Re: Democratic Party platform plank on gun prohibition

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“It’s possible that increasing the minimum wage improves life satisfaction, increases access to health care and decreases mental illness, which all lead to fewer suicide deaths,” Gertner said by email. “We can’t say for sure that the slower growth in suicide rates is caused by increasing minimum wages, but it warrants further study.”
Although the study cannot prove whether or how changes in the minimum wage might directly impact suicide rates, it builds on evidence from other studies suggesting that higher wages might indeed mean fewer suicide deaths, said Dr. Martin McKee, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who wasn’t involved in the work.
Correlation but not causation, but it definitely deserves more research. If minimum wage has an impact on suicide and mental health I'd expect there is a connection to our opioid epidemic. More research is justified.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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I just did an analysis of worldwide stats on suicide (differentials by country). The US comes in 32nd or 34th depending upon one uses 'gross' or 'adjusted' numbers. Gross: just the number of suicides per 100,000 people. Adjusted: average age of population adjusted.

Here is a redux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... icide_rate
That is not sources I used, but the numbers all agree.
Suicides by Country.001.jpeg

Basically, the US is on the high end of "Average", but less than 1 standard deviation from the middle.

What can we infer from this?

If there is an effect from more liberal guns laws, it might account for the 2 suicides per 100,000 difference between the US and Canada.

Caveat: I am a mathematician, not a "statistician", but my team does analytics for the WHO every year (pro bono).

Hint: If you click on the image (hosted on our forum here), the words a easier to. read.)
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There is another factor. The hollowing out of the middle class, which breeds fascism.

https://eand.co/the-downwardly-mobile-s ... d538b6dd27

If the hapless Dems focus on only guns, they miss the other mitigating circumstances that alter the way people think about their lives. Happy, curious, and satisfied people don't go around shooting each other very often. If the Dems wish peace, they have to pursue quality of life issues over gun policy issues.

CDFingers
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like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

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CDFingers wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 12:33 pm There is another factor. The hollowing out of the middle class, which breeds fascism.

https://eand.co/the-downwardly-mobile-s ... d538b6dd27

If the hapless Dems focus on only guns, they miss the other mitigating circumstances that alter the way people think about their lives. Happy, curious, and satisfied people don't go around shooting each other very often. If the Dems wish peace, they have to pursue quality of life issues over gun policy issues.

CDFingers
I have been concerned that the middle class is an endangered species...this should no be overlooked.
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Re: Democratic Party platform plank on gun prohibition

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Here is version 2 of the chart with more Countries.

Suicide is a very complex topic.

Here is what we know about historic suicide rates:
1) They go Way Down during shooting wars.
2) Only 3.3% of reported suicide attempts in the US are successful.

There is a 20 year rise in US suicide rates. Since 1999, our rate has risen from roughly 9.1:100K to 13.7:100K. Most of that growth (in my unqualified opinion) is likely driven by the factors mentioned by CDFingers and senorgrand: economic decline and employment uncertainty. (The shrinking middle class)

Suicides by Country.v2.jpeg

According to the WHO, there are 92 Countries below the halfway mark by rank order. Of the 92 Countries below the half way point, here is the WHO list of Countries -Without- reporting problems:
Portugal, Spain, Singapore, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, Greece

Basically, of the 92 Countries, 85 are consider to have significant under-reporting for three main reasons: (1) No way to track the numbers (Country too poor or too disorganized); (2) Religious prohibition of Suicide skews the numbers significantly; (3) Political Agenda (No one really thinks China's actual rate is 8:100K - down from 20+ only 25 years ago)

What that means is that it is likely that the United States is much closer to the arithmetic mean than it looks (even though the US is less than 1 std deviation above the mean).

No reasonable metrics based person would be able to 'find' evidence of a 'liberal gun law' effect in US suicides. It doesn't matter that many, many people in the US kill themselves with guns - our overall rate of suicides is not significantly high. As I said before, if there IS a Gun Law effect, then you should be able to see it between France and Switzerland (France=Restricted Gun Laws; Switzerland=Liberal). But what we do see is that Switzerland has a suicide rate exactly proportional to its French/German/Italian populations suicide rates and then matched back to those three Country's native rates.
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As an EMT working on a city contract ambulance and later as a RN working in MICU and later in ED I saw the result of suicides and attempted suicides. In different educational programs we were taught about the difference between men and women also different ethnic groups and suicides. Some ideas have been discarded over the years but some still hold true. Men tended to use a violent means such as a gun or motor vehicle. As one LEO said that many one car fatal accidents are suicides. That was true years ago when cars were not built as safe as today. Same hold with the use of carbon monoxide. Women tended to use pills and many times the attempted suicide was a call for help. Take the pills and then call 911. Different ethnic groups have different views on suicides such as the older Japanese. It is a very complex subject and there is not a single cure all for it.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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CDFingers wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 12:33 pm If the Dems wish peace, they have to pursue quality of life issues over gun policy issues.
one way or another there will come a day that it won't be possible to blame guns for our problems. I wonder what the Dems will use as their scapegoat/redirection of attention will be then?

our "gun problem" is largely a symptom of other problems. fix those other problems, you fix the "gun problem". When you break your leg, the doctors do not treat the symptom (the pain) and send you on your way with a broken leg. they fix the leg which fixes the pain. or put another way...work on the root cause issues of our "gun problem"...which is people, economy, justice, etc. and then you don't need to worry about who has guns.

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max129 wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 4:46 pm No reasonable metrics based person would be able to 'find' evidence of a 'liberal gun law' effect in US suicides.
I wish you could convince the bulk of the anti-gun activists of that. Check out the April 19 edition of the Left, Right and Center podcast for their guest arguing that the Ds should go all in on draconian gun control to reduce suicide, and claiming that it worked in MA (never mind that the demographics and economics of that state are hugely different than states that have lots of guns).

It would be great if we could get you or Lara onto some shows like that to present the liberal, data-driven side of the gun issues that never make it into any media I'm aware of. Maybe we could start an email campaign pestering the producers of some of these chatty shows? (LRC, To The Point, etc.)
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You need to look at the picture differently. Suicide by method. For instance look at Finland, it has a high rate of suicide and high gun ownership and suicide with a gun is a small part of the suicide number. Choosing a suicide method involves more than availability of guns, it involves cultural preferences as well as other factors. Staring at suicide numbers and not recognizing that it is by no means just a gun availability issue is non productive. Suicides occur in high numbers with or without guns and gun availability is not the sole determinant to selection of method.
https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/03/top-1 ... ownership/
Also violence is not increased just because a country has high gun ownership. Finland has one of the lowest rates of violence. I suspect if you did look at violence in Finland the most common tool would not be a gun. Statistics and numbers.
Bottom line, drop the gun plank and start addressing root causes of violence. Frankly putting suicides by gun into violence numbers in our country is misleading.
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sikacz said:

You need to look at the picture differently. Suicide by method. For instance look at Finland, it has a high rate of suicide and high gun ownership and suicide with a gun is a small part of the suicide number. Choosing a suicide method involves more than availability of guns, it involves cultural preferences as well as other factors.
Sure you can slice and dice using many parameters - but the deeper you go, the worse the data quality. Gross metrics on Age, Gender and Suicide Methods a pretty good in the richer Countries. The more poor the Country, the worse the data quality.
it involves cultural preferences
This, as far as I can see explains the largish gap between Countries such as France and Germany. I do know there is a very strong correlation between number of non-sunny days and higher suicide rates (in fact I lived through it in Alaska - very large military suicide rates - for no apparent reason). I believe (but cannot prove or even defend) that cultural differences explain a lot of the variance between Countries.

But overall, the numbers do not show that the United States has a particularly high suicide rate; the US -does- have a higher rate of death by guns (our ratios are distinct). But if you removed the gun deaths, our suicide rates would place us down between Italy and Panama- an unlikely position. The likelihood is that many (most?) of the current US gun suicides would simply move to some other mechanism.

Guns do not cause suicide - Dr Ray Baumeister has explored this topic in a depth greater than I can even review. His conclusion was that the act of suicide is driven by a 'mental narrowing' in most cases. In that state of narrow mental outlook, suicides often pick a method that is both easy and dramatic. The late great Anthony Bourdain comes to mind. He certainly had the wherewithal to obtain a fatal dosage of some narcotic. The death would have been painless, certain and easy. Instead he hung himself. Whether this was to punish himself, others or both cannot be known.

Studies show that terminal cancer patients pre-plan suicide far in advance, use mostly painless and non drastic methods. Their suicide is not driven by mental narrowing, but rather by a rational point of view with trades offs for life, quality of life and a miserable end. Suicide methods for folks in this circumstance are very different.

My conclusion is that we should very much remove suicide statistics from other gun deaths in the United States. The US does not have a remarkably high overall suicide rate. It is likely that the absence of guns would not lower our total rate by much at all.
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Re: Democratic Party platform plank on gun prohibition

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DD989 wrote: Sun May 12, 2019 7:30 pm I find it really challenging to listen to legislators that are clearly not gun owners. How exactly does limiting magazines stop crime / mass shootings?

If even ONE time, a gunman was taken out during a reload...I’d revisit my feelings. I call Politics on that magazine Shenanigans.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
If they would focus on poverty and despair to reduce the number of deaths by suicide and overdoses, maybe that would help Americans more?

Guns and abortion are wedge issues for fundraising. They don't really want to solve a problem. Most gun deaths are suicides but politicians don't want you to look that up, I guess.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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I agree with Max regarding suicide. When someone says "most suicides in America are by guns!" it's very inflammatory. It's technically true, too. But, in fact, according to the CDC's figures for 2017, it's hard to see the numbers as too different than 50-50 when they are 51-49%.

I hadn't thought about terminal illness suicide, but I cannot imagine it being scientifically sound NOT to separate those people from other suicides. I had a friend who was dying of lung cancer who shot himself, but it had metastasized in his brain for the 3rd time, was totally unstoppable, and he told me he was losing his memory, both long and short term, 2 days before he died. He knew he was going to be a burden on his family, and I have always presumed he simply decided he needed to abort this before he lost all ability to decide. I cannot say he wasn't depressed, but if he was, it wasn't a mental health issue that was his problem, it was that he really was dying.

It seems completely isolated from all the other reasons for suicide, such as depression, PTSD, etc.
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"Weapons of war—such as assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines" aren't the problem.

Big Pharm (Pfiezer) accused of price-fixing and inflating prices on prescription drugs.

"A far-reaching lawsuit filed Friday by the attorneys general of more than 40 states accused some of the nation's largest generic drug manufacturers of conspiring to inflate prices, in some cases by over 1,000 percent.
"We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multi-billion dollar fraud on the American people," Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, whose state led the probe into the companies' practices, said in a statement.
"Teva and its co-conspirators embarked on one of the most egregious and damaging price-fixing conspiracies in the history of the United States." —Lawsuit
"We have emails, text messages, telephone records, and former company insiders that we believe will prove a multi-year conspiracy to fix prices and divide market share for huge numbers of generic drugs," said Tong.
The suit names 20 major drug manufacturers—including Pfizer, Teva, Novartis, and Mylan—as well as more than a dozen senior executives, who the complaint accuses of deleting evidence after the states began their investigation in 2014.
"The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs," the New York Times reported Saturday, "including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for ADHD.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... rices-over
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.

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MaxwellG wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 10:09 am "Weapons of war—such as assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines" aren't the problem.

Big Pharm (Pfiezer) accused of price-fixing and inflating prices on prescription drugs.

"A far-reaching lawsuit filed Friday by the attorneys general of more than 40 states accused some of the nation's largest generic drug manufacturers of conspiring to inflate prices, in some cases by over 1,000 percent.
"We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multi-billion dollar fraud on the American people," Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, whose state led the probe into the companies' practices, said in a statement.
"Teva and its co-conspirators embarked on one of the most egregious and damaging price-fixing conspiracies in the history of the United States." —Lawsuit
"We have emails, text messages, telephone records, and former company insiders that we believe will prove a multi-year conspiracy to fix prices and divide market share for huge numbers of generic drugs," said Tong.
The suit names 20 major drug manufacturers—including Pfizer, Teva, Novartis, and Mylan—as well as more than a dozen senior executives, who the complaint accuses of deleting evidence after the states began their investigation in 2014.
"The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs," the New York Times reported Saturday, "including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for ADHD.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... rices-over
Glad to see it, these are generics which as supposed to be cheaper because patents expired but one article I read said some prices were inflated 1000%. Not just US companies, Pfizer is US, Teva is Israeli, Novartis is Swiss and Mylan is Dutch - they just love the unregulated US drug market.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Democratic Party platform plank on gun prohibition

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DD989 wrote: Sun May 12, 2019 7:30 pm I find it really challenging to listen to legislators that are clearly not gun owners. How exactly does limiting magazines stop crime / mass shootings?

If even ONE time, a gunman was taken out during a reload...I’d revisit my feelings. I call Politics on that magazine Shenanigans.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I'll agree that in the shootings we've had reloads have been a minor factor at best. But close to your parameters I'd point out the Giffords shooting. A major factor in that shooting occurred when his gun jammed. He was using a 33 round extended mag with the Glock. Extended mags are known to have jamming issues. Proponents of mag limits are looking for a pause in a shooting to have an affect, so while not a reload, it did involve the magazine and it was a pause in the shooting. Of course I believe waiting for a shooter to reload is way down on the list of options I'd like to have during a shooting.

I don't know which incident, but I do remember a child stating that when the shooter paused to reload they took that opportunity to escape the classroom they were in.

Again, waiting for the shooter to reload is not an option on my top priority list. It's below having a pile of rocks in the classroom specifically for throwing.

Re: Democratic Party platform plank on gun prohibition

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I read yet another article on safe gun storage this morning. Here is a redux of what seems to be the "consensus adult view":

1) All guns should be locked at the trigger
2) All trigger locked guns should be in a safe
3) All ammo should be locked in a separate safe - preferably in another location

I have a serious gripe with this "consensus" (which is in danger of becoming a regulatory requirement is many States).

The above set of methods basically removes firearms from any real use for self defense unless one has 10 minutes of warning.

If you live in a place with a super heavy door AND do not have a first floor, I think you could almost get there. But really, the whole point of Heller was that owning a firearm for self defense is legal. The "consensus" safety standard removes the utility of self defense. Do I think safe storage is important? Hell yeah. But the combination on the safe will have to do the job, because my idea a self defense weapon is loaded and locked up.

Contrary points of view are welcome.
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Safe storage when you only have dogs is different than safe storage with kids. Why do I need to keep the ammo separately locked up?

If they took the same attitude about safe storage of alcohol and tobacco "for safety of the children", would lobbyists and "adults" have the same consensus?
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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