Thursday, October 8, 2009

Guns Don't Kill People. People With Guns Get Killed.

Another meme from the NRA shot down:
A team at the University of Pennsylvania "analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity." You are going to be totally stunned by what they found: "[P]eople who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher." One small caveat: There is no indication of how many of the shooting victims "had it coming."

5 comments:

  1. Article in the Journal Sentinel October 9th, page 5A about a woman who carried her 9 mm glock handgun to soccer games...shot with her husband in an apparent murder suicide.

    The article states that they were having marital problems.

    Good thing they both carried handguns for "protection". They left two small children.

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  2. The man overseeing the University study, Dr. Charles Branas, was quoted as saying:

    "We don't have an answer as to whether guns are protective or perilous. This study is a beginning."

    Had you done more than "cut" someone else's work and "pasted" it as your own, you may have noticed that the study doesn't come to the conclusion that you claim it does. Or are you intentionally trying to mislead your readers?

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  3. Gee.

    Since the vast majority of those who carry happen to be gang-banger/drugrunners, this comes as a REAL shock.

    Yes, indeed. Shock.

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  4. thanks for pointing this study out, Chris, it'll be interesting to follow this U-Penn team and see what conclusions they come to.

    Dad29, "gang-banger/drugrunners" tend to be poor, but it also says that they controlled for socioeconomic status, ipso facto the finding applies equally to middle- and upper-class conservative paranoid gun nuts (or, at lease, people who don't live in the ghetto).

    it's a REAL shock that packing heat may "give a sense of empowerment that causes carriers to overreact in tense situations" because no one ever thinks "I'm a big man with a big gun so I'll just dispense my own brand of justice, what could go wrong!"

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