Spike in gun deaths after BG checks eliminated

[mrsleeve]

I thought I was trolling the troll???? sorry was I not obvious enough

[einhander]

Normally my stratospheric level of thought leads you goofs to think I was trolling, but this time I was just trolling.

It wasn't clear, sleeve, but I had my suspicions.

[The Dark Side of Will]

if you care about the evidence then you wouldn't be sitting here arguing against background checks in this thread when the article you posted laid the research out for why and how the Brady Bill was a huge success in reducing overall gun deaths. you don't understand the issues fully so you think you're posting "evidence" in support of your political position. But that doesn't mean you actually care about the evidence. It's evident, at least to me, that it's not as if you'd actually change your position once you learned what the data says.

also, how do background checks restrict the rights of 2.6 million people? Are you the same person who was misusing the 15m figure? Could you please open the census website next time you start opining about issues related to population sizes? It's annoying to read your comment about caring about evidence but misusing it and misunderstanding it every time you post.

I haven't said anything about background checks yet; I was going on about Chicago's gun laws, which make it effectively impossible to legally own a gun within the city. The population of Chicago proper is 2.7M, less the 100K in the primary co-offender group leaves 2.6M. Those 2.6M have their 2nd amendment rights taken away without due process.

Background checks and waiting periods are two different things.

Waiting periods reduce the incidence of suicides only and have no effect on homicides. There was a similar situation in Britain with old coal-gas ovens. A quick way to commit suicide was to stick your head in the oven and turn the gas on without lighting it. As the ovens became obsolete and were replaced, suicides by that method dropped and were not replaced with any other method of suicide. There's definitely a *RIGHT NOW* component to suicidal behavior that can be averted by the absence of a quick way to do the deed.

Background checks stop approximately zero suicides and have essentially no effect on the ability of "prohibited persons" to obtain weapons. The attribution of "prohibited person" status is also not bound by due process, meaning that people like Veterans returning from Iraq can have their rights taken away in violation of the 5th amendment.

[smooth]

Waiting periods reduce the incidence of suicides only and have no effect on homicides.

Background checks stop approximately zero suicides and have essentially no effect on the ability of "prohibited persons" to obtain weapons.

Both of these statements are wrong.

The population of Chicago proper is 2.7M, less the 100K in the primary co-offender group leaves 2.6M. Those 2.6M have their 2nd amendment rights taken away without due process.

You need to learn how to assess population sizes better. This is just silly math and bordering on ridiculousness.

[einhander]

The attribution of "prohibited person" status is also not bound by due process, meaning that people like Veterans returning from Iraq can have their rights taken away in violation of the 5th amendment.

You lost me here - where does the 5th Amendment come into play? Something about registration, presumably, but I don't see it. Taking clause?

[The Dark Side of Will]

Liberty is the ability to exercise a right.

Both of these statements are wrong.

Prove it. ;)

Three of the four assertions in those two statements are straight out of the article about Chicago.
If you look up stats on appeals and adjudications of NICS refusals, then you'll see that most of the initial no's get overturned... the system doesn't stop a meaningful number of people legitimately. Most of the people who know they'll get a NICS refusal don't even try at an FFL and instead get their guns elsewhere.

[smooth]

Prove it. ;)

Three of the four assertions in those two statements are straight out of the article about Chicago.

Quote the three of the four assertions you think are listed in the article then and I'll explain the data for you so you have a better understanding. Then neither of us are wasting our time and I can focus on people who actually care about learning the reality of the situation.

[The Dark Side of Will]

Waiting periods reduce the incidence of suicides only and have no effect on homicides.

One last example: the Brady Bill, from the early ’90s, everyone wanted that to be a gun-violence reduction program. And it actually did almost nothing for gun violence, but it did a whole hell of a lot for gun suicides.

...

The subsequent evaluation of the Brady Bill, some people say it works, some people say it doesn’t, or if it does work, it has very modest effects on aggregate levels of gun crime.

What people consistently find is that there were pretty significant effects on gun suicides—a decline in gun suicides since the Brady Bill.

Background checks stop approximately zero suicides

I may have misspoken on this one. Papachristos doesn't talk about background checks, but here's what 10 seconds of googling yields: http://www.voxeu.org/article/firearm...ks-and-suicide

Suicides go up when the number of background checks in a state go up. That just means that more suicidal people are more likely to have access to a firearm. Like Papachristos said in the Chicago article, when a suicidal person decides to use a gun, it's minutes, not days or hours, until they do the deed. It also means that background checks do not decrease suicides.

2.7M is Chicago's (NOT Chicagoland metro area) population per the 2010 Census. That's the population investigated by Papachristos' study, as well as the population affected by Chicago city laws regarding gun ownership. Apples to apples.

Quote the three of the four assertions you think are listed in the article then and I'll explain the data for you so you have a better understanding. Then neither of us are wasting our time and I can focus on people who actually care about learning the reality of the situation.

Explain away. I'm having fun, not wasting time. ;)

[einhander]

Who cares about suicides?

[The Dark Side of Will]

Just people who like to debate gun control. :p

After all, if anyone else cared, they wouldn't have committed suicide

AMIRITE?!?

[smooth]

I may have misspoken on this one. Papachristos doesn't talk about background checks, but here's what 10 seconds of googling yields: http://www.voxeu.org/article/firearm...ks-and-suicide

Suicides go up when the number of background checks in a state go up. That just means that more suicidal people are more likely to have access to a firearm. Like Papachristos said in the Chicago article, when a suicidal person decides to use a gun, it's minutes, not days or hours, until they do the deed. It also means that background checks do not decrease suicides.

2.7M is Chicago's (NOT Chicagoland metro area) population per the 2010 Census. That's the population investigated by Papachristos' study, as well as the population affected by Chicago city laws regarding gun ownership. Apples to apples.




Explain away. I'm having fun, not wasting time. ;)

You're mixing up a lot of things here but I'll try to sift through it for you and help you understand what you're reading a little bit.

Papachristos *is* talking about background checks because the Brady Bill implements both background checks and waiting periods. You should probably read it since you appear to be opposed to it and apparently don't know the content of the bill.

But Papachristos doesn't say that background checks or waiting periods do *nothing* for homicide, he says they did almost nothing for homicide in his state--two very different things. Just like the study that opens this thread doesn't say that when all background checks everywhere are eliminated all gun deaths everywhere go up. No, it's a study about Missouri.

You should know that Andy isn't on your side on this. That's why I questioned why you would use him as poster child for your views. But it seems to be boiling down to you misreading what people are saying about the topic in a way that lines up with your views--we call this "confirmation bias" in social science methodology classes.

Here's what he actually thinks about gun legislation as it pertains to Chicago: "I did work on Chicago's gun laws, and one reason why they didn't work is because of other states' lax laws," he said. Chicagoans are only a few highway exits from Indiana, where gun laws are far more lax. The distance isn't a sufficient barrier for gun crime, no matter how strict Chicago's laws.

--http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-06-27/is-gun-control-coming-to-a-state-near-you-

here's a presentation he did on Project Safe Streets:

http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/andrew-papachristos-explains-why-criminals-obey-the-law-video/

(this might actually blow you away because I suspect you are of the opinion that criminals don't generally follow the law and Andy thinks they do)

He's a proponent of strict gun control and he doesn't believe, as you seem to think, that gun control does nothing for reducing gun crime or violence. In any case, in order to understand what he thinks it's better to look at his peer reviewed research and presentations rather than snippets from a news article. I can opine in LA Times all I want but those kinds of comments can be taken out of context (as you did his) and they don't really "matter" in terms of what constitutes science.


You are also misunderstanding the second article. Basically the only thing Lang found was that:
"increases in the state background check rate are associated with a significant increase in firearm suicide in the current and following year.

The total suicide rate increases insignificantly when background checks increase,"

He's using background checks as a measure of how many people want to get a gun. Makes intuitive sense, right? What he is *not* doing is arguing that more background checks *means* more suicides. He is simply demonstrating a correlation, not a causal relationship.

He is pointing out that when people want to commit suicide they then want to go and buy a gun. When they buy a gun we see a spike in background checks because gun shops put their request into the database. If we stop them from buying a gun the total suicides in the state tend to go down meaning that they don't simply go and find another way to kill themselves.

Papachristos is also not saying that people kill themselves in minutes and we don't have much time to act. What he's saying is that the window where one decides to kill themselves is very short before they change their mind. It takes someone a really long time to finally decide to kill themselves, once they make up their mind they do it fairly quickly, and if they don't then they go back to brooding about killing themselves. So if we can intervene at that nexus of where they finally decide to do it and when they can actually access one then we can close that small window quickly.


Finally, you're misusing the census data because you're not really thinking through the numbers very critically. You keep saying there are 2.7M residents in Chicago and then you extrapolate from that 2.7M of them would want guns and be thwarted from having them.

First of all, 2.7M is every man, woman, and child. Roughly 25% of population are children (you can look that up in the census data). So they aren't directly impacted by gun legislation. Then you have an unknown number of citizens who don't even care about gun ownership for themselves. We also don't reasonably expected every member from a household to desire a handgun for each person. So in dual person households we wouldn't expect both the husband and the wife, or the boyfriend and the girlfriend, to both want guns and both go in and undergo background checks/waiting periods.

So right off the bat you can see we're already far below that 2.7M figure you keep using of people who are being hassled by gun legislation in Chicago.

I don't care if *you* waste your time I was referring to myself. I could be spending this time talking to my students or Andy and have a much more interesting conversation about the topic. But I also don't want you polluting the discussion so I sometimes get involved in these silly threads against my better judgement :|

[einhander]

Just people who like to debate gun control. :p

After all, if anyone else cared, they wouldn't have committed suicide

AMIRITE?!?

I'm still waiting for you to clarify what the 5th Amendment has to do with anything.

[The Dark Side of Will]

I'm still waiting for you to clarify what the 5th Amendment has to do with anything.

Liberty is the ability to exercise a right.

[The Dark Side of Will]

You're mixing up a lot of things here but I'll try to sift through it for you and help you understand what you're reading a little bit.

Thanks! Your condescension is always appreciated! ;)

Papachristos *is* talking about background checks because the Brady Bill implements both background checks and waiting periods. You should probably read it since you appear to be opposed to it and apparently don't know the content of the bill.

The Brady bill implemented both. Papachristos' discussion in the article I linked focused on waiting periods exclusively.
I don't know how he could less equivocally state (and still be published in ChicagoMag, and considering that he doesn't want to admit it to himself) that no clear pattern has been found relating the Brady Bill to aggregate gun crime.
Since a clear pattern hasn't bee found clear pattern BY NOW, there isn't a clear pattern, which means it didn't do anything.

But Papachristos ... says they did almost nothing for homicide in his state

He in fact does not say that. At least not in the study I linked.

You should know that Andy isn't on your side on this. That's why I questioned why you would use him as poster child for your views. But it seems to be boiling down to you misreading what people are saying about the topic in a way that lines up with your views--we call this "confirmation bias" in social science methodology classes.

I'm not using him as a poster child. I'm thinking independently and drawing my own conclusions from the data available.
A researcher doesn't own everyone's opinions about his data.

Here's what he actually thinks about gun legislation as it pertains to Chicago: "I did work on Chicago's gun laws, and one reason why they didn't work is because of other states' lax laws," he said. Chicagoans are only a few highway exits from Indiana, where gun laws are far more lax. The distance isn't a sufficient barrier for gun crime, no matter how strict Chicago's laws.

The irony that you try to lecture me about confirmation bias and then quote Bloomberg is so thick I could cut it with a knife.

As I stated lines ago, Papachristos isn't my poster child. The network research is very interesting, but I choose to interpret the data differently than you do. I share his curiosity about the "countours" of that network. I can do that and still disagree with him about gun control.

However, saying that gun crime in Chicago is as bad as it is because Illinois has less restrictive gun laws is like saying there are hookers in CA because prostitution is less restricted in NV.
He's a true believer in gun control, obviously, and I think *THAT* is confirmation bias.

It's the same logic and failure to understand human nature that has perpetuated the drug war. When what the government is doing doesn't work, believers in government power want to do more of the same, failing to recognize that that battle isn't "winnable". Keeping people from getting what they really really really want just doesn't work. Not only do we have 50 years of failed drug war, backed up by the failure of prohibition, we have a million years of evolution that has allowed us to survive and thrive by using our brains to get things that are hard to get.

You are also misunderstanding the second article. Basically the only thing Lang found was that:
"increases in the state background check rate are associated with a significant increase in firearm suicide in the current and following year.

The total suicide rate increases insignificantly when background checks increase,"

He's using background checks as a measure of how many people want to get a gun. Makes intuitive sense, right? What he is *not* doing is arguing that more background checks *means* more suicides. He is simply demonstrating a correlation, not a causal relationship.

He is pointing out that when people want to commit suicide they then want to go and buy a gun. When they buy a gun we see a spike in background checks because gun shops put their request into the database. If we stop them from buying a gun the total suicides in the state tend to go down meaning that they don't simply go and find another way to kill themselves.

What he's also not saying is that he's not saying that background checks go up and suicides go down, which is what would happen if there were a negative correlation between background checks and suicides. That negative correlation would be shown if background checks deter suicides. It's not there -> Background checks don't deter suicides

Papachristos is also not saying that people kill themselves in minutes and we don't have much time to act. What he's saying is that the window where one decides to kill themselves is very short before they change their mind. It takes someone a really long time to finally decide to kill themselves, once they make up their mind they do it fairly quickly, and if they don't then they go back to brooding about killing themselves. So if we can intervene at that nexus of where they finally decide to do it and when they can actually access one then we can close that small window quickly.

Correct. That's what I said and that's what my example of British ovens also shows.

Finally, you're misusing the census data

TL; DR

I (deliberately) wasn't talking about potential guns sales or potential gun buyers. I was talking about people who have their 2nd amendment rights trampled on by the proponents of a misguided social theory empowered by a corrupt government.

[ParsedOut]