Death Clock

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Found this very interesting little application today. Should be very helpful when you have one of the anti's tell you how "30 thousand people are killed by guns every year". This shows that not only is that not true, but what they should really be worried about.

It also has a "Life Clock" line, which shows how many lives were saved because a firearm was available, plus links to the statistical data to back everything up.

http://nramemberscouncils.com/lifeclock/
 
Interesting, I'm glad to see I've killed more people with my second hand smoke, driving habits, bad advice, and drinking, (though I'm not a doctor and I don't sell/do drugs) than with my firearms ever will:evil:
 
I like the idea, but I think that it's not quite accurate.

I think that the number of lives saved a year by guns is incorrect. I believe that the number shown is the total number of defensive gun uses annually, NOT the number of lives saved annually by guns. According to Kleck's study, only about 30% of defensive gun uses "probably" or "almost certainly" resulted in saved lives. That would be somewhere around 750,000 a year using the highest estimate for defensive gun uses per year.
 
This has it's good and bad points.

The main point to remember is that, regardless of your side, you can make statistics say damned near anything you want them to.
 
They'll be right, until someone fixes the Lives Saved statistic.
 
And it isn't like the NRA has always been 100% accurate in their interpretations of data. JohnKSa is right about this and it does reflect another pro-gun bias of inaccuracy.

Think about it for a moment. The vast majority of folks in the US do not or cannot use guns during various incidents of danger. Even if firearms were used defensively in half the incidents in order to save lives, have we had 1.355 million murders and lethal animal attacks this year in the US? [1.355 million is the number of lives supposedly saved this year with guns as of 5 Sept 2006, 8:20 AM CST] No, of course not. And the NRA only shows firearm homicides, but homicides by other means are less common than by firearms. So the NRA has twisted the data to suit their needs by reclassifying firearm uses to lives saved. It is a sneaky ploy, but of the sort that is oft repeated by both sides of the gun rights argument.
 
D.N.S. said, "...homicides by other means are less common than by firearms."

The Center for Disease Control (some few years ago; haven't checked lately) has said that of some 50,000 homicides per year in the U.S. (down from 56,000), around 14,000 or so involved the use of firearms. Around 11,000 with handguns, 3,000 with long guns.

Thus, 36,000 as "other means".

Last I heard, $36 bought more than $14. :)

Art
 
Oh, I thought this was going to be about the band. :)

"Wait, you mean I take this living creature, and I throw it in a pot of boiling water, and it screams, and turns red, and dies, and then I eat it? That is the most metal thing ever!!" - Pickels.

Sorry, obscure reference made me laugh. Back to your thread.
 
All fine and dandy, but the number of "lives saved" is just somebody's biased estimate. There is no empirical way to measure it.

K
 
The main point to remember is that, regardless of your side, you can make statistics say damned near anything you want them to.
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Only if you're peddling them to an ignorant audience.

The deathclock thing is probably pretty accurate (as accurate as these things can be, taking the number of seconds in a year and dividing it by the raw number of deaths per year), but I wonder just how they came up with the "number of lives saved" statistic. By definition, you can determine how many bodies hit the floor in a given year, more or less, but "lives saved" is a very nebulous concept.

Mike
 
Dethklok

"Oh, I thought this was going to be about the band.

"Wait, you mean I take this living creature, and I throw it in a pot of boiling water, and it screams, and turns red, and dies, and then I eat it? That is the most metal thing ever!!" - Pickels.

Sorry, obscure reference made me laugh. Back to your thread."



I believes it is called a food library. Fooooood Librrarrry.
 
JohnKSa said: I like the idea, but I think that it's not quite accurate.

I think that the number of lives saved a year by guns is incorrect. I believe that the number shown is the total number of defensive gun uses annually, NOT the number of lives saved annually by guns. According to Kleck's study, only about 30% of defensive gun uses "probably" or "almost certainly" resulted in saved lives. That would be somewhere around 750,000 a year using the highest estimate for defensive gun uses per year.
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If you can document that "30%" statement with an online reference, I'd be glad to adjust the value used.

The links below the clock establish the sources for values used; all from independant sources. Those that dismiss the Life-Clock as "just an NRA propoganda tool" are unlikely to accept/consider the truth anyway.

After asking a few antis "How many people do you think are killed by guns in the US anyway?" and getting back answers like "millions, easily", I wanted to find a way to add some real perspective to the discussion.

Mike
 
Wow, fire arms are just a little bit more on a non-issue than drugs. What are we fighting the war on drugs for again?
 
The links below the clock establish the sources for values used; all from independant sources. Those that dismiss the Life-Clock as "just an NRA propoganda tool" are unlikely to accept/consider the truth anyway.
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My issue is not with the life-clock, per se, it is probably with the research underlying it. My main concern is how they are categorizing "lives saved". Assuming that the values that Kleck, et al, have gotten for Defensive Gun Uses are valid (which is a debate in and of itself), one still cannot equate a DGU to a life saved. There are literally thousands of people robbed at gunpoint in the USA who are not killed, every year. If those victims had used firearms to scare off/disable/kill their assailants, they would be listed as DGUs and, presumably, lives saved on the life clock. Now, change that "lives saved" label to "Defensive Uses of Firearms" and this objection disappears.
After asking a few antis "How many people do you think are killed by guns in the US anyway?" and getting back answers like "millions, easily", I wanted to find a way to add some real perspective to the discussion.
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Absolutely. I hate it when either side of a debate uses questionble statistics, or just starts using totally BS numbers. The antis are famous for this, but to be completely fair, the pro-gun side is not above it either.

Mike
 
change that "lives saved" label to "Defensive Uses of Firearms"
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I want the Life-Clock to have relevance to non-gun-types (otherwise it's just preaching to the choir) - to folks that may not know or are even unlikely to know what a DGU is. Accordingly, I prefer the "Lives Saved" label - catches the eye.

However, if Kleck applied a percentage of DGUs for this, I'd be happy to reflect a different number.

Mike
 
I understand your point- you want to compare apples to apples (lives taken to lives saved), and I fully agree that it is a more powerful statement, and also (if done properly) a more "honest" approach. I really think, though, that you'd have to use some percentage of DGUs in order to come up with something approximating "lives saved", and:

1. I have no idea what % that would be, and it may be that Kleck does not, either.

2. It may be that there is no way to accurately come up with that %.

As it is, it will come off as deceptive to anyone who takes a moment to think about what "Lives Saved" means.

Mike
 
If you can document that "30%" statement with an online reference, I'd be glad to adjust the value used.
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Mike,

The number looked wrong to me so I followed the links under the Clock on the website to find the numbers I quoted.

Here's where I ended up.

http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html

I read through the article and found Table 3

http://www.guncite.com/kleck3ab.html

At the bottom of Table 3, there are statistics on the Defender's Perceived Liklihood that a person would have died without the DGU.

The 30% comes from adding the "Probably would have" and "Almost certainly would have" stats together. It's actually 29.9% to be precise.

That 30% should be applied to Kleck's stats in Table 2

http://www.guncite.com/kleck2.gif

(I have NO idea why the link to Table 2 doesn't work--you'll have to go to the article and find a link in the article. The link I listed is correct, but it gives some weird "forbidden error".)

Table 2 says there are about 2.55 Million DGUs a year, so 30% of that would be about 765,000.

You could play around with the stats in Table 3, but I thought it was reasonable to use the 30% number. I guess you could bump it up a little by adding some of the people who said it MIGHT save a life, but that's probably splitting hairs since some of the folks who said "probably would have" were probably wrong.
 
Meh.

I have an issue with the validity of that argument (that the reporting person's estimate of whether someone would have died without the DGU is accurate), but it is quite possibly the best statistic available. It is, at the very least, much better than using DGU as a proxy for "lives saved", which is clearly not a valid measure.

I'd say use the most limiting estimate of potential lethality, so as to be able to say, "See, we're being overly conservative here, and it's still better to have guns around than not have them around." That would be 15%, "Almost Certainly Would Have", and I believe that would leave you with 203,892 "lives saved."

That still makes my inner statistician twitch, but it's probably good enough for a graphic on a website.

Mike
 
I think you could actually justify applying the 29.9% figure to the 2.55million figure Kleck lists in Table 2. Kleck approximates the figure as 2.1 to 2.5 in section two of the article, and makes a good argument that this range is probably low. At the very least, you could use the low end of his range--2.1 million and be perfectly safe.

Which means that what you currently have on the site is very defensible and can accurately be said to be on the conservative side.

I think your explanation is also good and I agree that the more indeterminate answer categories regarding the likelihood of death would contribute enough saved lives to balance the possible lives not saved in the two categories that add up the 29.9%

Coronach,

Since the entire survey is dependent to one extent or another on estimates, I think you sort of have to accept that the numbers aren't exact while realizing that the general results are going to be representative. I think that the key is picking something that's defensible at least to the extent that it can't be immediately dismissed.
 
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http://www.guncite.com/kleck2.gif

(I have NO idea why the link to Table 2 doesn't work--you'll have to go to the article and find a link in the article. The link I listed is correct, but it gives some weird "forbidden error".)
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Many websites don't want you posting gifs on some other website (it's called hot-linking). What happens, is that every time that other page is visited, it's using the bandwidth of the linked to site. For example, let's say you posted the above picture on some other web page that received 100,000 visitors in a day. The original website is bearing the traffic of those 100,000 visitors even though the link was not clicked.

Normally a link ending in .gif will display the picture on the page containing the link, as opposed to a link ending with .html where one would have to click on the link. Hope this makes sense.
 
The Center for Disease Control (some few years ago; haven't checked lately) has said that of some 50,000 homicides per year in the U.S. (down from 56,000), around 14,000 or so involved the use of firearms. Around 11,000 with handguns, 3,000 with long guns.

Thus, 36,000 as "other means".
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In the U.S. there has never been 50,000 homicides in a given year. Not even close.

Also, the number of homicides attributed to fireams has never been below 50% going back to 1966. Between 1966-1995 the lowest percentage was in 1983 with 58.3%.

You can see (for some of the years) the absolute number of murders per year here: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/offense_tabulations/table_01-01a.html
 
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