Things we do for a false sense of security

[Duke]

The point of this thread is to find the things that we do to make our self feel better mentally, but in no way would help the real situation physically.

Buy cars with such a high shoulder line that the windows become tiny and you can barely see out of them.

 

[Omnis]

Buy cars with such a high shoulder line that the windows become tiny and you can barely see out of them.

HAHAHA! I was JUST talking about that with my dad over e-mail.

 

[Danoff]

In 2004, 11624 people were murdered by guns in the USA. Population is about 301 million people, giving you a 1 in 26000 chance of getting killed by a gun.

In England, 58 people were murdered by guns in 2006/7. Total population is 61 million, giving a 1 in 1051727 chance of being killed by a gun. That's one in a million, compared to 1 in twenty six thousand. Hardly a good argument for allowing people to arm themselves.

But knife crime is way up as a result. I'd rather be shot to death than stabbed to death.

 

[Alfaholic]

But knife crime is way up as a result. I'd rather be shot to death than stabbed to death.

Whatever makes you happy (or slightly less unhappy), but the fact is that Michael88's example was just plain wrong for his argument. It is an interesting point though. I'll Google more figures tomorrow to see how knife crime figures compare (though knives are strictly controlled here too).

As for border control and privacy, if we were allowed to own handguns here, those factors would make little difference to the gun crime figures - at least if it ended up anything like South Africa, where the majority of illegal firearms used in crime were not transported across borders, but rather stolen from local residents who had originally purchased them legitimately. That might be different in the USA where crime is far lower than in SA. By the time I left SA, I knew precisely 8 people, in total (and of course in SA), who hadn't been victims of a car hijack or robbed at gunpoint in their homes. I knew a guy who had been through five armed bank robberies (no, he wasn't the robber ) Even then, I felt more comfortable when my gun was locked away in my safe than I did when it was on my person. If the criminal has any level of competence, you're chances of using your own gun to your advantage are small. The criminal also is often as nervous as you if not more so, and the sight of you wearing a gun or even reaching for one is normally enough to convince them that the best thing they can do right now, for their own safety, is shoot you while they have a chance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the right to own a gun. I owned one myself when I was allowed to and enjoyed time on the range. I just don't think they make the owner safer, and I do think that Michael88's argument against banning them is flawed

 

[Danoff]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the right to own a gun. I owned one myself when I was allowed to and enjoyed time on the range. I just don't think they make the owner safer, and I do think that Michael88's argument against banning them is flawed

You should look up the statistics for crimes prevented by guns. They're staggering.

 

[Azuremen]

Whatever makes you happy (or slightly less unhappy), but the fact is that Michael88's example was just plain wrong for his argument. It is an interesting point though. I'll Google more figures tomorrow to see how knife crime figures compare (though knives are strictly controlled here too).

As for border control and privacy, if we were allowed to own handguns here, those factors would make little difference to the gun crime figures - at least if it ended up anything like South Africa, where the majority of illegal firearms used in crime were not transported across borders, but rather stolen from local residents who had originally purchased them legitimately. That might be different in the USA where crime is far lower than in SA. By the time I left SA, I knew precisely 8 people, in total (and of course in SA), who hadn't been victims of a car hijack or robbed at gunpoint in their homes. I knew a guy who had been through five armed bank robberies (no, he wasn't the robber ) Even then, I felt more comfortable when my gun was locked away in my safe than I did when it was on my person. If the criminal has any level of competence, you're chances of using your own gun to your advantage are small. The criminal also is often as nervous as you if not more so, and the sight of you wearing a gun or even reaching for one is normally enough to convince them that the best thing they can do right now, for their own safety, is shoot you while they have a chance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the right to own a gun. I owned one myself when I was allowed to and enjoyed time on the range. I just don't think they make the owner safer, and I do think that Michael88's argument against banning them is flawed

Question: Did you grow up with guns around, or did you acquire one later in life? Because I have always felt comfortable with a firearm on me, that not. How much did you practice with your firearm, etc?

 

[Philly]

Giving up your toothpaste at the airport.

That looks like a pretty good description of the TSA.

My favorite for feeling secure is just to not feel insecure in the first place....

 

[Zrow]

Buy cars with such a high shoulder line that the windows become tiny and you can barely see out of them.

 

[Alfaholic]

Question: Did you grow up with guns around, or did you acquire one later in life? Because I have always felt comfortable with a firearm on me, that not. How much did you practice with your firearm, etc?

My dad had a gun as long as I can remember. I bought myself an air rifle when I was 14 or 15, and got a handgun of my own in my twenties. I took it to the range once or twice a month and usually went through a couple of hundred rounds.

I felt more comfortable without the gun because I felt my chances of surviving a hijacking were more without it than with it. Any pro hijacker will have the advantage of surprise. They're watching you as they approach the car. If you notice them coming, they notice too, and move on. It's the ones you don't see coming that hijack you. At home, it was a different story. A burglar would have to break through a security door, then a house door, or through the burglar bars covering the windows, and not wake up the two dogs inside the house while doing so, to take me by surprise. That gave me plenty of time to prepare to defend myself, and in that environment I certainly did feel more comfortable with my gun close by.

 

[V1P3R]

Car alarm

 

[Zrow]

Car alarm

Bingo!

 

[Solid Lifters]

In 2004, 11624 people were murdered by guns in the USA.

I wouldn't trust where you get your info. According to the DOJ and FBI, it was 9,385 murdered by guns in 2004.

Regardless of what statistics other countries have, in the U.S. people have a better chance of living in those communities with very little or no gun control laws. Proof? After the Brady Bill was signed into law, gun crime dramatically grew in all areas of the country. Since falling out of law, gun crime has been going down. This is not a unique situation. It happens with nearly every gun law.

 

[Alfaholic]

I wouldn't trust where you get your info. According to the DOJ and FBI, it was 9,385 murdered by guns in 2004.

Regardless of what statistics other countries have, in the U.S. people have a better chance of living in those communities with very little or no gun control laws. Proof? After the Brady Bill was signed into law, gun crime dramatically grew in all areas of the country. Since falling out of law, gun crime has been going down. This is not a unique situation. It happens with nearly every gun law.

I can believe that. The situation in the USA is very different to the UK. Here you don't have to disarm hundreds of millions of people to enforce a gun ban. They're just used to it as is. Also, if the gun control laws in the USA vary from state to state, doesn't that make them difficult to enforce? It's not like there are border posts on the state lines to enforce this, so I can imagine stricter laws would more likely disarm potential victims than potential criminals, and thus act in favour of the criminal.

I got my original figures here:
http://www.gun-control-network.org/PR08.htm
The DOJ / FBI figures are probably more reliable, since my source is pro gun control and therefore probably mixed and matched the figures to best illustrate their point.

Here are the knife figures I've managed to dig up. This is for homicides only. The "attacks by knife" figures are based on surveys and not official figures so I stuck with homicides only, as I did with guns.

UK, 2004: 236 homicides by sharp instrument (that would include anything from a broken bottle, letter opener, pencil, etc. The figures don't specify knife, exactly, though the majority are assumed to be knives, and it's not really relevant anyway. Someone got stabbed to death with whatever cutting instrument was available at the time.)

USA, 2004: 2133 homicides by knife.

So, in the UK there is one knife homicide to every 254000 residents, approximately. In the USA it's 1 to every 141000.

Far closer than the gun figures then, but there's enough clear air between those two figures to suggest that choosing to live in the USA rather than the UK to avoid death by knife would pass as one of those "things to do for a false sense of security" that this thread is based on.

Incidentally, the same site where I got the US figures:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/weaponstab.htm
says gun homicides in 2004 were 10661, including firearms not classed as handguns, or 8304 by handgun only. I'm only glad my budget figures don't throw up this many different answers to the same question....

I found it even more difficult to find reliable figures for UK gun homicides to check my original quotation, but most sites agree that this rate has fluctuated between 46 and 97 in the last ten years, as stated on this Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom

You should look up the statistics for crimes prevented by guns. They're staggering.

Really? What are they?

 

[Danoff]

Interesting article: http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html

Cultural differences and more-permissive legal standards notwithstanding, the English rate of violent crime has been soaring since 1991. Over the same period, America's has been falling dramatically. In 1999 The Boston Globe reported that the American murder rate, which had fluctuated by about 20 percent between 1974 and 1991, was "in startling free-fall." We have had nine consecutive years of sharply declining violent crime. As a result the English and American murder rates are converging. In 1981 the American rate was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and the latest study puts it at 3.5 times.

Preliminary figures for the U.S. this year show an increase, although of less than 1 percent, in the overall number of violent crimes, with homicide increases in certain cities, which criminologists attribute to gang violence, the poor economy, and the release from prison of many offenders. Yet Americans still enjoy a substantially lower rate of violent crime than England, without the "restraint on personal liberty" English governments have seen as necessary. Rather than permit individuals more scope to defend themselves, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government plans to combat crime by extending those "restraints on personal liberty": removing the prohibition against double jeopardy so people can be tried twice for the same crime, making hearsay evidence admissible in court, and letting jurors know of a suspect's previous crimes.

Except for murder and rape, it admitted, "Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."

The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.

Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.

This sea change in English crime followed a sea change in government policies. Gun regulations have been part of a more general disarmament based on the proposition that people don't need to protect themselves because society will protect them. It also will protect their neighbors: Police advise those who witness a crime to "walk on by" and let the professionals handle it.

Check wikipedia for guns preventing crime:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_States

These are US statistics.

Another researcher, Dr. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, estimated that approximately 2.5 million people used their gun in self-defense or to prevent crime each year, often by merely displaying a weapon. The incidents that Kleck studied generally did not involve the firing of the gun and he estimates that as many as 1.9 million of those instances involved a handgun.

Those are staggering numbers. Those numbers are nearly twice as large as the number of violent crimes in a given year. If one can assume that each of these thwarted attempts would have been a violent crime (I know, that is a dangerous assumption) you'd conclude that 2 out of 3 violent crimes were prevented by gun ownership.


From that I'd conclude that gun ownership is NOT one of those things we do to give ourselves a false sense of security.

 

[Orion]

How about people who slam on the brakes for false security? Sometimes it's better to accelerate and get out of the way.....

He should've parked at the side... This is what happens when people slam on the brakes sometimes.