Shootout at Toys я Us

[iago]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/11/shots-were-fire.html

See what happens when you let people carry guns wherever they want? You get random shootings! If guns were illegal this kind of tragedy would never have happened!

(See, I can jump to conclusions too!)

[CrAz3D]

Too bad statistics prove that armed citizens are less likely to be victims of crimes.

[Joe]

Too bad statistics prove that CrAz3D is ten times as likely to post unsourced statistics.

[CrAz3D]

look up gary kleck.

he is a criminology prof @ fsu.

[Blaze]

look up gary kleck.

he is a criminology prof @ fsu.

That only applies to areas where lots of people have guns, though.  There's significantly less gun crime per population in Canada than the States.  It's all about knives, here.  Shank!

[Sidoh]

look up gary kleck.

he is a criminology prof @ fsu.

Honestly, I think there are heaps of studies that have reasonable amounts of evidence on both sides of the fence on this argument.  The fact that he's a professor of criminology certainly lends to the credibility of his argument, but by no stretch does it automatically make his conclusions accurate.

I think the problem with arguments on immensely complex social issues, including firearm control, is that when studies are conducted, they draw strong conclusions from weaker evidence.  For example, one might say that if murder rates are lower in areas with strong firearm control laws, then firearms should be disallowed.  One thing that they haven't considered that they should have is other types of crimes.  How does the lack of firearms effect these types of crimes?  The same problem applies to arguments on the other side of the fence, I think.  They gather good statistics, but they totally ignore other important factors that should be included.

Maybe there's a study out there that isn't guilty of this.  If there is, I'd like to read it.

[iago]

I found a really good (as in, concise) article about the Australian gun controls recently, but I totally forget what it was called.

Instead, I found one with a bunch of graphs (first non-Wikipedia result for "australian gun control" on Google):
http://www.gunsandcrime.org/auresult.html

Basically, in the mid 1990s, Australia started a "buy back" program, encouraging everybody to turn in their illegal firearms. Over 600,000 guns were turned in. Did the number of assults go up in the following year? Yes. And that is trumpeted a lot by pro-gun people. However, if you look at the graph, you'll see that the increase was actually proportional.

Was there a higher rate of robbery? Armed robbery? Again, yes, but again the increase was the same as the increase before the ban. See graph, and note that burglary fell in that time period (which is likely equally meaningless, although it's the only one that showed an abnormal change).

So yeah, I'm not trying to take sides, I'm just providing hard numbers that raise questions in the debate. After disarming 600,000 people, did any crime trends change? Nope.

<edit> For the sake of interest, here's a anti-australian gun control site, you can see first hand how they take those numbers out of context.

[CrAz3D]

look up gary kleck.

he is a criminology prof @ fsu.

Honestly, I think there are heaps of studies that have reasonable amounts of evidence on both sides of the fence on this argument.  The fact that he's a professor of criminology certainly lends to the credibility of his argument, but by no stretch does it automatically make his conclusions accurate.

I think the problem with arguments on immensely complex social issues, including firearm control, is that when studies are conducted, they draw strong conclusions from weaker evidence.  For example, one might say that if murder rates are lower in areas with strong firearm control laws, then firearms should be disallowed.  One thing that they haven't considered that they should have is other types of crimes.  How does the lack of firearms effect these types of crimes?  The same problem applies to arguments on the other side of the fence, I think.  They gather good statistics, but they totally ignore other important factors that should be included.

Maybe there's a study out there that isn't guilty of this.  If there is, I'd like to read it.

A lot of stuff he has done was based on the National Self Defense Survey.  It showed that people are less likely to be the victim of a crime if they are armed (this applied to all crime).  However, they fatality rate was higher.  I believe it also showed that most criminals dont use guns, making a citizen with a gun even more effective.