politics

Not to diminish your comment, but this research is tautologically flawed:

Men who owned handguns were eight times more likely than men who didn't to die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Women who owned handguns were more than 35 times more likely than women who didn't to kill themselves with a gun

I mean… obviously? I bet sailors get bit by sharks more than Great Plains farmers. This is the wrong denominator — they should be looking at all cause mortality and all types of suicide in gun owners vs others.

I definitely do believe owning a gun would have a higher suicide rate by making it more convenient to use the gun in a moment of weakness/impulse. 

That article brutalizes the original research for a scarier popping headline.

From the actual paper, the important bit:

Rates of suicide by any method were higher among handgun owners, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 3.34 for all male owners as compared with male nonowners (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.13 to 3.56) and 7.16 for female owners as compared with female nonowners (95% CI, 6.22 to 8.24).

 Handgun owners did not have higher rates of suicide by other methods or higher all-cause mortality. The risk of suicide by firearm among handgun owners peaked immediately after the first acquisition, but 52% of all suicides by firearm among handgun owners occurred more than 1 year after acquisition.

This is the interesting bit for me. If you remove people buying a gun for purpose of suicide, all cause mortality is the same, which indicates that purchase of a gun for suicide is a relatively small proportion of all gun owners.

Also important to note: this type of statistic does not differentiate no difference from not enough data to say there’s a difference, which is important. P value/frequentist statistics cannot say no effect, ever.

Next you are going to tell us that buying a firearm with threaded barrel is a scary feature and should be banned like WA state has already done.

A firearm is not a good solution to anything. It's a tool of last resort. If i believe I, or some one I love is going to die. At that point, i don't care if i can beat the military, or if im labeled a cop killer because the alternative is Im dead. This isn't about being a hero, this isn't about saving my neighborhood or my country, this isn't about beating the military. Owning and carrying a firearm is about giving yourself one last option when all else fails. When you know you will die without it, may as well have the chance to do something.

Firearms also work as a deterrent. They are a show of force. Without it, the government has a monopoly on violence. Cops, ICE, the military, whoever. When they are they only ones with the ability to do that, we will always be under their thumb.

I'm not saying we should be resorting to violence unless there is absolutely no other choice. The very last thing i want is a shootout or fight with any government agency. I will not win that fight. But I would rather die standing and fighting then die on my knees.

I strongly believe that it is everyone's responsibility to do their best to protect themselves and those they love. Go exercise. Go learn martial arts. go learn how to shoot. Not because you plan to use violence, but so when violence is used on you, you are not helpless.

I'm not going to point out the flaws in your statistics. Someone else already did that.