If there’s an article full of anti gun bias, you can bet the byline will be an AP writer. You gotta imagine that graduating from the Joyce Foundation Academy of Illogical Bullhuckery is a prerequisite to write there.
Suicides accounted for 55 percent of the nation’s nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Which means fewer than half of the “gun deaths” recorded are criminal homicide; you don’t often hear Paul Helmke and Dennis Hennigan owning up to that. The plain reality is that if somebody wants to off themselves, they’re going to do it…often by more horrific means than small arms fire…like for instance, a supermodel tossing herself out of a ninth story window in Manhattan. Moving on.
Public-health researchers have concluded that in homes where guns are present, the likelihood that someone in the home will die from suicide or homicide is much greater.
They of course miss the fact that your odds of defending yourself from criminals are much greater when the firearm is present as well. Well, more on that in a few.
One public-health study found that suicide and homicide rates in the district dropped after the ban was adopted.
What kind of crack is this guy smoking? It’s a well established FACT that DC’s homicide rate skyrocketed after the ban. How do people get away with this crap?
The American Public Health Association, the American Association of Suicidology and two other groups filed a legal brief supporting the district’s ban. The brief challenged arguments that if a gun is not available, suicidal people will just kill themselves using other means.
I wonder how they explain then a country like say…Japan? Where despite having essentially zero civilian firearms ownership, their suicide rate is double ours. Or Russia, where only mobsters and the government have guns and civilian ownership is severely restricted, but the suicide rate is more than triple ours.
“Other methods are not as lethal,” said Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.
Great, they’re quoting the Joyce Foundation’s cabana boys at the infamous (and rather discredited) JHU Gun Grabbery Center. That kinda speaks for itself, eh?
The high court’s majority opinion made no mention of suicide. But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer used the word 14 times in voicing concern about the impact of striking down the handgun ban.
Anybody who thinks I need to surrender the means to defend myself because people who want to off themselves might actually use a gun to do it should be required to come take a bullet for me. Seriously. If you think I should be denied the means of self defense because you’re worried about suicide, then you’re enabling the people who maim or kill me. Put your money where your mouth is and come stand between me and the bad guys. I mean it. Let’s see you shed that hypocrisy.
Public-health experts have said the telephone survey methodology Kleck used likely resulted in an overestimate
Even if we posit that that’s true, of the dozen or so studies of that have looked at DGUs, almost all of them concur with Kleck’s results more or less. Even the most conservative estimates (like the infamous DOJ study from the mid 90s that most experts feel greatly underestimated DGUs) indicate that DGU is way, way more common than gun suicide. Even if we assume that Kleck overestimates DGU by a factor of ten, there would still be 15 times as many DGUs as gun suicides.
But the agency cut back research on the subject after Congress in 1996 ordered that none of the CDC’s appropriations be used to promote gun control…
Today, the CDC budgets less than $900,000 for firearm-related projects, and most of it is spent to track statistics. The agency no longer funds gun-related policy analysis.
Ah, those evil congresscritters…stuffing that gun related policy work. Maybe it’s an evil plot. Or maybe it’s obvious that gun control doesn’t work and that DC’s handgun ban didn’t change the fact that it was still one of the most dangerous cities in the civilized world.
