The Gaming Den

Generally, where guns are more common in homes... Armed robbery is more common than in areas where it's not. That was Frank's point.

Also, places known to have guns or drugs are prime targets for invasion or robbery not because they're 'less dangerous' but because those guns and or drugs themselves are very valuable to a potential robber.

The thief that robs when you aren't there is the guy who steals stuff not because it's valuable - I've had the reflectors off my bike stolen, a garden hose, now the granny seat off my old bicycle, the only seat not to be stolen the last dozen times every seat went missing - they steal these things because they are easy to steal.

Someone who's in for it for the money or weapons is likely to be armed themselves, and no amount of guards or guns will stop them. They don't stop robbing banks because banks have guns!

-Crissa

Koumei wrote:
Presumably you could make up a trapped dungeon of doom, advertise it as such, complete with big warning signs out the front ("Warning: contains fiendish traps that may kill you. Not recommended for anyone who has not completed a Gary Gygax module.") and find a way to have it legally accepted.

You could have signage instead of actual traps.

Now that is fiendish.

Warning
This complex wing is protected by Grimtooth's brand traps.

Generally, where guns are more common in homes... Armed robbery is more common than in areas where it's not. That was Frank's point.

Well that's not a particularly useful statistic, because it doesn't tell us which is the cause and which the effect.

For instance, I could accurately say that people wearing army uniforms have a statistically higher chance of being injured or killed. Or that more people are injured using a kitchen knife than a chainsaw. Context makes a difference.

Now that isn't to say that that guns are or aren't more dangerous to their owners - just that statistics like the one above aren't particularly useful.

Its fairly simple game theory really. If home owners have guns then either you don't rob houses or you bring a gun when you do. Its not rocket science so every potential home invader can figure it out.

Why wouldn't you bring a gun anyway? People will still have bats/knives/whatever around their homes, and bringing superior firepower is generally preferable to bringing equivalent firepower.

Hell, in D&D terms, would you leave your magical weapons and wands of fireball at home because the kobolds whose cave you're attacking only have pointy sticks?

Crissa wrote:Generally, where guns are more common in homes... Armed robbery is more common than in areas where it's not. That was Frank's point.

First, I'm not certain if this stat is true. Second, I'd need to see the other background statistics. Probably the percentage of armed robberies versus unarmed robberies would be higher if you live in an area where everyone owns a gun. That's pretty obvious. But are the overall number of robberies the same or higher? Or are there fewer robberies, but the ones that exist are armed?

There's a lot of questions about said statistics that makes a big difference on how you would interpret them.

Someone who's in for it for the money or weapons is likely to be armed themselves, and no amount of guards or guns will stop them. They don't stop robbing banks because banks have guns!

Actually banks are specifically given instructions not to fight back in the event of a robbery. You can pretty much just hand a teller a note that says "Give me the money" and they're going to do it.

I actually bet that if banks established a "we're gonna shoot the shit out of you" policy and had trained weapons professionals and hidden slits in the wall and ceilings where snipers could fire, that you'd have a lot less bank robberies. If you're willing to just say "fuck the civilians, we just want to kill you!", you discourage a great deal of robberies. The ones that do occur will be very bloody affairs, but they will be few and far between assuming you set up sufficient deathtraps that are going to take out most of the offenders. Most criminals will give respect to a Dirty Harry style "Shoot to kill" policy, while they are actually encouraged to rob banks when you have a "roll over and play dead" policy.

All robberies are about doing what's easy. Robbers want to pick on helpless victims and having an unarmed and compliant populace that is willing to roll over and play dead whenever one of them brandishes a gun is a good way to encourage crime, because you're making it easier. While it is true that getting in a gun fight might get you killed. If more people were willing to do that, then it would discourage crime.

Once you start entering into a life or death situation everytime you decide to mug or rob someone, you're much less likely to do it.

Ice9 wrote:

Generally, where guns are more common in homes... Armed robbery is more common than in areas where it's not. That was Frank's point.

Well that's not a particularly useful statistic, because it doesn't tell us which is the cause and which the effect.

For instance, I could accurately say that people wearing army uniforms have a statistically higher chance of being injured or killed. Or that more people are injured using a kitchen knife than a chainsaw. Context makes a difference.

Now that isn't to say that that guns are or aren't more dangerous to their owners - just that statistics like the one above aren't particularly useful.

To expand on this farther, there's a correlation between ice cream sales and car theft.

Does ice cream sales cause car theft?

Or does car theft cause ice cream sales to go up?


Neither is true. One of the most basic things you learn in critical thinking is that correlation isn't causation. In this case, a different factor is involved.

I've asked for references twice, and thus far no one has been kind enough to do so for me. So I haven't regarded this debate as very serious at all.

Random Casualty wrote:I actually bet that if banks established a "we're gonna shoot the shit out of you" policy and had trained weapons professionals and hidden slits in the wall and ceilings where snipers could fire, that you'd have a lot less bank robberies. If you're willing to just say "fuck the civilians, we just want to kill you!", you discourage a great deal of robberies. The ones that do occur will be very bloody affairs, but they will be few and far between assuming you set up sufficient deathtraps that are going to take out most of the offenders. Most criminals will give respect to a Dirty Harry style "Shoot to kill" policy, while they are actually encouraged to rob banks when you have a "roll over and play dead" policy.

You know, Banks used to have a "fight to the death" policy. They gave it up in favor of the "stall for time and let the police deal with it" policy because fighting to the death against robbers was found to be ineffective. Bank robberies don't actually succeed very often, and they don't succeed less often if you make a big bloody combat in the middle of the place every time someone tries it.

Really, the world isn't an action movie. Shooting people in the face is awesome, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything.

Count wrote:I've asked for references twice, and thus far no one has been kind enough to do so for me.

Ah. Yeah, getting gun instance stats is actually fairly difficult, because people keep marking up wiki with urine and crazy talk. I mean look at this gem from wikipedia:

Wiki on Gun Politics wrote:Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union did not abolish personal gun ownership during the initial period from 1918 to 1929; the introduction of gun control in 1929 coincided with the beginning of the repressive Stalinist regime[not in citation given][61]

See that? Someone went off on a tirade about how Stalin took peoples' guns away (hint: no he fucking didn't) and then linked up to a citation that doesn't show that at all (which is unsurprising because it isn't true).

Now, if you want to get anything vaguely approaching a straight answer from any of this, you're going to have to go do some original data mining of your own. After all, people have no fucking compunction about wikivandalism on this issue, and strongly and I dare say irrational views are held on both sides. Here is a god place to start. It's the US Bureau of Justice. The thing to note is that of the gun fatalities there is a roughly equal amount of murder and suicides (with a moderate edge for suicides, especially in recent years). And a not inconsiderable number of unintentional killings - about 4 percent.

So you seriously have a better chance of literally killing yourself than you do of deliberately killing another person with them. And indeed you have a substantial chance of killing a random dude who you had no intention of even harming. What's more, the number of robberies actually foiled by guns is pretty small - to the point where it shows up in the statistics as a series of anecdotes rather than a serious statistical number. It certainly doesn't reach the several hundred accidental firearm fatalities we get every year.

But see, that's what we're talking about really. Every year a handful of people manage to scare off some kind of attacker or win a firefight with an invader or something. Every year several hundred people get an accidental discharge behind the ear and die. And while that does mean that the danger outweighs the safety by several dozen times, we're actually talking about pretty small numbers.

Because honestly, we don't live in an action movie, and your chances of having your life end at the end of any weapon at all are pretty damn small. Remember that in 2001, the increase in traffic fatalities caused by the increase in people driving rather than airplanes actually killed more people than the terrorists that people were trying to protect themselves from. Hell, in September of 2001 drunk drivers straight up killed more people than Islamic Jihadists. Violence is the exception rather than the rule. Even in the killing fields of Sudan it is the disease caused by the destruction of infrastructure that kills the most people - far more than the actual people riding around shooting people could ever hope to accomplish.

-Username17

RandomCasualty wrote:I actually bet that if banks established a "we're gonna shoot the shit out of you" policy and had trained weapons professionals and hidden slits in the wall and ceilings where snipers could fire, that you'd have a lot less bank robberies. If you're willing to just say "fuck the civilians, we just want to kill you!", you discourage a great deal of robberies. The ones that do occur will be very bloody affairs, but they will be few and far between assuming you set up sufficient deathtraps that are going to take out most of the offenders. Most criminals will give respect to a Dirty Harry style "Shoot to kill" policy, while they are actually encouraged to rob banks when you have a "roll over and play dead" policy.

What costs more -- maintaining all the trained professionals, or the occasional bank robbery that almost never succeeds anyway?

Surgo: One word: Insurance.

-Crissa

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:If someone's breaking into your house while you are there, he's probably doing it for the express purpose of killing you, unless he's a retard. Or just wants to rape you. Or kidnap you. Whatever.

(...)

Either way, your guns aren't going to help you, the first case you're just as likely to die as not. (...)

That, actually, is retarded. Let's suppose that, having a gun, your chances are 50/50. Presumably, if someone armed entered your house to kill you, you have no chance if you don't (well, sure, a significant part of homes has easy escape routes, but that's far from universal, especially with regards to not being shot in the back).

But anyway, I don't actually think people entering your house to murder or rape you is a thing of terrible statistical significance. But aren't all those instances of "accidents more common than self-defense use" actually caused by: a) illegal obtention; and b) tests for gun ownership not rigorous enough? After all, claiming everyone corresponds individually to the average is retarded, and presumably said tests are already designed to test for better-than-average - they could be just failing to do so well enough.

While we're on the subject, how come everyone (on both sides of the issue) get caught up in the issue of gun fatalities--which even in the US, is only in the thousands--but no one gives a fuck about pollution?

If I had a hazard to magically wave away without worrying about if something will replace it, I'd pick alcohol. Then I'd pick cigarettes. But next on the list would definitely be pollution.

Like, unless you're talking to an ecologist you can generally shock people by pointing out that even in the US many times more people die of air pollution than crime. And that's just baffling.

FrankTrollman wrote:
...many facts about what kills people more

-Username17

So... as societies become more advanced, Slaanesh (drunk drivers), Tzeentch (death by doing things that you think are safer (driving vs flying); death by tricking yourself into thinking you are safe when owning a firearm) and Nurgle (unclean water, infection, disease) get more sacrifices compared to Khorne (actually killing with violence)?

Sorry, the repeated stats on how people die to things other than straight up violence got me thinking that; I was up all last night compositing a "chaos army" picture out of miniatures. It turned out.... poorly.

That is probably the most ghoulish thought that I've had in the last while. I havn't slept since.... the night before last.

FrankTrollman wrote: Now, if you want to get anything vaguely approaching a straight answer from any of this, you're going to have to go do some original data mining of your own. After all, people have no fucking compunction about wikivandalism on this issue, and strongly and I dare say irrational views are held on both sides. Here is a god place to start. It's the US Bureau of Justice. The thing to note is that of the gun fatalities there is a roughly equal amount of murder and suicides (with a moderate edge for suicides, especially in recent years). And a not inconsiderable number of unintentional killings - about 4 percent.

Well, a suicide really doesn't count for much, because people who are suicidal will find a lot of ways to kill themselves. The fact that people choose a gun over pills doesn't say a heck of a lot about the safety of guns. After all, we don't want to ban tall buildings because suicidal people jump off of them.

As far as the rest of the statistics, only 3-4% of gun deaths fall in the unintentional category. And that actually seems pretty lax, compared to what a lot of anti-gun people are saying. Apparently you are more likely to kill another person intentionally than you are to kill them unintentionally. In 2001 for instance, there were 802 unintentional killings and 11,671 homicides. That's really not all that bad numerically if the homicides were shooting robbers and the like.

Unfortunately, we're not sure how many of those cases involved actual self defense or otherwise shooting the bad guys.

That's really not all that bad numerically if the homicides were shooting robbers and the like.

You must tell us more about the exceptionally weird alternate universe you must live in and the exciting and the exotic laws of nature that must govern it.

If you expand the search to "all crimes" with and against handguns, rather than fatalities, things get much larger (though still small). Back in the late 80s and early 9s (most recent data I can find from the BOJ on the subject), people defended themselves from crimes with a firearm about 83 thousand times a year. Which sounds like a lot, until you realize that this isn't going against the nearly million handgun crimes committed during a year in this period, but against the total crimes. That many of the people defending their property are people threatening trespassers with a firearm (technically within your right to do, but definitely not advised).

So we got 60,000 people defending themselves from actual violence with a gun. That sounds goo, right? Well, sort of. First of all, the same period averages 341,000 incidents of firearm theft. That is, your gun is literally over five times more likely to be stolen and used by a criminal than it is to be used in combat. But let's also check the stats of people who use a fire arm to defend themselves against attacks vs. people who fight back in any other way (recall that 80% of women who fight back against would-be rapists in any way actually escape).

So here's the exact quote:

BOJ wrote:A fifth of the victims defending themselves with a firearm
suffered an injury, compared to almost half of those who defended
themselves with weapons other than a firearm or who had no weapon.
Care should be used in interpreting these data because many aspects
of crimes--including victim and offender characteristics, crime
circumstances, and offender intent--contribute to the victims'
injury outcomes.

Very roughly, "being someone with a gun" puts you in a demographic where fighting back is nearly 60% less likely to get you injured than being in the demographic "being someone without a gun." But even the BOJ noted that this is a bad attempt at correlation or causation because "being someone without a gun" is a demographic which is a lot more likely to overlap with such demographics as "being a child" or "being handicapped" or "being a woman." Furthermore, the study doesn't differentiate between people who used self defense weaponry such as pepper spray and people who kicked and scratched.

---

The long and the short of it is that you owning a firearm is several times more likely to increase crime by being stolen than it is to ever be a factor when you are being victimized by crime. And for that matter, the effects of actually having a gun while defending yourself are unclear at best.

-Username17

Ice9 wrote:Why wouldn't you bring a gun anyway? People will still have bats/knives/whatever around their homes, and bringing superior firepower is generally preferable to bringing equivalent firepower.

Because armed robbery is treated far more seriously than unarmed. If you get caught in the act and run off you're pretty set. Bring a gun and expect a much more significant use of police resources.

FrankTrollman wrote: The long and the short of it is that you owning a firearm is several times more likely to increase crime by being stolen than it is to ever be a factor when you are being victimized by crime. And for that matter, the effects of actually having a gun while defending yourself are unclear at best.

I actually suspect given that the theft statistics are so high that a lot of that is probably gun dealers who get people to buy guns legitimately and then declare them stolen so they can sell them on the street.

That's just a guess, because it sounds highly suspect that 341,000 firearms are truly stolen each year. Though that may just be some gun nut or gun store getting ripped off who owns like 100 firearms.

In any case, as you said, the statistics have lots of room for misinterpretation either way. I mean we do have foreign countries where everyone owns a gun and those places aren't necessarily batshit nuts for crime. I mean, maybe you are right Frank, and that guns are more dangerous, but on the other hand, it's not exactly a conclusive fact, and taking away people's freedoms because of one such interpretation of rather generalized data seems a bit sketchy to me. If you're going to start removing freedoms, there better be a better reason than "the data is unclear."

Because really, cigarettes kill more people than guns do and unlike guns, they can never save your life.

Koumei wrote:

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Because really, cigarettes kill more people than guns do and unlike guns, they can never save your life.

Shows how much you know! There is in fact a medical condition that smoking cigarettes can treat - it doesn't cure it, but it hats the symptoms so as long as you're willing to take up smoking, the condition in question can't kill you. I forget what the condition is.

Yeah, okay, it's only one condition (there may be others for all I know), and it's rare, but I just had to prove you wrong.

what the hell is that condition?

Prak_Anima wrote:

Koumei wrote:

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Because really, cigarettes kill more people than guns do and unlike guns, they can never save your life.

Shows how much you know! There is in fact a medical condition that smoking cigarettes can treat - it doesn't cure it, but it hats the symptoms so as long as you're willing to take up smoking, the condition in question can't kill you. I forget what the condition is.

Yeah, okay, it's only one condition (there may be others for all I know), and it's rare, but I just had to prove you wrong.

what the hell is that condition?

Schizophrenia.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:

Koumei wrote:
Shows how much you know! There is in fact a medical condition that smoking cigarettes can treat - it doesn't cure it, but it hats the symptoms so as long as you're willing to take up smoking, the condition in question can't kill you. I forget what the condition is.

Yeah, okay, it's only one condition (there may be others for all I know), and it's rare, but I just had to prove you wrong.

what the hell is that condition?

Schizophrenia.

I was hoping somebody would say Lupus. :-D

I was hoping somebody would say Lupus.

It's not Lupus.

-Username17

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:

Koumei wrote:
Shows how much you know! There is in fact a medical condition that smoking cigarettes can treat - it doesn't cure it, but it hats the symptoms so as long as you're willing to take up smoking, the condition in question can't kill you. I forget what the condition is.

Yeah, okay, it's only one condition (there may be others for all I know), and it's rare, but I just had to prove you wrong.

what the hell is that condition?

Schizophrenia.

huh. that explains some things...