It’s far from comprehensive, but gun control does *seem* to have serious correlation with individual acts of violence against others.
Higher gun control laws do one thing–ONE thing–that is categorically good as far as I can tell: they MASSIVELY reduce suicide-by-gun statistics, sometimes by as much as 90%, and they have an ALMOST EQUAL overall reduction in suicide generally. That’s not nothing, but whenever you hear talking heads cite ‘gun violence’ or ‘gun deaths,’ understand that nearly all of them are including suicide-by-gun in those statistics. I can’t describe how angered I was when I first learned that little factoid. /rant
But yeah, there are anecdotes–most of them well-sourced–describing what happens when mass shooters target something like a revival church in, say, Louisiana or some other low-gun-control district and the crime never even gets off the ground. One of my favorites was of a woman who, if memory serves, was literally checking her makeup in a mirror outside the service hall when a guy came in with a handful of weapons. He killed a security guard with a silenced pistol so she calmly ducked behind a nearby table, drew her .38, and put him down from concealment before he could enter the service hall.
College campuses are also routinely targeted by depraved wackos with a suicide-by-cop fetish, and most college campuses are no-gun-zones.
Guns aren’t exactly part of this thread’s topic, though, so I hesitated for about five minutes before hitting the ‘save’ button.
DR D’ TWO CENTS ON NO GUN ZONES
Ann Coulter has been banging this drum for years. Everytime there’s a shooting she’ll do a column pointing out that it was in a No Gun Zone again – a school, a post office, a government facility, a rave (like in Florida), etc.
We notice there have been no shootings at the riot scenes so far. The victims cannot be presumed to be harmless sheep, as they can in a No Gun Zone.
When I got over my fear of range plinking, and went down to the County for a CCW, carried a .357 on my hip, I knew for a fact that nobody was going to line up the customers in my restaurant and tell them all to get on their knees. It was a nice feeling. Not to say the knowledge that if there comes violent banging on your front door at midnight you are in zero danger, compared to the “Safe Room” panic-filled night you’d have without.
The Guns & Ammo crowd usually comes up with the stats on the order of 5,000 shot per year … 4,000 of those suicide … 350,000 home felonies prevented by gun-owning homeowner. Of course the anti-gun crowd argues for all it’s worth that only a few homeowners defended themselves.
The stats are disputable, but there’s no excuse for not noticing how many of the execution-style San Bernadino massacres are in no-gun zones. It’s not an absolute, but not noticing the No Gun Zone factor is like not noticing NBA players are tall :- )
.
GRATUITOUS BASEBALL FACTOID
The Mariners’ strength of schedule is (theoretically) worth -0.6 wins to their record this year. The Indians have the easiest, at +2.3 wins, and the A’s worst, at -1.7.
That’s before we know who’s good, of course.
Respectfully,
Jeff
Detect O Vision Mainframe 
Definitely a better spot for this than over at SSI. Good idea on the transplant 🙂
Regarding Gun Free Zones and their hyper-representation in gun violence statistics, yeah…it’s a sad state of affairs when people demonstrate their immunity to the evidence while clinging–often blindly–to their perfectly rational and, usually, logical assumptions about gun control and what it *should* do. The problem is that humans are TERRIBLE at predicting outcomes, so once you’ve tested your theory scientifically (by testing it and analyzing the evidence collected from those tests) you have to throw your perfectly reasonable and, usually, logical assumptions out the window and submit to the evidence at hand. Otherwise, you’re an ostrich.
Sam Harris (I keep linking to him because I find him very articulate–almost to a fault much of the time, in that his writings are never short, but that melds with my own style so I forgive him that shortcoming) has a pretty good essay called The Riddle of The Gun which, I’ll link below this paragraph. It’s an essay that’s largely written for his (left-leaning) crowd, so there’s a bit of slogging to get to the juicy bits if you’re none too keen on the notion of ever-expanding restrictions on gun ownership.
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-riddle-of-the-gun
In the essay he tackles on of the more subtle, yet *incredibly* important facets of gun ownership: the total, largely hidden, social/psychological cost of low-frequency atrocities which *might* be prevented by greater incidences of gun ownership (atrocities would be any kind of violent crime, either committed against individuals or groups) compared to the more obvious costs associated with proliferation of guns (costs such as: increased suicide-by-gun rates, accidental discharges, guns being stolen from law-abiding citizens and used by criminals, etc..) and asks some thought-provoking questions like, essentially, how many rapes equal a murder in the total NET negative effect on society as a whole and the victim(s)/direct acquaintances of the victim(s) specifically? How many armed robberies equal a suicide in the overall deleterious effect on social cohesion? His argument is that the answer is nowhere NEAR as simplistic as any extremist on the issue would care to admit, and I find that a compelling starting point for many ruminations on the subject.
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For sure Mr. Jonez.
And where do we put, in the numerator of the fraction, that I sit at my desk at night feeling 100% safe?
Never worrying about whether some thugs happened to target *my* house at 2 a.m., or whether I annoyed somebody in traffic and they followed me home, waiting for later?
What’s the feeling worth? Would submit that this feeling of responsibility for my own safety is — > precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind when writing the 2nd Amendment.
No way to measure it, though. How do you measure The Domestic Tranquility? :- )
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The GF and I live in a relatively safe city (If Orwell was writing currently, would “Diversity is Strength” make the cut for one of his bon mots?) but our apartment is first floor with nearly floor to ceiling windows on one side. Crawl through? Anyone determined could walk through w/o worrying about a scratch to his ne-er-do-well head. Thankfully 2A and Sam Colt made all men ‘equal’ and we sleep easy at night. The disconnect on the left in regard to guns is that the well off and upper middle class who determine policy read about violence and crime as esoteric concepts and have never experienced the fear anyone who grew up in the ghetto experiences. The sense of resignation in your gut that someone means to do you harm and you are impotent to stop them is a shame most don’t soon forget.
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Great input, Charles Martel. Your post snaps into focus the ‘hidden’ costs of disempowering people–costs which the linked Sam Harris post, The Riddle of The Gun, seeks to outline.
At what point is the loss of, say, a few hundred lives to accidental firearm discharges a net GAIN for society compared to the cognitively unavoidable conclusion that we, as a society, are powerless to stop the ne’er-do-wells from bringing harm to us and our loved ones?
I attempt to ask that question in a bizarre, operatic, and utterly unapologetic way in my novel series, Imperium Cicernus: The Chimera Adjustment. At what point does *society* view a trade-off of life (and even of freedom) as a net gain if it results in greater social cohesion, contentment, and–by inevitable extension–productivity?
It’s an age-old question with no easy answer, which is why we keep asking it. To my mind, that makes it one of the best questions.
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Speaking of which, in the Philippines they recently put in a law saying that if a drug dealer was hanging around your ‘hood, you got a cash reward for shooting him in the leg and bringing him in…
Now, that’s domestic tranquility … ;- )
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Duterte, the Philippines’ president, is as Tough On Crime as they come. Back a few years ago when Typhoon Haiyan (sp?) came through (nearly bulls-eyeing my house, where we got 100+ mph winds for about an hour and a half) there was mass looting all over the typhoon’s path.
Duterte was on the record saying, “If there are looters in my jurisdiction, I am telling my constituents right now: shoot them in the foot or the leg, and tie them up until the police arrive. There will be no charges if you shoot them in the foot or leg. Looting has no place in our society.”
Naturally, there was no looting in Duterte’s jurisdiction 😉
And yeah, immediately after the election there were cash bounties out for drug dealers or criminals actively engaged in the commission of crimes. It was like p10k for a regular type of criminal, and p50k if it was drug-related–dead or alive didn’t *seem* to matter to the people cutting the checks, and in my local city there were like eight payouts in the first few weeks alone.
I can’t effectively convey the positive way the locals here feel about Duterte’s approach to the solution. They absolutely LOVE it.
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