Ah yes, a source-less article from the NRA claiming that gun ownership = personal safety. Par for the course for the outhouse-brained wintermute_oregon who lives in fear of being accosted by angry mobs of democrats on a daily basis. God I love this place.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I'll politely ask you to be civil, please.
Also, that NRA article does list it's sources, it's just not hotlinked. The main issue (if it is one) is that the article assumes you have some knowledge of gun-related issues, and know where the common sources are.
Although I appreciate the calls for civility, civility also includes people responding in good faith and being respectful of the people discussing with them. When one person breaks that contract, all bets are off. You can’t only ask for civility from one side of the discussion without looking at what led to that response in the first place. If you’re serious about what you’ve said elsewhere, you need to do better to foster respectful, productive discussion.
I see so many people struggling with the article because of their own bias or their assumption of what I believe.
I have yet to state an opinion on the article.
To be blunt I’m not a fan of Lott. I think he starts with his conclusion then works backwards but that is my own bias.
His work has been replicated and peer reviewed. The issue I have is he seems to come to a different conclusion than other studies but they do appear to be solid studies that are well done.
One of the critiques always makes me chuckle. People complain that he’s an economist. To me it shows they don’t understand what an economist is or what a PhD is. As someone with a doctorate degree. It makes me chuckle what people think a doctorate degree actually is.
No one is struggling with the article. It just doesn’t say what you say it does and you’re completely sealioning everyone here with your fake civility.
If Blamemeta actually had any care for fostering discussion about conservatism here, he wouldn’t be telling everyone else to stay civil except you while also excusing your dishonesty.
I didn’t say anything about it. I’ve never asked you for more citations. You’re the one who is sealioning. All the information is in the article but you seem confused by it. I’m not being dishonest. You’re being a little nutty to be quite frank. Talking about we. Claiming I made a statement about it when I didn’t.
I posted the article and provided experts from you Mr attempt to sea lion. I didn’t add anything to it. You went to fantasy land and created a strawman after your attempt to sea lion failed.
So strange. Be well
You clearly have a mental issue that you should get checked out. Everything you just said is demonstrably false.
Ban me, dip shit.
Ok.
I don’t live in fear. Not sure why you keep making baseless attacks instead of focusing on the topic.
Being prepared is not fear. It’s being smart.
It’s not baseless though: it’s based on your claim that you need to defend yourself from a non-existent threat. It’s your fear that is baseless and I have asked you multiple times to provide evidence that, in your words, “violent mobs of democrats” pose a threat to you but you haven’t provided any. That’s the topic, and you’re the one not addressing it. You’re not “being prepared,” you’re being deranged and fearful and arming yourself in response.
I have never used the word fear. As such you are acting in bad faith by claiming something I never said.
I clearly did give an example but you decided to ignore it because like a child you want to hurl insults at people.
I am prepared, and that upsets you but no much how much you want to stomp your foot and pout, I will still be able to defend myself. I know that makes you irrationally angry because I can defend myself but that isn't going to change.
Lmfao. You don’t need to use the word in order for your fear to be apparent. It drips from you. And no, blanket statements that angry mobs of democrats stormed the world during the “summer of love” do not count as evidence for your claim that you need to arm yourself in order to stave off a nonexistent threat. It’s like a child sharpening a stick to fend off the boogeyman.
Secondarily, I have no issue with you owning guns or exercising your 2A rights. What I disagree with is your moronic and literally foundation-less opinion that the 2A can never be limited, modified, or restricted in any way. I think it’s funny, yes, both this stance and your palpable fear, but I also think it is scary in that your opinion is not reflected in the law or reality and yet you still are convinced of your own rightfulness. It truly is childlike: clinging to your perspective against all reason and against any objective fact.
Thanks but I don't need your opinion about me as a person. I would prefer if you could stay on topic. Your argument is weak when the best you can come up with is trying to paint me inaccurately as being scared. That is a childish answer.
Once again you just keep doubling down on making things. up. I never said it couldn't be limited, modified, or restricted. You are so hell-bent on operating on a bad-faith model that you don't even notice what anyone says. You just want to hurl insults like a hurt child.
I don't make decisions based on fear. I make decisions to be prepared. Do you call people names for having smoke detectors in their homes? A gun is no different.
Prepared for what? Ze Germans?
He (they?) told me on another post that they’re preparing for confrontations with violent mobs of democrats. I’m not joking.
He’s not someone anyone should take seriously.
Is there any more info here? They just kinda say that the numbers are wrong and the real numbers are higher but then fail to state why the numbers are wrong and where these “real” numbers are coming from. It would be great if 2022 had a 60+% rate but where is that number coming from? And why are the reported numbers that different? Is it a methodological difference? The only info they give is “their processes suck and are biased” for why they’re “wrong” and then “our numbers are better” for why their numbers are right.
On top of that, the linked source is more of the same and seems to be completely based on semantics - “the FBI doesn’t count shootings done with other crimes as mass shootings”. Of course they don’t. If the primary crime isn’t the shooting, why would they? The shootings are notable because the shooting is the point of the incident.
Kind of a terrible article.
That’s in the article.
But, according to economist John Lott, there was an abundance of cases missing or misidentified by the FBI, and while the FBI acknowledged errors, the Bureau failed to update the reports for accuracy purposes. Lott is the president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research
What you just posted doesn’t answer the question. The errors in question in the source say there were only 5 errors that weren’t corrected. That doesn’t change these statistics in the way they’re claiming.
The FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher," wrote Lott. He further noted, "[O]ut of 440 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2022, an armed citizen stopped 157. We also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard.
He was just noting five cases were listed as security guards.
The difference is 14 vs 157
Again, you’re not answering the question… either you’re being dishonest or intentionally obtuse here.
How is that the “correct” rate? What defines what is correct and what isn’t and why? If it’s incorrect, why is the FBI reporting that number? According to the article’s source that’s linked at the top, this economist (no idea why I should be taking data and crime reporting info from an economist) is saying it’s wrong because he has a semantic disagreement with the FBI on why incidents where the shooting is not the primary crime are not considered “mass shootings”. It’s a bit disingenuous.
It’s all in the article. I’m not sure why you are confused. I find it very clear. This sounds like a you problem and not a problem with the data.
Got it… so you don’t know and don’t even understand the article yourself. You keep posting the same thing. There’s no answer to the question. So that means you’re just dishonest. If it’s “all in the article”, it should be easy for you to quote the answer to the question I’m asking.
If you say the number is 4 and I say “you’re wrong, it’s 10” and don’t offer any explanation or evidence, then what makes my claim more accurate than yours? This is what’s happening here.
Edit: From your latest link: “Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional.” So, as I said… dishonest semantics. In other words, this whole story is just a matter of redefining a word dishonestly and then criticizing the FBI for not following his new definition rather than the one that’s been used for decades.
I understand the article just fine. I just don't get your confusion on the article.
I cited what you wanted and you were unable to understand it. That isn't a problem with the data, that is a you problem. I even cited an article with all the data and you still didn't understand it.
The other article breaks things down even more.
I can cite the information but it is up to you to be able to read and interpret it.
You clearly don’t if you can’t answer a simple question. You did not cite what I asked. You just quoted the part of the article where the guy says the FBI is wrong without pointing out why they’re wrong which is what my question was. And the “data” that they’re including is not at all data supportive of their conclusions. They’re merely redefining the definition of a shooting (dishonestly, I may add) and then feigning outrage that the FBI’s data doesn’t match theirs (because, spoiler alert, the FBI doesn’t define it the same way).
I can read and interpret data just fine. It’s my job to do so. You didn’t even look at the data, don’t understand the methodology, and can’t explain it or even answer a simple question about it. You’re a dishonest person who is afraid of their own shadow.
I cited what you asked. You just failed to understand it. It is clearly explained in the article.
Stop making weird personal attacks. I can't help it that you can't read well. That isn't my problem. The article clearly explains your question and you can't articulate why you are confused.
Have a good day,
No, you didn’t. Where did you send anything that explains the methodology and difference between how the FBI is getting their counts versus where these jokers are getting their counts? Your avoidance of just providing an answer speaks volumes to the point it’s deafening. You’re a dishonest person who is trying to push something that you don’t have evidence for and are ignoring the questions being asked and the issues being pointed out.
Where have I stayed my stance in the topic? I didn’t. Once again you are showing you can’t read well or are a compulsive liar. Which is it? I didn’t make a comment on purpose as I wanted to see the opinions of others as I have my own opinion of Lott.
It isn’t my job to answer questions for you especially when it’s contained in the article. I will reply to a conversation about the topic itself as I find it an interesting topic.
Again with the lies. If you can’t answer a simple question and just keep telling others that they need to do the job of debunking your claims then you’re dishonest. On top of that, you keep parroting the line that “it’s so easy” and “it’s right there” and yet refuse to just cite one statement that shows what is being asked for. Claims without evidence can be just as easily ignored without evidence.
No one cares about your stance or whether you “stayed” it or not, whatever that means. We just want you to explain the information you posted that you claim contains something it doesn’t.
My job is data analysis. Yours clearly isn’t.
Dude, are you ok? Your rant doesn't make any sense at all. You are calling me a liar because you can't read and interpret data. That's on you.
It isn't my job to read the paper and spoon-feed you information. Be an adult, read the article, and have a conversation about the topic.
My stance is relevant since you keep lying about it for some odd reason. I never stated it. Yet you keep wanting me to defend some strawman you built because you can't understand the article.
And who are we? Is there someone else in your head?
Are you? My “rant” makes perfect sense. You’re just being dishonest and intentionally obtuse to make it seem like your links have something that they don’t. I don’t take kindly to dishonest people who claim to want to discuss things in bad faith.
Assume for 2 seconds that I’m a completely vacuous moron like you are and explain to me the answer to the question. I’ve already told you that I cannot find what you are claiming in your sources and yet you insist that it is. That’s like telling a blind person “Look right there! There it is!” If your bullshit actually said what you claim, it would take a second for you to just copy and paste rather than continually putting the onus on me and everyone else in these comments to find the information that supposedly validates your claim that the details of their methodology and the explanations of their data are there. If they really were, you would have pointed it out to further the discussion since that’s what you claim to want, right?
On top of that, you start with the personal attacks and this putrid condescension in every single one of your replies to every single person here and then you have the gall to criticize me for personally attacking you. Saying empty meaningless shit like “be an adult” just makes you look like a hypocritical liar since an actual adult would say meaningful things that further the discussion, provide evidence that supports their claims, and admit to deficiencies in the information provided. You’ve done none of the above.
Your stance isn’t relevant because no one cares about it. I haven’t lied about it because I haven’t inferred any stance that you have. You just made that up. My entire issue here is that the article you provided, and the sources that that article cites, make claims that are unsubstantiated and unsupported by the “evidence” they’re providing. Anything outside of that is a delusion that you’ve made up. I’m not asking you to defend a straw man. I’m asking you to specifically point out the part of the article that supports your claim that they explain the differences between the two numbers. They don’t so you can’t provide that but are pretending like it is there and everyone else is just a moron like you.
If you could read at all, you’d see that “we” is everyone in these comments pointing out the same unsubstantiated claims and downvoting your responses because they’re total horseshit.
No your rant makes zero sense and it’s concerning you think it does.
I don’t have to assume. It’s evident.
I never attacked you. What I have done is told you to stop attacking me and read the article.
I did read the article and I had questions about it that you refuse to answer. My rant makes sense to anyone with half a brain. That’s why you’re arguing with multiple people who are all saying the same things about you. The only thing evident here is that you are a dishonest person with mental issues and denial problems.
I am not arguing with multiple people unless you have multiple personalities.
Anyways I am sorry you found the article hard to read. Keep trying old sport
Right… all these usernames that have responded to your post are all my alts. You’re deluded.
Most likely. Have a good night old sport.
Yeah, this article is trash...
But!
"The FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher," wrote Lott. He further noted, "[O]ut of 440 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2022, an armed citizen stopped 157. We also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard."
This bit comes from the Crime Prevention Research Center. It pisses me off that the reader has to do the leg work for finding the article's sources, but...their sources are there.
The outcome? Of the 18,000 agencies nationwide, only half filed a year's worth of data, and only 63% put forth partial information. This made already dubious data even more deceptive and spotty; in fact, the country's biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, failed to report statistics to the FBI at all. Subsequently, the FBI often draws its conclusions using a small percentage of jurisdictions—or none—in a state to conjure up a national estimate. The lack of crime data from big cities can also lead to the perception that those cities (or the states they are in) are safer than they are.
Then...why don't those jurisdictions report their data? That's not the FBI's fault. It works with what it has. Moreover, how as the CPRC fixed this problem? Are these jurisdictions reporting to the research center but not the FBI for some reason? Highly doubtful. So, I'm not sure why we'd trust the CPRC over the FBI.
At every stage of the data-collection process, bias and distortion can infect a narrative.
This is literally just the nature of statistical analysis. It's why in my state people are like, "crime is definitely increasing!" and the police are like, "Our statistics show that crime is decreasing." When multiple slashed tires are reported as a single instance of crime rather than an instance for each tire or each car, there's going to be a difference in how crime is perceived between the public and officials.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the supposedly non-partisan national public health agency of the United States—quietly deleted some data on defensive gun uses from its website.
This is an unsubstantiated claim. It's their job to provide evidence for it since they made the claim. I have no reason to believe this is true.
With such skewed statistics and stories, this isn't a fair debate; it is a political attack to take away our freedom. If we don't stand up for accuracy and point out the problems with these government statistics, our rights will inevitably diminish under the canopy of a political agenda.
The conclusion here is woefully unsupported. While the statistics are skewed, they might be good enough. I'm not going to get into the problems of statistical analysis, but suffice it to say that sometimes, good enough is good enough. The article certainly didn't offer a more accurate alternative.
And really, the implied argument that statistics that support gun control are an attack on our "freedom" is just straight, grade A, unadulterated nonsense. I really wish people would make that argument explicit rather than just asserting it like it's true. And the slippery slope he derives, "our rights will inevitably diminish" is a cute rhetorical trick that tries and fails to absolve him of making the argument that it is in fact inevitable.
It’s worse than that. LA and NYC failed to report because of the NIBERS changeover but only because there’s a grace period for reporting to the FBI as they comply with the changeover. Everything about this article is dishonest.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the supposedly non-partisan national public health agency of the United States—quietly deleted some data on defensive gun uses from its website.
This easily veers into the problems of statistical analysis.
The inclusion of the 2.5 million DGU numbers hinges on what counts as a defensive gun use. According to "The Reload", on which your link is based:
GVA uses the most conservative criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use. Instead of attempting to capture any time a person legally uses a gun to defend themselves or others, it only counts incidents that make it into media reports or police reports (though it’s unclear how many police reports they have access to). The site’s methodology takes a strikingly dismissive tone towards any other potential defensive gun uses.
But what's Gary Kleck's methodology, the means by which he estimated the 2.5 million DGUs?
By pure coincidence, The Reload doesn't cover that explicitly. It merely alludes to the fact that he extrapolated that amount.
So, doing their research again since people can't seem to do it themselves (also, thank god for AI...really makes this process go way faster), here's analysis of their work by David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard.
I'm going to quote the entire "The Kleck-Gertz Survey" section of that paper:
In 1992, Kleck and Gertz conducted a national random-digit-dial survey of five thousand dwelling units, asking detailed questions about self-defense gun use. Their estimates of civilian self-defense gun use range from 1 million to 2.5 million times per year. The 2.5 million figure is the one they believe to be most accurate and the one Kleck has publicized, so that figure will be discussed in this paper.
K-G derive their 2.5 million estimate from the fact that 1.33% of the individuals surveyed reported that they themselves used a gun in self-defense during the past year; in other words, about 66 people out of 5000 reported such a use. Extrapolating the 1.33% figure to the entire population of almost 200 million adults gives 2.5 million uses.
Many problems exist with the survey conducted by Kleck and Gertz. A deficiency in their article is that they do not provide detailed information about their survey methodology or discuss its many limitations. For example, the survey was conducted by a small firm run by Professor Gertz. The interviewers presumably knew both the purpose of the survey and the staked-out position of the principal investigator regarding the expected results.
The article states that when a person answered, the interview was completed 61% of the time. But what happened when there was a busy signal, an answering machine, or no answer? If no one was interviewed at a high percentage of the initially selected homes, the survey cannot be relied on to yield results representative of the population. Interviewers do not appear to have questioned a random individual at a given telephone number, but rather asked to speak to the male head of the household. If that man was not at home, the caller interviewed the adult who answered the phone. Although this approach is sometimes used in telephone surveys to reduce expense, it does not yield a representative sample of the population.
The 2.5 million estimate is based on individuals rather than households. But the survey is randomized by dwelling unit rather than by the individual, so the findings cannot simply be extrapolated to the national population. Respondents who are the only adults in a household will receive too much weight.
K-G oversampled males and individuals from the South and West. The reader is presented with weighted rather than actual data, yet the authors do not explain their weighting technique. K-G claim their weighted data provide representative information for the entire country, but they appear to have obtained various anomalous results. For example, they find that only 38% of households in the nation possess a gun, which is low, outside the range of all other national surveys. They find that only 8.9% of the adult population is black, when 1992 Census data indicate that 12.5% of individuals were black.
The above limitations are serious. However, it is two other aspects of the survey that, when combined together, lead to an enormous overestimation of self-defense gun use: the fact that K-G are trying (1) to measure a very low probability event which (2) has positive social desirability response bias. The problem is one of misclassification.
Conducting a survey like Kleck did would be like if I did a survey of Trump support from /c/conservative, and took the proportion that said they do, and multiplied it by number of accounts in the Fediverse. Do you really think that's representative of support for Trump across the fediverse? If you do, you're just wrong. If you don't, then you shouldn't accept Kleck's haphazardly generated 2.5 million number either.
The inclusion of the 2.5 million DGUs isn't a political issue, though gun rights activists make it out be. It's a one of statistics, and statisticians say his methodology is trash. No matter what you want to believe, no matter how hard, the 2.5 million DGU's is far, far more probably false than it is true..
Great response! I’ll further add that the OP article does the exact same thing. It redefines the metric to be more favorable to its narrative despite not being the metric by which any agency in the country measures these numbers and then it fails to explain its own methodology and why that is more accurate. It’s dishonestly redefining its terms while ignoring all the issues inherent with this data in the first place.
Been a while since I saw a geocities website