Freedom from Fear

I would like to talk about an absolutely ludicrous notion that I've heard several times at different places, mostly in discussion with pro-ignorance, anti-freedom people about firearms.

The concept is they have a RIGHT to be free of fear.

Let's get some definitions established

Right - Freedom, immunity, power, or privilege, due to one by agreement, birth, claim, guaranty, or by the application of legal, moral, or natural principles.
(as a side note, just trying to define a "right" is worthy of it's own post)

Fear -

a. A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger.

b. A state or condition marked by this feeling:

Do people have a right to be free of fear, the answer may surprise you, but I say YES.

Now it is not a Constitutionally protected right, like the Right to Free Speech or to Keep and bear arms.
Nor is it an unlimited right, this right is definitely limited. First it is limited by the nature of the problem. It is not practical to remove all the things people fear from the world, it simply can not be done. Some people fear the dark, yet under no technology can we banish the dark. Nor would it be wise since the natural cycle of life requires dark.
Those who suffer from one fear probably suffer from others -- explains much about those who fear inanimate objects...wonder if they also have Ablutophobia : Fear of washing or bathing. How do we determine who fears what, where they live in relation to those things they fear. The logistical nightmare of trying to implement this concept of freedom of fear would require massive government intervention and bureaucracy -- which should tell you why the United Nations includes it as one of their human rights. According to research, at some time in their life 11% of the world's populatoin will suffer from phobias....not just fear -- most extensive list I could find has 417 listed, the world would be paralyzed if we tried to get rid of things people fear.

If the practical and logistical challenges are so daunting, why shouldn't I end the conversation here? Well, there are some other issues to consider. Let's look at the first part of the phrase - a right to be free of fear.

Do people really have a right to be free of fear, is this an actual right? That depends on how you define rights. I was intrigued to see so many definitions of the word. The most common definitions in dictionaries do not even include the meaning as I show it above.

I say that the only portion of that definition that applies in this case is due to birth. Just being alive gives a person the right to be free of fear....but it is an oh so limited right. If someone is afraid of beards (I happen to have one-full disclosure), they have no authority or power to require me to remove mine. The person who fears beards can not grow one or request their spouse not to grow one. But nothing in the legal, moral or ethical code in the world grants that person the authority to enforce their wishes on a single other person.

A person's right to be free of fear was not listed in the Constitution as a right as the right to keep and bear arms was thus the government has no power, no authority to take actions for the benefit of individuals. Now as a nation as a whole, there are things we fear - war, famine, pestilence, etc and the government is required to take action. I'm not sure how to fully explain the difference other except this way -- the government can and should act only on those issues that the vast overwhelming majority of the people properly are concerned about.

Actions needed to remove the fears and phobias individuals have do not trump my constitutionally protected liberties. PERIOD.

My wife is afraid of snakes but that fear gives her no authority do demand that anyone else does not keep a snake in their house or apartment. What it does give her the authority to do is take reasonable and legal precautions to avoid what she fears. We've put out snake away products, we remove from OUR property places where snakes may want to inhabit, we plant flowers & plants that are known to help repel snakes.

Let's go back to the definition of fear -A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger.


The mere presence of a firearm does not endanger an imminence of danger either, the firearm is an inanimate object. It by itself can perform no action. This view that firearms by themselves do not create a public disturbance or danger has been confirmed by court cases.

This is why the people who fear firearms or the people who carry them do not have the authority to limit my carrying them....I do nothing to endanger an imminence of danger. NOTHING.

And that should be the end of the story....but it won't stop the attacks on our right to keep and bear arms.

(by the way, this will probably be the last new post at Blogger. I'm going to try to port everything over to the WordPress site and domain my son has provided for me today.)

Please join the discussion

Manipulated Statistics

Not here in America....but the land of gun controlled Australia (hat tip to Strange Justice)

SENIOR police say they are being forced to "fudge" reports, and test drivers for drink-driving at times and places they know few offenders will be caught, to manipulate crime statistics.

Officers from at least three Local Service Areas have told AdelaideNow it is common for reports to be manipulated and for traffic blitzes to be held to improve statistics and meet specific targets

It is not just alcohol related traffic incidents that are being manipulated but think about that. We often compare firearms to cars and here is a systematic attempt to lessen the crime rates for drunk driving; that over inflates the impact that firearm related crimes.

Crime statistics are analysed daily from police incident reports (PIRs) and one senior officer has described how reports are commonly manipulated to keep crime statistics lower and apprehension rates higher.

"Say a car gets broken into and something gets stolen," the officer said. "Rather than two charges, illegal interference and theft, it just gets entered as a theft – one charge.

"If we happen to stumble across someone who'd broken into a car, then they would get charged with both, so your statistics show your crime rate lower, but your apprehension rate being high."

In offences with multiple victims, the victims are often grouped or become witnesses and the matter is entered as one incident report

Now, why would the law enforcement agencies want to lower the apparent crime rate? Perhaps it would reflect badly on their performance. Perhaps it would reflect badly on the laws they have passed, including the ones that work to disarm the population. Perhaps if people knew how bad crime really was, they might want to have firearms to defend themselves and their property, eh?

One person told AdelaideNow one management directive was to redirect schoolyard assaults back to the school so they were not recorded as crimes.

"That way the LSA can claim a downturn in assaults," the person wrote.

Hmm, sounds much like what the United Kingdom has been doing for decades with their numbers.

Crime statistics at one of Britain's most beleaguered police forces are being manipulated by detectives, who are under pressure to record burglaries and robberies as lesser offences to meet targets for cutting some of the most feared crimes.

Serving officers in the Nottinghamshire police force have revealed to The Telegraph the techniques they use to help manipulate the headline crime figures, enabling Steve Green, the Chief Constable, to claim that he is winning the battle to combat burglary and robbery....

A former head of CID with Nottinghamshire police has also claimed that incidents of gun crime have deliberately not been logged by the force, effectively halving its number of recorded shootings.

Retired Det Supt Peter Coles said last night: "I know for a fact there have been incidents of gun crime which have not been recorded. People have turned up at hospital with a gunshot wound and told the police to go away because more often than not there is a disinclination among villains to pursue the matter. Despite the fact that there has obviously been a shooting, the crime has not been recorded by the force."...

In a separate development, crimes which would formerly have been recorded as attempted burglaries, and therefore been included in overall statistics for burglary, are now being logged as criminal damage.

Where an effort has been made by a criminal to force an entry, such as by jemmying a door or window, it is being marked down only for the damage caused to the property. The figures for criminal damage are also far less likely to attract adverse publicity than those for burglary, a crime which inspires a high level of fear in the general public.

Mr Coles said: "The offence of attempted burglary is virtually non-existent in the figures now. If someone contacts the police in Nottinghamshire now to say that a burglar has tried to get into their home, with a window broken but nothing stolen, that will go down in the Nottinghamshire figures as criminal damage."...

And yet some people have trouble believing that the crime rate in the United Kingdom is higher, nearly 4 times higher than that of America.

Defensive Gun Uses - Reasonableness Test

One of the issues I often encounter online is people not believing how many times firearms are used defensively to stop crime.

So, thinking about it I decided to see if it was reasonable or not to believe the numbers.

Dr. Gary Kleck's survey determined that as many as 2,500,000 times a year someone uses a firearms to stop or prevent a crime....is that number outrageous as some people claim?

Let's examine it and see.

There are an estimated 80,000,000 gun owners in America. Let's assume that each defensive gun use is done by a different person.

2,500,000 divided by 365 days equals 6,850 uses per day.

Sounds like a lot until you consider that 80 million people own firearms.

(6,850 divided by 80,000,000)*100 = 0.0085625%


Okay, so is it reasonable to say that less then 0.01% of gun owners each day use their firearms to stop or prevent a crime? I think it is.

Let's assume that most gun owners never have to use their firearms, or the presence of their firearms never stops a crime...if only 10% of the gun owners use their firearms
(6,850 divided by 8,000,000)*100 = 0.085625%

- that is still less than a tenth of a percent of gun owners per day -- at 2.5 million DGUs. Is it reasonable to say that 0.1% of gun owners might use their firearms to stop a crime each day? I think it is?



I think most people will readily recognize the reality behind the situation. It will be a typical bell curve, most people never use their firearms to stop a crime, some people will use them once or twice, others will use them multiple times a year.

So, is it reasonable to say there might be 2,500,000 defensive gun uses a year?
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

It's not the guns, It is the culture.

Via Drudge Report and The Smoking Gun comes details of this "artist":

Meet Steven Gilmore. The wannabe rapper tried to rob a Florida convenience store Friday night and shot an employee in the head with a BB gun in a bid to establish "street cred" for his nascent hip-hop career. The 21-year-old Gilmore, seen in the below mug shot, admitted his harebrained scheme after he was arrested Saturday night, according to Gainesville police. Gilmore, who also copped to a stickup of the Hungry Howie's restaurant, told police that he thought the robberies would provide him the kind of reputation he apparently believes is required in the rap world

Now, is this is the root of this crime based in the "gun culture" or the "rap culture"?

Now normally, I won't name post the name of criminals because I don't want to glorify their violence or provide any legacy for them...but in this case I want plenty of publicity for this young man. I want it to be difficult for him to live down his decision.

I want to publicize how some people view crime, as a means to an end, as a way of life. They view crime this way, not out of ignorance, not out of unconscious response but out of a calculated, fully informed decision. This is the type of "culture" that firearm related violence comes from, not the law abiding gun owner.

This is one of the popular myths that people want to attach to firearms. That every "gun owner" has the same culture, the same values, the same principles. We don't. The results are clear & easy to see - Some people commit crimes with their firearms and some people use their firearms for sporting and self defense purposes without breaking the law. Same types of firearms, just completely different cultures.

Debunking availability Part 3

In the comments to debunking availability part 2, MikeB thinks comparing various countries is comparing apples to oranges. And to some small extent that is true. What is true is that countries with more guns don't necessarily have greater suicide rates...so that demolishes his theory.

He say this:

The real comparison would be if you could compare Japan with very few guns
to a Japan with lots of guns.

Since I couldn't easily find information on Japan (hey, I'm on vacation - I get to be lazy), I substituted America for Japan. No one will deny that America has been increasing the number of personally owned firearms through the years, right?

So, if the theory - more guns = more deaths- should have suicides going up if that is the pre-dominate factor.

But has it happened?
From the CDC WISQARS site, the second number is the age adjusted rate (edit -- OOPS, According to Weer'd, I shouldn't have used the age adjusted rate. So, here is the edited column, first number is the year, second is the age adjusted and the last number is the crude rate.
1981..........12.31..........12.03
1982..........12.44..........12.19
1983..........12.33..........12.10
1984..........12.58..........12.42
1985..........12.51..........12.38
1986..........12.99..........12.87
1987..........12.82..........12.71
1988..........12.48..........12.44
1989..........12.30..........12.25
1990..........12.46..........12.39
1991..........12.28..........12.18
1992..........11.98..........11.88
1993..........12.04..........11.97
1994..........11.89..........11.84
1995..........11.79..........11.75
1996..........11.53..........11.47
1997..........11.24..........11.20
1998..........11.12..........11.08
1999..........10.48..........10.46
2000..........10.44..........10.43
2001..........10.70..........10.74
2002..........10.93..........11.00
2003..........10.75..........10.84
2004..........10.94..........11.06
2005..........10.88..........11.03
2006..........10.95..........11.15

Edited - still a general down turn in the number of suicides. For the 2003-2006, I wonder how many of those suicides are related to the increased number of veterans committing suicide. Still, doesn't this disprove the theory. If availability was the factor, the predominate factor, then the number of suicides should have climbed each and every year. The rate didn't.
So, once again NO INCREASE that can be directly related or attributed to the amount of firearms owned. So, once again NO evidence to support the availability myth.

It appears that other factors are at work here, factors that have greater correlation & causation then availability.

Shouldn't we be addressing those issues before we try to take away people's rights?

Debunking Availablity Part 2

Looking at the myth that firearm availability is the predominate or major factor in "gun violence" brings us to suicide.

In Part 1, I presented evidence showing that there was greater correlation between poverty and homicide rates than there was correlation between firearm ownership and homicide rates by state.

That wasn't enough for some people. They claim we shouldn't exclude suicide from the comparison. I disagree because if someone truly wants to end their life, NOTHING is going to stop them. Most people who use suicide attempts as a cry for help don't want to be successful thus choice methods that are less likely to succeed.

Even still, let's demolish the myth a little more

Country Ownership Suicide Rate
Russia 9 32.2
Finland 20.1 32
Japan * 23.7
Ukraine 9 22.6
Serbia 37.5 19.5
France 32 17.6
Switzerland 46 17.6
Austria 31 15.6
Sweden 31.5 13.3
New Zealand 26.8 13.2
Germany 30 13
Canada 31.5 11.4
United States 90 11.1
Australia 15.5 10.9
India 4 10.6
South Africa 13.1 10
Argentina 12.6 8.7
Spain 11 7.8
Thailand 16 7.8
Italy 12.1 7.1
United Kingdom 5.6 6.8
Colombia 7.2 5.7
Brazil 8.8 4.3
Mexico 15 4.1
Greece 23 3.5
Philippines 4.7 2.1
Iran 5.3 0.2

Wikipedia is the source for both set of statistics.

As you can see from the chart, the country with the highest suicide rate doesn't have the highest firearm ownership rate. That alone should end the debate, right?

Finland, the country with the twelth highest firearm ownership rates is nearly tied with Russia. So, isn't that a strong indication there are other factors besides firearm ownership at work in suicide rates?

America with the highest level of firearm ownership is 13th in suicide rates.

Also, for the final evidence destroying this myth - JAPAN. Firearm ownership in Japan is practically non-existent!! Read that again, personal firearm ownership in Japan is practically non-existent, yet their suicide rate is the 3rd highest.

So, doesn't that definitely disprove that firearm ownership is the major factor in suicide?

Debunking Availability Part 1

I suppose if this is supposed to be a gun blog, I might as well talk about firearms. So here goes with what I hope to be the first of a series looking at statistics.

MikeB302000 actually posted some evidence to support his claim of "more guns, more everything".

His contention, and many gun banners like him, is that the more firearms there are the more deaths, accidents, crime, and I think they even claim firearm ownership causes more sunspots and graffiti, but I'm not sure.

So I decided to look at the rates of firearm ownership, poverty level, homicide by firearm rates and firearm related death rates.

All you scientific types out there, please feel free to correct me and help me understand this better.

(bear with me - this is the first time I've tried to post something like this

I created this spread sheet to compare firearm ownership with Homicide Rates, Firearm related deaths for all reasons (suicide, homicide, legal) and a single other factor...the percentage of people living in poverty by state.

Using the M/S Excel functions, I ran the correlation rates for those factor. I make no claim to be an expert (hardly any statistical knowledge) but basic understanding says that if two random factors have an impact on each other, there should be a higher degree of correlation.

			State Homicide Age - Adjusted Rate All Intentions Age - Adjusted Rate Firearm Ownership % % people living in poverty Alabama 7.28 16.07 51.70 15.50 Alaska 3.24 17.20 57.80 9.20 Arizona 6.43 15.68 31.10 13.80 Arkansas 5.60 15.65 55.30 17.60 California 5.22 9.48 21.30 13.20 Colorado 2.58 11.41 34.70 9.80 Connecticut 2.04 5.35 16.70 8.80 Delaware 3.96 8.88 25.50 8.50 District of Columbia 21.58 23.27 3.80 16.80 Florida 3.85 10.01 24.50 12.30 Georgia 4.80 11.83 40.30 12.00 Hawaii 0.43 2.17 8.70 9.70 Idaho 2.03 13.88 55.30 10.50 Illinois 4.40 7.93 20.20 12.50 Indiana 4.22 11.13 39.10 10.20 Iowa 0.93 6.70 42.80 9.70 Kansas 2.30 9.22 42.10 10.70 Kentucky 3.78 12.96 47.70 15.40 Louisiana 9.98 18.66 44.10 17.00 Maine 0.57 7.68 40.50 12.20 Maryland 7.85 11.90 21.30 8.60 Massachusetts 1.71 3.41 12.60 9.80 Michigan 5.05 10.63 38.40 12.10 Minnesota 1.73 6.93 41.70 7.00 Mississippi 6.31 16.05 55.30 17.70 Missouri 5.17 12.90 41.70 10.90 Montana 2.10 16.93 57.70 14.30 Nebraska 1.70 7.70 38.60 9.90 Nevada 5.13 16.32 33.80 10.20 New Hampshire 0.63 6.54 30.00 5.70 New Jersey 3.56 5.14 12.30 8.20 New Mexico 4.29 13.92 34.80 17.50 New York 2.70 5.18 18.00 14.40 North Carolina 5.23 12.78 41.30 14.80 North Dakota 0.45 8.97 50.70 10.30 Ohio 3.74 9.60 32.40 10.80 Oklahoma 4.15 13.18 42.90 12.60 Oregon 1.92 10.64 39.80 11.70 Pennsylvania 4.61 10.82 34.70 10.40 Rhode Island 1.84 3.60 12.80 11.30 South Carolina 5.66 13.81 42.30 14.00 South Dakota 0.91 10.11 56.60 12.50 Tennessee 6.26 16.03 43.90 14.90 Texas 4.39 11.07 35.90 16.40 Utah 1.31 9.66 43.90 9.60 Vermont 1.28 6.72 42.00 8.80 Virginia 4.70 11.51 35.10 9.80 Washington 2.37 8.76 33.10 11.70 West Virginia 3.37 13.80 55.40 16.10 Wisconsin 2.95 8.45 44.40 10.20 Wyoming 2.10 13.53 59.70 9.60
			Mike points out: The States designated "high gun" are eleven with total population of 28.5 million, as follows: Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, South Dakota, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota and Kentucky. (designated in green above) and The States designated "low gun" are five with a total population of 26.2 million, as follows: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. Designated in red above. So what are the correlations: The correlation factor for All Intentions and Firearm Ownership is 0.4438. The correlation factor for Homicides and Firearm Ownership is -0.2295. It seems there is a higher correlation for suicide and firearm ownership then there is for Homicides and firearm ownership. This has been discussed many times; people who are serious about suicide will often chose a firearm because they know it will work. Those that are reaching out or unsure will choose less effective measures. Now for the interesting part. The correlation factor for All Intentions and the % of Poverty is 0.5952 The correlation factor for Homicides and % Poverty is 0.5088. Hmm, maybe it is not firearm ownership that is the biggest factor but something else? Poverty perhaps? I, and most of gun bloggers, realize that correlation is not causation but doesn't it point us in a direction that might actually lead to changes? If we focus on the causes of poverty, might not that lead to a reduction in the reasons for some crimes...including firearm crimes?