Topic: Gun free zone - page 18. (Read 21931 times)

I look at it this way.
The number of guns in a given area is only slightly proportional to your risk of being shot, but who has the weapons is strongly proportional to your risk.  I have been thinking about this since Sunday when I was at a restaurant. I noticed that several patrons were open carrying their weapons and I was concealing mine. I wondered if some people at the restaurant were unnerved at all these guns?
MY first reaction was to think “wow, nothing bad is gonna happen here!” a crazy person trying to shoot someone would be lucky to get two shots off before a rain of lead came their way.

When faced with a hard to understand mind like the active shooters in the news, it is easy to blame the weapon. Especially if you know little about weapons. Many have a superstitious view of guns as having some sort of power. As though a sensible person is changed into a killer by the presence of a gun. People who know about guns are baffled by this because we think of them like a screwdriver or any other tool. It's not the gun that is the risk, it's the person. Indeed if you want to find a place that is safe from active shooters consider going to places that have guns. A police station, military base, a gun club, these  places have the most guns and are among the safest places. Schools, theaters, gun free zones; are places where only criminals have guns and there may be no one with any ability to stop a shooter.

I know some don't agree. That's cool. I'm not saying you should carry a gun. But for those of us who understand that the only survivable response to a shooter is an armed response, let us protect ourselves. You can hide in a closet and pretend your invisible if you want, I'm going home that evening.

I see. So if one or two (or three or four or five or six) were unlucky enough to die, the two events would be equivalent?

I think it's just luck that no one died in the China school knifing incident. Both gun and knife can easily kill or not kill. It just happens the gun man in CT shooting is highly experienced shooter, while the guy in China I doubt he spent any time practicing knifing or learning how to kill with knives.

OK, So I made a little chart, with the countries ranked, left to right, with lower to higher gun ownership. I then put the murder rates along the Y axis. Everything is in per 100 citizens, though it really doesn't matter, since we're just trying to show a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates, if there is one, and as long as all the murder rates are in the same unit, the relative rates will be the same.

So without further ado, the chart:


So, as you can see, there is no strong correlation between gun ownership and intentional murder.

If anything, you see a bell curve, which I might hypothesize could be explained thus:

With almost or completely no guns, murder is kind of hard to pull off. Knives, baseball bats, etc. all require that you get good and close. So it's not really worth the effort/risk. With few guns, murder becomes much more easy to pull off. You can get a gun, but it's not likely your victim will have one to defend himself with. Once past a certain point, though, guns start showing up in the hands of the "good guys," as well, making murder a much less attractive option. Once again, it's not worth the effort and risk... unless you can be assured your victim does not have a gun, such as in a school or other public place where legally carried weapons are banned.

Clearly, culture plays a part, as well, since on both sides of Honduras (that huge spike in the middle) there are countries which are at or below even the US level (the far, far right bar, the US has more guns per capita than almost any two countries combined).

We just need to make the "Gun free zone" signs larger. I assume these nut job shooters are just not seeing the signs. Because no one would dare disobey a rule. 

I would like to see a map showing active shooter incident locations and no carry zones. Seems the shooters always pick schools, theaters, churches; places they can be sure no one will be able to shoot back.

Well, considering they provided data from those countries, yes, I do. If you can provide proof that the data is erroneous, please do.


the same way you could prove that cannonballs arent more dangerous projetiles than plush bunnies. just include samples in which the cannonballs were thrown by little girls and the plush bunnies were fired by cannons. do some research into how statistics are interpreted properly.