Share the wealth. That'll significantly reduce gun violence in the US. Maybe not the gun violence that gets white folks all worried but hey ho. School shootings ain't a drop in the us gun violence ocean ☻

Alan C wrote:
Wouldn't have been so easy to kill 17 schoolkids with a knife I'd imagine or the 58 in Vegas.

This happened here a few days ago. A man who I know who has mental problems threatened highschool kids with two knifes. No one was hurt, well the perpetrator was because the students threw their backpacks at him.

zoon wrote:

OlivierK wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:Their latest comprehensive review, in 2013, for example, concluded among other things that substantial numbers of crimes are prevented by guns; it estimated defensive gun uses in the US at between 500,000 and 3 million per year.

Perhaps that's why the US has so much lower a violent crime rate than, say, the UK and Germany.

Or perhaps it's because the US only counts aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault as violent crimes, whereas other jurisdictions count all assaults and sexual crimes. Just saying.

Yes, Warren Dew has made this claim before, for example in the Las Vegas shooting thread, and as you say, it's wrong because the US does not count common assault as a violent crime, while other countries such as Australia and the UK include common assault in their statistics for violent crime. The offence of common assault includes merely threatening someone physically without a weapon, or hitting them without causing serious injury, and unsurprisingly this happens much more often than causing serious injury, or threatening someone with a knife or gun.

There was a very long gun control thread where this was examined. Including common assault in the US dropped the UK multiplier from 4x the US violent crime rates to 2x the US violent crime rates.

But then it turned out the UK authorities had been faking their data, so UK crime rates might have been substantially higher than shown in the statistics. I suppose they might have been lower as well, though I think it's less likely that the data was faked to make crime look worse than it actually was. That the UK rates are higher than the US are still almost certainly true, though, even if we don't know the exact multiplier.

Well, you may be almost certain without data, but I'm not sure that counts for much.

OlivierK wrote:Well, you may be almost certain without data, but I'm not sure that counts for much.

The data is in the old thread. I'm sure anyone sufficiently interested can dig it up.

I'm sufficiently interested, but I'm also sufficiently informed about this topic to seriously doubt whether a rigorous comparison is even possible, given the different offence definitions, and different reporting protocols.

Regardless, even granting that the US has a violent crime rate of half that of the UK, and even granting that the difference is explainable by defensive gun use (I don't think either premise is sound, but they seem to be your contentions), what exactly is your point? That it's worth the extra 300+% homicides to get other violent crimes down by 50%? I'm happy to be corrected, but that's the best I can make of your case here.

Warren Dew wrote:

OlivierK wrote:Well, you may be almost certain without data, but I'm not sure that counts for much.

The data is in the old thread. I'm sure anyone sufficiently interested can dig it up.

Well, I'm sufficiently interested to have followed the link to the Vegas thread that was posted here, and to have re-read about ten pages worth around the point that was linked, and the closest I can find is this:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news- ... l#p2588201

where you make the same claim about the data, along with the observation that the justification for your conclusion is that UK common assault corresponds to US aggravated assault in its definition, a claim that is swiftly addressed by several posters who cite the actual definitions, which clearly show that claim to be false. In my re-reading, you did not respond to your claim being demonstrated as false.

So, given that I was sufficiently interested to re-read an old thread that showed that your conclusion was based on a demonstrably false premise, I'm just going to treat this current claim that the UK undoubtedly has a higher violent crime rate than the US as similarly rectally extracted. If you are sufficiently interested in producing an accounting that doesn't rely on demonstrably wrong premises, or pointing me to where I could find one, I may reconsider.

OlivierK wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:

OlivierK wrote:Well, you may be almost certain without data, but I'm not sure that counts for much.

The data is in the old thread. I'm sure anyone sufficiently interested can dig it up.

Well, I'm sufficiently interested to have followed the link to the Vegas thread that was posted here, and to have re-read about ten pages worth around the point that was linked, and the closest I can find is this:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news- ... l#p2588201

That's a recent thread, not an old thread!

It might be in this one. If not, the thread is worth reading anyway, from the beginning. The post linked has links to relevant RDF threads, but I don't know if they're available any more:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news- ... =40#p86606

Well, I haven't read the whole thread, but I did read the post where you made similar claims, and also the one where you got schooled on them, and I note that you didn't return to that thread after that.

OlivierK wrote:Well, I haven't read the whole thread, but I did read the post where you made similar claims, and also the one where you got schooled on them, and I note that you didn't return to that thread after that.

The second post you link to basically repeated previous assertions while failing actually to refute any of my points. It even admits that the UK rate of violent crime is six times higher if you go by the government categories that it criticizes me for not using.

You seem to think that whoever posts last, wins. I can understand that if the arguments are too involved for you to follow, but I'm not interested in posting just for the sake of getting the last word in.

Warren Dew wrote:

zoon wrote:

OlivierK wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:Their latest comprehensive review, in 2013, for example, concluded among other things that substantial numbers of crimes are prevented by guns; it estimated defensive gun uses in the US at between 500,000 and 3 million per year.

Perhaps that's why the US has so much lower a violent crime rate than, say, the UK and Germany.

Or perhaps it's because the US only counts aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault as violent crimes, whereas other jurisdictions count all assaults and sexual crimes. Just saying.

Yes, Warren Dew has made this claim before, for example in the Las Vegas shooting thread, and as you say, it's wrong because the US does not count common assault as a violent crime, while other countries such as Australia and the UK include common assault in their statistics for violent crime. The offence of common assault includes merely threatening someone physically without a weapon, or hitting them without causing serious injury, and unsurprisingly this happens much more often than causing serious injury, or threatening someone with a knife or gun.

There was a very long gun control thread where this was examined. Including common assault in the US dropped the UK multiplier from 4x the US violent crime rates to 2x the US violent crime rates.

But then it turned out the UK authorities had been faking their data, so UK crime rates might have been substantially higher than shown in the statistics. I suppose they might have been lower as well, though I think it's less likely that the data was faked to make crime look worse than it actually was. That the UK rates are higher than the US are still almost certainly true, though, even if we don't know the exact multiplier.

Please explain where to find the assertion that the UK authorities have been faking data, or link to the relevant site.

According to Wikipedia here, the intentional homicide rate for the UK is 0.92 per year per 100,000 inhabitants, while the intentional homicide rate for the US is 4.88 per year per 100,000 inhabitants. “Intentional homicide” is simpler to define than “crime of violence”, since an actual dead body is involved. It does not include suicide, and it does include all forms of killing, not only with guns. There may be some differences in definition, but the numbers in the Wikipedia article are taken from UN data which have been checked for consistency. Quoting from the article:

This chart does not use the very latest data due to differences in how intentional homicide is defined, collected, and calculated for each country. In order to have more consistent, continuous, and reliable oversight only the latest UNODC sourcing is used for this section on countries.[1]

An intentional homicide rate for the US which is 4 or 5 times that of the UK hardly suggests that violent crime is much higher in the UK than in the US.

Warren Dew wrote:

OlivierK wrote:Well, I haven't read the whole thread, but I did read the post where you made similar claims, and also the one where you got schooled on them, and I note that you didn't return to that thread after that.

The second post you link to basically repeated previous assertions while failing actually to refute any of my points. It even admits that the UK rate of violent crime is six times higher if you go by the government categories that it criticizes me for not using.

You seem to think that whoever posts last, wins. I can understand that if the arguments are too involved for you to follow, but I'm not interested in posting just for the sake of getting the last word in.

What?

Like it is not hard to understand that the UK categorizes more things as violent crime than the US does. Therefore it is not surprising that the UK reports a higher violent crime statistic than the US.

The UK's statistics and the US' statistics are not directly comparable so saying the UK has 6 times the violent crime rate as the US is simply not true by any objective measure. You can say the UK reports a violent crime rate that is 6 times greater than the US reports violent crime, but that is not the same as saying violent crime is higher in the UK.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... violent-c/

It is quite easy to use google and get a plethora of articles debunking that concept.

Warren Dew wrote:

OlivierK wrote:Well, I haven't read the whole thread, but I did read the post where you made similar claims, and also the one where you got schooled on them, and I note that you didn't return to that thread after that.

The second post you link to basically repeated previous assertions while failing actually to refute any of my points. It even admits that the UK rate of violent crime is six times higher if you go by the government categories that it criticizes me for not using.

You seem to think that whoever posts last, wins. I can understand that if the arguments are too involved for you to follow, but I'm not interested in posting just for the sake of getting the last word in.

I guess whether your points were refuted is in the eye of the beholder. You yourself have posted that your accounting is dependent on drawing an equivalence between assault in the UK and aggravated assault in the US. I've read the definitions and it's clear to me that they're not remotely the same, and so my conclusion is that your accounting isn't worth shit.

And that's fine. I'll keep thinking that until I see evidence to think otherwise. You've said that simply repeating your previous line of argument would be a waste of time. On this, we agree.

Real class act by the NRA:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/nra-tweets-ar-15-gun-used-in-parkland-during-national-student-walkout.html

Might as well just title it:

I'll let Nikolas Cruz control his own guns, thank you.

Good quotes from the comments on that article

Gun owners: "I'll control my own guns."
Banks: "We can regulate ourselves."

Expect the same results.

"I'll control my own gun..."

"A well-regulated militia..."

Or indeed...

you can't make these things up ....

U.S. teacher accidentally fires his gun in the classroom. He was trained in gun use
The incident comes amid a national debate on how to protect students from mass shootings. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

Wed., March 14, 2018
A teacher who is also a reserve police officer trained in firearm use accidentally discharged a gun Tuesday at Seaside High School in Monterey County, Calif., during a class devoted to public safety. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018 ... n-use.html

It would seem that controlling one's own guns is not as straightforward as the NRA suggests.