Somehow and thanks to their belief in magic, some people think the above is achievable.
It is believed that in the US, at least 2 million fully automatic weapons were floating around the country when the National Firearms Act came to be. In the register, there are only barely just above half a million and that was after two grace periods to register them. Those guns are still out there, passed from grandpa to father to son, hidden and only coming out when no Feds or snitches are around.
Conservative estimate say that we have 350 million firearms of all types in the hands of regular folks. That somehow and by the power vested in wishful thinking liberals by Unicorn-ridding Samoan Gnomes you will be able to get rid of them is lunacy and idiocy having a child. People in NY and Connecticut are already defying the registration schemes above the 90 percentile and those are states in which Gun Control was/is imbued in the local culture. Colorado and Oregon are laughing at the Universal Background checks with Chief LEOs ignoring it.
Murders by firearms will avoided? Not even in the Lilly White Countries they keep flapping around as examples have been able to do that. And in the “colored” countries that gives them cooties to talk about unless they need a toilet cleaned but have Gun Control Laws that would make them dizzy, murders are at an all time high and climbing.
As for the medical cost, Do you really want spend 10 times that much money getting rid of guns? The again neither The Economist nor CSGV will be trying to enforce the laws and kicking doors down.
Right on. Well put, Miguel.
Bill Clinton’s DOJ estimated that firearms are used in self-defense 2 million times per year. If only a very small percentage of those defensive uses of firearms result in the saving of innocent lives, those saved lives very easily offset those taken unlawfully with firearms. To say nothing of the rapes, crippling beatings, robberies, and other crimes that are prevented. Indeed, if there are 2 million defensive uses of firearms every year, that’s 2 million crimes prevented because of firearms.
Do these firearm death statistics include homicides by police officers, and deaths ruled justifiable homicide, or otherwise self defense homicides?
I’d like to see the corresponding numbers(homicides, suicides, injuries, costs) for automobiles.
Also, DC Comics of all groups has an interesting rebuttal to this in their (really good!) Injustice: Gods Among Us comic, which is a setup for their game of the same name.
Year 1 issue 26 features Superman pitching the idea of confiscating all firearms on Earth to The Flash. The Flash responds that if Superman really wants to save lives, he should be looking at cigarettes.
And then automobiles.
And then mistreated dogs.
And then recycling.
Superman doesn’t end up trying to confiscate Earth’s guns.
It’s a really well-done scene, and the entire comic has absolutely top-notch art and writing.
Don’t forget the life and AD&D insurance claims when more-than-a-few SWAT officers attempt confiscation and encounter … resistance.
I’d bet that would rather quickly add up to more than their claim of medical costs (and that’s not counting the medical costs incurred by those confiscatory raids).
Also, 12,000 “gun deaths” not counting suicides? They’re dreaming! If they’re arriving at 12,000, they’re either counting suicides or they’re counting ALL homicides by ANY means. “Homicide by firearm” is below 9,000 (and going down), and has been for several years.
Then again, honesty has never exactly been their strong suit.
Since they ask “what if America got rid of guns,” I assuming they’re proposing full-blown gun confiscation, with all the door-kicking that implies.
I’ve seen estimates that there are 80-100 million gun owners in the US. For these back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’ll go with consistently low-balled numbers, starting with 80 million gun owners.
Now, if only 3% (an interesting number, is it not?) of those 80 million gun owners resist until they’re killed by the confiscating officials, that’s 2.4 million dead gun owners (or what CSGV would call “a good start”). Now, quite a few of those gun owners will have family members at home when their doors are kicked in. Let’s say that, on average, each of these deadly raids results in one additional family member’s death. Further, the resisting gun owners are likely to have some success in resisting the confiscating officials. I’m going to assume that, on average, each such instance results in the death of one LEO.
2.4 million * 3 = 7.2 million deaths in the effort to rid America of privately-owned firearms.
Even if we assume that not one of those 12,000 annual firearms-related homicides would be committed in a gun-free America, that puts the breakeven point at (7,200,000 / 12,000), or 600 years. Such a bargain!
Of course, the CSGV types would celebrate 4.8 million of those deaths….
Joe gun owner wasn’t home at 0300 when the police came. In the raid, his wife and youngest child were killed. Joe goes into hiding. At 0300 in the morning, Joe sets fire to the chief of police’s house and kills everyone that runs out. Two days later, at 0300, Joe repeats the process at the mayors house. Joe’s rampage last for two weeks. The death toll has gone over 100. Joe and his “sniper rifle” move to another state, changes his name and keeps a low profile until he dies from natural causes.
They are assuming no substitution, huh? None at all? It must have been the guns whispering in the killer’s ear, because none of them would simply pick a different weapon. Oh, but they’ll say those other weapons aren’t as “deadly”. But why did they say all those death and injuries would be avoided, instead of just some of them? And if a killer uses a knife instead of a gun, I don’t mind agreeing that more of their victims will live (I won’t bother with the defensive side of guns right now and the mess that taking away the best available self-defense tool would cause). So these stabbing/bludgeoning victims that survive… they’re still going to have to go to the hospital to get fixed up, right? Surgery and a lengthy rehab are going to cost more than a trip to the morgue, so the cases of attempted murder that become survivor stories because the weapon wasn’t as effective as a gun, are going to increase medical costs.
Then there is the smoke and mirrors they had to use to come up with that $174B figure given that direct medical costs of treating gun shot wounds is about $700 million. That only comes out to two bucks and a quarter per year for every man woman and child, so rather than risk a bunch of “meh, I’ll keep my gun, thanks”, they had to come up with a way to magnify it 250 fold. They adding in prison costs, assumed that if Mr. Armed Robbery hadn’t got a gun, he would have got a job instead and positively contributed $40K a year to society- so they added on his “lost wage” as well. They also assumed that none of those dead bodies would be in prison had they survived their gang-banger shoot out (because all gun shot victims are innocent victims), and also added on their “lost wage” to the figure, because again, these were all productive members of society and not the type that cost citizens by being in and out of prison their whole life. It gets more and more laughable, but their biggest add-on comes from taking examples of civil suits awarded and then multiplying that by all gun shot victims (including all the criminals)- though only a tiny fraction of them do result in successful civil suits. They called this the “quality of life” adjustment. By the way, if you use their same logic applied to the “cost of smoking” using the RJ Reynolds suit as an example of the “quality of life” that smoking costs, you come up with $40 Quadrillion a year as the “cost of smoking to society”.
Oh, and remember…”nobody wants to take your guns- but this is how awesome it would be if we did!”
I wanted to get at the numbers, and I found this study. It defines “homicide,” for this study, thus: “The analyses excludes deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; justifiable homicides; and attempts to murder.” The numbers are from 1993 to 2011. The quote is: “There were 11,101 firearm homicides in 2011, down by 39% from a high of 18,253 in 1993.” Also: “Homicides made up about 2% of all firearm-related crimes.” [Haven’t the firearm ownership rates increased tremendously over the same time frame?] The rate of firearm homicide in 2011 was 3.6 per 100,000 persons. Of these, 73% of the homicides were from handguns and 27% were from other firearm types.
Unless my math is totally messed up, this means a 0.0036% chance of death by firearm murder.
Compared to the stats for defensive uses of firearms by the good guys, those numbers look pretty good.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf
The nation that allowed the repeated molestation of thousands of little girls because the molesters were a ‘protected’ religion and the authorities didn’t want to look “bigoted”… and still hasn’t done anything about it… wants to tell me how to reduce crime.
We should have sent a boat in for Churchill, and let the Germans have the rest of England.
Here at democrat tyranny industries DTI ignorance is our most important product.
“What if America got rid of guns?”
A better follow up question would be, what could possibly go wrong?
Hmm…Nazi Germany, Turkey, North Korea, Venezuela, Honduras, communist China, USSR, Great Britain, Australia, and all the other gun-control paradises in the Middle East and Africa.
[Examples of democide and genocide, impotence in the face of terrorism, eroding rights and governmental unaccountability, revolutions and coups, and undeterred criminals]
Sorry, but only my ENEMY wants me disarmed. They do want to subjugate us, and are willing to hurt us, if necessary (by proxy because they are cowards).