Comments on: A Study Opportunity

By: Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:52:27 +0000

I thought the train thing was on the way out, since the government there started charging the families of the deceased for the cleanup and the delays. The NEW go-to method is "detergent suicide" by which the wishing-to-be-deceased mixes commercially available cleaning products together to produce hydrogen sulfide gas. This is a very efficient method, and has been the choice of 517 people in 2008 as last reported, up from 29 in 2007.

By: Turk Turon

Turk Turon — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:58:24 +0000

If memory serves, the FBI classifies fatal shootings in which a person is shot by another person as either “accidental” or “non-negligent homicide”. In the latter category are both murders and self-defense shootings. Shootings by police officers are counted separately. So the formal calculation of “homicides” and “homicide rates” includes both murders and self-defense slayings; the FBI does not make any distinction in its annual Uniform Crime Report.

As far as the D.C. statistics in the post-Heller era, it will be interesting to see if there is a different death rate in the “registered” households as opposed to the “unregistered” households. My bet is that a) there will be a vast difference and b) D.C. public-safety officials will try to suppress this information because it will serve to demonstrate the difference between law-abiding gun owners and thugs.

Further, cities sometimes withhold their homicide data from the FBI until after the publication of the U.C.R. That way, there will be no headlines about which city is “The Murder Capitol of the U.S.A.”

Baltimore has been doing this for a couple of years now. The headlines do appear, but just not on the front page, because the statistics are a little stale by the time they are published.

By: GrumpyUnk

GrumpyUnk — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:57:05 +0000

The ability to utilize tools is one of the major things that separates us from all other species on the planet. That people with serious intent are smart enough to pick the most effective option available should not be much of a surprise.

By: Chas

Chas — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:57:59 +0000

The planet consists of water and land. The water will drown you if it gets half a chance, and the land will conspire with its ever present companion gravity to smash you to death should you fall onto it from even a modest height. It’s a dangerous world that we live on. Though while they are both quite lethal, neither water nor land are very effective weapons against a criminal attack. That’s where guns are useful.

By: Billll

Billll — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:54:48 +0000

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the suicide rate in DC should drop, post-Heller, assuming that DCs newly liberalized gun laws actually result in guns getting into homes legally.
Before, all you had to look forward to was the kick at the door and an ugly death at the hands of some critter. After, there’s hope of survival: you can shoot back.

By: AntiCitizenOne

AntiCitizenOne — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:13:59 +0000

Maybe the gun control advocates can conveniently spike their own results…starting with themselves.

By: Allen Garvin

Allen Garvin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:24:51 +0000

After reading that article this morning (where the headline said ‘Surprising Fact’–hardly surprising to people who know how the gun control lobby works. The famous ‘guns are 43 times more likely to kill an owner or family member than an invading criminal’ statistic is often repeated without mentioning that 39 of the 43 were suicides), I looked around at suicide rates around the world. According to this wikipedia list, the US is pretty much right in the middle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

Many countries with very strict gun control top the US, sometimes by significant amounts. Of course, if owning a gun makes makes you 3 to 5 times more likely to commit suicide, and the US has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world, maybe banning them would reduce our suicide rates to the lowest in the world. We should probably also ban ropes (hanging is now more popular than shooting oneself among teenagers), razors, knives, and prescription drugs, as well.

By: jones

jones — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:35:19 +0000

When someone in DC defends themselves with a handgun, will we ever hear about it?

By: JJR

JJR — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:45:07 +0000

Y’know, the right to end one’s own life is still part of our fundamental freedoms. Freedom also means the freedom to make bad/questionable decisions about one’s life and be held responsible for those decisions. I’m just as ultimately responsible for the state of my mental health as I am for my self-defense. Why should I be disarmed so that someone else has to find an alternative means to do what they’ve already resolved to do anyway. Why not let them privately do themselves in at home with a gun rather than horrify/endanger others leaping in front of buses, jumping off a building, stepping onto an electrified rail at a train station, etc. I don’t want to see any of that. Sucks for the cops and medical personnel that have to review the self-shooting scene behind closed doors afterwards, but that’s the line of work they’re in, it comes with the territory.