Comment

Self-Defense Statistics-When Stats Are Colored With Attitude

28
Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)6/03/2014 11:12:12 am PDT

re: #27 Rightwingconspirator

Could you describe at all what level of threat justifies having a gun and all that goes with it by way of training and insurance and proper storage?

It’s not a number that has meaning on its own, it’s only a comparative number, and it would obviously be related to the increase in risk that having the gun is. In order to give a super-precise answer, I’d have to do a ton of risk-related research.

However, like most things, there are obvious extremes. I live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There were literally no murders in my neighborhood in 2013. There have been no stranger-murders in about five years, when there was one. There were 81 violent crimes in my neighborhood last year, only half of them occurring against residents, and the majority of the remainders being domestics. There are about a quarter of a million people who live here.

This puts me at infinitesimal risk of being violently attacked, especially when you take into account that I don’t stay out drinking late and I’m a six foot tall, in-shape male. I don’t have the time or inclination to go to the range and shoot often enough and take the tactical training courses that’d give me the confidence to actually use the gun on the street, and even in the home I’d want to train the hell out of myself so I didn’t shoot some poor drunk neighbor in a panic.

Furthermore, the population of people who are assaulted includes people who were complicit in that assault, who started shit with someone at a bar, who got drunk and started being racist. Except in a few weird jurisdictions, If two guys get into a fight, they both get charged with assault. So if you’re a nice, normal person, your odds of being assaulted are significantly less than raw statistics would show. This is not, in any way, saying those assaults were legitimate or excusable, but in many cases assaults are mutual or provoked.

Nobody is going to have the time to do the thorough statistics on this to get an exact answer, but the majority of people live in a place where the risk of violent assault from a stranger in a scenario where they could defend themselves from a gun without it being a situation they’re getting themselves into is very low, much lower than the dangers of commuting, or, more pointedly of suicide by gun, as compared to suicide without a gun, when removing the population who bought a gun just to commit suicide).

Another number that it’s impossible to calculate exactly is how responsible an individual is going to be, but to correct for that rigorous training that actively fails people for fucking up is completely fine. You can’t ask people to self-assess competence and while I think that gun enthusiasts have a duty to discourage people they know are irresponsible from owning guns, there’s needs to be actual enforcement of competence, too.