Hat tip to commentor Howard Beale IV for the AddictingInfo link:
The Texas House approved the use of “panic buttons” in lawmakers’ offices after several incidences earlier this month where open-carry advocates showed up to bully and harass politicians and staffers they deemed “anti-gun.” Nothing says free and open democracy like people with guns threatening people who oppose them at the place that they work.
In a disturbing video posted to social media, open-carry advocates from the group “Open Carry Tarrant County” pile into the office of Texas Rep. Poncho Nevarez (Eagle Pass), and start demanding to know his stance on gun control. At issue is a new bill led by Texas Republicans that would repeal a century-long ban on openly carrying handguns. To his immense credit, Nevarez doesn’t waiver from his position that he is for strong gun control laws, however that position led to the group hurling ugly accusations, and finally, outright threats at him…
Which reminded me, Politico (yes, I know) just published an interesting article on “The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership“:
…[A] tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.
In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year…
These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible…
Gunfondlers: Big Fans of Statistics, But Only the Invented OnesPost + Comments (66)