Common Gun Myths
Is it true that there is a place in a man's head that, if you shoot it, it will blow up?
It's important to understand that correlation does not imply causation. Just because two things are correlated, does not mean that there is necessarily a link between the two. The number of Christians in the world have increased since 400 years ago, as the earth's population has increased. Obviously, people would have made more towels than, as well. But does that mean that the rise of Christians lead to the rise of towels? This may seem silly or arbitrary, now, but an argument you might support may be based on this fundamental flaw, and it might not be so obvious to you, such as the number of guns per country and the rate of violence.
Far more prevalent factors are associated with crime. These include poverty, general economics, law enforcement effectiveness, technological development, culture and the general presence of organized crime. The Homicide rate of the America is 16.3, and the homicide rate of Africa is 12.5, compared to 3.0 for Europe, 3.0 for the Oceania, and 2.9 for Asia. Poverty correlates directly with crime and homicide. Poverty reduces tax money, which in turn reduces law enforcement effectiveness on top of increasing desperation, which allows criminals seed in these locations, particularly organized crime, which exacerbates violence. In the U.S. nearly 48% of violent crime is caused by organized criminal organizations, who make up less than 1% of the U.S.'s population, while an untold figure after this is facilitated by illegal weapons smuggling. In some countries such as Mexico, they make up over 90%. Urbanization and poverty are in general correlated with crime.
Before any key determinant can be made as to what can reduce crime, one has to first consider a myriad of factors. Gun control alone, or truly any piece of legislation, will only attack a part of the problem with crime. Laws restricting gun use may have little if any effect, in countries such as Mexico, where only 2.5 million of the 15.5 million guns are even legal, or only 13%. If the smuggling of illegal weapons persist, gun laws will have little to no effect. Island nations, such as the UK or Japan, may have greater capabilities of restricting the flow of weapons, due to the increased difficulty compared to overland routes. Nazi Germany in 1945 had high levels of crime, compared to Germany today, which has a relatively low murder rate; more people died in the holocaust than are probably going to die in Germany for the next 100 years. More people died in the clashes between the IRA, UVF, and British forces than are likely going to die from "homicide" in the UK. Countries such as Japan are notorious for under counting crimes [1][2][3], particularly homicide. Some countries, such as North Korea, have completely unusable crime statistics, while others such as China have extremely questionable statistics, and others such as Japan have fairly questionable. It's difficult to tell based on differences in recording, reporting, and definitions. In some countries, if crimes go unsolved, many are not listed. In some countries, the police lie or are generally so bad at catching criminals their crime rates appear unusually low. In others, reported rates by citizens are ignored or low due to the general lack of technology, such as phones, which makes reporting easy to do. The statistics, on paper, can only give us so much value based on their relative information. It's important to keep in mind that the statistics do not always tell the truth.
Gun Physics - The ease of Use
There are of course, a lot of common myths about guns. If you shoot someone, they'll go flying backwards. If you shoot a car's engine, it will explode! Guns take no skill to use or intelligence, and make killing lots of people easier. Guns are much more deadly than other weapons, such as knives, hatchets or axes. This simply isn't the case.
First of all, guns don't make people go flying backwards. They simply lack the total energy or physics. A very basic rule of thumb is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite, reaction, commonly cited as Newton's third law. Simply put, if a person goes flying backwards after being hit by a bullet, you should to, since after all, it should produce the same amount of recoil. The truth is, bullets are tiny things that travel at really high velocity in order to have sufficient penetration to get down to internal organs. They are efficient weapons, but not particularly powerful weapons. For instance, the 5.56mm, the primary cartridge used by the U.S. military and by most NATO countries, is 4.1 grams in weight. Comparatively, a penny is 2.5 grams, and a nickel is 5 grams. [1] This makes bullets relatively small. Traveling at 940 m/s, or 3100 fps, it generates roughly 1800 joules, or 1300 foot pounds, and has a momentum of 3.854. A 1 kilogram baseball bat, swung at 10 m/s, has a momentum of 10 kilogram m/s, while a bow and arrow is about 1.5-2.5, making them roughly comparable. Other than raw numbers, mythbusters showed while this resulted in little movement on episode 25 and 38; for a more accessible video, here you go! Guns simply lack the momentum to make targets go flying backwards, unless they're really small.
Gasoline burns or deflagerates, it does not explode. In order to burn, it needs oxygen, and most be exposed to a sufficient heat source in order to catch gasoline on fire. Unless exposed to an open flame, gasoline won't light, especially inside of a container with little oxygen. In fact, you could heat gasoline to 1000 degrees in a vacuum, or in space, and it would never burn, not once. Without oxygen, combustion is impossible, and a bullet doesn't have the temperature to light gasoline on fire past it's flash point, or about 280 °C (536 °F). Even if it did, gasoline would only burn, like this. A pretty uneventful video, but I hope the point is made; your care won't be "exploding" any time soon.
Here's a video of a human skull replica being shot! Here's a video of it being hit by a baseball bat and a sword. Here's some sword, an axe, etc. The point is, these other weapons produce just as much or the same catastrophic injuries. A bullet might poke a smoke hole in you, while an axe might cleave you in half, destroying an untold number of organs and causing substantial blood loss. Obviously a car crash could completely demolish a person. You only have about a 5-10% chance of dying, if shot by somebody else. Looking at the broader set of statistics, there are a total of 104,852 gunshot injuries in the U.S., or 31,347 deaths (29.8%). 18,735 deaths are suicide, which are intentionally self inflicted, and thus more likely to kill someone. This results in 12,612 deaths from murder or accident, and out of 86,117 incidents, is 14.6% of all gunshot wounds relating in a death. It's even lower than this when other factors are applied.
What I'm trying to present is a sense of scale; people often times mistake firearms for extremely deadly weapons, or assume people want firearms for their deadly nature. The reality is the convenience, that is range, the loud noise and bright flash which attracts attention and instantly screams call the police, and the ease of which the trigger can be pulled. One can engage a target, whilst running away, or can take cover behind something such a car or brick wall which serves as a natural barrier between you and the target. To fight someone in a knife fight takes raw strength, speed, and intelligence, on top of the skill to know how to use the knife, and the commitment, or dedication to rush in close with an attacker and get a hit. You may hit him, but he probably can hit you, too; knives, axes etc. are intuitive to use, since human instincts tell use how to use the weight of a weapon or device through raw feel. Guns on the other hand, are not so easy to use. The average police officer only has about a 1 in 6, to 1 in 10, or 10-15% chance, of hitting the target (Page 4). One then could reasonably assume that criminals would have a lower chance to hit. Even if they did, there's only about a 5-15% chance it will the person, and that's assuming medical personnel can't get there quickly. By the time the criminal pulls the trigger, he has a about a 10-15% chance to hit you, and a .25%-2.5% chance of killing you. The idea that, as soon as someone pulls out a gun, your gun is useless, is really not particularly true, given that not every bullet will be a hit, and not every hit will be a kill, let alone an instant kill. If using guns was so easy, being a sniper or the training emphasized by modern militaries would be ignored, since just anyone could shoot someone and instantly killing them with no skill. The notion that it gives killers the ability to kill people instantly or that it's impossible to defend against, is rather ridiculous.
There's a correlation between civilian gun ownership and the homicide rate
Technically there is a correlation, but not one that implies more guns equates to more violence. This is a common myth I hear perpetuated, the idea that, the lowest homicide countries all have low volumes of guns, so therefore, doesn't that mean that civilian ownership of guns increases violence, or at the very least, homicides?
The problem is that there is no such association. For the sake of brevity and to target the issue, I'll take a look at the top 25 countries with the lowest homicide rates, whom possess information regarding their total civilian firearm ownership, and compare that to the world average. According to the United Nation's small arms survey, there are approximately 875 million firearms total in the world, and 650 million in civilian hands (Page 1). The world population on July 15th 2015, according to the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, is approximately 7.3 billion. Doing simple math, that means there are approximately 8.9 guns per 100 people in the world on average, in civilians hands.
The U.S. possess a third to a half of these firearms, creating a world average excluding the U.S. of approximately 5 guns per 100 people (350 million out of 7 billion), and countries such as Switzerland or Israel have fully automatic weapons in the homes of civilians, military firearms, given to them by the state, which offsets this figure somewhat. Nonetheless, this gives us a rough baseline of the world average of guns. How high is the gun ownership rate in the the countries with the top lowest homicide rates?
20 out of the 25 (80%) have a higher gun ownership rate higher than the world average. Of these, 15 have a gun ownership rate higher than 15 per person (60%), and 7 (28%) have a firearm ownership rate of 30 per 100. Another common association is that the U.S. has a significantly higher homicide rate than Europe. While Europe does in fact have countries with lower homicide rates than the U.S., the average is about 3.0, while it was about 4.5 in the U.S. suggesting a not so extreme difference. Comparatively, Russia had a homicide rate of 13, Greenland 19.4, Brazil 25.2, Venezuela 48, and El Salvador 65.
This is a comprehensive list of the UNODOC's self reported homicide and civilian firearms ownership rate. The bolded are countries above the average. The Raw numbers are Japan is .6, Singapore is at .5, Iceland is at 30.3, Brunei is at 1.4, Bahrain is at 24.8, Austria is at 30.4, Luxembourg is at 15.3, Oman is 25.5, Slovenia is 13.5, Switzerland is at 45.7, United Arab Emirates is at 22.1, Czech Republic is at 16.3, Spain is at 10.4, Germany is at 30.3, Qatar is at 19.2, Denmark is at 12, Norway is at 31.3, Italy is 11.9, New Zealand is at 22.6, China is at 4.9, Bhutan is at 3.5, Saudi Arabia is at 35, Sweden is at 31.6, Malta is at 11.9, and Australia is at 15.
Surely Mass shootings are Higher?
Surely mass shootings are higher? If not for violent crime or homicides in general, surely it's the mass shootings? There is little evidence to substantiate this, even though it's been said by the president of the United State's; that's how common a myth it is. So, what do the facts say, do mass shootings, and mass murders, occur in other countries than the U.S.? Other industrialized or "advanced" countries?
Here is a chart of such countries.
As you can see, the U.S. has a rate of about .15, and Switzerland is .17, Finland is .34, while Norway is 1.3. Hold on a second here. Norway has a homicide rate of .6, but then suddenly, a single mass attack brought it up 2.2 homicides per year?! They have a mass murder rate of 1.3, compared to the U.S.'s of .15? How is this possible? The fact of the matter is, it's completely random. It has almost no bearings on the total murder rate. Crime is random, and random mass attacks are evne more random. We can't blame anyone, any law or any procedure for this. It is an inevitability in a free world. The UK has had mass attacks since their gun laws were enacted. Australia has had them. Australia has had knife attacks, and fire attacks. These problems don't go away by laws, by wish washy feel good measures.
These violent attacks are caused by deeply rooted psychological issues. Each one of them has been insane, a terrorist, or possessed other mental issues. By ignoring the human aspect, by ignoring these people as people, and instead focusing on the weapon, be it the car bomb in the Oklahoma city bombing attack, the knives in the Chinese attacks, the box cutters or the plane used in 9/11. The fact of the matter is, these problems will persist as long as there are people motivated to kill one another, and it's naive or even blind to simply think that regulating a single tool will take away the ability for people to kill one another, even in large numbers.
The Danger of assault weapons
Hey, you take a scary word, assault, you mix it with another scary word, assault weapon, and you have the making for a great thing to be scared of, right? Approximately 2% of all gun homicides use a weapon that would qualify as an "assault weapon" (Page 2) (Page 98), with the highest estimate of 8% in state's such as California with much broader assault weapon categories. In fact, only about 9% use a rifle or a shotgun at all (4% and 5% respectively). Roughly 88%, or a confirmed 72% of firearms homicides use a pistol, or a handgun. According to the FBI, in 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US, with 6,371 of those attributed to handguns. [1] This is a little strange, considering people continue to assert that these weapons are particularly deadly or should be banned.
Try to explain to me why an adjustable stock should be banned? A barrel shroud? A forward grip? Do you even know what these things are? If not, and you support an assault weapons ban, you are blindly banning something that you have no idea what it is. And to me, that is terrifying. Who knows what you might vote in if you actually have no idea what these things are? How, do you believe, they make weapons any deadlier? Any more dangerous? What particular features about them say the average civilian shouldn't have one? If you're jumping on the bandwagon to support something simply because of it's name, you are a terrifying, ridiculous individual, and you should make a mental note that you dived head first in to policy that would effect hundreds of millions of people, effect their freedoms, based literally on nothing; no thought, no googling, nothing. A knee-jerk reaction, you blindly supported it. To me, the most dangerous element of a democracy is when the votes aren't counted properly or people are uneducated about the subject at hand, because that effectively makes the democracy worthless. What's the value of the citizenry choosing something if they don't think about that choice? Or their thinking is dumb?
For those of you who have a done a little bit more information or haven't made up your minds, the fact of the matter is, adjustable stocks, pistol grips, forward grips, barrel shrouds, and the like are not particularly dangerous. They don't increase the lethality of the firearm or danger in any way. They do however make it more comfortable, and so that different people can use the weapon. A person with loner arms may want a longer stock, while a person with shorter arms may want a shorter stock. With an adjustable stock, you can simply make this stock fit to your shoulder without major tools or modification. In this way, it makes the gun more comfortable. Perhaps the only logical thing to come out
On top of this, the assault weapon bill promises to ban another 153 guns by name. These are largely the most popular firearms in the U.S., such as the AR-15, Ak-47, mossberg 500, Remington 870, and the like. They suggested that they wouldn't be attacking the average American's guns, but these are the average gun's people own. It's in fact nearly 90% of the firearms. Even if you still agree that adjustable stocks, pistol grips, forward grips etc. should be banned, you surely can't believe that all these guns which lack these features need to be banned, as well? For what purpose does this serve? I don't want anyone to feel stupid or dumb. After all, it's a commonly held opinion, and a lot of people think this way. But I do want you to realize how it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, how you support something and you don't really know what it is. I assure you, if you did, you wouldn't support it. I want you to feel smart for realizing that you can realize these things, and then do it, all the time. Almost everyone has the potential for intelligence, it's all a matter of applying yourself.
For me, when someone says the word "assault weapon", it's an automatic red flag. As compared to other types of weapons, that aren't used for assault? Such as chocolate weapons? After all, anything can be a weapon, and any weapon can be used to assault. Why not say "Assault firearm", or "assault gun", or even "lethal firearm", or "lethal gun". Why not "deadly weapons", or the like? Why assault? It's practically the vaguest term in existence, and it could contain almost anything. And from the looks of it, it contains a lot of random stuff.