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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
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This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
This is a helpful demonstration of why I've pretty much completely soured on the idea of people carrying weapons for self-defense. Adding weapons to the mix is almost inherently escalatory, and the cases of genuine self-defense seem to be massively outnumbered by instances of simian chest-beating that got out of hand or someone pulling a gun to win an argument. I'm not sure I believe the survivor's claim, but who acted first in this instance is almost irrelevant. Both of these people decided they needed to bring lethal force as backup to the world's stupidest argument.
edit: I don't really care if you own an M1 Abrams for home defense or an M61 for plinking, but actively carrying seems to be overwhelmingly downside for just about everyone.
You're ignoring the cases where pulling the gun does win an argument. The argument being something classic like "I think you should give me your wallet" "Well, I disagree."
In 90+% of Defensive Gun Uses, in every survey I've ever seen, the gun isn't fired. Presenting the gun defuses the situation. In many home invader incidents, the criminals flee when they hear the distinctive sound of a firearm. Private legal guns save more lives than they take.
I'm aware. The problem is that these surveys overwhelmingly rely on self-reports, which are notoriously dodgy, and the fact that some guy thinks he justly defended himself by brandishing a firearm doesn't mean that he did. In many cases it 'defuses the situation' in the sense that when somebody pulls a gun you decide that the disagreement you were having with your loud neighbor isn't worth continuing. In other cases, it's just some fearful individual jumping (or shooting) at shadows.
That seems... incredibly unlikely. Per the CDC, in 2019 there were: approx. 14k firearm homicides, approx. 24k suicides, and 486 accidental deaths, and approx. 20k non-fatal injuries (not counting people shot by LE, which is outside the scope of this argument; also not considering assaults or other gun crime that doesn't result in injury).
In 2019, the FBI reports 386 justifiable homicides by civilians. Now, that doesn't include people acquitted on self-defense grounds, but acquittal rates aren't that high and acquittals are dominated by people who got off because their lawyer successfully argued they didn't do it rather than a successful self-defense claim. It's not a great start, with accidental deaths outnumbering verified self-defense homicides. But as you note, most claimed DGUs don't involve anyone getting shot.
The problem is that this still entails the claim that brandishing a firearm or similar DGU averted almost 40k murders in 2019 (or merely ~14k if you completely discount suicides). That's an extraordinary claim. Even taking the homicides-only number, it suggests that the US homicide rate would be almost 75% higher but for defensive civilian firearms usage (34k vs 20k in 2019). It's also impossible to substantiate, since the only evidence we have are self-reported survey responses and no real counterfactual. If there are supposed to be thousands of attempted murders being averted, you'd think they'd leave more of a footprint.
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He's already taken those 90% into account, calling them "unreported assaults" committed by the defensive gun user.
Oh well in that case...
This is a very hostile paraphrase. @Skibboleth suggested that people who report defensive gun use on a survey are going to believe that they had a good reason to do so. That doesn't necessarily mean that this belief is correct in all cases.
This is what he said:
Right. @Skibboleth says that he concluded that "many (if not most) reports" look to him like cases of
"Many if not most" of 90% is not 90%, and he didn't just call them "unreported assaults" and drop the mike, he backed up that belief.
Personally, I think he has a reasonable point: I doubt that every one of those non-lethal interactions was actually a case of successfully defusing a mugging / home robbery / etc. and I suspect that quite a considerable fraction of them was two people in an argument, one guy escalates by pulling a gun, and then he justifies it to himself later because 'who knows what that guy would have done to me if I hadn't frightened him off'.
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Every time I've looked into this, the most noteworthy thing has been the vast variance in definitions used by the entities who are doing the counting. It's usually blatantly biased, to the point where I can probably tell you roughly what the definitions are going to be just by looking at the funding sources of the group in question.
The numbers that best correspond to my intuitive understanding of "self defense" come from Lott, and they suggest that the exact opposite of what you propose is true.
Out of curiosity, what numbers are you using as a basis for your statement, and what definitions are being used to calculate those numbers?
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Are you sure this isn't just toxoplasma, where johnny the cop stabber being shot during an attempted armed robbery arouses no controversy, and only borderline cases become noted?
Am I sure? No. But I didn't start thinking this because of news reporting on individual homicides. I formed this opinion when looking into DGU statistics* and concluded that many (if not most) self-reported DGUs were really unreported assaults (the wielder having essentially threatened somebody by pulling a gun). And further observing that a large proportion of homicides were the result of arguments between two men who were either armed or had guns near to hand.
And the thing is that I don't think the problem is necessarily a matter of bad faith/lying. In most cases these people are reporting their own actions positively. Likewise, if you get two twitchy, dominance oriented idiots, it's very easy to get a feedback loop where they push each other towards a violent outcome. Whether or not this gets classified as murder or self-defense can come down to nuances of the situation and the caprices of the local justice system.
To be clear, my position is not that most self-defense homicides are actually murder (though I would posit that many are). It is that
a) many self-defense homicides would be easily avoided if neither party were armed (and would not result in a regular homicide instead)
b) the act of carrying a weapon publicly in the name of self-defense is usually a net negative for public order/safety. The genuine self-defense case is outweighed by the 'guys carrying guns for self-defense instead commit crimes or have accidents' problem.
To the second point in particular, the presence of weapons (especially firearms, although it applies to any weapon to some degree) changes the dynamic of any adversarial interaction. Weapons don't cause violence, per se, but they are lubricants to violence (and also make violence deadlier). If some guy is being loud and pushy, that's annoying. If some guy is being loud and pushy and he has a gun, that's scary. And if I have a gun in either of these situations, things can get even messier.
Tangentially, I think it also complicates the task of law enforcement, since LE has to square the circle of high potential of encountering someone armed with the fact that carrying a weapon is not illegal.
*Specifically, John Lott's numbers, which are commonly cited in defense of carrying weapons. The problem is that they rely on self-report and are literally unbelievable.
@birdcromble
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Usually the mechanism behind toxoplasma is that only borderline cases go viral. This isn't a tweet, though, it's a news article in one of the world's top newspapers, whose quoted thesis is that literal first sentence, "It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it."
Even given the collapse in journalism, wouldn't you expect someone pushing that thesis to collect the most persuasive cases, not the most ambiguous? If Florida Methed-Up Chainsaw Man was something like the Rittenhouse shootings that had already gone viral nationally, that might make it an unavoidable choice of example to discuss, but right now the top Google hits for
"Druzolowski" "de leon springs"are two Orlando TV stations, then after the WSJ article and a Daytona Beach TV station we get down to the dregs of a "Florida Man Friday" podcast episode.I think the balance of the evidence is that genuine cases of murder or mutual combat being written off as self defense basically don't happen. Journalists trying to pick examples of self defense that should be illegal and picking floridamen shouting threats while trespassing is an indicator that claimed self defense killings are mostly good shoots.
There's probably some mutual combat that gets written off, but "two low-lifes get into a fight with blunt weapons only and one of them dies and the charges get dropped" probably barely even makes the paper. With a firearm, probably essentially never.
Doesn't this describe a fair amount of "gang violence"? We generally (for worse, IMO) look the other way about that, through some combination of what you described and ignoring it for political reasons, be it "we don't care about [redacted]" or "it'd have a disparate impact to prosecute those crimes".
I think most non-lethal gang violence just doesn't come to the attention of the police at all, or if it does, not with any useful information. And even the lethal stuff the killing most often goes unsolved.
That's exactly why homicides are used as a metric and proxy. They get reported via some route in almost every case.
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I guess that speaks to either the weakness of the case or the incompetence of the journalist that these are the best cases he could come up with.
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No. I would expect someone pushing the thesis to collect the most lurid and sensational cases whose details can be plausibly characterized or molded to support their view. There's no screen for ambiguity when the writer is strategically minimizing or ignoring countervailing details.
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Concealed carry comes with the burden to lose every argument and to walk away.
That's Fudd lore. Perhaps it's generally a wise sentiment to hold but it's in the same vein as Dave Ramsey: "never use credit cards" of trying to keep low impulse control people from doing low impulse control things.
The problem is that low impulse control people say "Ha, I'm not like those other idiots" and then mag dump at IHOP.
The truth is, you don't know who you are, deep down inside, until your life is on the line. A rational well meaning person that operates 99.9% of the time in a rational and logical manner can turn into a bloodthirsty animal in the outlier. Most Americans do not find themselves in such a situation in a daily basis.
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And not only that, but high impulse control people hear the meme and repeat it uncritically; this then harms other high impulse control people.
High impulse control people don't need to be told "they have the burden to lose every stupid argument", and continuing to tell them that will over-calibrate them into losing fights they really shouldn't be walking away from.
You don't need to tell me not to shoot people with machine guns because their dog pissed on my lawn, and someone treating me as if they did need to tell me that "because Some People would" is best seen as projection (as in, the speaker is low-impulse and has to tell himself not to do that, so he assumes he has to treat me as if I would).
Non-gun-owners have a higher rate of violence than gun owners do for this reason, or at least they do in at least one country that has a licensing scheme and keeps stats in English. The effect is not just limited to guns but looking at them is revealing.
When I'm training people on the legalities of self defense, I still remind them that THEY have to determine where their personal 'line in the sand' is to determine when it is go time.
You draw it further from you, you'll probably respond more quickly and are more likely to survive, but risk legal consequences.
You draw it closer, you'll probably be legally safe but not before the attacker gets a couple blows in and thus you might end up dead if your reactions aren't quick.
No 'right' answer, but make sure you decide where your line is well in advance so you aren't thinking that over when the attack is already coming.
De-escalation IS a skill that carriers should try to develop... and of course noticing when someone you're talking to might be willing to throw hands over a 'friendly' argument.
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Not when Stand Your Ground applies.
Of course not in the legal sense. In terms of moral culpability, it’s better to plan to lose every argument than to plan to enter gunfights.
I decline to subscribe to your morality.
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As somebody from a country where civilian firearm ownership is barely a thing I broadly agree. The vanishingly small likelihood I or somebody I know having a firearm available for self defense in a time of need seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with firearms being way more likely to be present in random aggressive interactions.
You can keep your beliefs about the relative prevalence of these things, and I have no interest in challenging your perspective there. But there's something interesting to notice, which I hope you'll take an interest in exploring.
Obviously one could say the opposite of your statement, with "The vanishingly small likelihood that I or somebody I know gets themselves justifiably shot seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with not having a firearm available for self defense in time of need."
The interesting part is about what this choice of what to minimize and what to focus on says about our implicit worldviews.
What experiences have you had, or not had, which leads you to the opposite? Is it easy to imagine losing your cool "randomly", and ending up shot? Easy to imagine people you care about doing the same? Hard to imagine anyone being genuinely above that? Have you had any experiences where you or someone you care about were threatened by a predator of either the two or four legged variety? If so, is it hard to imagine the situation being safe if the "good guys" were armed?
In spirit of going first, I have a hard time imagining myself or anyone I care about getting shot by someone who can then pull off a self defense claim. I have had experiences, and known people to have experiences, where there's serious threat of harm in the ways that firearms can stop. Given how these events played out it's easy to imagine having firearms making things worse too, but there's still a clear possibility that not having that option could prove disastrous. Naturally, this leads to me being sympathetic to the idea that we should allow firearms for self defense, and if someone gets themselves shot by being "randomly aggressive" in ways that puts an innocent person in reasonable fear of serious injury or death... so be it?
What about you?
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Every stat I've read on the matter says the opposite, is the thing.
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