Biden's Gun Control Law Will Radically Change U.S. Gun Ownership

According to..?

 

So... where's your proof of cause?

 

When you ask many people why they own a gun at home, it's to protect their family. It's not "to reduce the odds my computer gets stolen at increased risk to our lives." If they say they are owning a gun to protect their family, that is a misinformed choice. It is against the evidence.

 

You would have to read the study and tell me how it doesn't support what I'm saying. I did a whole thread on it. Most criticisms were based upon people not reading the study, though.

 

That's only if you include criminals possession firearms in the case group. Find a study that only addresses lawfully possessed firearms in the home.

How would you compare all lawful uses to all unlawful uses. Self defense in the home is but one lawful use that I have guns for.

What exactly is the lifetime risk increase for me to have a gun in the home?

 

Provide the evidence.

 

2nd link on post 81. It was only lawfully owned guns. Though the risk of homicide when living with a lawful gun owner is doubled, the risks endured are still small in absolute terms. But if the point was to own the gun to protect your family at home (or be protected, from the perspective given by the study) it means it's not a rational reason.

 

Population level statistics don't apply to individuals. People do win lotteries and people do defend themselves at home with guns.

What is your data worth, anyway?

 

Sorry, son.
Your claim, burden of proof lies completely with you.
As correlation does not prove causation, you're left with no proof.

 

Biden wrote a law?



This is about Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which was introduced by Senator Marco Rubio (R–FL) on October 5, 2021 as S. 2938 and was passed with unanimous consent.

 

When you ask many people if they would prefer to shoot an intruder or simply drive them off, they choose the latter.

 

I'm looking at Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762

"A total of 737 012 cohort members died during the study period; 2293 died by homicide, of which 1495 were homicides by firearm. Fifty-three percent of the homicides occurred away from the victim's home, 37.8% occurred at the victim's home, 1.3% involved victims residing in irregular dwellings (for example, homeless or institutionalized), and the location could not be determined for the remaining 7.5% (Figure 2). Among homicides that occurred at home, the relationship of perpetrator to victim was unknown for 26.6%; among the rest, the victim was killed by a spouse or intimate partner in 36.9%, another family member in 25.9%, a friend or acquaintance in 20.9%, and a stranger in 16.2%.

1/6 of firearm homicide deaths were from strangers.

"Firearms were used in 65.2% of all homicides, 51.6% of homicides at home, and 77.2% of homicides away from home (Table 2). Crude rates of all 3 of these categories of homicide were higher among cohabitants of handgun owners than among cohabitants of nonowners."

"In adjusted analyses, cohabitants of handgun owners had virtually the same all-cause mortality rate as cohabitants of nonowners (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.01 [95% CI, 0.99 to 1.03])"

"Our study has several limitations. First, we could not determine whether the nonowners in our sample were killed by the actual handgun owners or handguns that defined them as exposed; this limitation is less relevant to homicides perpetrated by strangers and others with whom the deceased did not reside. Second, some cohort members may have been misclassified as unexposed because, for example, they or their cohabitants acquired handguns unlawfully or before our data on acquisition histories began in 1985. Such misclassification of exposure to firearms should bias toward the null any differences in homicide risk we detected. Third, we only partially accounted for long gun ownership, although this omission is unlikely to have a large effect on our estimates for 2 reasons: Fewer than 20% of firearm owners in California own only long guns (37), and handguns are used in approximately 90% of homicides by firearm (38, 39).

Fourth, our results suggest that exposed cohort members also had higher risks for dying by non-firearm homicide. These elevated risks were substantially smaller than those estimated for firearm homicides and did not attain statistical significance. Nonetheless, this result may indicate some residual confounding. Fifth, our study focused on homicide; residing with a gun owner may affect the risks for other kinds of adverse events, such as nonfatal assaults, home invasions, and property theft. Finally, the generalizability of our results beyond registered voters in California is unknown. Voter registrants are not representative of the statewide adult population in certain respects (Supplement Table 3), and homicide rates were lower in our sample than in the general population."

Over the period of the study, 737,012 of the cohort members died, 1495 by firearm somewhere in the US. That's 0.2% of the deaths in the study cohort. 0.1% of deaths were non-homicide firearms.

 

The study proves it, to the extent that one study can. I'm not going to articulate it better than the study, though there's a whole lot of literature that says the same thing, so you should just read it if you actually care about the truth and not just forum jousting.

 

Of course. But if you want to know whether driving them off with a gun saves lives, you compare groups who have a gun at home vs groups that don't.

 

People win lotteries, but that doesn't make it rational to play the lottery to make money. It's a bit more than "population level statistics" by which I assume you mean an ecological-type study. This is a cohort study that does a great job of controlling for confounders. If an individual has a specific reason to think they are at increased risk of fatal home invasion compared to the average person, then maybe they could say the study doesn't apply to them, but as general guidance for average people, this study (along with other studies on the same topic) show that it does not make you safer to live with a lawful gun owner.

 

Like you said, it's one study, and even the authors acknowledge the limitations of the study.

Let's get to the meat of it: so what?

 

This study, along with the earlier studies of more limited design consistently show: Don't buy a gun to protect your family from home invasion murder. Their risk of murder is doubled (albeit double a small number) by having the gun in the house. Home invasion murder is so rare that it makes no sense to buy a gun for this purpose. If people understand not to buy guns for this purpose, people will be less motivated to create this safety hazard.

 

In my personal opinion, there is too much worry about a national gun registry. Who cares if they know who has what? There's nothing they can do about it anyway. For example, let's say they ban AR-15 style weapons, and the registry shows that there are 50 million people who own an AR-15. What are they going to do? Arrest 50 million people? No. There wouldn't be a damn thing they could do. Gun owners in the United States outnumber our entire combined military and law enforcement by 200 to 1, as it should be.....

 

So a PSA based on California? You think that will sell in the rest of the US?

 

California has rural places with conservatives too. Not so incidentally, those are the areas with a higher rate of lawful gun owners doubling their family's risk of homicide. I'm sure NRA types will spin things however they can, but in reality, it's generalizable.

The point of using California is that it keeps track of deaths and lawful gun ownership better than most places, and has a large population to be able to see small effects.

 

Prove this. Also remember you yourself noted that doubling a very small number is still a very small number, so "doubling" is just scare tactics.

Remember that this also only works if people accept that if they don't buy a gun that they are accepting in their heart that they would be more likely to be a murderer.

Is it similar enough to other states to draw similar enough conclusions?

What does this tell us?

"According to several studies, the rate of death is lower for travel on public transport than that in cars. For example, in the USA, fatality rate for car occupants were found to be 23 times higher than those for bus occupants, per 100 million person-trips "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906382/#:~:text=According to several studies, the,person-trips [3].

 

I qualified it immediately, so I'm not using scare tactics. It's only that it's irrational to buy it for the purpose of protecting your family from home invasion.

It's true people are irrationally afraid of unlikely things out of their control (dying on a commercial airplane) vs more likely things in their control (dying in a car crash). We can always give people facts and encourage them to be rational. But some people will still make the wrong choice for emotional reasons. Anybody who ever loses their temper and does something they wouldn't normally do could be affected. But there are additional risks such as suicide of anybody in the house, homicide by anybody in the house, or just an accident.

Yes. We're not talking about apples and oranges. We're talking about people and people. But there are other studies showing the same thing not restricted to California. It's true there are more liberals in California, but the cohort is more likely to be conservative given they're living with or moving in with people who acquire guns.

Only looking at your quote, it appears entirely unsurprising. Public transport tends to be larger vehicles driven by professionals. Larger vehicles are more resistant to fatal crashes given they aren't thrown around as much in crashes. Professionals are less likely to crash. This is buses, so also is at a slower speed on average. And for fatality speed is a major factor given kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared.

Obviously I haven't evaluated whether it's a good study or not.

What was your point?

 

You won't be the only one proselytizing the point; those reaching out to the public will be using scare tactics. Your qualification of "it's twice a very, very small number, so it's still a very, very small number will never be mentioned. Your claim of irrationality is only true if the odds always work.

There are additional risks such as living alone or renting, both of which outweigh the risk of homicide if you live with a gun in the house.



https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199310073291506

Likely so. Those people are even less likely to listen to anyone preaching not to own a gun.

That the risk of death is much higher putting your kids in the car compared to other options compared to the difference in risk of homicide with a gun in the home.

This is a gun control forum. Is there some gun control use for your cited study?

 

Shift the focus from restricting guns to educating people on the facts around guns. A long-term, cultural shift is the goal, much like what happened with tobacco. Perhaps technology could help too with alternative means of being safer. If guns don't make you safer by having them unlocked and loaded in your home, then people should be encouraged to not buy a gun for this purpose, and if they own a gun for some other purpose, keeping them secure. I would rather regular facts be used. I do recall that the anti-drug campaigns used exaggeration. It would be better to be factual and maintain credibility.

One thing I would note though is that the study I cited did not look into suicide or accidents. So the small but doubled increase in risk is only looking at homicide. It does the opposite of what it's supposed to do, but this doesn't capture the whole risk picture of having the gun.

 

Regular facts like some tiny fraction of lawful gun owners commit murder, so you should consider yourself one of those people? And just accept the risk you'll still be able to kill your family or yourself with common household items.