I saw this on a website recently and thought it was a pretty nifty idea. Have an instant comparison of firearms related deaths to other comparable mechanisms of injury, and BAM! Right there at the bottom, the number of DGUs for the year so far. The data isn’t exactly live, and is instead calculated using previously available numbers for DGUs and other deaths, but something is better than nothing.

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21 COMMENTS

  1. So I clicked the link and the article it took me to was from 1999, with no mention of how these specific numbers were calculated. Dissapointing.

  3. http://actionamerica.org/guns/gun-web-widget.shtml

    The data used to generate the numbers that you see on the face of the widget comes from two very reliable sources. The death rate data comes from the Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control for 2006; the federal agency tasked with collecting and compiling such data. The gun self-defense data comes from a report in the The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, (Fall 1995) titled, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun,” by renowned criminologists Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz.

      • The self-defense gun use data is projected based on a study done in 1995. The rest of the data is projected from the CDC’s 2006 data on causes of death and injury.

        Although the CDC now has complete data from 2009, 2006 is still reasonably recent as far as these things go. The DGU data is questionable though, as the rates of murder and other violent crimes have dropped significantly since 1995. Arguably, fewer crimes committed would mean fewer DGU’s as well.

  5. Neat, but it links to a poorly-made website with a bunch of links to FairTax and Tea Party shite. I’m unmovably pro-gun, but those make me leery; how is this going to do anything to convince people who are already set against Conservative politics and guns?

    • One can do little to convince someone to change their core beliefs learned in their formative years and there are many studies that support this point.
      What you can do is use it to cause rational PPL to question the endless propaganda they hear everyday

      • Except that if it’s embedded in the other side’s propaganda, it automatically loses.

        You probably wouldn’t trust anything you found on Mother Jones unless you already knew it was true beforehand (and maybe not even then). The average liberal will do exactly the same with anything they find on a super-conservative site like Action America.

        • Data that is openly admitted to be 7 and 18 years old respectively but presented as current is a bit too transparent for anyone using this to expect to be taken seriously.

        • The 2006 CDC data is not that old, as far as these things go. The 2009 data was only completed just a few months ago.

          But yes, the numbers based on a 1995 study are questionable. It would be better if this counter were based on something like stories in the Associated Press and Reuters.

    • Many have already pointed out that the Democrats will lose a lot of votes if they try to force through anti-2A legislation. The GOP’s candidates and agenda in 2012 were awful, and that more than anything else is why Democrats had such good turnout at the polls.

      As a trade unionist (construction), there is already a lot of support for gun rights among my co-workers. We understand that yes there really are people out to get us, and we have seen violence used against union organizers and members in the US in living memory. The overreach of government and government-like powers is not a theoretical issue for union members.

      And before anybody gets too worked up over the union issue, not all unions are the same. My local (IBEW) is proud to work with our contractors, not against them. Our livelihoods depend on the success of the contractors who hire union labor.

  6. Maybe the truth about guns can create one that links to a book on the subject and doesn’t also have links to other political topics and who else would have more Pro Gun related info on there site.

    Thanks
    Robert

  7. “…how is this going to do anything to convince people who are already set against Conservative politics and guns?”

    You never target your conversation to those people because they won’t change their mind until something drastic happens. You instead target the audience that is watching from the sidelines who may or may not have made up their minds yet. If you can demonstrate that they are in fact in the weaker position (what is the weaker position will depend on the context) then you can sway the undecided’s to your side.

    • I totally disagree. What we need to do is disassociate gun rights from conservative politics and instead treat it as a human rights issue.

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