's views on guns shifted. She later gave up her concealed weapons permit. "I was the one that found Supervisor Milk's body..."

 

[Stellafane]

I clicked this thread to see when the poll was going to be put up, but didn't realize that the question was settled in the first post so there's no poll necessary.

The argument seems like a bit of chest-thumpy swingdickery to me. "You're just a-skeered, ain't ya?"

Yeah, I'm afraid of guns. You're supposed to be. That's their deterrent factor, after all. And I'm safely afraid of guns to the point that even a cop with his gun holstered or a Brinks guard with his scattergun cradled in his arm and not pointing at me is sufficient to get my attention.

Do I break out in hives if I see guns in a display case or shouldered when their handlers are marching in a parade or standing guard duty? No. Do I ratchet that up a bit when it's an eighteen year old who's barely shaving and he has the muzzle stuck in my navel? (Chile 1985) Why, yes... quite a bit. Or when it was a mugger with the barrel of his handgun stuck in my ribs (NYC 1968), well, yeah... I was afraid.

Guns kill. They are designed for killing. Not for making political statements and not as conversation pieces at the pre-school. I'm in favor of the 2nd. I'm just in favor of having much more rigid limitations on the types of guns and the training and education of the people who own them and the controls and inspections on those owners. To the "gun nut" lobby that means I'm anti-gun. So be it. I'll accept that label. You win the semantic debate.

Frankly, only an idiot or a psychopath wouldn't be afraid of an instrument designed for killing. As the Duke noted, "Afraid, son? Hell, yes, I'm afraid. Only person who's not afraid is a fool or a liar."

Umm...this.

 

[MontagK505]

Guns don't kill people. People kill people! Therefore, I'm afraid of people with guns. Because they kill people. If you took all the guns, unloaded them, piled them into giant containers, and sunk them in the ocean, they'd be awesome.

Many fantasy's are awesome. If we were all nice to each other that would be awesome as well, and then it wouldn't matter if we were armed to the teeth, because we would only shoot at targets and aggressive animals.

 

[Totovader]

No us guys didn't ask for an "example of people who want to ban guns." This is a derail. First, you didn't make the original comment so my response wasn't directed to you anyway. The statement was made that gun control is actually a subterfuge for taking people's guns away. I asked for proof. I didn't ask can anyone name a politician who proposed a ban. I did ask you to keep going and you're not mentioning any other persons or groups. I guess that answers the question.

Fine, already.

Here's a recent one:

I think it is perfectly reasonable to ban guns. You do not. I think, being a reasonable man, that this harms no one and helps many - you, being a reasonable man, think there are harmful consequences. Of course, each of us thinks the other is being unreasonable.

Can we get back to the issue at hand, now?

 

[The Don]

Note that England, where not only guns are effectively outlawed, but also police do not carry guns except on specific missions, has rather low murder rate (about 1/3 from the bottom), but is in top 8 in every other category. Looks like maybe police ARE the ones who should carry guns

Don't forget the Welsh, we're included in those figures and are pretty violent as well .

It's very difficult, possibly even impossible to use one element (legal status of handgun ownership) to fully explain the difference between countries with very different societal norms, attitudes to self-sufficiency and historical distrust of law enforcement but it is striking how much lower the England and Wales murder rate (which is comparable country to country) is than the U.S. when England and Wales is otherwise apparently just as, if not more, violent (direct comparison based on statistics may be less easy in this case).

The police in England and Wales are typically not armed (although there are specialised firearms officers) and poll after poll shows that the majority of police officers do not want to be armed. Policing by consent seems to be the general order of business.

 

[asydhouse]

<snip>

Fear is a healthy, normal response to the unknown. People who are afeared of guns have, in general, little or no experience with them. People with more experience with guns are, in my observations, afraid of the gun owner or gun bearer if that is the unknown.

<snip>

You guys seem to have decided that those of us who don't want to live in an armed society are simply childish, being "afraid of guns", in contrast to your adult and competent recognition that guns are simply tools etc blah blah…

Preening yourselves and strutting around with guns on hips just like in the cowboy movies… is that image as insulting to you as this assumption that I am a childish idiot for not wanting to confront armed fantasists in civil areas is insulting to me?

Think about it.

 

[fagin]

I'm scared of clowns with guns

 

[marplots]

Fine, already.

Here's a recent one:

Marplots I think it is perfectly reasonable to ban guns. You do not. I think, being a reasonable man, that this harms no one and helps many - you, being a reasonable man, think there are harmful consequences. Of course, each of us thinks the other is being unreasonable.

Can we get back to the issue at hand, now?

You took that out of context. It was addressing a hypothetical about whether reasonable people would all agree on gun control. The point was to show that a case could be made for either side of the issue, based on reason - and that logic alone could not determine the right answer. It is not an assertion of a position. Please retract.

ETA: If the rhetorical device is confusing, try this, where it is more obvious:
"I am Superman, so naturally I fear Kryptonite. You, as Lex Luthor, think it's a handy thing to have around. We both have good reasons to hold opposite views."

I hope you can see in that bit of prose I am not actually claiming to be Superman. If not, well, I tried.

 

[catsmate]

Are you afraid of guns?<snip>

No. I have and, currently do, own several, I've shot competitively, I've worked for a gunsmith.

This doesn't in the slightest effect my opinion that US firearm laws and habits are ridiculous and irrational, contribute to deaths and violence, and need to be changed.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Not sure I understand your counter-argument, here. Without digging the posts out of AAH (where they belong) I am giving a pretty accurate argument of the posts I have seen here on the forums.

If I am wrong, I would appreciate some clarification.

As for the "fudge up statistics in such a simplistic manner" I'm not sure what you mean. They are simple- to be sure- but fudging? Are you accusing me of being dishonest? Do you have any counter-examples or no?

Unfortunately they are not. But let's say that they are. It appears the numbers he's using are sourced and his general reasoning solid, even if I disagree with tone and some of the conclusions he reaches from other threads. If there's a counter argument for any of his points, then the presence of the straw men (especially ones not attributed to anyone specifically) don't actually get in the way of that. Straw manning someone else's stated argument would of course not be helpful.

Let's look at this section:

Those are troubling statistics, indeed. Based on this, your likelihood of being the victim of a crime with a gun is... high? Wait, what is it? Are you likely to be the victim of a gun crime? Perhaps more importantly, does the existence of guns make the crime more likely?

Based on the numbers above, one might conclude that the probability of being murdered by a firearm is 68%, but maybe you've done at least a little bit of math and found that- of the over 10 million crimes per year in the US: 467,321 is an uneasy percentage- about 4.5 percent. I'd be willing to bet that doesn't even matter, though, because that 68% sticks in your head: if we eliminated guns, wouldn't a least a portion of that 68% of murders, 41% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults go away?

And that's where the problems start. This kind of thinking is the result of a very common- and very seductive- error: the confusion of the inverse. When thinking about conditional probabilities (the probability of something given that something else has happened) we can make the mistake of thinking that the probability of A given B is the same as the probability of B given A. It's not.

The probability of a gun being used given that there was a crime is not the same as the probability of a crime given that there is a gun.

Often times that error is used to justify medical arguments against the existence of guns. Medical journals are extremely biased against guns- for a number of different reasons- and they commit this error routinely. When trying to understand how guns affect suicide rates, they will look at suicides, determine how many used guns (65%) and then conclude that the chance of suicide given that there is a gun is 3 times more than those homes without guns- even though the comparison was the chance of a gun, given that there was a suicide. Other studies use the same method to determine the impact on spousal abuse, etc.

This is creating a strawman or simply lying about the content of studies that show guns in a negative light.

So in a new paper published in the International Review of Law and Economics, we studied the relationship between guns and suicide in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009. Using five measures of gun ownership and controlling for other factors associated with suicide, such as mental illness, we consistently found that each 1 percentage-point increase in household gun ownership rates leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent more suicides. Or, to put it the other way, a percentage-point decrease in household gun ownership leads to between 0.5 and 0.9 percent fewer suicides.

Are the people not killing themselves with guns simply committing suicide by other means? Some are—but not all. While reduced household gun ownership did lead to more suicides by other means, suicides went down overall. That’s because contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier.

...

As Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill determined in a paper published in the American Law and Economics Review, these changes resulted in a reduction of the country’s firearm stock by 20 percent, or more than 650,000 firearms, and evidence suggests that it nearly halved the share of Australian households with one or more firearms. The effect of this reduction was an 80 percent fall in suicides by firearm, concentrated in regions with the biggest drop in firearms. Meanwhile there was little sign of any lasting rise in non-firearm suicides.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_..._causes_higher_suicide_rates_study_shows.html

Results. During the study period, 803 suicides occurred in the two counties, 565 of which (70 percent) took place in the home of the victim. Fifty-eight percent (326) of these suicides were committed with a firearm. After excluding 11 case subjects for various reasons, we were able to interview 80 percent (442) of the proxies for the case subjects. Matching controls were identified for 99 percent of these subjects, producing 438 matched pairs. Univariate analyses revealed that the case subjects were more likely than the controls to have lived alone, taken prescribed psychotropic medication, been arrested, abused drugs or alcohol, or not graduated from high school. After we controlled for these characteristics through conditional logistic regression, the presence of one or more guns in the home was found to be associated with an increased risk of suicide (adjusted odds ratio, 4.8; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.7 to 8.5).

http://cel.webofknowledge.com/Inbou...ID=Highwire&IsProductCode=Yes&mode=FullRecord

Results. During the study period, 1860 homicides occurred in the three counties, 444 of them (23.9 percent) in the home of the victim. After excluding 24 cases for various reasons, we interviewed proxy respondents for 93 percent of the victims. Controls were identified for 99 percent of these, yielding 388 matched pairs. As compared with the controls, the victims more often lived alone or rented their residence. Also, case households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home. After controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.6 to 4.4). Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

http://cel.webofknowledge.com/Inbou...ID=Highwire&IsProductCode=Yes&mode=FullRecord

Among industrialized countries, the United States has the highest rates of firearm suicide and homicide, as well as the highest rate of gun ownership. The present study compares the differential impact of gun availability on firearm suicides and homicides in the U.S. Using data from the NCHS Mortality Detail Files (1989-1991), the 1990 U.S. census population estimates, and the General Social Surveys (1989-1991) for nine geographic divisions, we computed rates of firearm and non-firearm suicides and homicides as well as rates of gun ownership for four gender-race groups. We tested the strength of the associations between gun availability and firearm suicide and homicide rates by computing the Spearman correlation coefficients. To help elucidate the role of method substitution, we conducted similar analyses on non-firearm suicide and homicide. The results show that gun ownership has a stronger impact on firearm suicides than homicides. These findings held up after stratifying by gender and race. The study suggests that reducing the aggregate level of gun availability may decrease the risk of firearm-related deaths.

http://cel.webofknowledge.com/Inbou...ID=Highwire&IsProductCode=Yes&mode=FullRecord

I could go on.

 

[BenBurch]

I'm scared of clowns with guns

Well, that means ALL NRA members and all GOPers.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

Shouldn't one be at least a little afraid of guns? After all, that's kind of the point of it isn't it? If people weren't afraid of guns, the gun rights advocates would lose an argument.

Gun in hand? Sure, one would be fool to not take brandishing seriously. Gun in a holster? That's not more or less dangerous than a pocket knife in a pocket or a belt pouch. I'd not expect a knife to jump out of a pocket and stab me anymore that I would a gun to jump out of a holster and shoot me. If anything those things will hurt the people carrying them before they hurt me.

I'd be just as fearful when a guy with a knife in hand came towards me as a guy with a gun in hand. It's a threat and it's immediate in nature. The nature of the threat is not all that different and anyone who claims that they can defend themselves better against a gun vs a knife is fooling themselves unless they have extensive training in hand to hand fighting. It may be more one on one but the knife will almost always win, just like a gun.

The anti-gun crowd like to frame it as some sort of deranged person with a hundred round machine gun (or whatever their action movie fantasies are) inside a crowded location. That is so rare that it comes close to, if not surpassing, airplane crash levels of fear and paranoia vs reality. I might as well not go on any interstate or freeway ever again because the odds are much greater that I'll die there first.

 

[geni]

What you just posted here simply is not true.

Argument by assertion logical fallacy.

 

[The Don]

I'd be just as fearful when a guy with a knife in hand came towards me as a guy with a gun in hand. It's a threat and it's immediate in nature. The nature of the threat is not all that different and anyone who claims that they can defend themselves better against a gun vs a knife is fooling themselves unless they have extensive training in hand to hand fighting. It may be more one on one but the knife will almost always win, just like a gun.

The only defending myself I'd be doing is running away and I'd be more confident on putting sufficient distance between me and the person with the knife than I would be with the person with the gun.

In the event that the person got close enough to use the knife, I'd be less likely to be killed. Indeed using a gun is almost a statement of intent to use deadly force.

I'd be fearful of someone with a knife - I'd be much more fearful of someone with a gun.

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

To the OP. Assuming I have read between the lines of your very long post correctly and discerned your line of reasoning, then no, I would not correlate the gun control lobby with being 'afraid of guns'.

The reason? Well I think the American obsession with a 'right to bear arms' is wrong headed in the extreme for any civilised society with an organised police force. Is that because I'm afraid of guns? No, because I am demonstrably not afraid of guns: my father was a fire-arms dealer so I grew up surrounded by guns (we had an armoury attached to our garage with around 30 assorted firearms!). I was shooting (target and hunting - my dad used to help local farmers out with any fox problems and was allowed to hunt anything he wanted on their land for free) from an early age (as early as I can remember in fact) and could strip down, clean and re-assemble guns just like other kids would do with their bikes. Very unusual for a Brit to have that much association with firearms.

Therefore, demonstrably 'not afraid' of guns but definitely pro- gun control.

Obviously that's an anecdote of one, but since that 'one' is me, I give it a very heavy weighting!

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I had to do a sidewalk taste-test for an armed Air Force cop once. (Total misunderstanding on his part) I was afraid, not of his M16 but of his youth and confusion.

A nervous young man with a gun, what could possibly go wrong?

 

[DC]

Are you afraid of guns?
yes, except when handled by a trained Police officer.

 

[tsig]

I don't fear guns. I fear the people for whom guns are not a deadly object to be treated with respect and kept locked away except in great need. And because so few gun owners are like that, I would rather nobody was allowed to have them.

I fear those who walk around with a kill or be killed mentality.

 

[Craig4]

I fear those who walk around with a kill or be killed mentality.

I fear the Zimmermans of the world who walk around with guns and a hero complex. I'm also not terribly fond of the gun owners who think of their piece like Linus did his security blanket in the "Peanuts" cartoons.

 

[epepke]

I'm nowhere nearly as afraid of guns as I am afraid of automobiles. Even table and hand-held power saws give me the willies more than firearms do. Firearms are relatively easy to control. If you think that a pistol is scary, try driving in Florida, where it can be clear one minute and an impenetrable sheet of rain the next.

It is quite possible and, depending on where you are born, can be relatively easy to spend your entire life in the United States and never see a drawn weapon except in movies and television. Not so with automobiles.