Every day, 20 US Children Hospitalized w/Gun Injury (6% Die)

[overtone]

How could there be progress on it when you say we shouldn't even try?

In my opinion, well illustrated and fully supported with fifty pages of example here, there can't be progress on it, partly and significantly because of the history and nature of "your" (the generalized "you") manner of "trying".

 

You have to abandon your manner of trying, and give the issue enough time for people to forget your trying. Then you can try again, hopefully in some different way.

 

Meanwhile, we have a serious issue in the US with lots of children being shot, both by accident and on purpose. Granted the actual hazard is quite small, and most people can render it negligible for their own children by taking a couple of usually easy precautions, but the injury is tragic enough, and the wholly unnecessary frequency of it great enough, and the occasional particular vulnerability of some people serious enough, that it has become a proper matter for governmental attention.

 

So while waiting for the gun control gridlock to erode and fade under human forgetfulness, you have much to address in a thread devoted to gunshot injury to children. And the good news is, these other factors appear to be considerably more promising in their potential effects as well as their political feasibility. So it's a win/win. If you are primarily worried about the kids getting shot, anyway.

Edited April 13, 2016 by overtone

[imatfaal]

Just for you guys enjoying splitting hairs and making digs whilst children die

 

 

This is Emily Han - who along with her mother Jenny and father Weidong were shot and killed a week or so ago.

[iNow]

There have been more since, but there were:

 

2 on Saturday

1 on Friday

2 on Thursday

1 on Wednesday

 

...and that's just kids, just the US, and just the last week (and there were almost 10 more the week before that, and ten more the week before that, and the week before that ad infinitum), but yeah... clearly tone is what's important here.

 

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/child-injured-killed

[MigL]

All other criticism of Overtone aside, iNow, he does mention...

 

!- Reliable and universal background checks

2- Trigger locks for privately owned guns

3- Legal standards for responsible ownership

$- Legal standards for responsible carry

 

He also mentions ( I don't have the stats myself ) that 85% of NRA members are in favour of these provisions.

Isn't this enough common ground to at least begin a serious discourse ?

 

Oh, and I had addressed my post to John Cuthber.

Sorry for the confusion.

[Raider5678]

Most of your arguments are built on this simple statement. Low-gun countries have less gun related deaths. Obviously that's true, no guns means no gun related deaths. But then again your also only looking at it from one angle, how many people guns kill. I mentioned earlier about crime rates NOT related to guns, and for some reason nobody addressed it. Looking at it from the homicide rate INCLUDING every other homicide, not only gun related ones, you see a different story. Although this is comparing it to every country, not just cherry picked ones, so this might not count.

 

Also, if everyone in a country doesn't own a gun, crime rates DO go down. If everyone in a country OWNED a gun and were TRAINED how to use it, would crime rates go down too?

 

https://mises.org/blog/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries

 

http://crimeresearch.org/2014/03/comparing-murder-rates-across-countries/

 

And just for discussion what do you guys think of these?

 

http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/miscellaneous-gun-control-information/#BCS

 

http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/guns-in-other-countries/

[overtone]

 

 

He also mentions ( I don't have the stats myself ) that 85% of NRA members are in favour of these provisions.

Not all four - that number is for background checks and partly for concealed carry.

 

Also, I said I favored required trigger locks for guns available to children, not all privately owned guns. I especially think that handguns available to children - meaning in the same house they are in - should be trigger-locked, and that handguns around children are a special area of more stringent regulation. (much as speech and expression around children are more strictly curbed, and other such rights more restricted).

 

Along the way, I have mentioned required secure storage for guns above a certain number in a house - that number for me was 2 - and spoken favorably of isotope tagging ammunition, and have not mentioned but would favor biometric security for police, security force, and concealed carry weapons. Also a few more such measures (biometric security for ammunition in private homes with children, or for loading as well as firing a handgun, say) seem worth looking into.

 

And so forth. A long list.

 

But I think John's actual query was about the other approaches I mentioned for reducing the frequency of children being shot, not the gun control measures I mentioned favoring. A few can be compiled from my posts alone (others have also contributed), if anyone were interested (nobody was at the time of posting), explicit in posts 223, 332,458, 476, 480, 657, 699, and 888; suggested in a few others. I believe the moderator trashed post in the 70s alluded to something relevant along those lines as well, which would be the earliest, but memory fails.

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

 

...I believe the moderator trashed post in the 70s alluded to something relevant along those lines as well, which would be the earliest, but memory fails.

Although you were specifically warned twice and still thought you should respond to moderation notes - in the interest of the discussion here is the only substantive part of your missing post; the other four paragraphs were bleating about how badly you are treated by the oppressive moderators.

Or as they have proven incomprehensible, perhaps another one? One of the odder patterns here has been the conflation of accident and intent - guns do damage by accident, like other dangerous objects, but they also do harm by intent, which is distinctive (although not unique). if we are talking about background checks and the like we are not talking about curbing accidents - the curbing of accident and the prevention of intentional harm almsot certainly would require different approaches in the law. What are the laws actually anticipated? .

 

It is possible I have missed another post but I don't think so.

 

 

[dimreepr]

Most of your arguments are built on this simple statement. Low-gun countries have less gun related deaths. Obviously that's true, no guns means no gun related deaths. But then again your also only looking at it from one angle, how many people guns kill. I mentioned earlier about crime rates NOT related to guns, and for some reason nobody addressed it. Looking at it from the homicide rate INCLUDING every other homicide, not only gun related ones, you see a different story. Although this is comparing it to every country, not just cherry picked ones, so this might not count.

 

Also, if everyone in a country doesn't own a gun, crime rates DO go down. If everyone in a country OWNED a gun and were TRAINED how to use it, would crime rates go down too?

 

https://mises.org/blog/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries

 

http://crimeresearch.org/2014/03/comparing-murder-rates-across-countries/

 

And just for discussion what do you guys think of these?

 

http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/miscellaneous-gun-control-information/#BCS

 

http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/guns-in-other-countries/

 

 

This thread is about accidental gun injuries/deaths of children, so this argument is off topic, nevertheless the abundance of guns, in America, clearly and directly contribute to these incidents; surely you can see the benefit of changing the current status quo to profit your children, even if that means you have to prove your competence to own a gun?

[overtone]

This thread is about accidental gun injuries/deaths of children,

It includes attempted murders, gunfight injuries, and suicides, as well as accidents. As per the OP.

 

 

 

nevertheless the abundance of guns, in America, clearly and directly contribute to these incidents;

Low prevalence of guns demographically - inner city black people, most dramatically - is associated with most of the hospital admissions counted.

 

Also, the rates have been dropping for ten years, at the same time that per capita gun prevalence has been rising. (according to the OP link to USA Today).

 

Statistically, then, within the US the lower the prevalence of guns the higher the risk of gun injury, and vice versa.

 

Which leads - in the type of prevalence based argument we have become accustomed to around here - to the fact based and simple and obvious conclusion that we should hand out guns and ammo to inner city black people, to make their lives safer. Unless there's something wrong with that kind of argument.

Edited April 13, 2016 by overtone

[waitforufo]

Which leads - in the type of prevalence based argument we have become accustomed to around here - to the fact based and simple and obvious conclusion that we should hand out guns and ammo to inner city black people, to make their lives safer. Unless there's something wrong with that kind of argument.

No flaw in that argument that I can find. I'm for it.

 

I'm sure Bobby Seale would agree as well. Google "Bobby Seale", "May 2, 1967"

Edited April 13, 2016 by waitforufo

[dimreepr]

It includes attempted murders, gunfight injuries, and suicides, as well as accidents. As per the OP. .

 

 

 

 

Who knew gunfighters were quite so young?

[John Cuthber]

It includes attempted murders, gunfight injuries, and suicides, as well as accidents. As per the OP.

 

I think we need to define "accidental". Few of those children were deliberately targeted as in "There's little johnny- I'm going to shoot him". Some were "I'm going down all guns blazing and I don't care who I kill" and some were either a child playing with a gun and killing themselves or random "he dropped a gun and it went off " accidents.

In the cases where the intention was to kill a child, and the shooter was themselves a child it's difficult to say whether or not they had legally recognised responsibility anyway.

 

At one level, the response needed to address the different modes of death are different.

At another level- not having guns would do it. But, apparently the "best" strategy there is to be defeatist and not try,

I believe Overtone listed four approaches in the post previous to yours where you asked him to list 'a few'. Posts #1017 ( his ) and #1018 ( yours ).

If you don't bother reading his posts, John, how can you have a meaningful discussion ?

OK, so what he said is

"It doesn't matter how many people think reliable and universal background checks, trigger locks in family homes, legal standards for responsible ownership and carry, for example, would be a good idea in a better world (It's over 85% of the NRA membership even, last I checked): they aren't going to hand political power over to people who think like that, talk like that, and preen themselves in public on a moral and ethical superiority they nowhere near possess. Because such people are a threat."

Now, at best that's a tangential reference to what he might suggests- it's what he says that others might suggest.

And, of course, he then destroys his own credibility by saying "Because such people are a threat.".

Well, a threat to whom- apart from the gun indystry?

But never mind, since ewe now have some concrete proposals let's have a look at them (I suspect it's look at them again since they have been raised before)

 

Here they are (and I'm not saying these are all the possible ideas he's put forward but...)

 

universal background checks,

trigger locks in family homes,

Legal standards for responsible ownership and carry,

 

OK, the last of those is, as far as I can see, unconstitutional. It's prefect reasonable but some dimwitted gun enthusiast somewhere is going to object when someone tells him that he's simply not responsible enough to on a gun.

And he (or his NRA sponsored lawyer) will say that he is entitled to bear arms under the constitution.

And he will win the case- because that is what the 2nd amendment says.

 

The same goes for the first of them. What's the point of "universal background checks" if those who "fail" the check can still appeal to their right under the constitution?

 

Then there's "trigger locks in family homes, "

Well, it's really not my field.

Are these always available for any and all guns?

Are they going to be paid for by the state?

(I suspect the lawyers will have a field day with "family homes" What happens when little Johnny is visiting his uncle's place?- but that's beside the point)

It's progress and it would almost certainly reduce the number of kids getting shot.

 

How many dead kids are acceptable?

When do you stop tightening up on security/ control?

[overtone]

Few of those children were deliberately targeted as in "There's little johnny- I'm going to shoot him"

They said in the OP link that 75% of the very young were "accidental" injuries. In the teens - which seem to be majority - the proportion of "accidentals" was much lower, but unspecified.

 

The inverse correlation with prevalence would seem likely, just guessing here, to imply a lower percentage of true accidentals. So would the very large gender and racial skew. By thumbnail calculation, if young black teenage boys with half the prevalence exposure to guns as white boys nevertheless have four times the gunshot injury rate (as per the OP stats), that would work out to eight times the likelihood of them getting shot by accident with a given gun they happen to be near, if accidents are dominating these statistics. They don't seem all that much more clumsy or careless to me, when I meet them. First guess is one should seek another explanation.

Edited April 13, 2016 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

They said in the OP link that 75% of the very young were "accidental" injuries. In the teens - which seem to be majority - the proportion of "accidentals" was much lower, but unspecified.

 

The inverse correlation with prevalence would seem likely, just guessing here, to imply a lower percentage of true accidentals. So would the very large gender and racial skew. By thumbnail calculation, if young black teenage boys with half the prevalence exposure to guns as white boys nevertheless have four times the gunshot injury rate (as per the OP stats), that would work out to eight times the likelihood of them getting shot by accident with a given gun they happen to be near, if accidents are dominating these statistics. They don't seem all that much more clumsy or careless to me, when I meet them. First guess is one should seek another explanation.

Well, that's a fair analysis. Accidents should kill essentially, just as many boys as girls and (pro rata) just as many blacks as whites.

It looks like many of those shootings are intentional.

That rules out trigger guards as a way to stop them because, if you wan to shoot someone, you will obviously remove the trigger guard.

They will still stop a good fraction of "heat of the moment" shootings and "kid playing with daddy's gun" shootings. That's a useful start.

[overtone]

 

 

That rules out trigger guards as a way to stop them because, if you wan to shoot someone, you will obviously remove the trigger guard.

Trigger guards that lock would still be a barrier, to the kid who is "borrowing" the gun from a relative etc. But yeah, crime and gang prevention cuts to the root of the problem the guns decorate and symptomize.

 

And we're getting to the first full generation largely free of leaded gas - community adults, maternally, or self exposed.

 

There is, btw, a cultural observation that might apply: when I'm working out of a truck into a household the kids tend to behave according to race - as a general rule white kids stand around cluelessly and have to be moved when they're in the way, yellow kids line up against a wall and whisper to each other, brown kids hide behind handy adult relatives, red kids crowd around but not cluelessly, and black kids run around alertly clear of the work but will be up in the truck playing with stuff behind my back.

 

So I kind of suspect black kids might have more accidents with a household handgun left around, and trigger locks might be a larger benefit in black homes than the stats indicate. Balance that against the likelihood that the guns involved in this stuff are not bought by the household adult for the house in the first place.

[iNow]

All other criticism of Overtone aside, iNow, he does mention...

 

!- Reliable and universal background checks

2- Trigger locks for privately owned guns

3- Legal standards for responsible ownership

$- Legal standards for responsible carry

 

He also mentions ( I don't have the stats myself ) that 85% of NRA members are in favour of these provisions.

Thanks for the reminder. I'd nearly forgotten since their last hundred or so posts have all been about how stupid the rest of us are.

[mp][/mp]

I said I favored required trigger locks for guns available to children, not all privately owned guns. I especially think that handguns available to children - meaning in the same house they are in - should be trigger-locked, and that handguns around children are a special area of more stringent regulation.

(snip)

I have mentioned required secure storage for guns above a certain number in a house - that number for me was 2 - and spoken favorably of isotope tagging ammunition, and have not mentioned but would favor biometric security for police, security force, and concealed carry weapons. Also a few more such measures (biometric security for ammunition in private homes with children, or for loading as well as firing a handgun, say) seem worth looking into.

 

And so forth. A long list.

And it's a good list. Thank you for summarizing it clearly like this.

 

The next step IMO is to discuss how we might get these recommendations implemented. Any ideas on how best to do so (beyond telling other members here to shut-up)?

[John Cuthber]

 

There is, btw, a cultural observation that might apply: when I'm working out of a truck into a household the kids tend to behave according to race - as a general rule white kids stand around cluelessly and have to be moved when they're in the way, yellow kids line up against a wall and whisper to each other, brown kids hide behind handy adult relatives, red kids crowd around but not cluelessly, and black kids run around alertly clear of the work but will be up in the truck playing with stuff behind my back.

 

So I kind of suspect black kids might have more accidents with a household handgun left around, and trigger locks might be a larger benefit in black homes than the stats indicate. Balance that against the likelihood that the guns involved in this stuff are not bought by the household adult for the house in the first place.

 

 

And it had been going so well; until he decided that the best thing to do was to blame the victim for their own death- and then say it's because of skin colour.

 

 

 

All the real research has shown that- to the extent that race has a meaning, and that there are differences between races- those differences are small.

Yet somehow, when he's there they all conform to handy stereotypes.

 

And he says we are the irrational ones because the best way to get gun control is not to try to get gun control.

[overtone]

The next step IMO is to discuss how we might get these recommendations implemented. Any ideas on how best to do so (beyond telling other members here to shut-up)?

- - -

 

 

And it had been going so well; until he decided that the best thing to do was to blame the victim for their own death- and then say it's because of skin colour.

 

 

 

So lessee: instead of abandoning gun control and discussing other and far more likely approaches to reducing gunshot injury in the young, as I suggested, I am bid to repost my earlier suggestions for gun control - that were ignored for fifty pages and then their existence denied - so that we can begin again the endless task. So I do.

 

And one of them is chosen - trigger locks on handguns in homes with children. But the point is made that racial disparity in the stats - particularly the black race, and Minnesota stats, specifically mentioned - seems to indicate too large a role for intention, that assuming as we might racial neutrality in accident, accident can be playing only a very minor role and trigger locks then of only very small benefit.

 

But I pointed out that we have reason to think both accident and "borrowed" use might play a larger role among Minnesota blacks than among other races, due to various cultural factors I have observed and the obvious economics of gun ownership among the black people who are getting shot. So - my argument goes - trigger locks in children's homes have more promise than an initial glance at the racial bias in the injury stats might suggest. And they have the same basic justification that other child-conscious restrictions on exercise of Constitutional rights have, such as on speech (porn) or religion (can't beat the kid for God).

 

And that's the response. {those two quotes} The gun control advocates want that kind of reasoning and agenda to be given power over others.

 

Like I keep saying: gridlocked. The crazy is on both sides, and nothing will help but time.

 

Or as put before:

 

 

 

When you so completely and badly misrepresent the postings of others, your claims of reasonableness lose credibility.

If fewer gun control advocates illustrated their claims to reliable sense and reason by displaying unreasonableness, irrationality, and amnesiac incomprehension,

including threatening the very things they claim not to advocate, and refusing to credit critics of their approach with the very reason they claim to be looking for,

we might have a chance of breaking this gridlock, and adopting some of the dozen or more easily possible and almost universally supported improvements in American gun control I have been the earliest, most repetitive, and most consistently persistent advocate of on this forum.

But as that has been thoroughly demonstrated to be an impossible dream, we're stuck.

In other words, no, we can't have trigger locks. Why not? Maybe because they wouldn't work, but nobody's looking into that much. Instead, because a lot of people think gun control advocates are irrational, emotional, unreasonable, nannystate authoritarians who can't be trusted with power.

 

Where do you suppose they got that idea?

 

Meanwhile, we can get a lot of the benefit we need, kids not getting shot, without gun control. If we had decent drug laws, for example, how much of the 400% racial disparity - concentrated as it is in the drug law enforcement hot spots among black people - vanishes, and in the right way? If it's only 20%, against all expectations, it would still outweigh the entire possible effect of trigger locks among white people in Minnesota.

Edited April 15, 2016 by overtone

[iNow]

Now, as for those ideas regarding how best to implement the changes which we each agree will actually help the situation and without impuning our constitutional rights... those ideas where we have nearly 100% overlap in our positions and overwhelming shared consensus... any thoughts?

[overtone]

Now, as for those ideas regarding how best to implement the changes which we each agree will actually help the situation and without impuning our constitutional rights... those ideas where we have nearly 100% overlap in our positions and overwhelming shared consensus... any thoughts?

Wait for the gridlock to erode, and people to forget. Then meet as reasonable folks, and I think it would be fairly easy. I think things would go quite smoothly.

 

Meanwhile, if the problem is kids getting shot, there is a lot we can get done in the realm of better drug laws and enforcement, lead abatement, income inequality, etc etc etc. Any time.

Edited April 15, 2016 by overtone

[iNow]

We should do both. They're not mutually exclusive.

Now, returning to the question of how... any thoughts?

[overtone]

We should do both. They're not mutually exclusive.

The problem is not mutual exclusion. The problem is that the crazy has gridlocked the gun control option. And if this thread has demonstrated nothing else, it has demonstrated that the gridlock on gun control has not magically let go. Yet.

Edited April 15, 2016 by overtone

[iNow]

Lather

Rinse

Repeat

.

Now, returning to the question of how... any thoughts?

[overtone]

Now, returning to the question of how... any thoughts?

You have demonstrated the gridlock. I can't think of any direct way to break it. Certainly it would require marginalizing everyone who argues in public as the gun control advocates here post on the topic. How would one go about doing that?

Edited April 15, 2016 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

You have demonstrated the gridlock. I can't think of any direct way to break it. Certainly it would require marginalizing everyone who argues in public as the gun control advocates here post on the topic. How would one go about doing that?

One way to break it would be for the side which owns the guns that kill the kids to accept responsibility for that and stop insisting that it's the other side that should change. In particular, they should stop insisting that their opponents stop opposing them.

Are you going to do that?

Because until you do so you are maintaining the gridlock, and maintaining the death toll.

 

 

 

And one of them is chosen - trigger locks on handguns in homes with children. But the point is made that racial disparity in the stats - particularly the black race, and Minnesota stats, specifically mentioned - seems to indicate too large a role for intention, that assuming as we might racial neutrality in accident, accident can be playing only a very minor role and trigger locks then of only very small benefit.

 

But I pointed out that we have reason to think both accident and "borrowed" use might play a larger role among Minnesota blacks than among other races, due to various cultural factors I have observed and the obvious economics of gun ownership among the black people who are getting shot. So - my argument goes - trigger locks in children's homes have more promise than an initial glance at the racial bias in the injury stats might suggest. And they have the same basic justification that other child-conscious restrictions on exercise of Constitutional rights have, such as on speech (porn) or religion (can't beat the kid for God).

 

And that's the response. {those two quotes} The gun control advocates want that kind of reasoning and agenda to be given power over others.

 

Like I keep saying: gridlocked. The crazy is on both sides, and nothing will help but time.

 

Or as put before:

 

 

 

In other words, no, we can't have trigger locks. Why not? Maybe because they wouldn't work, but nobody's looking into that much. Instead, because a lot of people think gun control advocates are irrational, emotional, unreasonable, nannystate authoritarians who can't be trusted with power.

 

Where do you suppose they got that idea?

 

Meanwhile, we can get a lot of the benefit we need, kids not getting shot, without gun control. If we had decent drug laws, for example, how much of the 400% racial disparity - concentrated as it is in the drug law enforcement hot spots among black people - vanishes, and in the right way? If it's only 20%, against all expectations, it would still outweigh the entire possible effect of trigger locks among white people in Minnesota.

"Where do you suppose they got that idea? "

Did you rule out NRA/ Republican propaganda?

"And one of them is chosen "

Others were chosen too, but they were unconstitutional.

 

The fundamental point you are missing is that you only get gridlock when people are pushing in two directions a,d it won't go away until one of them backs down.

Whyshouldn't the side that's killing the kids be the one to back down?