Gun Rights

In this post I will extend the following three basic points raised in the first response :a) one can not use statistics to so trivially support a conclusionb) gun control laws have many uses to prevent crime and catch criminalsc) there are lots of options that people can use to protect themselves, you are not helpless without a gunTo start :"Let's continue with my opponent's example. Canada has double the crime rate of the US[1]"Now let us look at the data in more detail to try to understand the numbers. "According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, "The overall crime rate in Canada rose steadily from 1960 to 1990, it peaked in 1990/91, then started dropping throughout the 1990s. These fluctuations are attributed in part to the "baby-boom" and "baby-boom echo", where the proportion of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 25 was very high for many years before it dropped sharply -- by 18% -- in 1991." [1]Now if violent crimes are typically more common in the age group of 15 to 25 and suddenly that population percentage increases then one would directly expect a proportaional increase in violent crime. Further to this argument, it is also noted that in this youth age group the tendancy for violent crime is escalating. Looking at the actual behavioral development to find the cultural and social motivators results in a much more complicated and involved set of influencing factors than just a few trivial statistics. Consider :"Family breakdown and poor parenting, poverty, violence in the home, the Internet, the decline of religion and morality, video games, the proliferation of guns, lenient laws and weak sentences, a lack of discipline in schools, and on and on.And again, it is always trivial to find statistis to support an argument if you trivially pick a few numbers, do not engage in the required indepth analysis and cherry pick results, for example in regards to murders in Canada :"[..] the use of rifles and shotguns is down by half -- from 40% to 20% -- over the past decade.Alex Swann, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, said the positive pattern shows the federal gun registry is working."Again, does that mean that the registry is the cause and we should increase gun control even more? Of course not, that is a trivial and surface analysis. Actual conclusions have to be supported by well documented statistical analysis and propery study and academic review. Consider the following extension of the above point on exposure to violence :[...] experts agree our youth are "soaked" in violence from their earliest years in a society that embraces the use of aggression to solve problems."Kids are fed a steady diet of aggression in all forms of popular culture," says Dr. Fred Mathews, psychologist and director of research at Central Toronto Youth Services."This conclusion is one which is well supported in the academic literature which shows that desensitization to violence is a real and measured effect :"Regression analyses indicated that only exposure to video game violence was associated with (lower) empathy. Both video game and movie violence exposure were associated with stronger proviolence attitudes. " [2]and in explicit detail :"Numerous studies have shown that exposure to media violence increases aggression, though the mechanisms of this effect have remained elusive. One theory posits that repeated exposure to media violence desensitizes viewers to real world violence, increasing aggression by blunting aversive reactions to violence and removing normal inhibitions against aggression. Theoretically, violence desensitization should be reflected in the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), which has been associated with activation of the aversive motivational system. In the current study, violent images elicited reduced P300 amplitudes among violent, as compared to nonviolent video game players. Additionally, this reduced brain response predicted increased aggressive behavior in a later task. Moreover, these effects held after controlling for individual differences in trait aggressiveness. " [3]Note direct exposure to violence in video grames produced aggressive bahavior in unrelated tasks and the very critical sentance " Moreover, these effects held after controlling for individual differences in trait aggressiveness.". This is how you move from correlation to causation by making sure that what is changing is actually causing the effect being studied. This conclusion is supported by a host of other studies.[4,5]"Americans using guns for good."Again it is trivial to respond to this with an entire pile of statistics such as how many people are killed each year due to accidental shootings, how many crimes are escalated to the point which are impossible without guns such as the extremely well known school shootings, etc. . Considering this similar argument :"[...] while 162,000 households think someone would have died without a gun.This alone should be enough to implement right to carry laws and significantly reduce gun control."Even as a trivial first response, how valid is it to argue what would happened and to alter laws simply because of what people "think would happen"? Does this consider all effects of higher rates of ownership, does it approach the problem with even a hint of the detail which is noted in the above academic studies. No, no and no. It is just conjecture and this can not be used to change laws especially when they are regarding such significant penalties."If you suddenly meet with a hardened criminal, it won't matter how many karate classes you took or how many lights you put up, as they won't exactly save your life like the round the clock protection of a handgun."Again, this is a trivial and surface analysis which takes one and only one factor into account and applies that to one scenario and then attempts to generalize this to society as a whole. This topic of reducing violence and giving people tools to prevent and deal with violence is researched extensively in the literature through many programs which are both societal and direct in nature. It is not overly productive to simply give one example and imply that the 80 year old arthritic Mrs. Daisy is suddenly Dirty Harry breaking out the 44 Magnum and asking the mugger does he feel lucky. Actual research into preventing and dealing with violent crime is much more involved and requires actual academic research. Every aspect of violent crime has such studies and they consistently show results of how the groups in question can have strong and consistent reduction in violent crime by altering their tactical awareness and improving the societal and cultural responses. Examples of these are the "Bringing in the Bystander In-Person Program "[7,8] and the "Green Dot" program [9]Again, consider :"Without gun rights, you are a lot more helpless than you would be with gun rights. Obviously, gun rights is the way to go."This is yet another example of a statistics blurb, cherry picked with no indepth analysis and I would reaffirm the main contentions :a) one can not use statistics to so trivially support a conclusionb) gun control laws have many uses to prevent crime and catch criminalsc) there are lots of options that people can use to protect themselves, you are not helpless without a gun[1] http://www.thefreeradical.ca...[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[4] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[5] http://psycnet.apa.org...[6] http://vaw.sagepub.com...[7] http://vaw.sagepub.com...[8] http://vaw.sagepub.com...[9] http://vaw.sagepub.com...