Rusty Young Man
Regular Member
Found an article on an anti-Rights site where the author at least keeps a shred of objectivity and looks to what the numbers MAY say, vs what the antis WANT the numbers to say (and what they make the numbers say, even if the numbers say something else).
Suicides, not murders, are what pad the "gun violence" numbers the statist crowd keeps peddling.
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/9849390/mass-shootings-count
Suicides, not murders, are what pad the "gun violence" numbers the statist crowd keeps peddling.
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/9849390/mass-shootings-count
Article said:The shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday was the 353rd mass shooting of 2015, according to the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker that Vox uses for our maps documenting mass shootings. Or it was the 29th, if you use data from USA Today. Or it was the fourth, if you use a database maintained by Mother Jones.
How are three news outlets coming up with such different answers? It all comes down to definitions:
The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people were shot.
USA Today tracks mass killings, in which four or more people were killed.
Mother Jones tracks mass killings in which four or more people were killed but excludes "gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence."
There are other differences too — for example, Mother Jones says it generally only includes single gunman incidents, though it includes San Bernardino and the Columbine massacre in its database. But those are the main ones.
What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is.
SNIP...
Mass shootings can and should be prevented, and their comparative rarity makes them no less monstrous or tragic. But the best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, 63 percent, or 21,175, were suicides. The evidence that the presence of additional guns contributes to more firearm homicides is persuasive, but research from the Means Matter Project at the Harvard School of Public Health (much of it done by Azrael and Miller themselves, along with Cathy Barber) shows that the evidence that guns contribute to higher levels of suicide is considerably stronger.
Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn't typically planned and thought through extensively in advance. It's impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide. And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means. They didn't make a considered choice and then seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped."
SNIP...
The dominant focus of gun control efforts, then, should be on keeping guns (and particularly handguns) out of the hands of suicidal people....