Lethality verus survivability

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Inspired by the recent post about gun control, I wanted to talk about guns. More specifically, what guns do. It helps to nail down some basics before getting into higher-level discussions about gun policy. So what exactly do guns do? How should we talk about guns? I have a story.

Well, after years of study, I have determined that guns shoot bits of metal at things. Rather, guns shoot people. For instance, I point the gun-thing at that guy over there and a small bit of metal-stuff is propelled towards his general area, often involving some disruption of bodily integrity. More often than not, the small bit of metal misses completely as people are generally terrible at shooting when it doesn't involve a nice little range where everything is nice and neat, and your target isn't some piece of paper. Hell, all the hunters I know miss more deer than they hit. Shooting stuff is hard in the real world.

The question: does this ability to fling bits of metal in a general direction make you safer? I contend that it does not. I often find that people involved with metal-flinging most often find themselves harmed by other people's bits of metal flung in their general direction.

Personal protection these days seems to subsist on a blurring of lines between survivability and lethality. If you're very concerned about being shot, the best thing you can do is to lay down on the ground and put a bag over your head. 98 percent of all metal-bits flung out of gun-things are shot above waist-level, often in an ascending pattern. So hit the deck, and put a bag over your head. There you go, you've just increased your survivability by a whole bunch.

Do guns increase your chances of surviving a gun-shot? Not really. All the scientific evidence I've found suggests that being in the possession of a gun does little to nothing to mitigate the effects of having one's bodily integrity compromised by metal bits. It would seem that having a bag over your head is better, in that it prevents you from seeing possibly disturbing and traumatic things, and thus saving you a lot of psychological harm. In fact, I haven't found one case of someone being shot to death while wearing a bag over their head.

Do guns make your safer, or do guns just make you more able to use guns? I think that guns just make it easier for you to use guns. Gang-members, after all, are all about the guns, and they always end up dead for some strange reason, in spite of all the personal protection they have. Neither have I found any gang-member putting a bag over their head. I can find a pretty strong reverse-correlation between gun-deaths and a lack of bags-over-heads.

I have tried putting a bag over my head, and I can confidently assert that I've never been shot to death while doing so. Nor have I ever been robbed. This is because wearing a bag over your head implies that you lack any serious financial resources. If you had financial resources, you'd be wearing a very fancy bag over your head, and my experiments involve brown-paper grocery bags. DO NOT CUT EYE HOLES! This is very important.

Also of note: I can shoot just as accurately as any random person with a bag over my head. Weird how that works.

Comments

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Gang members without guns have a higher mortality rate than gang members with guns... perhaps it's not the guns in the equation that are inviting lethality.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Ok I'm going to need a source for that first of all.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Maybe the key is not protection, but who gets more stuff. Intuitively, it does seem to me that in a group of people, some having guns and others not having guns, the people with the guns will probably have more stuff. And having more stuff is good. Though, you are more at risk, as you may be confronted by another person who has a gun and wants what you want. No guts, no glory. Guns also encourage a lot of respect. I suppose that's a big reason we tend to be more congenial with a police officer, for instance.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well I don't really think of the gun when I see a police officer. I'm just a normal person who thinks "Oh shit, hope I don't get a ticket or something."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Fuck guns. This is what really instills respect in people:



And in fact very easily *buys* guns. A *lot* of guns. If enough of it plus callousness and balls, even heavy artillery.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I suppose there's also the quality of guns that is "what do people imagine guns do"

And then there is the image of the cowboy, dirty harry, or maybe the Matrix or that chick from the Resident Evil movies. Maybe you can hold it sideways and it shoots better, or maybe your aim is improved if you spin around in slow motion shooting two of them at once, sideways of course. You can do this with a shotgun, Desert Eagle, or elephant gun just as easily as you can a pistol. You don't have to worry about the damn thing bouncing back and knocking your teeth out. Also it looks cool to point it stuff, it makes you look tough. Nevermind gun safety or anything, the thing doesn't go off unless you want it to, you can even do little tricks with it like juggling.

There's the idea that it reinforces how much of a red neck someone is, or otherwise how much of a gangster they are. It seems to be a political statement in that you go brandishing it around when you want to remind people you're a conservative. If you're in the Police force it is one of the things you can use to bully around the public out there.

And then someone accidently gets shot and we all learn the reality of what guns do.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

What about open bolt guns like the Uzi?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

With the obvious intention of this being to kill shit dead. Primarily through the process of entering and tearing flesh, and even exiting with a bigger wound than that caused by the entry.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

You'll probably enjoy this excerpt from Marcus Sedgwick's Revolver:

"The Colt is the finest machine I have ever seen in my life. It does one thing, and it does it superbly well.

Imagine I take one of those cartridges there, from the box. I'm not going to, but imagine I did. It's a tiny thing. It's made from four separate parts. There's the case, the brass case that makes up most of its length. At one end, the back of the case, is the percussion cap, a small disc of copper with a little fulminate of mercury inside. At the other is the bullet itself, a tiny cone of lead weighing so very little. Inside the case is the gunpowder.

...

Imagine I took this cartridge, and lifted back the gate on the back of the cylinder here. It slides into one of the six chambers, a perfect fit. Everything measured and made to perfection. I pull back the hammer on the back of the gun, just halfway at first, so I can rotate the cylinder into place. Now the cartridge we loaded is sitting directly under the firing pin, on the underside of the hammer.

...

When the hammer hits the percussion cap, the fulminate of mercury explodes, for it cannot tolerate being struck. Once the cap explodes, it sets fire to the gunpowder inside the case, and instantly the temperature inside the case rises to a couple thousand degrees, as hot as the smelting works at the mine, but all inside that tiny brass case...

[T]he brass case, being so hot, there and then expands, and swells to press against the inside of the chamber, and so now it released its grip on the lead bullet...inside that barrel is a series of three grooves, set out in a spiral down its length. The bullet, which is lead, and with the hellfire of that explosion behind it, is now both hot and soft. It's forced into those spirals. They bite into it, so that as it makes its way down the barrel, it spins. It spins and spins, and by the time it leaves the barrel, with the last of the gas pushing out behind it, it's not only spinning faster than Rumpelstiltskin, it's moving at over a thousand feet per second, which means that the bullet has hit whatever the barrel was pointing at before the bang has even left your ears."

[dwer.livejournal.com]

tl, dr. Boring.

Guns are made to shoot things. The implied reason is to kill them

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

A lot of the arguments made for guns for everyone amount to viewing weapons as magic talismans. I would think civilization would have advanced beyond that view, but what do I know? A gun is a device made to kill people. Flinching from that and insisting people pulling a trigger of a device meant to kill people is trite, but only true in the sense that swinging a sword or a battleaxe didn't kill people, people killed people. The only weapon like that that can kill indiscriminately is either bombs or artillery, so the "people kill people" claim is nothing but moral cowardice to get around the real issue.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

The problem with the "armed polite society" argument is that it is utterly equivalent to an unarmed police society argument.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Not to disagree with the august [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] but guns do nothing. They are inanimate objects that sit and collect dust until they are picked up and used by a person exercising their own will over the gun. Then they can be used by people for any number of purposes. I used one paddle my duck boat once when the engine quit on me.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Your story contradicts your thesis. You gun, in fact, was used as a paddle and can be said to have paddled. Pointing out that guns can do many things contradicts the idea that guns can't do anything. This strange and obtuse linguistic gamesmanship only seems to come up with guns. Let's just use natural language to speak naturally without getting into silly language games. My car does sixty miles an hour on the freeway. My computer displays spreadsheets. My gun shoots bullets.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

To me it seems that the difference between a handgun and an assault rifle is that one is the level of force. Both of them are a threat, both of them are protection, but one of them seems to imply more force than the other. I might be wrong, that's just how it seems to me. Someone who thinks a 'handgun isn't enough' strikes me as a person who doesn't merely want a weapon for protection. They're thinking 'I need something that can kill people faster'.

Of course, I find it perfectly fine for people to collect weapons as a hobby or whatever, but when the rationale of protection comes into play, I question people who feel they need land mines and bazookas.

This is all just conjecture, and if anyone can actually tell me the purpose of an automatic weapon in the hands of a civilian for purposes other than collecting, I am willing to learn.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

My guns don't work. They've never in their entire existence hit a person with a bit of metal.

I'm taking them all back for a refund!

(And if I had time I'd leave a non-flippant comment along the lines of how misogynistic the whole omg-guns-have-no-use-at-all argument is. But I don't, so please ignore my reference.)

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

Guns actually do a couple of things.

One, fling metal in such a way that has the possibility of inducing trauma, great pain, and/or death in another human being. Two, being recognizable as being able to do such a thing with regularity and therefore affecting the behavior of other people that see and/or know about it.

So, let's consider 4 possible combinations of those factors: 1) Effective use (i.e. the gun hits the target) and not being recognized., 2) Effective use and being recognized as a gun. 3) Ineffective use and not being recognized, and 4) Ineffective use and being recognized.

You are talking about the 4th combination when you discuss "spray and pray". The main effect of guns in this situation is behavioral and it's to induce fear. The possibility of "accidental" effective use and therefore death is probably the big reason for the fear and it totally accents the differences in the people with a gun's "power" vs. everyone else's.

So, you're in the ballpark on that one.

The others, not so much.

Like #3. That's when someone hears a noise, doesn't register it as a danger and just goes on with their life. If it's not explained to them it's a danger, nothing really happens unless the bullet ends up accidentally going straight up, then coming down and killing someone on New Years or something. Then we get a law.

#2 Can be good and bad depending on why the actions are being taken. A SWAT team taking out a murderer is doing this. Often, police are theoretically applying this when they threaten a criminal with violence while trying to get him to surrender. The idea being "I can effectively kill and/or hurt you", you recognize I have a gun, you will comply. And--supposedly--many criminals will do so because they are also more afraid of #4 than the police. However, mass shootings like the one at Virginia Tech are this category as well. People watched the guy, knew he was armed, and he rather effectively--from his victim count--used his guns.

In both instances of #2, it's as much seeing the effectiveness of the gun use as the actual implied fear of the gun that creates the element of control over unarmed people. Even the police going into situations like this are afraid...

Which leaves us with #1.

THIS one is probably the scariest after the fact and the most shocking up front. This is like the beltway sniper situation. This is also what makes the Secret Service paranoid. Why? Because--if you never recognize the gun--you can't adjust your behavior to avoid getting shot. There's essentially nothing you can do to really ameliorate the threat. You can't comply with a sniper or a random gunman in a crowd or the person you don't suspect of carrying a concealed weapon. The only thing you can do is to try and figure out what they might want ahead of time and not be a target.

In the case of a concealed weapon, don't stick out as a likely mark for a criminal or be a criminal if the gun carrier is a law-abiding citizen. In the case of a sniper, it's more of the same except you may never even be aware of them in which case you have no idea who's making the decision to shoot or not to shoot and who you might want to appeal to.

Which is why the fear.

Most of the time--in situations #2 and #4--you know what the person with the gun wants. They want you to "Put your hands where they can see them and step away from the baby sitter slowly." or they want your "Motherfucking wallet" with "no hero shit". In which case, it's simple to handle situation by situation.

So, yeah, depends on whether someone can actually hit the target, eh?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Good points ^

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

As I said in the other thread, What guns (and weapons in general) do is that they democratize violence.

In a weapon-free world the ability to inflict or resist a violent attack is determined by physical ability alone. The weak or infirm, are easy prey for would-be murderer thief or rapist who is young and fit.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Are you suggesting that in a world with weapons that the weak or infirm are not easy prey for would be murderers thieves and rapists who are young and fit?

Cause while I don't know much, I'm pretty sure that in a world with or without weapons, the weak and infirm are always the easiest prey.
This applies to humans and non-humans alike. So I don't buy your argument, not for one second.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

My neighbor, Vinnie, has a habit of putting a bag over the head of his victim before he pulls the trigger.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

- Jack Handey

[404.livejournal.com]

A gun is a tool that can be used for a variety of purposes, mostly for killing things. Other than being a tool to be used, a gun has no other purpose; it has no agency and can be summed up by the phrase, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I don't think a single person here or well, outside of crazy people have ever claimed that guns have agency of their own.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

The sawed-off shotgun is the best home defense. You don't have to aim very well, just point it in the general direction, it usually is not lethal, it's range is limited and the threat is a deterrent. A pistol is about the worst thing for self-defense, since it's usually an ambush the bad guys have their guns out long before you can get to yours, and it requires training and repeated practice.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

A chainsaw is the best home defense.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Langauge quibbling aside, I'm loving these topics, as I just shot at a range for the first time last week, and now I'm actually thinkng about taking some classes.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

I think the fear among gun control advocates are that guns are not used primarily as a means of self-defense but as a means to exert one's will upon someone. Of course someone doesn't need a gun to do that, but when you look at the case when a Texan went to complain to his partygoer neighbors and pointed a gun at them for them to take him seriously, that is a gross violation of the limitations of his gun rights. You should never point a loaded weapon at anyone that isn't threatening your life, and no, taping yourself saying 'I fear for my life' or whatever he said is not justification to gun down three people who rightfully think you're a crazy man coming over to their property and pointing a loaded weapon at them.

Luckily, the Stand Your Ground laws in Texas aren't as retardedly worded like in Florida so this man will likely feel the full brunt of the law for his actions.