Chicago Police Chief says his cops will shoot legal concealed carry licensees

In which I once again prove I am not a lawyer, and never-the-less try to analyse something a Chief of Police said.    -- and yes, he said that.

No, really.

Ok, well, sort of, and yes, really.    More after the jump.

Gun deaths, Automobile deaths and Josh Sugarmann's attempt to manipulate you.

Once again Josh Sugarmann has jumped into the gun debate in the U.S. feet first with a Huffington Post essay entitled: Guns Kill More People Than Motor Vehicles in 12 States & DC.

Once again Josh says: "The road to reducing gun death and injury is clear and well marked, if only we would choose to take it."  By that he means a short list of things.  Ban semi-automatic guns. Ban almost all handguns. Enact universal registration so that later, the bans can be enforced against pre-existing guns. This pattern is well known, and well understood and is the path that has been followed in the U.K. and in Australia. He, and his ilk, contend that by leaving you single shot long guns and double-barreled long guns, they would respect the 2nd amendment, since they're letting you keep some arms.  Many of us would beg to disagree.

There are, of course, several problems, the first with his statistics. Josh gives us a list of thirteen jurisdictions where the number of gun deaths exceeds the number of auto deaths:

• Alaska: 144 gun deaths, 71 motor vehicle deaths
• Arizona: 931 gun deaths, 795 motor vehicle deaths
• Colorado: 555 gun deaths, 487 motor vehicle deaths
• District of Columbia: 99 gun deaths, 38 motor vehicle deaths
• Illinois: 1,064 gun deaths, 1,042 motor vehicle deaths
• Louisiana: 864 gun deaths, 722 motor vehicle deaths
• Maryland: 538 gun deaths, 514 motor vehicle deaths
• Michigan: 1,076 gun deaths, 1,063 motor vehicle deaths
• Nevada: 395 gun deaths, 289 motor vehicle deaths
• Oregon: 458 gun deaths, 324 motor vehicle deaths
• Utah: 314 gun deaths, 274 motor vehicle deaths
• Virginia: 875 gun deaths, 728 motor vehicle deaths
• Washington: 609 gun deaths, 554 motor vehicle deaths

Which looks horrible, except you need to remember something we've discussed before. Two-thirds of firearms related deaths are suicides. Massively restricting firearms as in the UK or Australia, or even for all practical purposes eliminating firearms does nothing to reduce the suicide rate.  The UK's suicide rate increased after the handgun ban. Australia's suicide rate stayed stable and then increased after the semi-auto and handgun ban, and Japan, which for all-practical-purposes has a total firearms ban for civilians, has a much higher suicide rate than the U.S. 

The thing is, it's very rare for someone to kill themselves using a car.  It does happen, but it's uncommon. Guns are more efficient, neater and less likely to harm a bystander. After guns strangulation, drowning, and medication overdoses are common. 

Take out the 2/3 of the gun deaths that are suicides and you get a very different picture... 

• AK  48 / 71
• AR  310 / 795
• CO  185 / 487
• DC  33 / 38
• IL  355 / 1042
• LA  288 / 722
• MD  179 / 514
• MI  359 / 1063
• NV  132 / 289
• OR  153 / 324
• UT  105 / 274
• VA  292 / 728
• WA  203 / 544

DC appears to be an outlier in this set, but there's an explanation even for that, a really simple explanation.

Two thirds of automobile fatalities occur in rural settings.  No one really knows why, but according to the 2001 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) traffic safety statistics, 61% of traffic fatalities occurred in rural areas even though rural areas account for only 40% of the vehicle miles traveled and 21% of the population. This is even true in other countries.  

DC doesn't have any rural.  

To go further, we would need to compare the percentage of population that is urban vs rural in the state along with the ratio to population of gun ownership in order to know if we can make any further conclusions on that front, but DC being an outlier makes perfect sense in this regard. 

Additionally, non-suicide gun deaths tend profoundly urban.  Overall gun death rates are similar in rural and urban environments, but how they occur are different. Homicides by gun are much more prevalent in urban areas per 100,000 people but suicide by gun is much more prevalent in rural areas per 100,000 people, so when you take out the suicides, the gun death's tend urban. (Reference Link)

So, were are we on Josh Sugarmann's  "oh the horror, oh the humanity" that gun deaths exceed car deaths in 13 jurisdictions?  

Uhmmmm, it doesn't hold. 

Josh also makes a big deal about the fact that auto-deaths have fallen over the last decade, and how gun deaths have not. Let's remember a few points we've gone over before. Most gun deaths are suicides. After you take out suicides, you are left with gun crime and accidental death. None of the proposals (background checks, registration, etc.) short of confiscation will reduce gun crime, and the Australian experience suggests that even confiscation doesn't help. So, let's look at accidental gun deaths:  Each year in the last decade, the number of guns in the US has increased between five and ten million per year.  Despite that the number of accidental handgun deaths in the U.S. has fallen from 130 in 1999 to 91 in 2010, a 30% decrease. (Reference) During that same time, according to Josh's graph, automobile deaths fell 17%. 

Here's the executive summary: 

• Other car deaths are related mostly to rural driving. Other than suicide, gun deaths are related to Urban areas. 
• None of Josh Sugarmann's or the Violence Policy Center's proposals for gun control would do anything to improve the ratio above.
• The rate of accidental gun deaths is falling faster than the rate of accidental automobile deaths.

And that's about enough for tonight. 

The Mosin-Nagant - Thoughts, Deals, investment, care, cleaning and etc.

This blog post was inspired by a recent spate of postings on facebook and a comment thread at "The Truth about Guns" on my favorite center fire rifle, the Mosin-Nagant. The M91 Mosin action was first put into service in 1891, and 19th century Mosin receivers are still in use by the Finnish military as the basis for sniper rifles. Along with the British SMLE (short magazine Lee Enfield) which dates from 1895 and the Mauser '98 which (obviously) dates from 1998, the Mosin-Nagant is one of the few military arms with more than a century of being in official service. (Yes, the 1911 just passed that gate, along with Browning's other masterpiece the M2 50 caliber machine gun.)  Since the Finns have actually used receivers from the 1890's in some of their Tkiv 85's, those may arguably be the oldest firearms in active military service in the world.

Anyway, the spate of facebook postings, and the comment thread on TTAG gave me an excuse to put all my thinking and experience with Mosins in one place triggered by this happy annoucement:

Classic Arms has my favorite rifle in the world on sale just now in a neat special: http://www.classicfirearms.com/mosin-nagant-rfile-by-the-crate  $2500 for an unopened crate of Mosin's direct from Mother Russia (Ok, from the Ukraine) for $2500.

Guns are bad. Evil Evil guns. Thoughts on gun control part nine: Summary

I've been laying out the information and thinking that has shaped my position on firearms over the last decade, what changed in my mindset and what changed in my actions.  I had been planning for the last several months to finish this series with an essay tying it all up neatly.  I was trumped this week by a post by Barry Snell in the Iowa State Daily.   If you want to just skip all the rest of this and go read that, I'll understand.  Barry did a better job than I can, and honestly, I'm going to be pull-quoting a lot of it in this post.  Still, there's doubtless a benefit in writing my own summary, even if only to make sure I have this all straight in my mind.

Thoughts on Gun Control - part eight. The Manchin-Toomey proposal. What went wrong?

The Manchin-Toomey proposal.  What went wrong? 

In other words, why didn't it pass?  The President, and VP Biden, and Emperor Bloomberg's mouthpiece organization Mayors Against Illegal Guns contend that the NRA and the Gun lobby (which they contend is the same thing) bought the votes to defeat M-T.  From where I sit it doesn't look that simple.  Let's walk through it a bit and see what went wrong:

Boston Marathon Bombing: Deriving some Physics and other info from video analysis

While the official investigations proceed, there is a ridiculous amount of speculation about the bombing, who did it, what it was, etc. Very little of this speculation is evidence based. Almost all of it is just blathering based on the beliefs or prejudices of the posters.
Instead, let's take a quick look at what we can know with certainty from the evidence we have.
The first thing we have to do is determine where the bombs went off. Fortunately, the New York Times provides an excellent infographic for that purpose:

Thoughts on the gun debate part seven: Treat guns like cars.

One of the frequent things I hear when discussing the gun control issue with many people is the proposal that we treat guns like cars. Recently, Michael Z. Williamson took a turn at that idea that I want to build on a bit. Let's visit that guns/cars equivalency. Let's turn it around for a moment. There are already rather a lot of gun laws out there which most folks who aren't "gun people" don't know about.  So, let's try the analogy in the other direction; as Mike asked the other day, how about we treat cars like guns?  Here's what would happen if we tried that.

Thoughts on the gun debate part six: A scholar's view of history.

This is going to be a short post. I want to call your attention to Steven Halbrook's lastest piece for the Fordham Law Review. He explores efforts to include a right to arms in their 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, and adoption of gun registration just in time for the Nazi occupation and gun confiscations.

The full article is available here. I'm going to cite (claiming fair use) a section from his conclusion.

Comparing England (or UK) murder rates with the US: More complex than you thought

Thoughts on the Gun Debate part 4a -- wherein I fix my oopsie in regard to comparing US and English murder rates... Oooops. It turns out that I was wrong.

This post edited after comments were reviewed on 3/29/2013.  Edits from that date will be noted with an Edit tag. 

First, lets get this out of the way.  I'm not going to fuss here about the terms "England", "The U.K", "Great Britain", "The Olde Country" or "The folks with those classy accents who live on some islands off the coast of Europe."  I'll be careful to cite things in the links, but don't chew me up on where I'm talking about.

On to the oopsie. I have frequently in this series referred to the English murder rates as historically low and currently very low compared to US murder rates.  I blandly accepted the murder statistics published by the UK Home Office as definitive.  I overlooked the details of what and how the English counted "murders." It turns out that was a big mistake.  (I was first turned onto my error by this post at Extrano's Alley.)

I fell into a definitions trap you may not be aware of. The shortest version is this. We count and report crimes based on initial data. The Brits count and report crimes based on the outcome of the investigation and trial. Yep, that says what I meant it to say.

Thoughts on the gun debate part 4

So, quick re-cap. We know from the last several posts that banning handguns in England did nothing to effect the English murder rate, that the murder rate in the US has fallen since around 1990, that the suicide rate hasn't surged, and that in nations with strict gun control suicides still happen, sometimes at even higher rates than the US.

The other question that seems reasonable is about who has guns, where they are found and how they are used.  Specifically, I'm talking about concealed carry license holders.  Different states have different rules about concealed carry ranging from Vermont's "We don't need no stinking rules" to Hawaii's "We have the ability to issue a license, but that doesn't mean we're going to do it."

Thoughts on the gun debate part 3

In the last rock, we looked at the murder rate in England after the gun bad following Dunblaine, and came up with "basically no effect."

That is to say, after the handgun ban went into effect in England, in January of '97, from then until 2003, the homicide rate went up from 11.5 per million to 18 per million.  I.E., in the six years following the handgun ban, the murder rate in England went up by 1.5.  Meanwhile, in the U.S, from 1990 to 2003, the murder rate fell from 9.8 to 5.5 per 100,000, despite the fact that during that time the number of handguns in the U.S. rose by more than 2 million.

From 2003 to 2011, the murder rate in England fell from 18 per M back to the 11.5 per M that it was at the time of the ban.   Meanwhile from 2003 to 2011 the murder rate in the US decreased at a slower rate, from 5.5 to 4.8 per 100K despite millions more guns making their way into the US population.

This suggests that at the very least, handguns don't by themselves drive the murder rate.

Thoughts on the gun debate part 2

So, in the last installment, I had decided to try to figure out what my position in regard to gun ownership should be. What was right and proper?  Early on, it became clear that at various times in various places in this country all sorts of laws had been passed and enforced regarding all sorts of guns and all sorts of people.  A data-based approach to the question didn't seem to be served by spending a lot of time researching those laws or why they were passed or their constitutionality, or the legislative and judicial history of gun control in the U.S.. What I wanted to know was what the effect of the guns was.  What was the risk and reward?

Thoughts on the current gun debate.

No one changes their minds based on stuff posted on the intertubes, and anyone who reads this ever will already have had access to all this info, but I'm going to try to pull it together for my peace of mind.

The first 50 years of my life I owned no guns.  I didn't hunt, I didn't shoot.  I largely "protected" my kids from guns, and was of the opinion in general that guns are sufficiently dangerous that I don't need them around any more than I need a chainsaw or an dune buggy or a motorcycle.  Guns are dangerous hardware, and I just didn't want to go there.  Note that I also didn't play with chainsaws, dune buggies or motorcycles.  I'm a geek.  I sat at my computer, and was content.

However, around 2003 something changed.  Perhaps, as I became more and more exposed to the gun community, as I  hung out with the 1632 writers and fans, as I met and socialized with other Baen authors, I became somewhat more acculturated to guns.  They moved out of the motorcycle category into the circular saw category  something that is dangerous, sure but not so intrinsically dangerous that they can't be handled and used.

At about the same time, my political position shifted too.  I'll never be a right-wing-ideologue but the longer I was a partner in a small business, the more I was forced to deal with out-of-state business regulations and taxes, the more I interacted with my customers about the regulatory difficulties that they had running their business, the more I came to the position that MOST of the regulations that apply to small businesses in the US are trickle down regs resulting from bad actions of a few idiots, and of large impersonal businesses.  More and more I came to ask why the government was involved in regulating things that I didn't see a need for them to regulate, nor an authorization for them to in the US or state constitution.