Your claim about more likely to die to your own gun is often a misleading statement. The leading type of death caused by firearms in the US is suicide, by a large factor. The leading method of suicide in the US is by firearms. Therefore, if you remove suicide from those numbers the chances of you dieing by your own gun is reduced significantly. Sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves whenever I see a statement like that tossed out without context. Without context, it sounds like you will be killed by your own gun by factors beyond your control, which would be rare indeed. Using it as a way to discourage gun ownership is misleading, unless they have suicidal tendencies.
Also, you don't need your cellphone to defend yourself; you can toss it whenever you choose.
Have you considered that gun ownership may contribute to suicide, by lowering the threshold of planning needed, and thus making it possible for gun owners who wouldn't commit suicide by other means?
It's not as simple of a relationship as you make it out to be.
Owning a gun does not contribute to suicide. I suppose there might be cases of someone killing themselves with their gun because they feel bad about owning a gun. What you are suggesting makes it easier, but does not contribute.
Owning a gun may make it simpler for some people to commit the act, but the sad fact of the matter is it not that difficult to do. There are numerous ways for someone to commit suicide easily without a firearm. There are ways that are quicker, painless, and more apt to succeed.
If the most common method to commit suicide happen to be jumping off the roof of their house, should the government start restricting the access to your own roof regardless of your feelings towards suicide? If the most common method were to jump off bridges, should the government restrict all foot traffic on bridges?
My take on people using this type of statistic, granted I don't feel they all do this, is that it is used as a sad fact to cause emotion in an effort to garner support for their position. I mean, what kind of person are you to want to not help prevent suicides? Don't you want to be reasonable to help people in pain? That's called emotional manipulation and the worst people do it all the time.
When it comes to suicide, people who focus on the how, but not the why, most likely have an agenda about the how and probably could care less about the why. These are the kinds of people who should not be included in the discussion of something so highly emotional and tragic as suicide.
As I stated elsewhere, the government using its powers to restrict ownership of an inanimate object based on what another individual may or may not do with their own inanimate object is a disgusting abuse of power.
The statistics suggest that you are incorrect. Harvard, the National Institutes of Health, and the Israeli Defense Forces all have studies that point to gun ownership actually increasing suicide risk.
EDIT: Furthermore, the argument that guns don't kill people is intellectually lazy. Guns are designed to kill things. That is their only purpose. Period.
The statistics show that firearms are the most popular choice. If it is a contributor then people shoot themselves BECAUSE they own the gun. I fail to follow that sort of logic.
The only connection I can agree with is that firearms allow for snap decisions and fatal first-attempts. Owning a gun does not lead you to a suicide risk, but it doesn't help if you have suicidal tendencies.
That's not enough of a reason to restrict people's rights.
The argument that all guns have only one purpose, which is to kill things, is naive and ignorant. Anyone who states that is being lazy with their arguments, or simply doesn't know anything about guns, because it is easily disproved. There are many guns that are designed for a very specific target and would be incredibly bad to use to kill any living thing.
> If it is a contributor then people shoot themselves BECAUSE they own the gun.
That is a pretty strict interpretation of the cause of suicide. Of course, nobody kills themselves by sheer virtue of the fact that they own a weapon.
> Owning a gun does not lead you to a suicide risk
That is precisely what those studies suggest. Having a firearm nearby does in fact increase your risk of suicide. Whether or not that is enough to restrict people's rights is a totally separate issue. You argued that guns do not increase suicide risk, which is incorrect.
> There are many guns that are designed for a very specific target and would be incredibly bad to use to kill any living thing.
Fantastic! We should allow those firearms for people to have their fun, and regulate the other types (the ones for killing people) as much as possible.
I don't see a strict interpretation of the cause of suicide in what I said, I see a disagreement in whether guns are contributors.
Having a gun increases the likelihood of you attempting to use it, much like using any other means to do so. If knives were the most common choice, should we consider them risks for everyone because they might commit suicide with them? The fact that so many succeed with guns while failing with others makes it look like a contributor. The studies tell me that people are just more successful with guns. Anything that states that guns are a contributor I would have to disagree with as to how I understand what contributing means.
But I'm glad to see that you agree with me that not all guns are designed to kill living things. Hopefully you agree that such arguments are silly on their face and are designed to cause an emotional reaction. I believe I've shown elsewhere that I have no problems with having reasonable regulations on weapons designed to kill human beings on the battlefield, such as fully automatic weapons.
> If knives were the most common choice, should we consider them risks for everyone because they might commit suicide with them?
Yes.
Your argument is unclear to me. All else equal, it makes perfect sense that having a gun accessible nearby increases your suicide risk. Just as if you had a big bottle of pills nearby, or a big tower that you could just jump off of. Now, the question turns to whether or not those things should or could be regulated in some way to reduce that risk. The answer is no. Death is a side effect of those modalities. Neither pills nor a tower's main purpose is to end human life. However, for the vast majority of guns, the main purpose is to end life.
> But I'm glad to see that you agree with me that not all guns are designed to kill living things.
Could you please provide some examples of guns like this? The only thing I can think of would be some sort of really heavily modified .22LR for target shooting.
Again, having a gun increases the likelihood of succeeding in the attempt. It allows for snap decisions is also true. But I do not agree that it contributes to the act in of itself.
A perfect example of this someone pointed out elsewhere; Japan has an incredibly high suicide rate. It is apparently the leading cause of death of men and women in the younger age brackets. Japan has little to no gun culture. From what I've read, people there are attempting to address the why's of the situation instead of tackling the how's as it would change nothing.
People who talk of restricting people's access to guns because of other people's choices of using those gun on themselves is attempting to tackle the how's of the problem and not discussing the why's. It restricts people's rights without actually solving anything.
I have no problems with restricting access to someone with suicidal thoughts, although that's tough to determine how to go about that fairly. But it's a completely different thing to restrict a person's rights because his neighbor is suicidal.
As for guns designed for things other than killing. The easiest examples are shotguns. There are a number of shotguns specifically designed for clay sports. There's even a difference in designs between a shotgun intended for trap and skeet. In trap the clay flies away from you so the shotgun is designed to sling lead as far and as accurately as possible. In skeet the lead doesn't have to travel far but you often have to be able to swing the gun from left-to-right rather quickly, so it is designed with that in mind. Then there are shotguns designed for you to carry in the field and shoot birds. There is often overlap in these designs and the guns designed for clay sports can of course be used to kill living things. But that's not what they are designed for.
There are many other examples, such as the very one you describe.
If you want to discuss the aspect of something being designed to kill, a better and more accurate discussion is about ammunition. A gun is something designed to sling a projectile at high speeds. You can take any gun and insert blanks to make it useless for just about anything.
A friend of mine eventually succeeded to kill himself. He did so jumping in front of a big lorry on a (British) motorway. There had been many attempts leading to that one. Bodies of water, tall buildings, other road traffic incidents, alcohol and pills were all tried, with quite some determination.
None of us could persuade him that his life was well worth living, we all tried. He was the brightest at our school so it wasn't as if intellect was a problem. To him getting himself killed was simply a difficult task he had to get done. But it was far from easy for him.
We don't have guns in the UK, however I am sure that my friend, had he had access to a gun, would have driven out to somewhere sensible and done the deed that way. As it was he drove out to a motorway service station, walked onto the motorway and ran in front of a lorry. Much harder to do.
I know the above is anecdote but statistics don't tell the story. Guns are a mighty fine way to commit suicide given the available alternatives. As a society of mostly non-suicidal people we do not want people to kill themselves, not having guns around helps us with that.
Regarding bridges and the jumping off of, tall buildings and the jumping off of, have you looked over the side of the Golden Gate or the Empire State building? There are nets to catch those that try to suicide themselves.
First, I'm feel for you that you lost a loved one in that manner. I share a similar pain because I have lost two family members to suicide, one with a gun and one without. Both succeeded on the first attempt. I suppose I should advocate the banning of personal ownership of shower curtains and shower rods.
From my perspective, the how was not a factor for me. I was more concerned over the why. To this day I have my thoughts on the why but I'll never know for sure, because they didn't talk to me beforehand. They were sudden and unexpected.
But I'm not about to advocate for the restrictions of people's rights because of what my two family members did to themselves. I appreciate the thinking behind that attitude, I simply just disagree with it.
Sometimes, people make their decisions and there's nothing to be done to change it. Despite access to a gun and your efforts, your friend still killed himself. The only thing that's different is that his pain, perceived and/or real, continued longer than he wished it to. I can't speak of how that fits into the scheme of things because I don't want to claim to know what he was thinking and/or feeling.
As you state, you are in the UK. One thing that is most often missing in these discussions are differences in attitudes from culture to culture. You may not live in a gun culture, I do. But our gun culture has deep roots in mistrust in government, sometimes well-founded and sometimes not. It's not going away anytime soon and ignoring the why's of suicide in an effort to restrict people's rights based on the how's of suicide is just wrong to me.
Yes, I know about the nets in those locations. I also know of similar locations that do not. Those nets are there just as much for the people not planning to jump as it is for people who do.
True, a lot of time was spent prolonging an unhappy life or at least trying to postpone the inevitable. However he was pleased to receive the company of friends. To say 'here you go, gun/pills in top drawer, help yourself!' is a betrayal of life, one would be breaking ranks with every sentient being that has life force and believes living is an ideologically sound thing to do. Yet, you are right, with hindsight, it would have been better for my friend if I had just helped him do the deed.
As well as 'failures' there are 'success' stories. At university I had the fortune of sharing a house with a deeply suicidal man, to discover there really weren't the resources at the university to handle that. As well as practical help (hospital, cleaning up blood-stained things) we found another path for him, to sort it out with his folks, funding bodies and his department. He quit university rather than top himself, recovered from his depression and the following year he gave university another go. I did wonder how far a 'cry for help' could go, he broke his leg jumping off the side of the bridge, not the middle, the cutting went a long way too, but not all the way.
Regarding gun culture in the USA, I can see the appeal, and, what would the West be without guns?
However, I also lived in an inner city area in the UK where there were guns and I thought the crime aspect of the area was 'cool' and that it was great to live 'on the edge'. Then I got beaten to a pulp - no gun, just knife - and, after that my perspective changed totally. I was no longer aloof from the shootings, wife beatings and drug related crime that went on.
Sometimes you need direct experience to have illusions challenged. To me US gun culture is a bit like that, it is easy to have illusions about how guns are this or that, we rarely hear the opinions of those that have been shot.
Now if you Americans could just get on with forming militia and driving up to Washington to dispatch that government of yours... Really, if that is what the guns are for, how much more provocation is needed?
Please understand, I wasn't suggesting that you should have helped your friend with his act. If I did seem to suggest that then I apologize, that was not my intent.
Personally, I feel that every human life lost is a tragedy in some way. Some are obvious, some not so much, and some we choose not to see it that way. But to someone, it's likely a tragedy to them.
There are cases where I can understand suicide, people with serious medical conditions that give them a life of pain without hope of relief for example. It's a fine line though and one of serious discussion these days. Especially in the US where we have so many of veterans committing suicide, it's truly heart-breaking.
I often wonder what our West would have been like without the gun, but you might as well ask what Europe would have been like without sword and shield. Sadly, we'll never know.
Keep in mind, I personally see a difference between "gun culture" and "thug culture" as it's usually called. One is not necessarily the same as the other.
I find it doubtful that we as Americans would ever move on DC, if we did there are likely really big problems in the world in general. So far our system of changing the hands of power has worked okay. Bumps in the road here and there, a few mistakes for sure, but as long as the current guy is willing to step down for the next guy (regardless of which political office we're talking about) then I can't really such a thing happening.
Gun ownership contributes to suicide, not because gun owners are more likely to attempt suicide, but because they are more likely to succeed. Men are more likely to commit suicide than women in the US, largely because most men who attempt use guns, while women are more likely to try to overdose.
The problem with saying that "owning a gun doesn't contribute to suicide" is that there is a clear and strong statistical correlation between gun availability and suicide. If gun ownership doesn't contribute to suicide, by lowering the planning threshold (or some other mechanism), then you have to find some other hidden factor that would both cause an increase in gun ownership and an increase in suicide.
Now, that doesn't mean that I necessarily favor gun confiscation. But there's a huge difference between saying, "Yes, there is a correlation between gun ownership and suicide, but that's outweighed by the fact that gun ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution," and saying, "No, there is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide." The first is an arguable and defensible point. The second is objectively false.
> As I stated elsewhere, the government using its powers to restrict ownership of an inanimate object based on what another individual may or may not do with their own inanimate object is a disgusting abuse of power.
Do you believe the government should restrict personal ownership of nuclear weapons, or is that a disgusting abuse of power?
Ah yes, the old personal ownership of nuclear weapons argument, as if that were the same thing and relevant to this discussion.
Note, in my comment above when I state "an inanimate object", I am referring to a gun. For you to take that statement and expand it to an extreme such as nuclear weapons is rather childish on your part.
Since we've started into childish manner of discussion, are you suggesting then that someone has used a nuclear weapon to commit suicide and therefore we should help prevent suicides by banning all nuclear weapons? Or are you suggesting that the banning of personal ownership of nuclear weapons is justified because too many people can easily commit suicide with them? I'm just trying to understand your stance as it pertains to this discussion.
Now, as for your question. No, I do not see the government restricting access to nuclear weapons as a disgusting abuse of power. To make your argument on a far more sane and realistic point, I do not disagree with the government restricting access to fully automatic weaponry either.
How do I justify what you probably see as a clear hypocrisy? Easy, because it's not. The government is fully within its rights to restrict access to things it deems too dangerous to the nation's people as a whole. If someone can convince me that personal ownership of handguns is a danger to the nation's people as a whole, I would likely change my stance. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.
So, do you actually have a comment about my position that it is a disgusting use of power for the government to restrict a person's access to an inanimate object, in this case a gun since you are having troubles following along, because of how another individual may or may not use the same inanimate object on themselves without harm to another person? Or shall we continue with comparing childish extremes?
Because if that's your stance, we really need to take a hard look at the inanimate objects we interact with on a daily basis.
By the way, we today have access to all kinds of things that a hundred years ago people would be shocked we have such easy access to. There is a good chance that personal ownership of nuclear weapons, depending on your definition I suppose, will be a strong possibility sometime in the future. Most likely well beyond our lifespans, which is probably a good thing.
I apologize for my harsh tone here, but this is yet another pet peeve of mine that often comes up needlessly in discussions such as this.
This is Hacker News -- you are expected not to be sloppy with your argumentation here. If you say "inanimate object" rather than gun, then we're going to assume you are making a more general statement and react accordingly. I cannot read your mind, so please do not assume I (or anyone else) knows your precise opinion on gun control without being precise with your words.
Well, I guess I'm at fault for assuming that people would follow that I was referring to the object that was the center of the discussion at hand. I should have guessed that someone would take such a simple concept and expand it to every single object in the known universe.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
You used a rhetorical flourish that made your argument sound more extreme than you intended, and it backfired when someone called you out on it. Rather than write a reply dripping with sarcasm and contempt, perhaps you should meditate on this incident as your personal failure to be a clear and effective writer.
Well, since we're discussing opinions here, it is of my opinion that it is your reading comprehension that's lacking. But you shouldn't take it as a personal failure, it happens to everyone from time to time.
When there is an ongoing discussion about an object then one is fully capable of referring to that object without literally naming that object each and every time it is mentioned.
My way: I am holding a stapler. The object in my hand is red. I use it to excess, wasting staples. The boss wants to restrict everyone's usage of staplers because of my waste. I don't think the boss should restrict your usage of an object because of my inefficient usage of the same object.
Your way: I am holding a stapler. The stapler in my hand is red. I use the stapler to excess, wasting staples. The boss wants to restrict everyone's usage of staplers because of my waste. I don't think the boss should restrict your usage of a stapler because of my inefficient usage of a stapler.
That's a stupid way to construct a discussion. But if it makes you happy.
If you take my statement and remove it from the context of the discussion then sure, you are quite correct. But it is not correct to quote that statement as to somehow proving your point by removing it from the context of the discussion.
I did not fail in using a rhetorical flourish to make an argument. I used a simple statement to prove my point that you apparently either failed to follow or attempted to use as a "gotcha!" moment. I'm leaning towards you thinking you had an excellent gotcha moment but alas, I think you protest too much.
By the way, your expanding my statement to include nuclear weapons to totally blow the discussion out of proportion and out of reality was the joke of my office yesterday. Many people thank you for the chuckles you provided.
The difference between the office example and the gun example is that the generalized version would actually make sense in the office example (for example, here is Derek Sivers bringing a similar argument up: https://sivers.org/punish ). If you were my coworker saying the generalized version to me in an office, I would have interpreted you as having the generalized opinion. Of course, since I agree, I wouldn't have raised a counterexample, and you would have walked away thinking I agreed with what you meant instead of what you said. Language is tricky like that.
Both examples are the same thing within the discussion that each was a part of. During any of the discussion of this thread, I don't see generalized opinions, the discussion was very direct in discussing one topic: firearms used for suicide. You were the one to attempt to generalize my statement by taking it outside the context of the discussion.
If I had walked up to you and made my statement without any context whatsoever then you would be absolutely correct, which I said before.
Thanks for the link, it supports my argument quite well that punishing all for the actions of an individual is not always the correct course of action. It actually goes beyond what I was saying since I was only speaking of restricting someone based on what another person does to themselves.
You are dealing in really generic platitudes that do not have any basis in fact.
> In 2005, 75% of the 10,100 homicides committed using firearms in the United States were committed using handguns, compared to 4% with rifles, 5% with shotguns, and the rest with unspecified firearms.[48] The likelihood that a death will result is significantly increased when either the victim or the attacker has a firearm.[49] For example, the mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the heart is 84%, compared to 30% for people who sustain stab wounds to the heart.[50]
The statistics on this issue are stacked pretty highly in favor of gun control. If part of the social contract for living in the United States means that we have to contend with the threat of gun violence, then so be it. However, we should not pretend that the number of guns currently in our society somehow makes us safer or more advanced or anything like that.
Switching from suicides to homicides doesn't really help the case for gun control.
That page's neutrality on the subject is also under dispute. You should read the comments about that, they are interesting.
If we're talking homicides, does that include legal homicides as well as the illegal kind? If it does then the number is misleading. Since homicide is defined as a person killing another person then many shootings are listed as homicides but are not considered crimes. A police officer shooting someone attempting to kill a person is considered a homicide. A woman shooting her rapist to defend herself is considered a homicide. It depends on how the data was collected and labeled.
If you dig a bit deeper into the statistics you will find many places with tough gun control laws that have high rates of gun murders. You can also find examples of low gun ownership with low gun murders. The thing is you cannot look at the US as a whole with stats like that, the stats can vary wildly from state to state if you break it down that way. It is not as simple as saying guns bad, gun control good.
If one is willing to do so, break down homicides by race in each state and you often see interesting numbers. But I'm sure that's racist to suggest such things...
If you dig deeper into state statistics you may find that the majority of some of the states with the highest gun murders also happen to have high levels of gang activity. Look at Chicago in recent years. I wouldn't consider the entire state of Illinois as a crime-ridden state with murders in the street every day just because of Chicago's problems. You can find such findings on the Wikipedia page you linked. If one were to remove gun crimes committed in low-income urban areas, the number gets cut roughly in half. Heck, it wasn't that long ago that Washington D.C., where Congress can run things almost as strict as they want, was the murder capitol of the country.
How come that most gun control advocates use AR style rifles as their go-to evil gun example when the stats show almost no gun murders happen with that type of weapon? Because of mass shootings that get immediate national news coverage, it has become a tool to prey upon the emotions of people to further their agenda. If they were serious about helping people through gun control they would try to do something in Chicago where tough gun control has failed people for years. But they don't because mass shootings is where the news is and that's where the people who need to grandstand go to push their agenda. They often push an agenda that wouldn't have prevented the tragedy that they are taking advantage of in the first place.
You also can't compare homicide statistics internationally because often times it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. It's my understanding that in some countries a homicide may not listed as a murder, or whatever crime, until someone has been convicted. If that's the case then numbers can't be compared with the US where normally a non-accidental death caused by another human being is considered a homicide, regardless of court findings. Even then, it could vary from state to state.
Plus, this type of attitude is just attempting to treat a symptom instead of facing the social issues that cause such symptoms. If only the guns would go away then everything would somehow be okay.
That's an interesting stat on the shot/stabbing to the heart, but also rather expected. But it's just a rather specific statistic that almost sort of supports one-side of an argument. For instance, right before that statement it is speaking in terms of victim and assailant, such as your attacker deciding to shoot you specifically in the heart while being mugged. It's an attempt at an emotional response without discussing the problem as a whole.
Finally, the last I heard is that our crime statistics show a downward trend in violent crimes despite any real national level gun control legislation. By the way people talk you would think every American is constantly on edge waiting for someone to shoot them, which for the vast majority of America is simply not true. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, you are more likely to shoot yourself than be shot by someone else.
Do you have any scientific studies to back up any of the claims you have made here? For someone lamenting the appeals to emotion of strict gun control advocates, there is a striking lack of evidence supporting your position.
Much of the information I described is listed on the very page on Wikipedia linked above. If you dig a bit further on Wikipedia you can find the stats on a state-by-state basis. I believe at one point there was a breakdown by race on Wikipedia at one time but I'm unable to find it now.
The FBI's own crime statistics can be rather enlightening if one were to drill down into the numbers instead of looking at the nation as a whole.
The problems with gun control studies are the same as with climate change studies, there are always accusations of bias on both sides. I suggest everyone read studies that purport to show the truth as presented by both sides and decide for yourselves.
If we take a "gun ownership"->"suicide" relationship for granted, we cannot assume that this particular gun owner is at risk for suicide. If there is a trend, then we can talk about the trend and populations. However talking about individuals requires more care.
I think the argument only applies depending on your definition of "risk for suicide" and whether you believe there are people who never under any circumstances in their lives feel suicidal even for a second before snapping out of it.
Killing yourself requires two things: the will to do it and a means. If you have a loaded gun, the means is a constant: at any point in time you have it you could use it to kill yourself. Will, on the other hand, is a function dependent on a bunch of things: bad news, time, emotional state, social interactions, etc.
I would define "risk for suicide" in terms of the combination of both will and means. As such, unless the individual's will to commit suicide is absolutely and always zero, adding a reliable means would always increase risk of suicide. I guess it's up for debate whether there's anyone on the planet who has never felt suicidal for even a second in their lives.
The argument does not work in reverse. If they had more guns, there would probably be more suicides. End of story.
I am not suggesting that no guns == no suicides, because that would be ridiculous. I am refuting the suggestion that having a gun does not increase your risk of dying by suicide. I submit that having a gun nearby does increase your risk of dying by suicide with ample supporting evidence listed above. I am happy to read studies to the contrary, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point.
I don't think anyone is disputing that having a gun increases the likelihood of succeeding. I just disagree with the idea that the gun contributed to the attempt.
Most of what you just stated I have no disagreements with, but it is worded differently than what has been stated by others before.
I think the assumptions you provided is more than enough to not support the idea of gun control because of suicide.
I fail to see how an individual deciding their own fate, whether it makes sense or not, is a "Public Health" issue; especially if it's an issue because of the most chosen method. If the number of suicides increases enough to become a real public health issue, then I'd rather they spend the resources trying to determine the why as opposed to restricting everyone on the how.
I feel I understand the other side of the argument; I just disagree with it. I do not agree that an individual's rights on owning an inanimate object should be restricted based on how another individual may or may not use said inanimate object on themselves. People who use homicide rates, and I mostly disagree with them as well, have more credibility on this for me.
Also, you don't need your cellphone to defend yourself; you can toss it whenever you choose.