TexasCHLforum.com

That was great. Well done.

rotor wrote: ↑Sat Sep 08, 2018 2:09 pm When you accept the term "gun violence" you have lost the battle. Guns don't spontaneously do anything. It is people violence that is the problem. I would ask before the interview that you have the right to review and correct the article if need be. Remember the news story by Katie Couric and how anything can be slanted by edit. Expect the worst when it comes to the media. No interview unless you approve final results.

I agree, and I would argue that any successful debate would point out that the term "gun violence" is hollow and poorly descriptive. I think that a strong argument does a better job of that than quibbling over terms at the outset. I do think that pointing out AFTER presenting strong arguments that the term gun violence isn't very accurate.

Gun violence doesnt correlate with gun ownership. When you look at the numbers from too far away, gun ownership and gun deaths seem to correlate. When you zoom in to the precinct level, that correlation disappears and indeed reverses. Gun homicide in America is highly focal to very small places while the areas where people own most of the guns are extremely safe.

Everyone knows that. I wish that someone would point it out. People's homes are usually the most expensive thing that they buy, and they will pay huge amounts of money to live in nice, low crime areas. The same or nicer lots are available for far less in "bad neighborhoods", but that doesn't stop people from paying 10-20x more for the same property in a "nicer area". This decision is extremely smart and makes the home buyer virtually immune to violent crime. This decision is never based upon gun ownership data (because such data doesn't really exist), and from what we know, good neighborhoods correlate with far higher rates of gun ownership (i.e. living in the suburbs of Chicago or Houston vs the city proper).

Gun violence is a behavior problem. Shooting another human being is nearly always one of the most deeply wrong things that you can do, and even if justified that act will have profound psychological implications for the shooter. There are tiny areas of the US where that act is so common as to be expected, set against a backdrop of a huge country where people own enormous amounts of guns but almost never shoot one another. All of us avoid the high violence areas to the best of our ability and do so despite the enormous financial cost of doing so when buying a home. We all know where the violence problem is and what to look for when avoiding it, and gun ownership rates can't and don't factor into that decision.

If we want to stop gun violence, then the very first step is admitting how focal it is. Antagonizing gun owners doesn't help. Rather, from an epidemiology perspective, we should examine all if these high gun ownership areas to see why they own so many "deadly" guns and yet don't have high rates of firearms homicide. Some research (https://news.yale.edu/2013/11/14/study- ... y-violence) says that even in areas with extreme crime rates, most folks are good people caught up in it. Tiny social networks of hyperviolent individuals draw tons of other people who wouldn't have committed violent crimes otherwise into the fray and terrorize everyone else. Put another way, there isn't even really a racial component to gun violence; rather, some communities don't or can't ostracize these tiny groups of people and as a result often suffer under barbaric social power structures based upon violence. Breaking up those social conditions and jailing those violent individuals does far more than telling people who will statistically never shoot someone that they can't have guns because they just might.

Sucide is a totally different animal. Our suicide rate isn't exceptional (we're ranked in the mid 50s), and if you look at the list its a mashup of countries with extreme rates of gun ownership and no gun ownership all over the place. First, to really impact suicide you'd have to ban everything on down to muzzleloaders that anyone can buy online if an 18 or 21 year old signs for it at the door. Second, even then people are substituting methods. Among suicides under 18 years old, hanging has become the most common method reflecting less access to firearms, without any decline in the suicide rate. Sucide is a mental health problem, and we as a nation DRASTICALLY UNDERFUND mental health.

The false dichotomy between "gun rights and freedom from violent crime" is a complete fabrication: we can have both and in fact nearly all Americans do.