Michael Shermer drops his usual skepticism to argue that we’re better at killing Americans than our enemies are:
If your gut tells you that mass public shootings are alarmingly common, your gut’s right.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a mass murder as four or more deaths during a single incident with no distinct time period between killings. By this definition, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, between 1980 and 2010 there were an average of 20 mass murders per year, or an average of one every 2.6 weeks.
I would expect a skeptic to point out that those are really small numbers in a population of over 300 million, with 15,000 homicides per year.
If we could easily stop the hundred or so deaths per year by previously law-abiding young men who are legally sane but alienated, that would be wonderful, but that leaves the other 99.3 percent of homicides by common criminals.
This is the least skeptical argument though:
In other words, the fantasy many of us have of facing down an intruder with a firearm is belied by the fact that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.
Guns aren’t randomly sprinkled amongst the population. They’re owned, illegally, by common criminals, they’re bought by suicidal men, and they’re owned by a third of ordinary Americans — who range from extremely conscientious to extremely negligent, with most in between.
Gun ownership isn’t the cause of gun-homicides, gun-suicides, or gun-accidents, and buying a gun does not mean that the gun is likely to be used in a criminal assault, etc. It depends on who is buying the gun and what the buyer’s intentions are.
For most owners, a gun has a negligible chance of going on to be a part of a homicide, suicide, or accidental death.
In the other direction, is a firearm useful for self-defense? Not if you accept Shermer’s straw man:
If you own a gun and keep it safely locked up and unloaded with the ammunition somewhere else (recommended by gun safety experts), do you really think that, in the event of a break-in, you could get to your gun, find your ammo and load it, engage the intruder, accurately aim and kill him, all before he takes your things? If you do, you’ve been watching too many movies. Go to a firing range and try shooting a handgun. It isn’t easy to do. It requires regular training.
If a gun is going to be out of your control, you keep it unloaded, etc. If it is going to be in your control — say, in your holster — you keep it loaded. If it’s going to be somewhere in between — say, on your nightstand — you can keep in an in-between state of readiness — say, unloaded, but with a loaded magazine in reach, or in a quick-opening safe.
A well-practiced shooter can load a magazine and be ready to shoot in a couple seconds.
Shooting a handgun quickly and accurately does take practice — and tens of thousands of shooters do practice regularly. But even “naive” shooters can shoot quickly and accurately across a room.
I’m appalled by the inverted skepticism of this claim:
A 2009 study corroborated these findings. Conducted by epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and published in the American Journal of Public Health, it found that, on average, people with a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.
Perhaps people who are likely to be shot in an assault choose to go get a gun?
Why put any credence in Michael Shermer? I will not damn him with direct insults or faint praise, but I have followed him peripherally for years and consider him to be less than honest.
Check out this strange blog.
The old moat-beam problem. America does not have a gun problem; it has a black problem. Most gun crime, violent crime, and hate crime is committed by young black males. Throw in young Hispanic males and you account for nearly all of it.
No one cares about this crime, because it is mostly black-on-black and brown-on-brown, and it occurs in the underclass ghettos. It is also un-PC to point out the massively dysfunctional behavior of blacks and browns.
Philip Tetlock’s next book, Superconfounders, will certainly feature Shermer prominently.
Somewhat off topic, but the allegation in the link in Dan Kurt’s comment is discussed in David Stein’s book Republican Party Animal. I don’t know how reliable Stein is, but he claims that Michael Shermer has a long-standing pattern of dishonest behavior as well.
Shermer has never been excessively honest.
As Dan Kurt asks, why would anyone who knows his track record put any credence to his claims?
If guns are so bad, how is it so many guns have never killed anyone in the US?
All this gun control hype is even funnier knowing that the homicide rate declined by nearly half since 1992, despite multiple surges in gun purchases!
There is also the denial, as Karl Denninger correctly points out, that “Nearly all of the rage-monster mass-murdering homicides over the last couple of decades have been committed by people either on, or withdrawing from, psychotropic medications that have a black-box warning against exactly that risk in the age group to which they belong!”
And to quote The Z Man once again:
“Gun control has always been a proxy-debate that is more signalling than a debate. Good whites from Yankeedom see guns as a stand in for southerners in particular, but all bad whites in general. After these shootings, the good whites get to have their day for acts of public piety. It’s why they say the same things over and over. Rituals are like that. Facts and reason have no impact on the believers, the statistics of crime have been explained for half a century. The illogic of gun control has been detailed for as long as I have been alive. Yet, the true believers belied ever more intensely.”
My rough estimate of America’s white murder rate is 1.1 per 100,000. Switzerland, where by law every household has an automatic rifle and someone trained in its use, rates at 0.6.