Regarding the "your", I bet vehicle collision related deaths are more randomly distributed than homicides and unintentional shootings of children (and probably firearm suicides too, for that matter).
If you take out 18 and 19 years old, that is no longer true.
We have way too many firearm deaths in this country but the way these studies choose their age ranges always feel like folks are in search of the conclusion they desire.
Firearm deaths and vehicle deaths, particularly vehicles killing pedestrians, both are more likely to befall poor people, which is correlated with certain ethnic groups in the US. Though a well-designed city is nearly the safest you can be in terms of places to walk.
Not really a discussion I particularly want to get into, but many people think “an increase in suicides” should be counted as a negative consequence of firearms.
Does shooting up some place count on the suicide figures, almost always it's going to be a decision to die (you might not die, but surely death of an 'active shooter' is the expected outcome).
I think we can be more nuanced and discuss casual relationships for suicide and those for homicide and recognize that there are many differences. If we aggregate the two we will likely have bad policy and be inefficient at fixing either.
Depends if those lives were genuinely a net negative due to suffering.
How many people suffer longer than they should due to lack of access to suicide? I suspect the answer is "fewer than commit suicide due to temporary and fixable chemical imbalances and an easily available gun" but the question should be asked and evidence gathered.
This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning. So, no, it is not intentionally misleading, but it does need more data to show it is meaningful.
> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning.
It’s not hard to find examples; Japan has a much higher rate of suicide. No guns.
Almost universally, men use guns or hanging, depending on what’s locally available.
> So, no, it is not intentionally misleading
They’re juking the stats to be able to make proclamations like “guns are the leading cause of death for children”.
When most people hear that, panic bells start ringing. They assume this means school shootings are killing an incredible number of children each year. This is a crisis!
People don’t realize that to manufacture that number, activists had to extend “children” to 19 years old, and include “suicide”.
It’s intentionally misleading.
If only they’d dedicate the same energy to exploring why our educational and cultural institutions are failing teenagers so spectacularly that they’re suiciding at unprecedented rates.
I'll grant it can be misleading. I don't think it necessarily is. I say this as someone that has had gun suicides in the family. I also have Saturday Night Special running through my head, now...
I don't understand the fixation that counting kids as up to 19 and including suicide is somehow a concern. Seems generally alarming that people under 21 is that high for this statistic, period.
Maybe it was _much_ higher a very long time ago, but it has been on a downwards path for a long time. And the US's on an upwards path... for so long that it has actually past Japan. So not only is Japan's suicide rate not _much_ higher, but it has been, for a few years, slightly lower.
> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning
I think if you look at gun deaths and suicide you're going to have significant autocorrelation. 60% of gun deaths are suicide, so the data is baked in. But I have another correlation that may be more fruitful and interesting. It isn't 1 to 1, but there is significant overlap with (per capita normalized) overdoses[0] and gun death rates[1]. We'd have to dig deeper, but I think it wouldn't be surprising to find that rates of gun suicide and overdoses has many similar root causal factors. The north east seems to be the biggest mismatch
I'm not sure what you are claiming. Seems safe to assume that suicides do correlate in numbers. Question is if they substitute in magnitude.
That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns. Just as you can prevent suicides by limiting access to drugs.
> That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns.
The problem here is you're assuming that there's a singular dominant causal factor. You don't need a one-to-one relationship for either a weak or strong causal relationship.
On the other hand, what I'm claiming is that there are causal relationships between gun suicides and drug overdoses. That solving one will help solve another if we look at the causes from a standpoint beyond the first order viewpoint. We need to ask why people are depressed and what in society is causing that. I'm sure you'll recognize that this issue is likely rather complex. I think you'll agree that getting to the root of this issue will save more lives overall (some people will for sure just choose an alternative method of suicide -- such as drugs -- though you are also likely to save a few that are acting in the moment and getting a gun -- which is why waiting periods can be helpful. But either way, they are still depressed, which is a problem we need to solve).
From the studies I'm seeing, limit access to the means of suicide, and you reduce suicides. Do you eliminate them? No, but a reduction is still a reduction.
Note most of the studies I saw were not about guns, but pesticides. I see no reason to think they would not apply similarly. Would be nice to see studies in them.
Now, should we /also/ try and tackle more issues down the chain? Yes. Not sure why this has to be a "pick one" scenario.
> There’s no evidence of correlation or a causal link between guns and suicides.
There's definitely evidence of correlation. But the thing is that there are clearly other factors. Access to guns is definitely a causal variable (you can't shoot someone unless you have a gun) but the question is if it is weak or strong. I think it is pretty clear that this is a weak causal variable. It's clearly naive to think that simply having a gun makes one more likely to murder someone or kill yourself. Similarly women do not are not subject to gun deaths (suicide nor homicide: killer or victim) at nearly the same rate as men when controlling for household ownership.
This is why I've encouraged people to look at a more complex picture. Clearly suicide, homicide, and mass shootings have different principle causal variables. There's definitely overlap as well. People are comparing to European countries and Australia simply based on number of guns. But this ignores a lot of other factors like access to health care, household debt, trust in government, social mobility, and many other things. The US consumes far more opioids per capita than European countries. We also have higher suicide rates. I'm willing to bet that there's some coupling relationships here.
But I agree it is misleading to lump homicide and suicide together. There's plenty of statistical paradoxes that depend on aggregating data that shouldn't be aggregated. If we over-aggregate data we'll have no hope of solving any of these issues. I'd make the argument that it is of the upmost importance that we be nuanced in these conversations and communicate in good faith. We must have self doubt in our own models. It is a complex problem, we've been handcuffed in obtaining data (forcing aggregation), and people with agendas are trying to oversimplify the problem and have us make decisions based purely on emotions. We live in the information age yet it is sad we have so little here and think so broadly about this problem. It is getting people killed.
One thing to note is that there's a pretty decent overlap between gun deaths/capita and drug overdoses/capita
Regardless, from the POV of day to day risky things, none of this crap matters.
All of these "average risks" people are slinging back and fourth like idiots are dominated by outliers who are engaged in specific behaviors that have a strong causal link to that means of death. Said outliers drag up the average making it completely unrepresentative of the typical person's risk.
Don't drive drunk, don't pedestrian while drunk, don't get involved in drug industry business disputes and don't let mental illness go untreated and you will almost certainly not get killed by a car or bullet.
Every single child (and people under 18 are just that: children) dying because their parents couldn't be arsed to follow even the most basic gun safety laws is one too much. Toddlers shooting themselves with the gun that their reckless father left under the pillow? Even in countries with very liberal attitudes to guns such as Switzerland don't have that problem.
Not to mention, the cutoff at age 18 is obvious because most people have finished education at that age - and the most shootings happen at high school.
So in a country with around 75 million under-18s, that works out to an approximate risk of 1/500,000 per kid per year. And per the article:
> The most likely age group to be both shooters and victims are teenagers ages 14 to 17
Maybe we should make firearms safety and hunters education classes once again part of the school curriculum to prevent these accidents? Just like with driving classes, training and experience in a controlled environment is a great way to reduce the frequency of accidents. Although that assumes the incidents in question are accidents, rather than "accidents".
That last link is so upsetting. Not just because of the racial composition, but also because of the assailant/victim ratio being 25/220, which means an average of 11 victims per assailant.
The homicide clearance rate in Chicago is at or under 50% and approximately 50% of those identified as assailants had no charges filed against them. This implies the assailant figures may be 4x under represented. Who knows?
Double false. First's it's not true. #1 and #2 are Texas and Californa
Second, unless you at least divide by population the comparisons are meaningless. A state with 1 person in it is going to have less death in general than a state with a million people
Dividing by population the top 10 are
Mississippi
Louisiana
Wyoming
Missouri
Alabama
Alaska
New Mexico
Arkansas
South Carolina
Tennessee
Teasing out the correlation and causation here is difficult. People generally don't like getting shot, so it's plausible that stricter gun control is at least partially responsible for the higher wages, since places with better gun control laws are more attractive areas to set up businesses in.
Wouldn't the correlation run in the opposite direction if that were the case, since the employees would basically demand the higher wages as a sort of hazard pay?
> it correlates stronger with income than anything else
If it were only income, we wouldn't see reductions in deaths from mild gun-control law (like banning high-capacity, automatic "assault-style" weapons) within the same state.
We also wouldn't have seen the large increase in gun deaths after such laws were invalidated, and we have seen that[1].
So income is certainly some component of it, but access to untracked, powerful firearms is a big component of it.
Just a quick point of correction, not to derail the conversation, but "automatic" weapons have been heavily restricted since 1934. Buying one requires a tax stamp, background check (even if private sale), notifying the ATF of where the weapon is at all times, and giving the ATF the right to search the premises of the firearms at any time without need for a warrant or reasonable suspicion.
As far as I can find data for, legally-licensed automatic weapons have only been used in 2 homicides since 1934 (both by police officers, weirdly) and a single suicide.
To address your data directly, it has some issues.
The first is that there was no "large increase in gun deaths". The lowest gun deaths during the 1994-2004 period was 5.9/100k, and the highest it's been since 2004 is 6.2/100k. About a 5% increase. 2001 was actually the highest since 1994, at 7.1/100k. That's per CDC data. The incidence of mass shootings is what they're talking about, not gun violence overall.
The second is that we're working with small numbers here. Homicides with a rifle are exceedingly uncommon; per FBI data, it's about 300/year. Your link is specifically discussing mass shootings, which are rarer yet. For the 3 periods, they list 19 events, 12 events, and 34 events, each spread across a decade. Columbine happened in the middle of that period.
The third is that the correlation isn't as tight as you might presume. Have a gander at https://www.statista.com/statistics/811487/number-of-mass-sh... Unless someone pointed it out, it would be hard to guess where the assault weapons ban even is in time. The numbers aren't really notably different until 2001. Mass shootings aren't even noticeably high until 2007 when we hit the recession, which is a massive confounding factor.
The fourth is that if assault weapons are to blame, you would expect numbers to roughly match before and after. They don't. 2005-2006 follow roughly the same trend as before. It's not until 2007 when they go up (again, recession), and 2012 before it gets really crazy. 2012 is coincidentally when US median wealth hit it's lowest after the recession, and hasn't really recovered since then. California has more mass shootings per year now than they did before 2016 when they passed their high capacity magazine ban. I don't think it's causal, just of note.
There are just so many other factors that play into this. Increased media attention on mass shootings, niche online communities forming, increased political polarization, increased wealth inequality, zero tolerance school policies, etc.
I also find it a bad thing to focus on. Every death is a tragedy, but rifles are low on the chart of causes. Homicides by rifles are roughly equal to deaths by ladder. About 2 times as many people are beat to death with hands/feet. About 5 times as many people are stabbed to death. About 10 times as many people die from foodborne illness. About 20 times as many people die of anemia.
It just doesn't make sense. Even if you want to focus on guns, why rifles? Handguns are used to kill roughly 50 times as many people.
> This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:
Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.
Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)
1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
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