Arms control

[purpletigron]

Bizarre statistic: A USA study found that women were almost three times more likely to be murdered if they lived in a household which owned a gun.

http://www.controlarms.org/

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Ah, another stat for Metro's 'No Sh*t Sherlock' factoid box.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking, the whole argument that "an armed society is a polite society" is so much bullshit. Now, I do believe in the freedom to use firearms in a responsible manner - properly licensed and so on - but the fetishising of the gun leads to its use in truly irresponsible ways. You only have to look at pre-WWI crime to see how often arguments escalated into shootings (duels for the upper classes, shotguns and blunderbusses for others), especially given that human life was pretty cheap back in The Good Old Days When Everything Was Better And People Had Manners And I Wouldn't Have Even Considered Talking To An Adult Like That. It's a balancing act, gun control. I always enjoyed target shooting, though I can't imagine wanting to shoot a living being, and I'm more than happy to go to a range for that, use their guns, and hand them over at the end of the day. I know a couple of people who believe that any attempt at gun control is dangerous, and others who think that guns should be banned outright; I think both ideas are wrongheaded. You need a culture that sees the escalation of violence as a failure rather than as a demonstration of strength and glamour; and for that, you need a society that doesn't a) define masculinity as superior to femininity, and b) doesn't define masculinity in such narrow terms - after all, machismo is all about insecurity and weakness, which is why demonstrations of strength are so desirable; true strength doesn't need to flaunt itself.

[sammywol.livejournal.com]

Statistics show that having a gun in the house actively endangers your family, whatever the frontier spirit says, and as usual the women and kids catch the brunt of it.

Unfortunately ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... I always worry about statistics.

I tried finding that stat on the link you gave but couldn't ... is that statistic for a particular city, country or the planet? If it's for the USA, then how is it adjusted (if at all) for different circumstances?

For example, the incidence of household gun ownership may be directly correlated with, say, street crime. So more households (per thousand) in New York will have a gun than, say, Idaho. And more women (per thousand) will be murdered in New York than in Idaho. This is at least partly because New York is more dangerous (with or without guns) than Idaho, and may also have higher stress levels that will lead to more abuse and murders "in the home". Thus there is a statistical correlation between guns and murder but it may not be as causal as it would at first appear.

Or it might be exactly as it seems. I really can't tell.

Still, even when I had a gun licence, I always (ALWAYS) kept guns at the gun club and never at home (actually, although I had a licence for years, I never actually owned a gun)