Did guns or vaccines save more lives in 2021?

[FlatAssembler]

True Gary is a gun nut whose research can't be trusted.

I thought that Gary Kleck was one of the most influential criminologists of all time. He is also famous for his arguments against death penalty.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

True Gary is a gun nut whose research can't be trusted.

I thought that Gary Kleck was one of the most influential criminologists of all time. He is also famous for his arguments against death penalty.

I’ve done a bit of reading, both on Kleck’s work and various critiques of it. Couple of issues:

-Kleck very broadly  defines ‘gun defense’. For example, he counts house signs indicating the residents have guns as defense, whether or not the guns are used or even exist.

-He arrives at the 300k figure by extrapolating from a sample size of just 5 000 out of a country with a population of well over 300 million.

-It seems difficult to determine, in any particular gun encounter, whether or not the presence of a gun was a factor in life saving.

-Even if we’re being generous beyond all reason and posit that guns were brandished often enough to save 300 000 lives, this means gun use produces a higher mortality than automobile crashes, breast cancer, and heart disease.

Boru

[Jehanne]

True Gary is a gun nut whose research can't be trusted.

I thought that Gary Kleck was one of the most influential criminologists of all time. He is also famous for his arguments against death penalty.

He needs to specify his null hypothesis more systematically before proceeding to reject it. For instance, in the 19th-century some towns west of the Mississippi River had murder rates far surpassing those of modern-day America; of course, everyone (or, nearly everyone) in those communities was armed. One could frame a null hypothesis to test that unarmed individuals in those communities were at a higher risk of being a victim of homicide than an armed individual, and, therefore, conclude that arming individuals is a good thing.

As Mark Twain said (paraphrasing), "There are lies, damned lies, and, there's statistics".

[The Architect Of Fate]

I thought that Gary Kleck was one of the most influential criminologists of all time. He is also famous for his arguments against death penalty.

Well, you thought wrong. Being famous for one good argument doesn't make him right on any other argument. So this is a very poor argument.

[FlatAssembler]

COVID-19 vaccinations are estimated to have saved around 300'000 lives in 2021 in the USA.
According to the famous study done by Gary Kleck in 1995, guns also save around 300'000 lives each year in the USA.
So, what do you guys think, did defensive gun use or COVID-19 vaccines save more lives in 2021?

There were something like 20,000 murders or criminal homicides in the US each year.   for guns to save 300000 lives a year, we would need to assume it prevented 94% of the murders or homicide that otherwise would have occurred.  it says were it not for guns the average american would have roughly 1 % chance of dying from murdered or homicide.   it also says guns are not only available for, but also successfully used for, self defense in 94% of the cases where the intended victims would otherwise have been killed.   do any of this pass the most cursory sniff test even for the US?    

Since I think Gary Kleck’s study overstates the life saving value of guns by only a slightly fewer orders of magnitude than Bishop Ussher’s study understates the age of the earth, I would say Covid-19 saved far more lives.

I don't know. I am Croatian, not American. I only know USA is a very high-crime country.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

There were something like 20,000 murders or criminal homicides in the US each year.   for guns to save 300000 lives a year, we would need to assume it prevented 94% of the murders or homicide that otherwise would have occurred.  it says were it not for guns the average american would have roughly 1 % chance of dying from murdered or homicide.   it also says guns are not only available for, but also successfully used for, self defense in 94% of the cases where the intended victims would otherwise have been killed.   do any of this pass the most cursory sniff test even for the US?    

Since I think Gary Kleck’s study overstates the life saving value of guns by only a slightly fewer orders of magnitude than Bishop Ussher’s study understates the age of the earth, I would say Covid-19 saved far more lives.

I don't know. I am Croatian, not American. I only know USA is a very high-crime country.

And yet the US is - by a whopping great margin - the world leader in the civilian ownership of firearms. I grasp that correlation isn't causation, but it's hard to ignore the fact that 400 million guns don't seem to be making Americans safer.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

The USA isn't a high crime country. We have a relatively large number of homicides (though no us city tops that list, either)...while other categories of crime are highly suppressed. On the whole, a us metropolis is a less safe place than Croatia, and a us metropolis has about as many people as the entire nation of Croatia in a much smaller space (excluding new york, which is twice the pop of your country crammed into 300 square miles to croatias 22k?). If we were looking at comparable cities then we'd be looking at Zagreb and...probably, DC. DC being one of the safest cities on earth..as I believe Zagreb also has some claim to?

At any rate, us gun ownership stats are a double edged sword. They certainly don't seem to indicate that guns are making us safer..but they don't seem to indicate that guns are making us less safe, either. We're chiefly concerned about a profound spike in what amounts to a rounding error in overall violent crime, and for good reason. It's an outlier all it's own, on multiple fronts. It's a crime committed overwhelmingly by rural or suburban perps, often wealthy, largely majority demographics. It doesn't follow the same trends that crime in a us metropolis does, for example.

[Anomalocaris]

There were something like 20,000 murders or criminal homicides in the US each year.   for guns to save 300000 lives a year, we would need to assume it prevented 94% of the murders or homicide that otherwise would have occurred.  it says were it not for guns the average american would have roughly 1 % chance of dying from murdered or homicide.   it also says guns are not only available for, but also successfully used for, self defense in 94% of the cases where the intended victims would otherwise have been killed.   do any of this pass the most cursory sniff test even for the US?    

Since I think Gary Kleck’s study overstates the life saving value of guns by only a slightly fewer orders of magnitude than Bishop Ussher’s study understates the age of the earth, I would say Covid-19 saved far more lives.

I don't know. I am Croatian, not American. I only know USA is a very high-crime country.

it has nothing to do with the crime rate in the US.   it has to do with whether you think it is even plausible that in 94% of all circumstances where a person would otherwise have been murdered or died of criminal homicide,  not only is there a gun available to the would be victim or his defender right at the criminal moment, but the gun was effectively used to prevent the crime.     think, man, don’t believe every statistic that seems to make a case you clearly favor.

[FlatAssembler]

I don't know. I am Croatian, not American. I only know USA is a very high-crime country.

it has nothing to do with the crime rate in the US.   it has to do with whether you think it is even plausible that in 94% of all circumstances where a person would otherwise have been murdered or died of criminal homicide,  not only is there a gun available to the would be victim or his defender right at the criminal moment, but the gun was effectively used to prevent the crime.     think, man, don’t believe every statistic that seems to make a case you clearly favor.

And don't you find it highly implausible that almost everybody who thinks gun saved their life is somehow mistaken? I suppose that 300'000 lives per year could be an overestimate, but, in order for guns to take more lives than they save, more than 90% of people who think guns saved their lives would have to be mistaken.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

it has nothing to do with the crime rate in the US.   it has to do with whether you think it is even plausible that in 94% of all circumstances where a person would otherwise have been murdered or died of criminal homicide,  not only is there a gun available to the would be victim or his defender right at the criminal moment, but the gun was effectively used to prevent the crime.     think, man, don’t believe every statistic that seems to make a case you clearly favor.

And don't you find it highly implausible that almost everybody who thinks gun saved their life is somehow mistaken? I suppose that 300'000 lives per year could be an overestimate, but, in order for guns to take more lives than they save, more than 90% of people who think guns saved their lives would have to be mistaken.

A person who thinks a gun saved their life is exactly the type of person most likely to be mistaken. Self-justification.

P1: I need a gun to save my life.
P2: I’m alive.
C: My gun saved my life.

Boru