Friday, June 28, 2013

Are Negligent Discharges Really Rare?

NBC Right Now/KNDO/KNDU Tri-Cities, Yakima, WA |

Pro-gun fanatics love to downplay the number of negligent discharges. One of the ways they do this is to cite the numbers of deaths and dividing by the total number of gun owners in the country. This is misleading for several reasons.  The number of deaths due to negligence is only a fraction of those wounded, and that is only a tiny fraction of those gravely affected, which include those doing the shooting as well as family and friends.

Even after calculating all that, we still have only a small percentage of the true number of negligent uses of guns.  If we use the same standard they use for DGU calculations, it would be only 5%, the 95% being those in which no one was hurt and no record was made of the incident.

The obvious problem is when you ask gun owners if they've used their gun defensively you get a lot of volunteers.  Not so when you ask if they've had a negligent discharge. That's not to say gun owners are particularly dishonest, I believe that description is limited to the gun-rights advocates who have axes to grind, no, it's just human nature. People are reluctant to admit their mistakes.

What's your opinion?  Do you still think negligent discharges are so rare?

Please leave a comment.

24 comments:

  1. I have been writing about them on my blog. It seems to me that there are an increasing number of them which is the natural outcome of more guns in circulation. Guns are dangerous. If you want a gun in your home or in public, there is a risk for you or someone near to you.

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    1. While not applicable for measuring incidences nationwide, this article seems to show that firearms injuries are dropping in a way similar to the drop in incidences in gun violence.

      "The number of people hospitalized for firearm-related injuries—from assaults to unintentional and deliberate self-inflicted shootings—has steadily dropped by a dramatic 67% over the last 20 years, from 10,832 in 1992 to 3,575 in 2010, according to a first-of-its kind report from California."
      http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/COM-293770/Gun-Injury-Hospitalizations-Drop-67-in-CA

      A caveat to this is that the total costs to treat gun injuries has risen.

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    2. Am I allowed to comment on your blog, Japete? This hit and run thing doesn't make for good conversation.

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  2. You love to call us liars, but aren't so keen about having the term used against you.

    But let's look at some numbers. Did you see the Institute of Medicine report on firearms injuries and death that The Truth About Guns discussed?

    1. Total number of injuries and deaths: about 105,000.

    2. Suicides significantly outnumbered homicides.

    3. Mass shooting are rare.

    4. Defensive gun uses range between 500,000 to 3 million per annum.

    5. Firearms are used in violent crimes around 300,000 times a year.

    This is what the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences is saying. A defensive gun use that doesn't involve a shot being fired is the best outcome, no? Of course, since you see gun owners as potential criminals, you regard any use of a gun as suspect. But the data here don't bear out your beliefs.

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  3. Mike, Anytime someone has a negligent or accidental discharge, (there is a difference) there is the potential for calamity. So the next question is, what do we do about it. Currently, the only thing done is to criminally charge and punish the person. That combined with the psychological and emotional trauma of wounding or killing another person who is possibly a loved one is the only way the government seems to want to get involved.
    I would propose that in order to help reduce the number of injuries and deaths due to accident or negligence with firearms, that we introduce firearm safety training into school health programs. We did much the same thing to reduce the spread of HIV and other STDs.
    At some age levels, this training would parallel the NRA's Eddie Eagle program which tell kids to not touch a firearm and tell an adult. At some point, as is done with sex ed and instruction in "safe sex", the training would become more detailed.
    This would include how to make a firearm safe, unload and clear. Muzzle awareness, and of course keeping your dammed finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire. School is a particularly good place for this training considering the tragic number of times that young people fall victim of these events.

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    1. Give me some examples of accidental discharges that do not involve negligence.

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    2. We've given examples in the past, from mechanical failures, to defective ammo, and so forth, and at the time, you've agreed that these examples were examples of truly accidental things. Problem is that you've put them out of your mind, and now you're demanding examples again.


      And all of this fight obscures the fact that you are fine with a distinction between tortious negligence and criminal negligence in, it would seem, every type of case other than cases somehow involving a gun. You haven't given a reason to treat firearms differently from motor vehicles, swimming pools, aircraft, and even explosives, but you have made the distinction quite clear: any accident involving a gun is criminal negligence of the felonious flavor.

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    3. One possible example is the article you posted about the police officer who's pistol went off while he was sitting in class. The problem is that its doubtful that we'll ever hear one way or other if it is a mechanical problem because it now falls into the old news category.

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    4. " Problem is that you've put them out of your mind"

      No, not really. My point is that true mechanical failures leading to a discharge are so rare the we can dismiss them as irrelevant to the discussion. Percentage-wise, it's as if they don't exist.

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    5. So, you demanded examples of non-negligent accidental discharges, saying that such DO NOT exist. Then, when being reminded of various categries that exist, your response is that one of these categories is so rare that you get to pretend it doesn't exist.

      Nice way to change the rules there.

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    6. Nice way to change the rules there.

      Standard operating procedure for Mikeb.

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    7. There are no accidents with guns, at least not enough to talk about. There's only negligence.

      When someone is "accidentally" shot, even if it was that million-to-one mechanical failure, the idiot gun owner was still breaking a safety rule with the muzzle.

      It's ALWAYS negligence.

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    8. Would you say that even a mechanical failure discharge where no one is hurt (no safety rules broken) is still negligence because the owner didn’t properly inspect/maintain their weapon?

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    9. Ah-Ha! Now we're getting somewhere!

      A better way to state what you're saying is that there are no purely accidental injuries because there's always a breach of the duty to be sure of where the muzzle is pointed.

      That's a much better way to frame your argument rather than trying to deny that an accidents ever happen.

      And now you're getting closer to something we might agree on--in most cases where an injury occurs there is that element of negligence you speak about, but what if there is a freak accident--an unexpected ricochet when the gun is pointed in what is thought to be a safe direction when it accidentally goes off due to a defective primer that fires the round as it is loaded.

      Is this uncommon? Yes. Unheard of? No. So you either have to allow court system to determine if there was negligence on a case by case basis in order to exclude this case, or you have to jail the poor person this happened to.


      Also, on a related topic, your statement here about it always being negligence seems to single out the cases where there's an injury, but you've said this before in a much broader way, saying that it's always negligence when a gun goes off, and that even if nobody is hurt the person should lose their rights.

      That's why, if you don't specify that you're talking about injurious accidents, we fight extra hard against the idea that someone who has the misfortune to buy a defective round of ammunition should lose their rights based on that because they loaded the gun, pointing it in a safe direction, and it fired as they loaded the defective round.

      Be specific and you may win friends and influence people. Keep being general and you shoot yourself in both feet.

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    10. TS, that's a good question. But, my position is not to even talk about mechanical failures because they're so rare.

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    11. except when it's in your favor, and then you post things saying, hmmm, maybe these aren't as rare as Greg claims

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  4. What you hear from folks like Greg, and what you actually read on the pro-gun forums, paint very different pictures. I've had gun loons say to me, in comments, that most gun owners are always very careful and never have accidental discharges, because they adhere very strictly to the Four Rules, blah blah blah.

    But what you read in their forums, and what I've heard from moderate gun owners in person, is that "accidents happen", and that they've had at least one instance where they've misfired a gun, or had a close call at hitting themselves or others, or had a ricochet, or whatever.

    Even in the most "safe" of places, shooting ranges, you see fatalities and injuries. I compile a list of these. Who knows how many accidents there are that aren't reported.

    And I know from talking to emergency personnel that only a tiny fraction of gun injuries and accidents are actually reported in the media, and the non-fatal accidents rarely even get reported to police.

    (by the way, Greg, quoting numbers from John Lott are laughable, regarding "defensive uses.")

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    1. "by the way, Greg, quoting numbers from John Lott are laughable, regarding "defensive uses."

      Baldr,

      One of the gun violence studies commissioned by the President has recently been released and its results suggest that Greg's numbers aren't as laughable as you might think.

      "Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year"
      http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/06/handguns_suicides_mass_shootings_deaths_and_self_defense_findings_from_a.html

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    2. Oregonian, did you see John Lott's name in what I quoted? The source was the National Academy of Sciences. If that's not good enough for you, then what will qualify? I will await your apology for lying about my comment.

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  5. Mikeb "logic" at its finest: we don't know how many negligent discharges there are, so there must be shitloads of them.

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  6. No, they are not rare. Local Municipalities hide NDs and people don't report them if they can get away with it.

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    1. How do you know something is common if it doesn't get reported?

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    2. Ah, yes, a MASSIVE, distributed conspiracy to hide incidents where people were injured or killed--all to manipulate statistics!

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  7. What are we to do with the attitude of the gun control freaks? Japete, Oregonian, Dog Gone, and Laci do a drive-by and then run away, as though their comments require no defense or even explanation. I call that arrogance.

    At least, Mikeb, you're willing to engage in the conversation. I applaud you for that.

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