Links - Guns (20th December 2018)

Gun Laws Stop At State Lines, But Guns Don’t - "60 percent of guns used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 to 2013 originated outside of Illinois, and Indiana and Wisconsin were two of the biggest sources of recovered guns. And Illinois is not alone... gun laws in one state seem to affect their neighbors, which makes this an important area of study in efforts to better understand the flow of firearms used in crimes"

Majority of Guns Used in Chicago Crimes Come From Outside Illinois: Report - "Nearly 60 percent of guns recovered in Chicago come from out-of-state dealers, with more than 20 percent traced back to Indiana, according to a newly released report on the city’s violence. The 2017 Gun Trace Report released Sunday also showed that nearly a quarter of the guns recovered in Chicago were sold by just ten federally licensed firearms dealers (seven in Illinois and three in northwest Indiana)... The top two sources of firearms recovered by police – Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale and Midwest Sporting Goods in Lyons – have been the source of a disproportionate number of weapons for the better part of a decade, according to the report, providing a combined 11.2 percent of all crime guns recovered in Chicago... The report cites the Lyons ordinance to show that stronger local regulations of gun dealers can reduce the number of weapons entering the market quickly and illegally.
Gun fans: "Places with strict gun control have a lot of gun crime. This proves that gun control doesn't work"
Places that fireman visit suffer a lot of fire damage. Therefore...

Where the guns used in Chicago actually came from - The Washington Post - "Only 40 percent of the guns recovered in the city were purchased in Illinois, the report read, including hundreds purchased at gun shops outside city boundaries... States with tougher gun laws often discover that places with more lax legislation are the source of many of the firearms used in crimes... Several states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia — are common sources of firearms for most of the states for which we compiled data. Those states are also ones in which gun laws are not among the most stringent... blaming Chicago’s gun violence on its gun laws misunderstands the economics at play nationally."
In other words, gun laws work in that people are forced to get them from more lax states

Interpreting the Empirical Evidence on Illegal Gun Market Dynamics - "We find that criminals rely upon a diverse set of illegal diversion pathways to acquire guns, gun traffickers usually divert small numbers of guns, newer guns are diverted through close-to-retail diversions from legal firearms commerce, and that a diverse set of gun trafficking indicators are needed to identify and shut down gun trafficking pathways."
In other words, criminals get guns which used to be legal - so claiming that gun control only affects law abiding citizens is wrong

Johns Hopkins Study: California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths - "The findings, which run counter to experiences in Missouri and Connecticut that did show a link between background checks and gun deaths, appear to have startled the researchers. Garen Wintemute, a UC Davis professor of emergency medicine and senior author of the study, said incomplete data and flawed criminal record reporting might explain the results. Wintemute noted:
In 1990, only 25 percent of criminal records were accessible in the primary federal database used for background checks, and centralized records of mental health prohibitions were almost nonexistent.
As a result, researchers said as many as one in four gun buyers may have purchased a firearm without undergoing a background check. “We know at the individual level that comprehensive background check policies work, that they prevent future firearm violence at this level," said Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, a researcher who led the survey"
In other words, if you don't enforce gun laws, they won't work

Do Right-to-Carry Laws Make States Safer? - "The academic backing for this argument can be traced to a 1997 study by University of Chicago economists John Lott and David Mustard... In the roughly two decades since, additional academic studies have strongly suggested that the opposite is true: that these laws lead to higher rates of violent crime. The latest—and, at least according to one of its authors, most comprehensive—was released earlier this month by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research... “Ten years after the adoption of RTC laws, violent crime is estimated to be 13 [percent to] 15 percent higher than it would have been without the RTC law,” the authors concluded. Just five years after, it’s about 7 percent higher. “There is not even the slightest hint in the data that [these] laws reduce violent crime”...
A 2004 National Research Council report essentially debunked Lott and Mustard’s claim that these laws reduce violent crime."

Gun Laws vs. Gun Crimes - "In attempt to gauge the impact of such laws, Fortune plotted the number of gun provisions in each state, using research by the State Firearm Laws project, against each state’s gun homicides, using Gun Violence Archive statistics. Correlation does not equal causation, but the revealed trend is striking: States with more gun provisions consistently see fewer gun deaths."

#ThisIsOurLane: Doctors hit back at pro-gun group NRA - "The National Rifle Association's tweet on Wednesday sparked anger.It came just hours before a gunman killed 12 people in a California bar."Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane," the NRA tweeted... Guns send 8,300 children to hospital each year in the US, the majority of whom die, while the number of violent gun deaths in America is greater than the Middle East, once armed conflict-related casualties are factored out."

'They basically saw a black man with a gun': Police kill armed guard while responding to call - "Police shot and killed the good guy. Jemel Roberson, 26, was working for security."

When police confront armed homeowners, it can be hard to tell good guys from bad - "her husband, Richard Black Jr., a decorated Vietnam War veteran and retired accountant, was struggling with the intruder, who was naked and attacking their 11-year-old grandson, according to the family’s lawyer.After trying to pry the attacker away, Black, 73, fetched his 9mm handgun and shot the intruder dead... Just as Black was shooting the intruder, Aurora officers were arriving at his house. Hearing gunfire and encountering an armed man — Black — one of the officers fatally shot him"

Amarillo man accidentally shot by police speaks out about the shooting - "The man who took a gun from a man at Amarillo's Faith City Mission and then was shot by police on Valentine’s Day, talked exclusively to ABC 7 about what happened that day."
Of course when white "good guys" get shot (as above), no one is very upset - even though what evidence we have suggests that police are LESS likely to shoot black people

The Texas shooting shows why “a good guy with a gun” isn’t enough - "Here is a simple fact that should underpin most conversations about guns: Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. This has been found repeatedly in empirical research on the matter... Regularly updated reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.For example, this chart, from a 2007 study by Harvard researchers, shows a correlation between statewide firearm homicide victimization rates and household gun ownership after controlling for robbery rates. A more recent study from 2013, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, reached similar conclusions: After controlling for multiple variables, the study found that a 1 percent increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate at the state level.This holds up around the world. As Zack Beauchamp explained for Vox, a breakthrough analysis in the 1990s by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns... Stricter gun laws can help prevent such deaths. Last year, researchers from around the country reviewed more than 130 studies from 10 countries on gun control for Epidemiologic Reviews. This is, for now, the most current, extensive review of the research on the effects of gun control. The findings were clear: “The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions is associated with reductions in firearm deaths.”... Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process."
Strange, given that we're told that criminals can get their hands on guns whether they're illegal or not - so there's no point in gun control or making them illegal.

Breaking down the NRA-backed theory that a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun - "John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University, was a co-author of a National Bureau of Economic Research study that examined how gun violence coincides with the ability for individuals to carry concealed weapons, known as Right To Carry (RTC) laws. The NBER study discredited the idea of the “good guy with a gun” as a possible solution to gun violence.Donohue told ABC News that the research “concluded that allowing citizens to carry handguns seems to increase violent crime 13 to 15 percent by the 10th year” of the laws being enacted in the state.Another takeaway from the NBER report is that the presence of the gun could turn a would-be good guy into an intentional or unintentional bad guy.Donohue and his co-authors cited the infamous 2012 case of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who got into a deadly confrontation with teenager Trayvon Martin.“Presumably, George Zimmerman would not have hassled Trayvon Martin if Zimmerman had not had a gun, so the gun encouraged a hostile confrontation, regardless of who ultimately becomes violent,” the report stated.Donohue said the Zimmerman case was one of several that he found where “these guys are likely to be more aggressive.”“The presence of the gun actually stimulates more provocative action and ends up getting people killed,” he said. A 1997 study co-authored by economist John Lott argued that the greater presence of concealed weapons led to a decrease in crime. The study examined data from 1977 to 1992.While Lott continues to defend the findings and writes about similar research in more recent pieces, it was viewed by many in the field as being debunked by a 2004 National Academies National Research Council report. That report, however, did not make a causal relationship between concealed weapons and crime... the FBI examined 160 active shooter incidents that took place between 2000 and 2013.The report found that in five of those incidents, armed individuals who were not members of law enforcement exchanged gunfire with the shooter, leading to either the shooter being killed, wounded or taking his own life. By contrast, 21 of the 160 incidents ended after unarmed citizens “safely and successfully restrained the shooter,” the report stated.“Most of the time, if you’re talking about a civilian stopping a mass shooter, it’s the unarmed guy without the gun because they're right there”... There is a growing number of mass shooting incidents that occurred after the release of the FBI’s 2014 report where a so-called good guy with a gun was on the scene but did not stop the shooting or shooter. .. “It’s not very often that somebody with a gun who’s a private citizen plays a useful role in ending these mass shooting events,” Donohue said. David Chipman, who served as a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms for 25 years before becoming a senior policy adviser at gun violence prevention advocacy group Giffords, said there is insufficient training for many armed civilians. "