gun ownership

As you know, I often mention reports from the Ohh Shoot blog, which chronicles the virtually daily instances of someone doing something accidental with a gun and the associated serious wounding or killing of one or more other individuals. These events are not part of the large number of suicides using guns that happen every year, and they are not part of the large number of shootings related to felonies carried out with the aid of a gun and they are not part of the number of times a person shoots a truly armed and dangerous intruder truly intruding the home (as opposed to a grandchild hanging…
Happy Gun Appreciation Day! Let's spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I'm not sure why we've never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let's celebrate with a review of the last month's interesting stories about guns! Yay! For completeness, because I'm sure Gun Appreciation Day was generated in response to the massacre of 20 six year olds and their teachers and other school personnel in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we'll go back to the day before that event, to something sort of local to me, and review events over…
Sometimes, a person shows up at a gun range, checks out a gun ostensibly to use in target practice on the range, but instead uses the gun to commit suicide. In one case not long ago, a woman brought her teenage son to the range, and checked out two pistols. They took turn shooting for a while, then, while he was aiming his firearm at the target, she shot him in the back of the head and then shot herself. So that was murder-suicide. Now and then a person goes to the shooting range, and while shooting end up shooting themselves dead but it is not clear if it was an accident or suicide. A quick…
President Barack Obama has signed 23 Executive Orders intended to reduce gun violence in the United States. This alone will not be sufficient--Congress must pass new laws to address this problem as well, and the citizens of the united states have to make some cultural adjustments--but it is a start. Republican Tea Party Congressman Steve Stockman of, where else, Texas, plans to file articles of impeachment against the president in an effort to maintain our current level of gun violence because, I suppose, he likes it when six year old children are gunned down in cold blood. The people of…
The evidence from palaeoanthropology suggests that in the past humans were about the stature they are now, with more sexual dimporphism than now, with similar or larger brains than they have now, and used technology at the same level of sophistication as many later humans. Scientists argue over the degree to which modern day language abilities, symbolic thinking, and artistic capacity was found in these earlier humans. Where we see physical evidence suggesting morbidity or even mortality among those humans, which included "archaic Homo sapiens" and Neanderthals and their kin, we often see…
Below the fold is a description from Wikipedia of the Red Lake School Shooting. Consider the details in relation to issues of gun ownership, safety, school security, and whatever other issues it brings to mind. Warning, this is graphic and horrid. ________________________ The day of the massacre, Weise got a .22 caliber pistol from his bedroom, and fatally shot his grandfather as he was sleeping; he shot him two times in the head and ten times in the chest. According to Weise's friends, the teenager may have had the gun for as long as a year. He took Lussier's two police-issue weapons, a .…
The gun nuts did not waste much time after the brutal slaying of 20 six year olds, some teachers, a principal, and some others at a school in Newtown Connecticut to start suggesting that everything would have been fine if only the teachers were armed. And now, after more days have gone by, it seems that the gun nuts are making this suggestion even more frequently. The evidence suggests that when there are more guns around, especially in the hands of untrained individuals, there is more rather than less danger. Don't let anyone tell you that an armed population is a safe population. That is…
A handful of us in the science-skepticism-secularism blogosphere have been saying roughly the same things for a few years now about gun ownership, regulation, and safety. (Here's 67 posts of mine on this topic. Oh, and here's another 60 on a different blog.) While we were busy with this issue as well as other pet projects, the rest of the bloggers and writers were busy with their own important and interesting projects. But when the "Dark Knight" shooting in Colorado happened, I noticed a lot of other bloggers who had not touched on the gun issue before at all to my knowledge chimed in and…
Let me start with this. People talking about Sandy Hook need to stop saying that "20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 were killed." That is technically true but misses an enormously important point and indicates that you really haven't thought this through. All of the children who were killed were born between September 2005 and December 2006. They were all in the first grade, all in the same school year, and most of them in the same exact class. Sandy hook had about 100 students in that year. Now, the class is 20% smaller. This means that every year for the next few years there will be…
I have been writing about this topic for years. Lately, I have been ignoring it. Last few massacres, I didn't say or do anything. I think Gabby Gifford's shooting was a last straw for me; I became too disgusted with our situation and I became too disheartened with the number of people who require that we Americans remain an utterly unique society in that we shoot each other at record rates. Somehow, it seems, that makes us good. Others claim that because there are problems in the world with higher body counts, this problem of guns in the US should not be addressed at all. That is utterly…
I am uncomfortable discussing ableism and related topics linked to mental illness for several reasons. One is that I don’t know enough about it to ask people to pay a lot of attention to what I have to say. Despite the whingings of my many detractors, I actually do tend to know a fair amount about the stuff I do talk about, such as race and racism, issues of gender related to both biology and politics, evolutionary biology, human foragers, and climate change. Indeed, I wrote my theses on these things. Well, some of them. But when it comes to mental illness outside of issues related to…
There was a time when I blogged regularly about homeschooling, though I have not done so in a long time. A while back I started to blog about gun ownership. I engaged in each of these topics for similar reasons. I have a political and professional interest in homeschooling (as a science educator) and a complex culinario-political interested in guns (as a political progressive who likes to eat wild animal but does not like people shooting each other). But the reason I blogged about these issues was more narrowly defined. I wanted to see if it was possible to achieve détente among people…
From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to kill themselves but messed up, or were wounded or shot by a cop. Here's the data culled form the CDC databases on injuries and deaths in the US, in crude rate per 100,000: The numbers for the year 2000 are from a somewhat different set of data and I would be cautious about…
Because you wanted to know: First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of medial intervention, or perhaps it is something else.
Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data. NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that tracks along with the CDC surveys; Most importantly would be information of similar quality and sources indicating attempted suicide and successful suicide with means other than guns. From the numbers we do have, we can say that there is a bias towards minors in the suicide category, and non-gun…
Yet the 11-year old girl lies in a coma, the bullet removed from her brain on Friday, with a poor prognosis. Maddy Montanye was shot in the head on Thursday by her father, Jesse. Jesse's .22 caliber pistol had jammed, and he was trying to get it unjammed while sitting in the living room across from his daughter. That's when the weapon discharged and the bullet penetrated Maddy's head. Several other family members where in the home at the time, but were not injured. For reasons that are not yet clear, it took 45 minutes to airlift Maddy to the Hennepin County Medical Center. The hospital…
Two local stories you might be interested in from my neighborhood. First, a girl high school wrestler advanced yesterday but was beaten today in the state tournament in Iowa. Why is this interesting? Well, first, this is not a girl wrestling on a girl's team. It is a girl wrestling on the regular team which happens to be traditionally boys. Second, she advanced yesterday when one of the favorite to win, a boy, refused to wrestle a girl, apparently because he things the sport should be reserved for boys. (I dunno ... in his case, maybe wrestling really is a gay sport? Who knows?)…
If you do something wrong, you should be fired or killed. Whether you should be fired or killed has nothing to do with what you did, but rather, the context in which you did it. If you do something wrong in the presence of a legal gun owner with a Conceal Carry permit and a loaded weapon, you simply need to die. If, on the other hand, you have a job and do something wrong, the only possible outcome is your being fired, no matter what it was you did. If the thing you do wrong happens in a context in which you have a job AND are in the presence of a gun-holding conceal-carry permitted person…
... they weren't scared, but the guy trying to rob them sure was. ... Wally was sitting at his computer when the man entered his home. "He just stood there in that doorway, standing there with a shovel," said Wally. "I thought, 'what the hell is going on here?' I thought it was a joke!" After hearing all the commotion, his wife, Betty, went to the front of the house and found him on the floor. Wally had been punched in the nose and it was bleeding. "I sat on the edge of the bed. He says, 'give me your hands! I'm going to tie you up!' And I said, 'No, I don't think so," Betty said. What? Who…
And most of them are boys with their toys Yesterday a few miles northeast of here, two dudes had a head-on collision in their snow machines. The snow machines burst into flames, one of the drivers died and the other is apparently in critical condition. Elsewhere in the state a man died of CO poisoning in his fish house, and as is often the case in these situations, a rescuer had some trouble as well and needed to be treated. If you heat your ice house with something that burns, remember that it will put out deadly carbon monoxide (and use up your oxygen as well, but those are two distinct…