No, you said “Most uses of firearms in the US are not self-defense. But funnily enough, if there were fewer guns… there’d be fewer need for those few self-defense cases.”
This isn’t a matter of debate or opinion. It is an absolute fact that you did not say “Self-defense is a minority of gun usage in the US.”
The first time you claimed something different from your actual, blatantly available statement it could have been chalked up to misspeaking or intending to say one thing but phrasing it a different way. By now that benefit of the doubt is gone and you are straight up lying, which is par for the course for gun grabbers. Gun control is based on lies and ignorance; people lie to force ignorance on the masses to get support.
If the statement is on “uses” of firearms, it is not true. You also just casually dispelled one of the core tenants of gun control that they are machines designed specifically for killing. Yet an overwhelming, extreme and exponential majority of gun uses in the US are not directed at any living thing whatsoever, let alone at a human. Out of any use actually directed at another living human, yet again offensive and criminal uses are vastly outnumbered by defensive uses. So if your original (incorrect) statement was the crux of your argument it is utterly shattered because it is 100% false.
If your statement is firearm deaths, that opens a whole can of worms regarding your personal views on morality. If an attacker pulls a knife and attempts to stab someone, which outcome do you believe to be the most favorable? A: The attacker stabs and injures/kills the victim. B. The victim uses a gun to shoot and kill the attacker. C. The victim pulls a gun and the attacker runs away or is captured. By your assessment that only deaths matter, it would seem that you think C is a less desirable outcome than B which is a less desirable outcome than A. Is your primary moral goal to prevent crime, deaths or gun deaths of any sort? Some of us care about human lives more than we hate guns.
The way that statistics have always been tracked and studied is with representational samples. Surveys, with careful wording and peer reviewed methodology are the primary way this is done. Discounting them completely simply because they don’t get the result you personally want just shows how much you’re grasping at straws to force your opinion through as fact. GVA on the other hand has shown their methodology time and time again; they are purely a propaganda mechanism for a biased organization with partisan goals. Actively searching for events based on criteria that are designed and adjusted to maximize events meeting their personal goals while minimizing and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit the desired narrative isn’t science or fact, it is dishonest propaganda. Once they got caught google and the others made sure to memory hole it but some of us still remember when they first started the project and were documenting “school shootings.” One of the very first events they catalogued (can’t remember if it was top 3 or 5 on the first page) was literally a man in his 30s that committed suicide in his car at 2 or 3 AM on a Sunday in the parking lot of a building that used to be a school but was closed down and long since abandoned. Yup, school shooting. There was also an event where a few kids were playing with an airsoft gun and shooting at each other (as airsoft guns are designed to be used) in their neighborhood outside of school hours but they happened to go past the spot on the street where the bus stopped. Well a “bb gun” is a gun and a bus stop is related to school so they labeled this as a “school shooting.” Searching news articles has some value for identifying events, but it is far more valid for statistically rare and news worthy events, such as actual random mass public shootings, not any time a constantly shrinking number of people are hurt by any means when a gun is involved such as is used by gun control organizations to inflate the number. For day to day crime and day to day defensive uses, many are ignored by the news and even more are ignored by the biased criteria used to search by organizations that have blatant agendas.
The CDC study is extremely easy to find even after they removed the data from their website. It is still a published and peer reviewed study that has not been academically refuted, it was merely delisted by the CDC who commissioned it. Additionally, you complain about biased sources yet you ignore things like the NY state representative that is literally the first google result for “cdc defensive gun use.” Additionally, even if you dislike the article accompanying it, the actual emails between the gun control organizations and CDC that led to the removal are widely available thanks to a FOIA request. Is your argument that official publicly released records of CDC activities don’t count because the person that asked for them doesn’t match your politics? If so that is an interesting take to have while attempting to claim the upper hand in an argument. The bottom line is that claiming the only facts that are valid are the ones that come from my personal echo chamber is basically how dictatorships rule the media. When I was discounting the GVA I explained why their methodology was flawed, gave examples of how they have wildly abused it in the past and explained the academically accepted standard that they are shirking; discounting direct CDC emails where they openly discuss their activities and reasoning are invalid simply because I dislike the person that asked for the public records.
No, you said “Most uses of firearms in the US are not self-defense. But funnily enough, if there were fewer guns… there’d be fewer need for those few self-defense cases.”
This isn’t a matter of debate or opinion. It is an absolute fact that you did not say “Self-defense is a minority of gun usage in the US.”
The first time you claimed something different from your actual, blatantly available statement it could have been chalked up to misspeaking or intending to say one thing but phrasing it a different way. By now that benefit of the doubt is gone and you are straight up lying, which is par for the course for gun grabbers. Gun control is based on lies and ignorance; people lie to force ignorance on the masses to get support.
If the statement is on “uses” of firearms, it is not true. You also just casually dispelled one of the core tenants of gun control that they are machines designed specifically for killing. Yet an overwhelming, extreme and exponential majority of gun uses in the US are not directed at any living thing whatsoever, let alone at a human. Out of any use actually directed at another living human, yet again offensive and criminal uses are vastly outnumbered by defensive uses. So if your original (incorrect) statement was the crux of your argument it is utterly shattered because it is 100% false.
If your statement is firearm deaths, that opens a whole can of worms regarding your personal views on morality. If an attacker pulls a knife and attempts to stab someone, which outcome do you believe to be the most favorable? A: The attacker stabs and injures/kills the victim. B. The victim uses a gun to shoot and kill the attacker. C. The victim pulls a gun and the attacker runs away or is captured. By your assessment that only deaths matter, it would seem that you think C is a less desirable outcome than B which is a less desirable outcome than A. Is your primary moral goal to prevent crime, deaths or gun deaths of any sort? Some of us care about human lives more than we hate guns.
The way that statistics have always been tracked and studied is with representational samples. Surveys, with careful wording and peer reviewed methodology are the primary way this is done. Discounting them completely simply because they don’t get the result you personally want just shows how much you’re grasping at straws to force your opinion through as fact. GVA on the other hand has shown their methodology time and time again; they are purely a propaganda mechanism for a biased organization with partisan goals. Actively searching for events based on criteria that are designed and adjusted to maximize events meeting their personal goals while minimizing and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit the desired narrative isn’t science or fact, it is dishonest propaganda. Once they got caught google and the others made sure to memory hole it but some of us still remember when they first started the project and were documenting “school shootings.” One of the very first events they catalogued (can’t remember if it was top 3 or 5 on the first page) was literally a man in his 30s that committed suicide in his car at 2 or 3 AM on a Sunday in the parking lot of a building that used to be a school but was closed down and long since abandoned. Yup, school shooting. There was also an event where a few kids were playing with an airsoft gun and shooting at each other (as airsoft guns are designed to be used) in their neighborhood outside of school hours but they happened to go past the spot on the street where the bus stopped. Well a “bb gun” is a gun and a bus stop is related to school so they labeled this as a “school shooting.” Searching news articles has some value for identifying events, but it is far more valid for statistically rare and news worthy events, such as actual random mass public shootings, not any time a constantly shrinking number of people are hurt by any means when a gun is involved such as is used by gun control organizations to inflate the number. For day to day crime and day to day defensive uses, many are ignored by the news and even more are ignored by the biased criteria used to search by organizations that have blatant agendas.
The CDC study is extremely easy to find even after they removed the data from their website. It is still a published and peer reviewed study that has not been academically refuted, it was merely delisted by the CDC who commissioned it. Additionally, you complain about biased sources yet you ignore things like the NY state representative that is literally the first google result for “cdc defensive gun use.” Additionally, even if you dislike the article accompanying it, the actual emails between the gun control organizations and CDC that led to the removal are widely available thanks to a FOIA request. Is your argument that official publicly released records of CDC activities don’t count because the person that asked for them doesn’t match your politics? If so that is an interesting take to have while attempting to claim the upper hand in an argument. The bottom line is that claiming the only facts that are valid are the ones that come from my personal echo chamber is basically how dictatorships rule the media. When I was discounting the GVA I explained why their methodology was flawed, gave examples of how they have wildly abused it in the past and explained the academically accepted standard that they are shirking; discounting direct CDC emails where they openly discuss their activities and reasoning are invalid simply because I dislike the person that asked for the public records.