Quote of the day—Chuck Michel

The authors are candidly blunt about fatal gun deaths being their measurement criteria. Using this criterion amuses working criminologists who, knowing criminals on a deeply personal level, tend instead to use violent crime as the standard of measure. They do so especially when discussing gun control, because their research shows that guns are used to deter criminal activity (usually without a gun death), upwards of six times more often than to commit crimes (with or without a gun death). A woman pointing her pink-gripped revolver at a rapist with his clothesline noose will instantly prevent a fatal crime of violence that did not involve a gun.

Chuck Michel
October 21, 2013
New Math, Old Buncombe
[I cannot recall an anti-gun person ever using violent crime rates as a measurement of the (in)effectiveness of gun control. And frequently they will be so bold as to quote the denial of firearm sales as proof of effectiveness. It’s hard to get any more transparent about their true motives as when they brag about the millions of people that have been denied their right to keep and bear arms.—Joe]

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8 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Chuck Michel

  1. I’m reminded of something that Gary Kleck referred to as the “nonsense ratio”, “studies” claiming to show that more people are killed by criminal gun use than are killed by self-defense gun use. The original example of that (cited by Kleck) was a so-called study by some doctors who looked at data from three counties (chosen because they were conveniently close to home). It never occurred to them, apparently — either that or they deliberately ignored the possibility — that the purpose of self defense isn’t to kill the attacker. And indeed, death of the attacker is a rare outcome — 2 percent or so of all self defense with a gun.
    It sounds like this piece of absurdity is the same thing, only more so. The gun confiscators must be getting really desperate.

  2. Fatal gun deaths? I started to say something snarky about non-fatal gun deaths, but I suppose there is some hoplophobe out there writing about them.

    It reminds me of a line from a short story — “Is it dead?” “The marines reported that it was ‘killed fatally’, sir.”

  3. Throw it back in their faces, always. I like to say “They don’t care how many assaults, muggings, rapes and murders occur just so long as none of them involve one of those icky guns.”

  4. I’ve always referred back to Kellerman’s 1993 JAMA article, wherein he found that having a gun in your home made you 43 times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than persons without guns in their homes.

    He also found that compared to having a gun in your home, renting rather than owning your residence was 6 times more likely to get you shot to death than having a gun around.

    So renting makes one ~240 times more likely to die of gunshot than owning a home without guns, while owning guns was ~43 times more likely to result in gunshot death than not owning guns.

    Yet nobody called for the abolishment of rental apartments.

    • I like that study. It’s great. Seattle and Vancouver (BC) were chosen because they had about the same ratio of whites to minorities, and they were close geographically. Much higher murder rate in Seattle. But if you compare the minority populations, the Seattle minorities were mostly black and Hispanic, lower and lower-middle class; Vancouver had mostly Asian in the upper and upper-middle class. Those two populations had vastly different murder rates. So if you control for that and only compare white populations, it turns out that Seattle had the lower murder rate. Oopsie. His study proves it’s the CULTURE, not guns or gun laws.

      • Asian of what variety? Japanese? Chinese? Taiwanese? Korean? Vietnamese? Cambodian? Thai? Filipino? Laotian? These are all Asian yet they all have different cultures and attitudes towards guns and violence.

        • Your google-fu is failing you. You can look up the Kellerman study, and note they only broke the demographics down into major categories, not by by detailed tribe affiliations. Also, Vancouver has long been known for a sizable Chinese community, with much smaller “other-Asian” communities as well. Generally speaking, they all have MUCH lower homicide rates than US black populations on average, so you are trying to make a distinction without a statistically significant difference.
          Again, ignoring those details and just looking at the whites, US had a lower “gun death” rate. So it CAN’T be the laws, because all of WA has the same gun laws, and all of BC has the same gun laws.

  5. This is why I spend so much effort on the “Gun Death?” Files
    http://www.weerdworld.com/category/gun-death/

    Seems that those who propose gun control only care about “Gun Death”, as opposed to being concerned about violent crime, or murder as a total.

    This leads to “Success” stories when a city goes from having 250 Murders, 100 of them “Gun Deaths” to 300 Murders and only 60 of them “Gun Death”.

    You see “Gun Death” can be used as a currency for their political goals, and a stabbing or a beating cannot.

    They have NEVER cared about public safety, because the people who care about public safety are pro-gun.

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