In my earlier diary I promised a second, little-discussed math-based observation regarding gun violence, and I will get to that, but first a recap of my first point in the light of some notable responses.
My first point was that the math of gun violence was not of direct cause-effect, but rather the lottery math of millions of small, infinitesimally-low-probability "tickets," inevitably leading to "jackpots," both small and large. Countries with lower gun violence rates don't have one single "cause" for their low rate, rather most of the several types of "tickets" occur in much lower quantities, and for various reasons.
This is a math model, folks. Some responses seemed to be on the order of "gun violence is not a lottery because I don't scratch off anything." And clearly, even many intelligent Kos readers do not understand the math of lottery probability, which is likely why they still buy tickets.
So here is the second math point:
That gun you purchased to "protect yourself" is probabilistically many times more likely (by a couple orders of magnitude) to harm yourself, or some you love, than it is to successfully defend yourself against "a bad guy with a gun."
It is far to gratuitous to link today to the St. Paul dimwit who allegedly threatened his daughter an AK-47 because of a disappointing report card. Not that all gun owners are like this guy, but the NRA members in Mister Beagle's family could, sad to say, just as well be this guy. Just sayin'...
But it is important to note that the Newtown massacre began and ended as one of the most statistically-common scenarios of gun violence - a family member accesses a gun in the household, harms another family member, and commits suicide. Less common was the horrific mess in the middle, and that was clearly influenced by the type of weapon and the type of ammunition available in the household (yet another issue, and not the subject of this diary).
So I link back to these statistics on gun violence, which are often misused in multiple ways:
In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S.
First of all, the suicide count is, quantity-wise, the most horrific number here, and yet it has received very little discussion in this debate. By a factor of at least two, and maybe 100, the gun in your household is statistically most likely to kill someone you care about by suicide.
As a courtesy to the family, such gun deaths are rarely reported in the news, so we don't feel the shock of this number until it happens to someone close to us. Those of us who have dealt with depression in our families know that the ready availability of a means of death is a critical factor to whether a loved one lives to face a new day.
It is the second number, the 30-per-day homicide number, that is the most misused data point on both sides of the debate. NRA supporters note that very few of these homicides are from "a gun in the household," and they are correct. It is difficult to parse out of this number the percentage of the 30-per-day that are the result of (usually) men who are "up to no good" (as we used to say).
So embedded in the gun violence number is this large number of deaths related to other criminal activity. And frankly, most readers here are not impacted daily by this number. So lets stipulate that this is another issue, one that we ought to care about more than we really do.
But even if that number is 80% crime-related, in-household homicide makes the daily news in many big cities. Even then, statistically this in-household violence number is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than "random guy in nice suburban neighborhood gets gunned down for no apparent reason." Add the accident number and the non-fatal incidents that are in-household, and the ratio is even higher.
And, of course, the in-household violence count is statistically several orders of magnitude higher than the "steely-nerved CPA faces down gunman" fantasy that Tom Tomorrow so wonderfully portrays.
In short, if you have a weapon in the home, and a son who is reclusive and odd, or a husband with a violent-while-drunk problem, or a spouse with clinical depression, you, too, may well be the next "lucky winner."
Mister Beagle
"The real world is tri-color."