"DerGlockenPooper, did you take Research Design? How dare you use such analyses in this discussion?"
Glenn- you are just trying to be funny with this statement, correct? I don't want to misunderstand you.
Pluspinc - You got hung up on one word in my post and failed to see the rest. I assume you are not familiar with debate, Logic and science, otherwise you would have understood my post better, particularly the word "unverified" in regards to your statistics.
I said that your statistcs are "unverified" because I have not verified them, and I don't care to. I trust your statistics are true! But still, since I don't have a source, as a "scientist" I have to ASSUME your statistics are true. This is no reflection on you, just a premise to the post and a basic prerequisite to working with a statistc is to assume that they are accurate in the first place.
I hope you did not miss the rest of my post that points out the error of your argument:
%6.5 of robberies being of homes that have people in them along with a gun possibly present somwhere in the home HAS LITTLE OR NOTHING to do with your argument that "if a person is in a life threatening situation, they will not be able to use the gun on them and shoot it straight to defend themselves". In debate, what you have used is called a straw man argument, and it means that you built up a statistic that has no direct causation to the argument, and then you tore down that statistic in an attempt to prove your point. Politicians and "bannits" LOVE to push this kind of fallacy on the general public, and most people are not well versed enough in Logic to understand that the statistc really has nothing to do with the argument.
Yes, SOME, very few, of those people that are robbed in their homes are gunowners, trained with the gun, and have it loaded and ready to go within reach and they then attempt to use it. But, it is far from the whole, and probably a very very small majority of your claim.
I would venture a guess that in direct application to your argument that only about .1% of people are actually in their home, with a loaded gun on them or right next to them, and feel threatened enough to use that gun to attempt to use it. (How many people reading this RIGHT NOW have a loaded gun within reach? Okay, we are on a gun forum, so the number will be respectively high. Now, How many of the general public do we really think have a loaded gun within reach all the time when they are home? Not many) Of those people, then you would need to find out how many actually succeed in using that gun to defend themselves, and how many failed, in order to build a statistic that is relevent to your argument.
My original post on the topic explains this in detail, and does not even account for all the variables, but just a few major ones.
Another large variable in your statistic is that you claim that "%13 of robberied are in occupied homes" and then you make the HUGE assumption that %50 of those homes have a gun somewhere in them (my last post addresses this part). But, most robberies are going to occur in high crime areas. Many if not most high crime areas have made guns illegal to own. The residents in these areas like New York, DC, LA, Chicago etc CANNOT OWN GUNS in those areas, or the residents cannot afford guns, and/or they have a record and can't buy one. Thereofre, if these people are home and they are robbed, very few of them will even have a gun. So, to assume that %50 of homes that are robbed have guns in them is a giant assumption. So, your assumption that %50 of the homes robbed have guns in them is missing yet another huge variable. In fact, very few homes that are robbed may have guns in them due to the kinds of areas that have high crime. This variable could go either way, but I don't think it works in your favor, and it is yet another variable that detracts from your statistic.
Red Bull just listed multiple recent stories of people who did just have a gun on them and used it to defend themselves in just the last few weeks. The latest example is the woman who was in Arizona. She was home, with her gun within reach (very rare situation), and a man came in threatening her family, and she reacted and shot him dead. Of course, this is just one case, but we would need a survey of many cases like this to observe the overall trends in regard to your argument (whether or not this study group uses the gun successfuly). In this one case, as well as a couple other stories by Red Bull, from the newspapers this month, the woman did exactly what you said she would not, and she grabbed her gun and shot the bad guy dead.
My last post is a little more succinct on the matter, but I don't think you understood it the gist of it all. Maybe you should read it again? It is all very logical, but if you are going to use statistics, you need to make sure they have some reasonable amount of relevancy to your argument.
