Study: More Guns Lead To More Suicides

[GreenStormCloud]

127. First I will read those.

The famous Philidelphia study a few years ago didn't control for whether the gun was being carried legally or illegally. I wi have to search for a link.

Lucky me. Your second link is also one that I would refer to as a very poor study. Here is a rebuttal to that one I wrote some time ago.

Gun controllers love to trot out so-called scientific studies that show that carrying a gun makes one more likely to get shot.

Common sense says that is pure bullshit. Guns are not bullet magnets. Bullets don't curve in mid-air to go to a person carrying concealed. Thugs don't hunt for concealed carriers to shoot them on sight. You don't get shot because you have a hidden gun on you.

The ONLY reason why a person might get shot is that they are engaging in a behavior that will cause someone to want to shoot them, or they have the bad luck to be a victim of a random shooter or other criminal. (Examples of the latter would be mass shootings, serial shootings, gang initiation shootings, etc.) Merely carrying a concealed handgun will not make someone a target as nobody knows that you have the gun, therefore you can't be targeted for having a gun.

So the real question that should be asked is not if the person had a gun, but what were they doing when they were shot? It is well known from FBI statistics that over half of all murder victims were themselves engaged in a criminal enterprise. But criminals do not make up over half of our population, so one draws the reasonable conclusion that being a criminal is dangerous. Certain crimes would be more dangerous than others. Drug dealing and gang banging would be more dangerous than being a business embezzler. The dangerous criminals are well aware that they are targets for other criminals and are extremely likely to be armed. Naturally, those who style of crime is armed robbery are going to be armed. All of them will be engaging in behaviors that have a high risk of drawing gun fire, either from other criminals or from armed citizens.

The law-abiding person who is legally carrying will not be engaging in any of those activities. His behavior won't change (with very rare exception) from what it was before. So he won't be a target unless his luck runs out and a violent criminal targets him. Then his gun gives him the ability to fight back.

None of the so-called studies have ever made any attempt to separate the legal from the illegal carriers but instead have lumped them all together as if they were all legal carriers. Until a study makes such a differentiation they will all be useless and will discover nothing except that being a violent criminal is dangerous.

How many were carrying legally? How many were carrying illegally?

Further they list many as being armed duels. I assume those were gang members. Legal gun carriers don't go looking for each other to have a duel. Naturally, if two armed guys are looking for each other, one or both are going to get shot. Such a statistic has no bearing on the honest gun carrier.

From the report:
For case participants, gun possession at the time of the shooting was determined by police observations at crime scenes and police interviews with victims and witnesses, as well as confiscation and recovery of guns by police investigators. We coded case participants as in possession if 1 or more guns were determined to have been with them and readily available at the time of the shooting. We coded control participants as in possession if they reported any guns in a holster they were wearing, in a pocket or waistband, in a nearby vehicle, or in another place, quickly available and ready to fire at the time of their matched case's shooting. We determined gun possession status for 96.8% of case participants and 99.6% of control participants. We imputed missing data by using multiple imputation by chained equations.35,36

We collected participants' locations as street intersection or blockface points. We collected environmental factors as centroid and population-weighted centroid points of blocks, block groups, and tracts.37 We assigned study participants cumulative, inverse distance-weighted measures of each environmental factor on the basis of the points where they were located and the point locations and magnitudes of the factors surrounding them. The higher the measure, the greater the clustering and magnitude of factors around a participant's location.15,38

Notice that they don't check to see if the gun was being carried legally or illegally. How many of those who were shot had CCWs? The study doesn't say. They only looked to see if the victim was armed or not.