What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing and very very loud

Hi Paul, welcome to Predator Masters. Most of us here are firmly in the "let's have more guns" camp, so you've got your work cut out for you to convince us of your position! I'm certainly not interested in further compromising my liberties so others can feel better about themselves. My AR is a valuable tool that I use regularly. I don't need others telling me which tools I should use, any more than you need others telling you which fingers you should type with. That said, I personally welcome good discussion, so let's see where this goes.

I suspect the stats you use to tell your story are much different when you remove large blue metropolitan areas, which are centers for violent crime of all kinds and typically have The strictest gun laws in the nation. See Chicago.
 
  • Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. (Clemens)
  • There are lies. There are damn lies. And then, there are statistics. (Einstein)

In 2022, the number of US gun suicides reached an all-time high: 73 people dying by gun suicide every day, or a total of nearly 27,000 deaths that year.

Despite years of intense debate over gun violence in the US, this central fact still receives little attention: the majority of the country’s gun deaths are suicides, not homicides.

The truth is, suicides get lumped in with gun death totals to make it more dramatic with leftest hacks such as heckbert.
 
www.thetrace.org

Should Suicides Be Considered 'Gun Violence'?

More than half of all firearm deaths are self-inflicted. A reader's question touches on a fault line in the nation's conversation about guns.
www.thetrace.org www.thetrace.org

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 39,707 gun deaths in the United States in 2019, the most recent year data is available. Sixty percent — or about two out of three — were suicides.

America has the highest gun suicide rate of any country on earth. Its gun homicide rate, meanwhile, ranks about 30th.
 
paulheckbert said:
The US has by far the highest gun death rate among advanced countries. And this scatterplot shows that there is correlation among countries between the number of guns (per person) and the number of gun deaths (per person). There are similar statistics comparing states within the US. These statistics suggest that we could reduce the number of gun deaths in the US by dramatically reducing the number of guns. We should regulate them more tightly so there are fewer casual (and often misguided and untrained and sometime unstable) gun buyers seeking "personal protection" (who end up endangering themselves far more than they are protecting themselves), leaving most of the guns in the hands of safety-conscious hunters and law enforcement people. Scatterplot from Gun Deaths vs. Gun Ownership ← Inductio Ex Machina ← Mark Reid
Click to expand...
Perhaps you would be so kind as to provide the "similar statistics comparing states within the US". Better yet, the statistics of major cities, such as Chicago & Wahington DC.

Taken on a wider scale, US is 7th worldwide in violent firearms deaths. Noting the countries with higher rates of homicides than the US, perhaps the geographic location has more bearing on firearms deaths than "advanced" country rating? What effect do you think the open borders policy will have on our homicide rate? Just asking.

The interesting statistic of per capita gun ownership/violent gun deaths in the top nine countries shown below shows:
Country.......................Guns/100..........Deaths/100 K
El Salvador........................12.............................35.5
Venezuela..........................18.5.........................32.75
US Virgin Islands............16.6..........................19.29
Bahamas............................N/A
Mexico................................12.9.........................15.55
Coulumbia.........................10.1.........................24.8
Honduras...........................14.1..........................21.22
Trinidad and Tobago.....3.2..............................15.21
Jamaica...............................8.8..............................10.06
Guatemala.........................12.1............................28.2*
United States....................19.6............................19.29
* Guatemala typo on graph below, not 18.2 as shown*
1704997906330.png
 
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NOTE: Guatemala should be rated at #3 as the actual # of deaths/100k is 28.3, not 18.3 as shown below.

1704997870140.png
 
OP's graph, as are most such studies, is just a snapshot of conditions at a given time, so it is impossible to compare numbers precisely. However, a bit deeper dive into cause and effect would seem to prove that there is a lot more at work here, such as population density, economic conditions, geographical location, and many others to be touched on below*.
1705079245321.png


List of countries by guns and homicide Article Talk
First, we should note OP's graph above, which begs the question, "If firearms death rates are tied directly to the number of firearms owned by a given population, how do we explain the discrepancies between Mexico and the US indicated in the chart.

We can't, according to statistics quoted from the in depth study (Linked above), from which I've extracted the following random statistics:

COUNTRY.....................INTENTIONAL HOMICIDES/100K.....FIREARMS OWNED/100
MEXICO...............................28.4.....................................................................12.9
UNITED STATES.................6.4.......................................................................120.5
US VIRGIN ISLANDS.......49.3.....................................................................16.6
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO...38.6......................................................................3.2
SWITZERLAND...................0.5.......................................................................27.6
SWEDEN...............................1.1.......................................................................23.1
SOUTH AFRICA..................33.5.....................................................................9.7
GUATEMALA.......................17.5.....................................................................12.1
EL SALVADOR.....................37.2.....................................................................12
DOMINICA...........................20.8.....................................................................6.2
COLUMBIA...........................22.6.....................................................................10.1
CANADA................................2..........................................................................34.7
BRAZIL....................................22.5.....................................................................8.3
BELIZ.......................................25.7......................................................................10
AUSTRALIA...........................0.9.........................................................................14.5

Yet the powers that be, MSM and the misinformed, choose to ignore the lack of prosecution of felons and push for defunding police, cry for more gun control. Click link below:
Gun Rights Face Whirlwind of Federal Action in 2024

Click "study" link below for full text:
A study by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) found that 2 percent of U.S. counties accounted for 56 percent of murders in 2020. The study, published in January 2023, showed that the vast majority of communities didn’t have a serious violent crime problem.
Click to expand...
 
Click links below for a couple more bubble "busters" for our progressive friends :

Bombshell Report: Crime Dropped in 6 Ohio Cities Under ‘Permitless Carry’ Law

Violent gun-related crime in six of eight Ohio cities targeted in a recently-released study commissioned by Attorney General Dave Yost dropped—in some cases by double digits—in the year after the state’s “constitutional carry” law took effect, according to a recently published study by the Center for Justice Research.
Click to expand...

Yost authored an Op-Ed at National Review, which said in the headline, “Ohio Just Disproved a Gun-Control Talking Point.” The study looked at eight major Buckeye State cities: Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Parma and Toledo. Here are the major talking points:​


  • Results from a trend analysis indicated a significant decrease in crime incidents involving a firearm for Akron, Columbus, and Toledo, and across all 8 cities combined from June 2021- June 2023.
  • Most cities’ crime rates decreased after the PCL (Permitless Carry Law) was enacted. Unlike the other six cities, rates in Dayton and Cincinnati increased slightly, however.
  • Toledo, Parma, and Akron each experienced an average of 19% decrease in summed rates of crimes involving a firearm post-PCL.
  • Based on data from June 2021 to June 2023, the enactment of the PCL does not appear to have any appreciable effect on law enforcement injuries or deaths by firearm in the cities of interest.
  • Data on gunshot detection technology for Toledo and Columbus also captured a decrease in validated crime incidents post-PCL by 23.2% and 20.6%, respectively.
  • Increases in crime rates in the spring-summer months appear both before and after the PCL went into effect for most cities (see Figure 1 in full report), but this observation could be due to the influence of other factors such as time of year or structural population characteristics. This slight acceleration in crimes involving firearms was also temporary.
Click to expand...

Ohio Just Disproved a Gun-Control Talking Point​

www.nationalreview.com

Ohio Just Disproved a Gun-Control Talking Point | National Review

Critics believed constitutional carry in the state would increase crime. They were wrong.
www.nationalreview.com www.nationalreview.com
 
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