Mass shooting in the middle school Vladislav Ribnikar in Belgrade

[Angrboda]

Property is theft. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

[The Architect Of Fate]

I don't understand why the burden of proof would be on the pro-gun side. They are not the ones advocating the use of force. It's the anti-gun people who are advocating the use of force (to forcibly take guns away from people), so obviously they have to at least prove it will result in the desired outcomes (less violent crime).

And even if the burden of proof is initially on the pro-gun side, doesn't the Gary Kleck study (concluding that guns save 10x more lives as they take) switch that burden of proof? Like the fact that we see the Moon switches the burden of proof onto the Mad Revisionists (the conspiracy theorists who claim the Moon doesn't exist).

Glecks study is crap and your perspective is delusional.

[The Grand Nudger]

Imagine that.  A world in which almost everybody who pulls a gun on someone else wasn't actually in any danger of losing their life.  Like the thief who robs people at gunpoint.  I wonder if he thinks he needs to protect himself from his clients, too?

Bank robberies and store robberies do not happen hundreds of thousands times per year, though.

Well, I guess we'll have to remove those types of crimes from the explanation for hundreds of thousands of defensive uses, won't we?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Because you STILL can't be sure that the attacker would have killed the respondent if the latter hadn't had a gun. Also, whether one is being 'attacked' is a very subjective matter. In recent news, people have been shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, approach the wrong car, or pulling into the wrong driveway. In each case, I'm sure the shooter felt they were in imminent danger of being harmed or killed, but the circumstances of those cases argue against it.

Boru

Do you have any evidence that happens hundreds of thousands times per year?

What’s that got to do with anything? Those were only used as examples to show that Kleck cannot determine after the fact if any particular life was saved by the use of a gun. In other words, it’s all but impossible to know if an assailant would have killed the person responding to Kleck’s question if the respondent hadn’t brandished a firearm. All he’s shown is that people predisposed to point a gun at someone believed that they were in immanent danger of being killed (colour me shocked) - this is why people who routinely carry firearms do so, because they think the world is teeming with people who want to kill them.

Boru

[FlatAssembler]

Do you have any evidence that happens hundreds of thousands times per year?

What’s that got to do with anything? Those were only used as examples to show that Kleck cannot determine after the fact if any particular life was saved by the use of a gun. In other words, it’s all but impossible to know if an assailant would have killed the person responding to Kleck’s question if the respondent hadn’t brandished a firearm. All he’s shown is that people predisposed to point a gun at someone believed that they were in immanent danger of being killed (colour me shocked) - this is why people who routinely carry firearms do so, because they think the world is teeming with people who want to kill them.

Boru

But don't you think it is kind of arrogant to think that almost everybody who thinks a gun saved his life is mistaken? I mean, don't they know better than you, since they have actually been in that situation?

[Ravenshire]

He just has different flavors of nonsense.

Kinda like Baskin & Robbins, but with more flavors.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

What’s that got to do with anything? Those were only used as examples to show that Kleck cannot determine after the fact if any particular life was saved by the use of a gun. In other words, it’s all but impossible to know if an assailant would have killed the person responding to Kleck’s question if the respondent hadn’t brandished a firearm. All he’s shown is that people predisposed to point a gun at someone believed that they were in immanent danger of being killed (colour me shocked) - this is why people who routinely carry firearms do so, because they think the world is teeming with people who want to kill them.

Boru

But don't you think it is kind of arrogant to think that almost everybody who thinks a gun saved his life is mistaken? I mean, don't they know better than you, since they have actually been in that situation?

It isn't a case of them being mistaken, it's a case of skewing the sample.. Look at Kleck's sample (not the sample size, but who he questioned): he drastically over-represented not just men, but the oldest male in each household with a gun. These are people predisposed to think they need firearms to preserve their lives, so naturally they're more likely to think that whenever they waved a gun in someone's face, their life was in danger.

No, they don't know better than me - they can't possibly. The only way to know for certain sure that they would have lost their life if they didn't use a gun would be to see into the future. No matter how much they believed they were about to be killed by an assailant (or a dog or the clerk who short changed them), there's simply no way for them - or Kleck or you or me - to know.

Boru

[FlatAssembler]

Look at Kleck's sample (not the sample size, but who he questioned): he drastically over-represented not just men, but the oldest male in each household with a gun.

You can argue that leads to a 30% overestimate, but you can not claim that leads to a 90% overestimate (which would be necessary for guns to kill more people than they save).

[The Grand Nudger]

Why 30%, you reckon?

[Angrboda]

Why 30%, you reckon?

It was the first thing he could reach when he dug in his ass for something to pull out.