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Yeah, data... Can we talk a bit about this? A couple of months ago, a start-up called Statwing released, as a promo of their software, a set of the Global Social Survey data. For those of you who don't know it, GSS is basically this long-running study of the American society. Cited in 14,000 articles, very statistically sound. Among other things, it has data on gun ownership... I downloaded it and essentially have been playing with it ever since. There's some interesting stuff in it - I partitioned the data according to age/race/sex, and worked on that. It turns out that young (under-40) white men experienced a drop in personal gun ownership rates of around 0.5%/year since the mid-80s. And they are a unique demographic in this. Personal gun ownership rates among young white men explain 70% of variability in US national homicide rates since mid-1980s, and household gun ownership rates among young white and black men explain 80% (that's a correlation coefficient of around 0.9). Huge correlates include marital status (married experienced larger drop than singles) and party identification (self-identified Democrats dropped at around 1.15%/year, Independents at 0.5%/year, Republicans stayed the same), but not political ideology (all of liberals/moderates/conservatives experienced a drop) or geographical region (all geographical regions apart from the Northeast, where the rates had been low already, did). And young white male gun owners have a statistically significantly different opinion from basically everyone else, including old white male gun owners, when it comes to answering the question of whether a local law can compel a house owner not to discriminate against a potential buyer based on race. It's pretty fun data, all in all. I'd especially love to know what caused the drop. One person I discussed it with theorised that guns simply became more expensive in the mid-1980s, but another thought that maybe the same reason that caused the change in homicide rates also caused the change in gun ownership rates... Would it be OK to discuss this here, what do you guys think?
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Apr 22, 2014 13:01
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Fat Ogre posted:Firearm ownership is also a symbol of trust in your fellow man, a symbol of freedom from oppression and a symbol of independence. Why exactly are those bad symbols? Uh, I'd say that firearms are a symbol of distrust more than trust. If people with guns feel safer with them than without them, this means that, unless they have a gun, they fear others. That's actually one of the interesting points I found in the GSS. There is a question there called "Neighborhood Fear". It's basically, "Is there a place in your neighborhood where you're afraid to go?" And the answer to this question very much differs on the social stratum, and, depending on the stratum, on gun ownership. For women, the percentage of those who said "no" (i.e. they felt completely confident) is around 40-60%. For men, it's from 70% up. In all the cases where there is a statistically significant sample, gun ownership added 3-6% percent to the percentage of those who felt confident. Apart from one specific stratum - young white men. For them, it added 11%. Young white men with guns just feel much more secure in their neighborhoods than those without them. It wouldn't be so funny, except that young white men already have exceptionally high neighborhood confidence levels, around 80%. So, in essence, guns don't do much for women, who are much more afraid of their neighborhoods in general, but serve as an additional crutch for young men, who are already pretty confident. Then again, since most women are killed by their partners, I guess this makes sense.
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Apr 23, 2014 10:25
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Hmm. It occurs to me that this thread could use some pictures. And since I already have them... (This is the GSS data I mentioned upthread.) Historical household gun ownership partitioned by age/race/sex:  You can see that, for example, OWM (old, i.e. over-40, white men) have remained almost the same, while YWM have dropped a lot. (Like I said, the p-values for the coefficients are much more significant, at the e-05 level.) "O" in the "race" field means, unfortunately, "other" - back in the 1970s, where the GSS started, there was no distinction between various minorities. This has since been amended, in that there is a second racial variable, but because I wanted to include historical data, and sample sizes for these categories are small, I had to use the original "White/Black/Other" $race variable. Personal gun ownership (as you can see, I dropped "other" race already):  Women own personally around 30-40% of the guns they report in households, men around 90%. There is a fun correlation between marital status and household gun ownership for young white women, but not men. In this plot, e.g. YWF.S means "young white female, single", i.e. never married, widowed or divorced:  Moving to young white men, since they had the most interesting/significant drop, here's the drop by region:  Political views:  Party self-identification:  Finally, homicide rates vs. gun ownership among young men:  The same thing, but as correlation plots, with gun ownership rates for over-40 men for comparison (left/right => white/black):  And finally, for shits and giggles, the relationship between age/race/sex/gun ownership buckets and the percentage of positive replies to the question whether a house owner can be compelled by law not to racially discriminate against a house buyer:  And yes, that drop at the end is statistically significant. Like I said, the GSS has some fun data. To those who think that there may be a problem with people underreporting, please remember that this is a biennial study that was last done in 2012. I think that this year's edition has not yet been conducted, or properly preprocessed.
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Apr 23, 2014 16:37
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Yeah. It could also be a 'my rights!' vs. 'those poor people...' thing. Selfishness vs. empathy. I'm kind of wondering. The one thing that connects shooters is not really mental illness, but anger. It's angry boyfriends shooting girlfriends, angry white men shooting minorities, angry mass shooters living out their paranoia... It's like this guy wrote: They are mad, angry, resentful, embittered. But not necessarily mentally ill. Or, maybe more accurately, it is their raging pathological embitterment, their underlying anger disorder (see my prior post) that makes them mentally "ill" and motivates their violent behavior, rather than vice-versa. What would the 'mental illness' people propose to separate angry people and guns?
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Apr 24, 2014 11:36
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Chomskyan (or someone else with university access), do you have access to (Siegel et al., 2014)? Here's the abstract - it sounds interesting and pertinent to the discussion, and the publication is from this year (actually, from 10 days ago):quote:Determining the relationship between gun ownership levels and firearm homicide rates is critical to inform public health policy. Previous research has shown that state-level gun ownership, as measured by a widely used proxy, is positively associated with firearm homicide rates. A newly developed proxy measure that incorporates the hunting license rate in addition to the proportion of firearm suicides correlates more highly with state-level gun ownership. To corroborate previous research, we used this new proxy to estimate the association of state-level gun ownership with total, firearm, and non-firearm homicides. Using state-specific data for the years 1981-2010, we modelled these rates as a function of gun ownership level, controlling for potential confounding factors. We used a negative binomial regression model and accounted for clustering of observations among states. We found that state-level gun ownership as measured by the new proxy, is significantly associated with firearm and total homicides but not with non-firearm homicides. I think that the next gun control thread should have links like these in the OP, just to establish the ground truth. Otherwise, the discussion runs the threat of no longer being data-based, and getting emotional.
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Apr 25, 2014 08:16
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Obviously it is. It's a cultural one. That's why the correct data are so important, to establish the ground truth. A polarised discussion can only get worse if people are at ease to introduce counterfactual, unsubstantiated claims. For example, without data showing that higher gun ownership rates are related to higher firearms- and overall- homicide rates, it's possible to claim that higher gun ownership lowers homicide rates. Without data showing that the majority of female homicide victims are shot by the people they know, especially by their intimate partners, it's easy to prototype a gun-use situation in a male-oriented way (men are, indeed, much more often killed by strangers). Without data showing that the presence of a gun in a man-on-woman domestic abuse situation vastly increases the probability of the man killing the woman, one can make claims that, I don't know, it really makes no logical sense to bar domestic abusers from having guns more than anyone else. Essentially, emotions and emotional appeals are an extremely powerful tool if you want to reinforce your current way of thinking, improve morale or convince a third party. If you want to discuss, however, especially emotionally charged matters, data are important. It's no accident that researching firearms as a public health issue, as opposed to a rights issue, was so unpopular among the NRA types - it prevented data from entering the question, and kept the dialogue emotional (and increased sales). I'm sure that gun owners have their own set of grievances to air at the emotional approach. I think SedanChair, specifically, mentioned typecasting gun owners as racist rednecks (not true; gun ownership in the South had apparently dropped the most among all US regions since the 1970s). Or, I dunno, claiming to do things "for the children" (which I don't think anyone in this thread has been guilty of, but again, that may be my bias showing). What I myself find fascinating about the gun control discussion is that liberals are supposed to be better than conservatives at this rational thinking thing. But take a matter that divides them, and they are as instinct-driven as everyone else.
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Apr 25, 2014 09:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The remaining few studies (I'm mostly thinking of the work by Ayers and Donahue, and a couple other studies I can't remember the names of off-hand) generally don't show much of any significant increase in homicide rates as a result of liberalization of gun restrictions; they don't show much of any significant decrease either, and what significant effects they do find are pretty minimal (from what I remember, on the order of a percentage point or two either way). In other words, it's not really clear from the actual evidence that, when you control for other factors, any of the changes to gun control laws made over the past couple decades in America made any sort of actual significant difference in violent crime or homicide rates. Also, why do you think it's only necessary to focus on the effects of laws? If many people are voluntarily arming or disarming themselves, to the extent that there seem to be cultural trends in one or the other way in different places, do you not think that just studying the relationships between e.g. guns, accidents and homicides can be an important one? If it can help people and communities make choices informed by data rather than custom or tradition, and offer alternative points of view, how is that a bad thing? Actually, when is 'more research' ever a bad thing? If it's bad research, it can always be debunked, and usually will. But not doing research at all is just... willful ignorance.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:51
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Fat Ogre posted:That paper is from 1988-1997.... See? That's why I think that a reference-based OP is a good solution. 
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Apr 26, 2014 07:06
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Nessus posted:You forgot to work in the comparison to gay marriage in that one, Ogre, your message discipline is weakening. In-depth firearms information used to be collected by the CDC in this thing: http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/ , in the "Injury/Residential Fire/Firearms/Seatbelt Use" category. However, if you look at the "Historical questions database", it's pretty clear when they lost funding for that: full 50-state surveys were conducted only in 2001, 2002 and 2004. No state-level data have been collected since 2004. As a consequence, the National Research Council declared the development of "a valid proxy that can be constructed from accessible, annual, state-level data". The first proxy that has been developed was the proportion of suicides in a state committed using a gun (FS/S). However, it turned out its correlation with state estimates of gun ownership in recent years is only 0.80. Recently, however, another proxy has been developed, which combines FS/S with state per capita hunting licenses. This addition increased the correlation with survey-measured gun ownership from 0.80 to 0.95. In validation studies, it produced correlations of 0.95 and 0.97. Since these proxies actually only use state-level information (FS/S and per capita hunting licenses), and do not even require gun owners to answer such embarrassing questions as "do you have a gun?", they are fairly easy to calculate. We should expect fun new data soon. :-)
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Apr 27, 2014 14:51
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The Carbon Tax posted:So in your world, if someone published a partial list of the names and addresses of all gun owners nearby, and shortly after there was a threefold increase of gun thefts (generally of people on the list, mainly guns were stolen, and the thieves brought power tools with them for opening safes) - this data can safely be ignored because there is no signed confession from the thieves saying the list was used? Hieronymous Alloy posted:Like I've said before in this thread, ultimately the statistical arguments wash out; none of the available evidence is strong enough to convince anyone either way because none of it is provable, and guns in America have become primarily an identity-politics issue, as we can see over the last few posts ("gun owners aren't reasonable" vs. "mah freedom"). Also, given that the majority of killers, shooters, mass shooters, gun-suicide victims etc., are men, one could say that, if one wants to focus on the human factor, not the guns themselves, one should focus on, well, the maleness .
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Apr 27, 2014 16:51
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Fat Ogre posted:Also guns are not a disease. They aren't an infection, they don't spread like an infection. So trying to study them like HIV when it would be more apt to study them like having stairs in your house, having a pool, having a fireplace etc. You can't stop having HIV but you can easily stop being a gun owner. You can't unknowingly infect others with guns, unless you're say accidental shootings are the infection vector and that number is so low there is literally no point in discussing this issue any further. LGD posted:A question for you- do you believe that the United States has a suicide rate that is naturally significantly lower than other industrialized nations? Because despite the massive numbers of firearms available, the U.S. suicide rate is not substantially higher than other nations with much stricter controls on firearms (such as the U.K.) and substantially lower than others (France, Japan, etc.). If access to firearms is causing a massive proportion of U.S. suicides, then this implies that the U.S. as a whole has a "natural" suicide rate that is far below that of other countries. This seems like a highly dubious proposition, especially when you consider what the effects of the U.S.'s substandard social safety net are likely having on the suicide rate. To some extent, this point actually goes in the 'the US has a lower natural rate' hypothesis, because it seems that the parts of the US that are, let's say, the closest to the "prototypic" European country (high population density, stricter gun laws, geographic location), i.e. the Northeast, do have lower suicide rates than European countries.
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Apr 29, 2014 10:31
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Fat Ogre posted:Just like how the religious right says being exposed to gay culture is infectious. Exactly. Or like being exposed to hybrid corn. Seriously, what are you arguing here? That ideas and attitudes don't spread between people? That it isn't worth studying what makes an idea go - yes, viral? That guns and gun-related attitudes should be for some reason exempt?
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Apr 29, 2014 13:04
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Mineaiki posted:I've been referring to politically active gun owners, too. I'm a gun owner, personally, but it's not much a part of my politics. I don't like using the term "gun nuts" because it isn't fair and it ends the discussion before it starts, but I am referring to people for whom gun rights trump most or all other issues when it comes to voting. The Insect Court posted:SYG laws are largely the result of conservative white racial paranoia over a fantasized wave of black on white violence. You can't disentangle the "gun rights" movement from the broader trend of right-wing white male ressentiment and rage, and the way the Republican Party plays to it. All the hysterical comparisons between gun owners and Holocaust victims or Jim Crow era southern blacks is a pretty good demonstration of that. Install Windows posted:"Gun rights advocates" these days is pretty much the same as "men's rights advocates", yeah. About the only data point combining attitudes on gun rights with attitudes towards other things is here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/164507/americans-fault-mental-health-system-gun-violence.aspx#1 . Democrats are more likely to blame spreading extremism and inflammatory political language in addition to easy access to guns for mass shootings than Republicans. And mass shootings are an extremely bad metric.
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Apr 30, 2014 09:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:What are the actual numbers for gun owner demographics? How do they differ from and how are they similar to the general American population? Here is the best discussion of gun owner demographics. Notable bits: quote:In the Pew Research Center survey conducted Feb. 13-18, 37% of adults reported having a gun in their household: 24% say they personally own a gun, and 13% say the gun or guns in their home are owned by someone else. These figures are not significantly different from the 2012 General Social Survey estimates that 34% of households have guns, and 22% of individuals own a gun.[...] The GSS data has 69% of gun owners being white men: 54% of gun owners being over-40 white men and 15% under-40 white men. Also interesting are the statistics on the 9% of the households where a member of the household is a member of the NRA. Their responses are markedly different from the responses calculated for the entirety of the society. I'd say that it's extremely viable to research them further. e: Gallup's polls. 37% report a gun in their home, 2% elsewhere on the property; of these, 27% own personally, 12% have other members owning. No demographic crosstabs. meristem fucked around with this message at 11:18 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 11:03
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SedanChair posted:gently caress those people. If you are such an rear end in a top hat that you are going to go blow your brains out in public, gently caress you. I'm not helping you with laws. LeJackal posted:Unless you're one-handed. Or otherwise unable to effectively use a long gun. Or you want to desperately phone the police with one hand while you keep the gun trained at the door your abusive ex-partner is beating down. Or you'd like to use a firearm in a closet while on the phone to 911.
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May 2, 2014 16:32
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LeJackal posted:Back to gunchat - are socioeconomics the real reason behind homicides? (And not gun-generated murderfields?) Maybe if a lot of shootings happened inside tight groups of socially linked people we could see if some kind of overarching criminal tendency correlates. LeJackal, thank you! That's exactly the type of network analysis I was talking about earlier in the thread: it shows that there is a community of people sharing the idea that shooting others is considered to be a reasonable solution to a problem, and it has this strong core where this happens regularly. However, in less extreme situations than Chicago, networks are becoming less geographically focused - transmitted over the Internet and via other media. I think it would be fascinating to map out some of these virtual communities, see how they intersect, which ones are maybe more conducive to shootings than others, which positions in these networks are more conducive to shooting than other etc.. Basically, what this part of the article says: quote:We don’t know the same just yet for the gun violence issue. Are there certain types of paths, or network structures, that are more conducive to victimization? There are all kinds of hypotheses. One of them is being in between. For example, if you’re in between different parts of a network, if you’re that person who connects a network, perhaps you’re more exposed. This is what ethnographers or cops tell you about gangs. The guys that go between factions, or running with two different crews, are a little more at risk.
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May 4, 2014 08:56
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LeJackal posted:I think that, once again, too much focus is on the tool used and not the violence itself. Granted, this study did track non-fatal shootings, so that focus is sort of baked in, but still. These people and these shootings are precipitated in settings where violence is considered to be acceptable or the only solution to their problems. We should be asking why that is - is it because they are involved in criminal activity? Has the social infrastructure failed them to the point of anarchy? Chicago is a bit of a special case, though. As I previously cited, the majority of guns are in the hands of white men, especially older, conservative, but not extremely rich, white men - the demographic that has been the most hurt, money- and prestige-wise, by the social and the demographic changes. Surely you must see that it is reasonable to treat the confluence of 'it's fine to defend myself with violence' and 'I'm losing my prestige/status/(country)'; or, alternatively, 'it's fine to defend myself with violence' and 'I have to work much harder, and may never obtain the same prestige as my father', happening on the scale of a whole society, with apprehension?
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May 5, 2014 11:09
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Drink Cheerwine posted:The way I see it, guns give potentially everybody equal footing. That this equal footing is a stronger position than the apex of the already existing hierarchy of strength is a good thing. Choosing not to elevate your individual strength to that level is fine, but demanding that no-one else be allowed to correct their baseline strength is both privileged and anti-equality. Guns democratize force. This is an especially good thing for women and victims of intolerance. In countries with stricter gun laws, a victim of domestic abuse or intolerance can go to the police and tell them, "here's the record, I really am in reasonable/constant danger, I need a gun." That way, they get access to the weapon - but their abuser doesn't, because guns are rare. In countries with looser gun laws, the abuser can also buy a gun. So instead of equalisation, you just shift the equation to who can afford the better weapon.
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May 11, 2014 23:58
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drat it, so many bad statistics on this page.Drink Cheerwine posted:A gun is a gun. You can buy a gun for $100 that will be effectively equal (for self-defense purposes) to one that costs $500 or $1000. cheese posted:Guns also greatly enhance a persons ability to violate another persons preexisting right to life. If we could measure it, and we found that guns as a tool to violate life and liberty were far more commonly employed than as a self-defense tool, would you oppose them? Drink Cheerwine posted:This is not at all what I said, weirdly racist (33% of black households own a gun), and fetishizes guns. The right to self-defense is preexisting. A gun is a common tool that enhances that right by providing an equal level of force (to anyone who wants it) that can reliably trump even the greatest physical disparities.
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May 12, 2014 05:28
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Drink Cheerwine posted:You think you're accurately describing the United States? quote:An analysis of 6 Gallup polls from 2007 to 2012 is disingenuous but one survey from 2013 is the Facts. Gotcha. Slipknot Hoagie posted:Assuming the stats are real on that poll, one reason a woman may own fewer or no guns at all is that the home's defense is generally seen to be the purview of the man of the household. Well, everyone is entitled to their folly, women included. LeJackal posted:I'm curious, what are you using for your sources on these numbers?
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May 12, 2014 18:45
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Chomskyan posted:I might be willing to do this, but I suspect that even if this happened the quality of discourse would not change. You would need a moderator to frequently review the thread and kick out bad posters. Drink Cheerwine posted:Holy smug, Batman! Your point was actually that I was using "disingenuous statistics" (read: lying) so no, your point doesn't stand. Additionally, multiple polls over time typically provide more useful and accurate metrics than a single survey, but that's neither here nor there. I didn't expect an apology from someone who so clearly considers himself an arbiter of truth and justice. LeJackal posted:Those in the quote from you. Let's start with deaths. Deaths by injury by firearms are in the CDCs National Vital Statistics Reports. In 2012 (Table 2), those were 32,163 firearm deaths, including 19,766 suicides, 11,101 homicides, and some minor accidental discharges and other types of stuff. For comparison, there were 34,677 'motor vehicle' accidents. Interestingly, when one compares this data with data from 2008-2010 (Table II), it shows that, in 2008, there were 18,223 firearm suicides, 12,179 firearm homicides, but 39,790 'motor vehicle' accidents. This means that, from 2008 to 2012, firearm deaths remained stable, but 'motor vehicle' accidents decreased by 5,000 per year. This is a decrease of ~12.5%. That's actually fascinating in its own way. Now it falls to me to show some indications that some of the suicides that occurred wouldn't have without access to guns, yes? Well, as I mentioned earlier, that's to the NIMH for us. Here is the suicide map. As you can see, suicide rates are extremely uneven across the country. They are also extremely uneven across different gender/racial groups. There are some nice pictures for this [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_suicide]here[/url] (sorry for the Wikipedia link). Essentially, what these show is that in general, around the world, suicides increase among urbanites. However, it is not so in the US, where those who successfully suicide are essentially white males (whites and Asians are nearly 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves than blacks; male suicide rates are higher than females), and among these, white males from the Mountain region. The parts of the country with restricted access to guns have much lower suicide rates than those that don't - lower, in fact, than many Western European countries. OK, that's 32,163 firearm deaths. Now let's move on to the other stuff. That's to the FBI for us. In 2012, firearms were used 122,974 times in robberies and 142,568 in aggravated assaults. Fascinatingly, firearms were much more often used in the Midwest and South. Looking into the table comparing aggravated assaults and homicides by region, it's possible to compare homicide rates and aggravated assault rates. That gives us some fun correlations such as that there is 1 homicide for 52 aggravated assaults countrywide, one for 54 in the Northeast, 1 for 46 in the Midwest, 1 for 51 in the South and 1 in 57 in the West, i.e. in the same regions where guns are more often used in aggravated assaults, the aggravated assaults are more deadly. Of course, one has to take into account e.g. what mugrim said about ER response times, so I think it could be fun data to crunch at a statewide level. Nevertheless, that's some 265,000 times a year that guns were used in robberies and assaults. Obviously, in at least some cases, guns would be substituted for other weapons in their absence. However, there are statistics that run contrary to that. For that, let's move to domestic abuse. How often are guns used in that? It turns out that 3.5% of women were threatened with a gun by an intimate partner over their lifetime (source 1, source 2) and 0.7% had the gun used against them, compared to 0.4% and 0.1% for men. This is more important than just the psychological impact of being threatened bu a gun. Here's the data on intimate partner homicide. In particular, what interests us is Figure 2: women who were threatened or assaulted with a gun were 20 times more likely than other women to be murdered. Women whose partners threatened them with murder were 15 times more likely than other women to be killed. The mere presence of a gun in the house increased the likelihood of death by 6.1. For these women, this 6.1x likelihood is literally the cost of having the gun in the house. I think it would be interesting to see how these likelihoods look for situations of racial etc., intolerance, but I don't have the data for this - so let's move on, to finally compare the FBI numbers of justified vs. nonjustified homicides. Justified homicides by law enforcement officers are here and here. As you can see, when it comes to homicides, the ratio of justifiable homicides by private citizens:all homicides is around 1:50. Homicide is not the perfect proxy, but it does indicate that in confrontations, successful personal defence by private citizens is exceedingly rare. I think that it would be interesting here to see how many of these justifiable homicides by private citizens happen in rural vs. urban regions - the difference between the two environments is crucial, after all. And so, that's it! Now I'm looking forward to seeing the counterdata. 
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May 13, 2014 10:53
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