tbburg
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Scottsdale AZ
I've been following the whole gun rights/CC/Castle doctrine/stand your ground debate for so long I don't remember when it started. Always thought it was a great idea. 'Got a Florida "out of state" CCW when they became available, because I used to dive with friends down there a couple times a year, and figured it would save hassles with the police.
Watched as one state after another made CC legal, then started expanding not just gun rights, but victim rights, homeowner rights,.. basically everyone but criminal rights. Followed the statistical evidence that the laws work in deterring crime and preventing criminals from further victimizing their prey by suing them.
I found this interesting:
A few days ago, a cousin listed a couple studies about the effects of expanded castle doctrine/stand your ground laws on the murder rate.
(both links lead to articles summarizing the studies, one has download link, the other has to be paid for)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18187.pdf?new_window=1
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/06/11/study-says-stand-your-ground-laws-increase-homicides/
(She's a lib. Her and her friends were decrying the rise in killings.)
I'll throw in the quote from Heinlein at this point: "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
Personally, I figure the "blip" in killings due to justifiable homicide isn't because people are finding an excuse to murder each other, but more a societal adjustment. Impolite/boorish/threatening behavior that would before have elicited a fear response is now being met with violence. I figure, no big deal, certain people are learning the hard way to be polite to strangers again.
I make nothing of the "100% rise in justifiable homicide" statistics. If there was no "justifiable homicide" rule on the books, the only way a homicide would be "justified" was if the situation was so gross that the prosecutor knew a jury wouldn't convict under any circumstances. Change the rule to allow justification, and you'll see a rise in occurrence - no big deal.
What I did find interesting was the NDER summary statistics about race.
Rather then white people using stand your ground laws as an excuse to kill minorities, as a lot of bleeding-heart worrywarts have stated, it seems that it might be the other way around, or maybe it's more white people killing each other. I don't have access to the full study(debating weather or not to buy it now) The summary only talks about the race of the "victim". I don't know if the study tracks the race of the perpetrator.(Yeah, I know, in a SYG case, it's the perp who is actually the victim, and vice-a-verse)
I'm guessing two possible real causes of these statistics:
One: because "whites" are such a large percentage of the population, and murder/killing is such an uncommon occurrence, the higher murder rate in the white population shows up only because of the large preponderance of white people. (60-70% of the population has 4-7 more murders per month, a subdivided 10% may have less the 1, making it statistically insignificant) So in effect, the "blip" is there for everyone, but it's such a small blip that it doesn't show up in the smaller segregated population samples.
Kind of like airliner crashes. They happen so infrequently that no meaningful statistical information can be gleaned from them by sub-type. There are hugely more 373s then there ever were Concords, and quite a few of them have gone down over the years, but one Concord crash made it plunge(statistically)from the safest airliner ever built, to the worst.
Two: Not sure how to put this one,.. White people are a**holes. In the US population, Caucasians are a pretty big majority. Because of this, we can get away with a lot of bad behavior. What I mean by this is that a white person could (statistically) get away with behavior that a minority wouldn't try. Not murder/rape/etc, just generally impolite/threatening behavior that before the stand your ground laws would only have resulted in at most a police report. Now they're(we're,.. I'm white)getting wacked for it.
Any way around, I still figure it's just a long overdue, much needed "attitude adjustment" in the population as a whole, and I'm not too worried about it.
Thoughts?
Watched as one state after another made CC legal, then started expanding not just gun rights, but victim rights, homeowner rights,.. basically everyone but criminal rights. Followed the statistical evidence that the laws work in deterring crime and preventing criminals from further victimizing their prey by suing them.
I found this interesting:
A few days ago, a cousin listed a couple studies about the effects of expanded castle doctrine/stand your ground laws on the murder rate.
(both links lead to articles summarizing the studies, one has download link, the other has to be paid for)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18187.pdf?new_window=1
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/06/11/study-says-stand-your-ground-laws-increase-homicides/
(She's a lib. Her and her friends were decrying the rise in killings.)
I'll throw in the quote from Heinlein at this point: "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
Personally, I figure the "blip" in killings due to justifiable homicide isn't because people are finding an excuse to murder each other, but more a societal adjustment. Impolite/boorish/threatening behavior that would before have elicited a fear response is now being met with violence. I figure, no big deal, certain people are learning the hard way to be polite to strangers again.
I make nothing of the "100% rise in justifiable homicide" statistics. If there was no "justifiable homicide" rule on the books, the only way a homicide would be "justified" was if the situation was so gross that the prosecutor knew a jury wouldn't convict under any circumstances. Change the rule to allow justification, and you'll see a rise in occurrence - no big deal.
What I did find interesting was the NDER summary statistics about race.
Rather then white people using stand your ground laws as an excuse to kill minorities, as a lot of bleeding-heart worrywarts have stated, it seems that it might be the other way around, or maybe it's more white people killing each other. I don't have access to the full study(debating weather or not to buy it now) The summary only talks about the race of the "victim". I don't know if the study tracks the race of the perpetrator.(Yeah, I know, in a SYG case, it's the perp who is actually the victim, and vice-a-verse)
I'm guessing two possible real causes of these statistics:
One: because "whites" are such a large percentage of the population, and murder/killing is such an uncommon occurrence, the higher murder rate in the white population shows up only because of the large preponderance of white people. (60-70% of the population has 4-7 more murders per month, a subdivided 10% may have less the 1, making it statistically insignificant) So in effect, the "blip" is there for everyone, but it's such a small blip that it doesn't show up in the smaller segregated population samples.
Kind of like airliner crashes. They happen so infrequently that no meaningful statistical information can be gleaned from them by sub-type. There are hugely more 373s then there ever were Concords, and quite a few of them have gone down over the years, but one Concord crash made it plunge(statistically)from the safest airliner ever built, to the worst.
Two: Not sure how to put this one,.. White people are a**holes. In the US population, Caucasians are a pretty big majority. Because of this, we can get away with a lot of bad behavior. What I mean by this is that a white person could (statistically) get away with behavior that a minority wouldn't try. Not murder/rape/etc, just generally impolite/threatening behavior that before the stand your ground laws would only have resulted in at most a police report. Now they're(we're,.. I'm white)getting wacked for it.
Any way around, I still figure it's just a long overdue, much needed "attitude adjustment" in the population as a whole, and I'm not too worried about it.
Thoughts?