Connection between gun ownership, alcohol abuse, and violence

"The Myth of the Mentally Ill Shooter: Why the NRA Blames Mental Illness and Ignores Alcohol Abuse....

"That same paper revealed that the substance most associated with violent crime isn’t a street drug like PCP or heroin. Rather, it’s alcohol. A 2013 meta-analysis of 23 studies concluded that '48 percent of homicide offenders were reportedly under the influence of alcohol at the time of the offense and 37 percent were intoxicated.'

"Several studies have established the relationship between alcohol abuse and firearm-related crimes. Just as an individual is severely handicapped while operating a car under the influence, these studies found that similar failures in judgment and impulse control manifest during the operation of a firearm. Research shows that the risk of homicide, suicide, and violent death by all causes is significantly elevated with chronic alcohol abuse. Another study found a causal relationship between alcohol abuse and 'impulsive' crimes such as assault and property damage.

"Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, has conducted two recent studies on alcohol use among gun owners and how it might impact their behavior. In 2011, using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System — an annual survey of risk-related behaviors conducted by the Centers of Disease Control — for eight states and more than 15,000 respondents, he found that gun owners are significantly more likely than non-firearm owners to have five or more drinks on one occasion, to drink and drive, and have 60 or more drinks per month."
https://www.armedwithreason.com/the...s-mental-illness-and-ignores-alcohol-abuse-2/

This is very interesting. I think it's one reason why more people owning guns does not lead to lower crime rates. Gun owners are more likely to drink excessively and people who are intoxicated are more likely to commit violent crimes.

 

We should outlaw gun ownership. And alcohol. And violence.

 

Perhaps a prohibition on the manufacture, distribution, sale, ownership, and consumption of alcoholic beverages should be attempted, in order to address this problem.

The cited studies that were used to reach this conclusion both reference Arthur Kellerman. As such their integrity must be called into question, as Arthur Kellerman fabricated the evidence of his study in order to arrive at his findings. He chose to count firearms within the home to include firearms that were not owned by the victim, but rather by the perpetrator who brought the firearm with them for the explicit purpose of murdering someone that was within the home.

Beyond such, one of the studies admits openly that the results rely entirely on the honesty of those who are being questioned, and that there is a risk of sampling error and bias.

http://www.waveedfund.org/sites/waveedfund.org/files/wintemute guns alcohol_0.pdf

At the very best, the study suggests that those who engage in the abuse of alcoholic beverages are more likely to engage in violence than others. However there is nothing within either study to suggest that the ownership of firearms is in any way connected to the amount of alcoholic beverages one may consume.

 

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

I don't drink.

 

Senator Ted Kennedy was Anti-Gun, drank Alcohol in prodigious quantity, and was quite hypocritical, he sank his car into the Chapaquidic (sp?) Disambiguation requested, causing the death of Mary Jo Kopecney (sp?) Disambiguation requested.

There are many Alcoholics on both sides of the argument.

Many Gun owners do not drink Alcohol, and many abusing Alcohol don't have Guns, so what is your point ????

 

Why would someone dishonestly claim to be a binge drinker in a survey if they are not? That doesn't make any sense.

 

Sure, you can cherry pick out a few exceptions but that doesn't change what the research says.

 

Please explain why those who possess a CCW are far more law-abiding than the general public.

If "gun owners" were statistically more violent, there should be no group more violent and alcoholic than people who carry firearms every day.

Your "study" even makes such a claim:

http://www.waveedfund.org/sites/waveedfund.org/files/wintemute guns alcohol_0.pdf

Heavy alcohol use was most common among firearm owners who also engaged in behaviours such as carrying a firearm for protection against other people and keeping a firearm at home thatwas both loaded and not locked away.

So where is the high crime and rates of alcoholism for those with a CCW?

The answer is, there isn't.

 

Read it and weep. This is not some biased study. This is the sum total of all convictions for all felony crimes by handgun license holders for 2015. A person with a License To Carry in Texas is 20 TIMES less likely to commit a crime of any kind. The stats are very similar for every year in recent history since Texas began keeping these statistics. This blows your biased study out of the water in spades.

http://www.dps.texas.gov/RSD/CHL/Reports/ConvictionRatesReport2015.pdf

Here are several more years worth of reports with very consistent results.

http://www.dps.texas.gov/rsd/chl/reports/convrates.htm

With over 1,000,000 Licenses To Carry(at least 5% of the adult population), we committed .2459% of all crime in Texas. So much for being beer swilling crime generation machines.

 

Why does anyone do what they do? Why do some choose to engage in acts of malice and cause harm to others when there is no need or justification for doing such? Why do some choose to engage in troll-type behavior on internet forums when there is no need for such? Why do some engage in the reckless and illegal use of illicit substances when there is no need, justification, or even legal basis for doing such?

The answer is that they do such because they can. Often times that is the long and the short of why people commit various offenses against others.

 

Not to mention, of course, that this is reflected in the CCW population of every state that issues CCW licenses.

Facts show that those who have a CCW commit a fraction of 1% of all crime in every state.

So much for the theory that people like to get drunk and start shooting.

 

No specific claim was made about people with a CCW. Many people who pack heat may not have a license to do so. Many people who do have a license may choose not to pack heat (at least not routinely).

 

I just quoted the bolded part from the study you referenced.

Unless of course, you're trying to point out that criminals like to engage in criminal behavior, which is pretty self-evident.

Clearly, there is no correlation between LAW ABIDING people who carry guns, or have guns in the home, and alcoholism and a propensity to commit violence.

If there was, we would see it in the CCW statistics. We do not see that, do we?

As usual, these "studies" take criminal actions and apply them to non-criminals.

The undeniable fact is that more than half of the murder in the US is perpetrated by 6% of the population.

 

FIFY. If 6% of the population committed half the murders, we do the math to see:

0.06 x 324 million = 19.4 million murders. I believe the actual total is much, much less.

 

Did 324 million people get murdered last year?

Facts are facts.

Black males were responsible for more than half of all homicide, including gun related homicide, and make up 6-7% of the population.

The gun murder rate of black males aged 15-29 is in the 90's per 100k. That's Honduran level violence in that small group of people.

If other races committed as much murder as the black population, we would have over 100,000 murders per year.

 

Guns

 

Straw man. The study never claimed to be focused solely on the fraction of the gun owning population that is law abiding.

 

No, it's not.

Your "study" tried to equate alcoholism and violence to ALL gun owners. Someone in illegal possession of a firearm, or who already has a criminal record, or both, does not represent "gun owners".

It would be like posting a study that tried to intimate that all men are rapists for being in possession of a penis.

About 6% of murders are committed with a legally owned firearm, meaning that 94% of those committing murder are already in illegal possession of a firearm.

We don't have a gun problem. We have a criminal problem.

Put the criminals in jail where they belong for being illegally in possession of firearms, and the murder would stop.

 

It is not a fact that half of all murders were committed by 6% of the population. Black men who committed murders make up no more than about 0.018% of the population.

 

Lithuania has rock bottom gun ownership rates the lowest in Europe with Romania.

Lithuania still manages to be #1 in suicides, and #2 in murder in Europe.

 

My point was that a small subset of the population commits murder at a rate that is, pound for pound, quite extreme.

Of course I'm not saying that all black men are murderers, that would be ridiculous.

What I meant was that black males only make up 6-7% of the total population, and within that population they are committing more than half of the murder in this country.

 

Regardless of how you choose to misinterpret the study, you're still part of the problem if you support the lax laws which make it easy for guns to fall into the wrong hands (even if you yourself are 100% law abiding).

 

The countries with the highest rates of suicide and homicide in the world all also have the lowest rates of gun ownership.

 

Vehicles kill way more people than guns, sure most are by accident, but then there's some people who run people over who anger them, and this includes some nasty terrorist attacks which used vehicles to mass murder, the Berlin, and Nice terrorist truck attacks come to mind.

When will we ban vehicles?