Quote:
Originally Posted by Thorgrimm
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To protect themselves from dangerous situations
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This is so very P99 right here: we've got a mix of people living in reality, and people living in the fantasy in their head.
First, the fantasy:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by https://www.safewise.com/resources/guns-at-home/
A 2018 poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found 58% of Americans agree with the statement “gun ownership does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.”1
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... and, the reality:
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Originally Posted by https://www.safewise.com/resources/guns-at-home/
2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide.3
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But (I hear you say), who cares if someone in my family kills themself, or me? I'm magically 100% certain no one in my family will ever have a mental health issue, and guns protect me from bad guys! NRA-funded studies told me so:
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Originally Posted by https://www.nap.edu/read/10881
The results, summarized in Table 5-2, suggest that respondents who use firearms are less likely to be injured and lose property than those using other modes of protection. For example, while the overall rate of injury in robbery is 30.2, only 12.8 percent of those using a firearm for self-protection were injured.
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... except, that data is from
self-reported studies. Why? Because the NRA got laws passed that made it difficult for neutral parties to conduct neutral studies, and then they paid for private studies that supported their view. But when you ask people to self-report, they're likely to have
bias:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by https://www.nap.edu/read/10881
The most obvious and fundamental limitation, however, is that the data on defensive gun uses are, as described above, potentially error ridden ... if respondents, concerned about being perceived as inept, are inclined to report successful forms of resistance but conceal ineffective forms, the estimated efficacy of self-defense will be biased upward.
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So to recap, there's fantasy-land, where you start by believing whatever you want to believe, and try to cherry-pick questionable data from a clearly-biased source to support that take:
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... and then there's reality, where the simple truth is that if you have a gun in your home, you're far more likely to have it kill you or a family member than a "bad guy". Here's Jon Oliver talking about the
reality of what happened when Australia got stricter gun control:
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