guns
tlambert | April 25, 2007After Martin Bryant murdered 35 people at Port Arthur, Prime Minister John Howard got new laws enacted that banned semi-automatic long guns. At the time, I felt that was bad policy. Since almost all most gun killings involve just one death it didn't matter whether whether the gun was a semi-auto or not, writing:
I think that the new laws are mostly a stupid waste of money.
In the years that followed, homicide, firearm homicide, suicide and firearm suicide all fell, but a paper published last year by Baker and McPhedran argued that the decline was not statistically significant. However,…
tlambert | April 18, 2007Glenn Reynolds argues that if only more people had guns, there would be fewer mass shootings. Unfortunately he gets his facts wrong.
If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.
In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene.…
revere | April 13, 2007In another post we pointed out that the number one cause of death in people aged 1 to 44 is unintentional injury. But some injuries are intentional, about half directed to other people and half self directed. Among people aged 15 to 44 intentional injury represents the second leading cause of death, about half homicides and half suicides (CDC). Guns figure prominently in both.
A recent study by Harvard School of Public Health researchers published in the Journal of Trauma shows that in states with higher rates of guns in households there is a significantly higher rate of suicide:
In the 15…
revere | February 13, 2007The sad saga of Anna Nicolle Smith has pushed the equally sad story of Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak off the front pages and it's not our intention to revive it. But we would like to call attention to one aspect that has received no discussion:
Police said Nowak drove 900 miles, donned a disguise and was armed with a BB gun and pepper spray when she confronted a woman she believed was a competitor for the affections of Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein, an unmarried fellow astronaut.
[snip]
Police said Nowak told them that she only wanted to scare Shipman into talking to her about her relationship and…
tlambert | January 13, 2007A Harvard School of Public Health Press Release describes a new study by Miller, Hemenway and Azreal:
In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state level rates of homicide, researchers at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that homicide rates among children, and among women and men of all ages, are higher in states where more households have guns. The study appears in the February 2007 issue of Social Science and Medicine
Earlier studies on the relationship between firearm ownership and…
revere | June 22, 2006Getting crank letters (or comments) goes with the territory on a blog. But what Sri Lanka's UN Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam is getting seems a bit excessive. 100,000 letters from Americans complaining a UN Conference on illegal small arms trade is taking place on -- imagine this -- July 4, that sacred global holiday, American Independence Day. The crank letters use wording kindly provided by the National Rifle Association. Not that it matters, but the letter writers are in error. The June 26 - July 7 conference is at the UN headquarters in New York which will be closed on July 4.
The…
tlambert | December 17, 2004The National Academy of Sciences panel on firearms and violence has reported its findings. The press release says:
There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime. To date, 34 states have enacted these laws.
There is almost no evidence that violence-prevention programs intended to steer children away from guns have had any effects on their behavior, knowledge, or attitudes regarding firearms. More than 80 such programs exist.
Research has found associations between gun…