"New York has the 3rd lowest gun death/violence rate" Myth.

[henrybowman]

Can anyone help me disprove this myth that Ladd Everitt attack dog of the CSGV made on The Anthony Cumia Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx4ezAB ... e=youtu.be

[Erik]

I googled a bit and it seems to be a VPC report that makes that claim.
It's a bit difficult to debunk with facts, because (as is pretty typical for all leftist reports like this) the figures it's based on cant be found, at least not easily. They write a report with a result and dont show the numbers it's based on, and then everyone else just cites the report as gospel truth. Because Science, man...

Here's what I got from the googling.
To make the claim, they count all gun deaths. This includes homocide, self defense, accidents and suicides. Their claim is that as long as a gun is involved, it should count. For instance, they argue that a suicide is often a spontaneous decision, and if there is no gun available then there would not be a suicide.
However, if they make this claim, they should be able to show that there are more suicides where guns are more common, and that the number of suicides with guns should roughly correspond with the number of guns. That is not true. So counting suicides with guns is flawed, and deeply dishonest until they can show that more guns mean more suicides.

The same could be argued for accidents. I cant find the numbers, but I've read elsewhere that there is not much correlation between more guns = more accidents. It seems that if you check "accidents at home" in different states with different gun laws, they are pretty much constant. If there's less gun accidents, then powertools, falls, etc make up the difference. People that have accidents seem to have it with whatever is available.

Also, counting self defence shootings as gun deaths is dishonest. It means that a death wont count if the criminal kills with anything but a gun, but if the victim has a gun and defend themselfes then it counts as a "gun death". And it also wont count the rapes, robberies and assaults that take place because the victim cant defend themselves. These people have no problem with criminals hurting people, they are only interested in stopping people from being able to defend themselves.
Remember that nut that run around with a knife stabbing people? That doesn't count in their statistic. But if someone had had a gun and shot him to stop him from stabbing more people, then that would count as a "gun death".

[JAG2955]

Ask them why a "gun death/violence" is worse than a non-gun death/violence. While the rates of gun-related violence go down, the overall rate goes way up due to people not being able to defend themselves. That's normally what you see when a total ban is in effect.

[Durham68]

Good stuff from the comment thread of this article

LindaRoth
Jan 30, 2015

I am no gun owners but I work with stats all day long and there are several major problems with the way these data are presented and the conclusions.

Firstly about 2/3 of these data appear to be gun suicides. Just a causal glance at the peer reviewed literature through NIH's portal shows that between 0.5% to 2% is the range of estimated gun suicides that would not occur by other means if all guns were to disappear overnight. This study is counting about 20,000 gun suicides when it should be counting between 100 to 400 instead. Using the base rate of gun suicide (20,000)is not serious science, when any serious statistician would use the elevated due to access numbers (100-200). Also certain demographics are more likely to commit suicide, and those populations seem to be higher in the top gun owning states as well.. Just looking at the areas of Canada, which has a lot of gun control, the areas adjoining Alaska have high murder+suicide rates as well.

Here in NYC we have low gun ownership but a very high and rising self inflicted death by drugs, especially opioid.

I am also surprised this study makes no attempt to do what we do in social science, which is to compare same-region similar demographic jurisdictions. The first several pairings I looked at under that rubric showed higher gun ownership seems to reduce crime and violence rates.

Look at Maryland vs Virginia. Demographers use those two states for comparative studies from health care to traffic precisely because they are so similar demographically, on income, age, education, etc, and are same region.

Maryland gets an "A" from the gun control groups while Virginia gets an "F" from gun control groups, Virginia has 22% more gun owners than Maryland. Virginia has more than an order of magnitude more civilian carry licences that Maryland has according to VPC. Yet Maryland has 50% more murder than Virginia

[Netpackrat]

Also certain demographics are more likely to commit suicide, and those populations seem to be higher in the top gun owning states as well.. Just looking at the areas of Canada, which has a lot of gun control, the areas adjoining Alaska have high murder+suicide rates as well.

I.E. the Alaska Native culture out in the villages. Those areas also have higher rates of drugs/alcoholism/child molestation. It's simply a defective culture. One of my aunts is involved with an organization that does charity work with the youths in one of the villages; I told her if she really wanted to help them, she would help them move.

[kapikui]

Jag kind of touched on this, but even though their numbers are cooked, they're probably right. A lower number of guns overall in an area probably leads to a lower number of GUN related deaths. That's their plan. They're phrasing the argument as if only gun deaths are bad. That forces you to try and defend a position that is not your position. You are saying that more guns means less crime/violence. By only counting gun related crime/violence, they neatly trick us into trying to defend a position that is not defensible because it isn't supported by facts, and indeed isn't even the argument you were trying to make.

When confronted that it might lower specific gun crime, but overall crime goes up, a few things happen. Either they get upset and degrade into ad homonym attacks, usually involving penis size, they completely ignore or doge the assertion, or say something to the effect of "well, we have to start with one kind of crime, then we can solve the rest", neatly ignoring that there seems to be a causal relationship between increased gun control and increased crime/violence.

[Netpackrat]

Best to reject the entire argument, since none of it has any bearing on our rights. Shall not be infringed, try to come and take them, motherfuckers. When we play their game, we lose, since as noted, they will use the numbers to say whatever they want them to.

[mekender]

Also worth noting that talking about "rate" versus total number is another way the debate gets framed... By the per 100,000 people standard Chicago has a very low rate but by the total number per year, they are top 10... Also worth noting, if you took out about a 50 sq mile area of the state of NY, you would have a land mass that was safer than probably anywhere else in the US. Same for IL.

But when you are talking about a group that considers suicide to be "gun violence"... And they even say that a husband shooting his wife in their bedroom is proof that no one needs to carry in public... The discussion is probably not worth having.

[HTRN]

NYC is one of the safest large cities in the US. There were less than 350 homicides here last year, compared to the 2000+ they had in the early 90s.

How they did it was simple - expanding the NYPD to the size of small military, and draconian enforcement of existing laws.

It's such a wonderful solution, that I'm looking to move three states away.

[mekender]

NYC is one of the safest large cities in the US. There were less than 350 homicides here last year, compared to the 2000+ they had in the early 90s.

Yup and they are almost all in 3 areas, Jamaica Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx.