Cory Booker: “If I Had The Power” To Ban Guns “I Would”

[Ray From Cleveland]

Moron.....the dumbest criminal out there is far smarter than you......when their victim produces a gun, they run away, or surrender, since the point is to victimize the victim, not go down in a blaze of glory.

So what you are telling me here is that 99.998% of drug addled, desperate criminals are going to totally shrink away from the mere sight of a gun being nervously handled by a scared white person.

Yeah, still seem pretty unlikely.

Do you think armed criminals go out with the intention of getting hurt or killed? Of course not. They don't want to suffer a scratch.

The criminal commits crime believing he can easily do so by subduing his subjects because he is armed. However an armed victim is not what he was counting on. It's why they often commit their crimes in no-gun zones.

A suspect and victim get into a gun fight. They are hiding behind cars or a tree, or something. The criminal knows if he kills his victim, it's likely he's going to spend the next couple of decades in prison if not the death penalty. He also knows that his victim can kill him with impunity. The criminal fully understands he is in a mismatched fight.

The criminal knows there are only three possible outcomes. He kills his victim and goes to prison. His victim kills him and nothing will happen to the victim. He can turn and run away from his victim knowing that he cannot get shot in the back without the victim himself ending up in prison. If you were the criminal, which option would you choose?

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

I didn't admit that... that's what the City claims when they whine why they can't do their jobs.

"The best thing about telling the truth is you never have to remember what you said."
Author unknown

You didn't say that Joe. Here is what you said in post 445

Because we don't have room to lock them all up. Sorry you don't get this. Cook County jail is full, so are most of the prisons.

You made no mention that you were conveying what the police or city said. The statement you made is what you believe.

Guy, I'm sorry your reading comprehension skills are so poor. What I clearly said was that we don't have room in jail to lock people up, not that the gun offenders were being let go. Sorry you can't see the difference.

No, that was your statement to 2aguy when he commented on police enforcement when it came to criminals with guns in your city. 2aguy stated that the Chicago authorities often let people who were carrying illegal firearms off the hook.

 

[M14 Shooter]

The criminal knows there are only three possible outcomes. He kills his victim and goes to prison. His victim kills him and nothing will happen to the victim. He can turn and run away from his victim knowing that he cannot get shot in the back without the victim himself ending up in prison. If you were the criminal, which option would you choose?

Unassailable reasoning.
Sure to be ignored.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

You care comparing entirely different cultures of people Joe, and then say it must be the guns and not them.

If you go to most any wealthy area in our country, murder is almost nonexistent if not totally non-existent. Same with upper middle-class, and even white middle-class.

Look, man, I know you lack compassion for people of color.. but those other countries have darkies, too.

Funny thing. They don't have guns, they don't have our levels of violence.

No country is nearly as diverse as ours. Most of our violent crime does come from people of color. You just can't admit that in spite of us posting statistic after statistic.

Do you think we don't have people who came here from Japan or Great Britain? How many murders have you seen from these people now that they have complete access to firearms like any other American?

And the only reason Blacks and hispanics commit so much crime is their out of wedlock birthrates are so high....courtesy of the democrats and the Great Society. Fatherless homes in the Black and hispanic communities are driving the crime rates here.......and are now driving the crime rates in Europe.

I think it's a little more than that. For whatever reason, blacks have major anger control problems. At least over here, many of the shootings and murders involve a guy who got into a fight and lost, or somebody that was in a heated argument. They kill each other for the stupidest reasons. Anger control problems.

You are correct about the single-parent issue though. I hear it on my police scanner all the time. Most of the calls our police get are about kids. A good percentage of those calls do come from the parent on their own kid.

The mother raises her boys just fine until they get past puberty. Then she is no longer able to control the kid. After a while she just gives up and lets her male children do whatever the hell they like. The kid grows up with the concept that a strong enough resistance will push back authority all the time.

The kid turns 18 with that attitude and gets stopped by a cop. Like his mother, he believes if he resists and fights authority, he will have the upper hand. He ends up getting shot by the officer and they bury him thee days later.

 

[Soupnazi630]

If you want to reduce gun crime, lock up the repeat gun offenders........

Why? If you guys are claiming that EVERY FUCKING AMERICAN HAS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO A GUN, then I'm not sure why you want to lock people up for merely having a gun. The point is, we can't lock up the robbers because we don't have enough room for the rapists and murderers. Taxes in IL are high enough already, you want to lock up more people? Where's the money going to come from?

Wrong....every home had a gun and they were common tools for survival.......you moron.

Spiking the Gun Myth

It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when -- while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 -- he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.

What happened to the gun we ''know'' was over every mantel, the omnipresent hunting weapon, the symbol of the frontier? Bellesiles looked elsewhere, examined many different kinds of evidence, trying to find where the famous guns were hiding. ''Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture'' tells us what he learned: that individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun.

In the Colonial period, the gun meant the musket, an imported item that cost the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. Without constant attention its iron rusted, and blacksmiths were ill equipped to repair it (they shoed horses and made plows). The musket was not efficient for self-defense or hunting. It was not accurate beyond a few hundred feet (it had no sight, and soldiers were instructed not to aim, since volleys relied on mass impact). It frequently misfired and was cumbersome to reload, awkward qualities for individual self-defense; by the time you had put ball and powder back in, your foe would be upon you with knife, club or ax. Most murders were committed with knives, and -- contrary to the myth of primitive violence -- there were few murders outside Indian warfare (in North Carolina, on the average, there was only one murder every two years between 1663 and 1740).

You should mention that Micheal Bellesilles was discredited , stripped of his Bancroft award and fired from his position as a professor because his book arming America was based on academic fraud.


His narrative is absolute fiction

 

[Pilot1]

You care comparing entirely different cultures of people Joe, and then say it must be the guns and not them.

If you go to most any wealthy area in our country, murder is almost nonexistent if not totally non-existent. Same with upper middle-class, and even white middle-class.

Look, man, I know you lack compassion for people of color.. but those other countries have darkies, too.

Funny thing. They don't have guns, they don't have our levels of violence.

No country is nearly as diverse as ours. Most of our violent crime does come from people of color. You just can't admit that in spite of us posting statistic after statistic.

Do you think we don't have people who came here from Japan or Great Britain? How many murders have you seen from these people now that they have complete access to firearms like any other American?

And the only reason Blacks and hispanics commit so much crime is their out of wedlock birthrates are so high....courtesy of the democrats and the Great Society. Fatherless homes in the Black and hispanic communities are driving the crime rates here.......and are now driving the crime rates in Europe.

I think it's a little more than that. For whatever reason, blacks have major anger control problems. At least over here, many of the shootings and murders involve a guy who got into a fight and lost, or somebody that was in a heated argument. They kill each other for the stupidest reasons. Anger control problems.

This is the issue nobody wants to recognize and acknowledge. For whatever reason, poor inner city Blacks not only use violence in crime but think it is OK to use violence and murder to settle arguments. Often this occurs at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning outside of bars and after hours clubs after drinking and/or taking drugs. Our "gun violence problem" is really a PEOPLE violence problem in the inner cities. Nobody seems to care if they kill each other.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

You care comparing entirely different cultures of people Joe, and then say it must be the guns and not them.

If you go to most any wealthy area in our country, murder is almost nonexistent if not totally non-existent. Same with upper middle-class, and even white middle-class.

Look, man, I know you lack compassion for people of color.. but those other countries have darkies, too.

Funny thing. They don't have guns, they don't have our levels of violence.

No country is nearly as diverse as ours. Most of our violent crime does come from people of color. You just can't admit that in spite of us posting statistic after statistic.

Do you think we don't have people who came here from Japan or Great Britain? How many murders have you seen from these people now that they have complete access to firearms like any other American?

And the only reason Blacks and hispanics commit so much crime is their out of wedlock birthrates are so high....courtesy of the democrats and the Great Society. Fatherless homes in the Black and hispanic communities are driving the crime rates here.......and are now driving the crime rates in Europe.

I think it's a little more than that. For whatever reason, blacks have major anger control problems. At least over here, many of the shootings and murders involve a guy who got into a fight and lost, or somebody that was in a heated argument. They kill each other for the stupidest reasons. Anger control problems.

This is the issue nobody wants to recognize and acknowledge. For whatever reason, poor inner city Blacks not only use violence in crime but think it is OK to use violence and murder to settle arguments. Often this occurs at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning outside of bars and after hours clubs after drinking and/or taking drugs. Our "gun violence problem" is really a PEOPLE violence problem in the inner cities. Nobody seems to care if they kill each other.

At one time committing such a crime was an act of shame. Today it's a badge of honor. Having a criminal record gets you street cred. Others actually look up to them when they get out and return to the street.

Years ago before our liberal judges turned jails into vacation spas, they were run like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. It was a place that nearly every American feared.

 

[JoeB131]

Kellerman's research was crap too....

Of course it was. It debunked one of your favorite myths about guns making us safer. Just like Bellesiles spiked they myth of heavily armed colonists.

I heard they did a study that owning a gun doesn't make your dick any bigger. I'm sure you will publish a study showing how manly a gun makes you.

 

[JoeB131]

At one time committing such a crime was an act of shame. Today it's a badge of honor. Having a criminal record gets you street cred. Others actually look up to them when they get out and return to the street.

Years ago before our liberal judges turned jails into vacation spas, they were run like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. It was a place that nearly every American feared.

Again, you wouldn't last a day in a prison, buddy. I'm always amazed when I see pampered white folks tell us how much fun prison is. It's just too funny.

 

[JoeB131]

Do you think armed criminals go out with the intention of getting hurt or killed? Of course not. They don't want to suffer a scratch.

I think if you are desperate enough to commit a crime, you've probably stopped thinking about the consequences.

SO let's review, one more time.

In this corner, you have the drug-addled, hungry, desperate criminal who need some money to get a fix.

And in this corner, you have the nervous, lilywhite gun owner who has probably never pulled out his weapon in anger before.

You guys really want me to believe that in 99.9998% of cases, the end result of that is going to be, "Oh, wow, you have a gun, what was I thinking?"

No. Not at all. Way too many chances for either side to miscalculate in that situation. The very fact that TRAINED POLICE OFFICERS miscalculate so often in these situations (you know, in these cases where you have a ton of excuses about why little Tamir or LaQuan just needed to fucking DIE!) tells me that if this was happening with untrained civilians 1.5 million times a year, we'd have a lot more cases of people being killed.

 

[JoeB131]

This is the issue nobody wants to recognize and acknowledge. For whatever reason, poor inner city Blacks not only use violence in crime but think it is OK to use violence and murder to settle arguments. Often this occurs at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning outside of bars and after hours clubs after drinking and/or taking drugs. Our "gun violence problem" is really a PEOPLE violence problem in the inner cities. Nobody seems to care if they kill each other.

Oh, I agree, if more white people were the victims of gun violence, we'd have taken a Sharpie to the Second Amendment by now.

 

[JoeB131]

I think it's a little more than that. For whatever reason, blacks have major anger control problems.

I don't know what's funnier. Ray denying he's a racist or Ray claiming other people have anger problems.

 

[JoeB131]

No, that was your statement to 2aguy when he commented on police enforcement when it came to criminals with guns in your city. 2aguy stated that the Chicago authorities often let people who were carrying illegal firearms off the hook.

yes, that's what they claim.

The reality is, we don't have enough space for the real criminals... but that has little to with the crime problem.

The crime problem in Chicago is because

1) The community no longer trusts our incompetent, corrupt, badly run police department.

2) After the Feds rolled up several of the big gangs dealing drugs, a lot of smaller gangs filled in the power vacuum and are fighting over markets.

3) After McDonald and Heller, most of the sensible gun laws we did have were repealled, resulting in a spike in violence.

 

[2aguy]

You care comparing entirely different cultures of people Joe, and then say it must be the guns and not them.

If you go to most any wealthy area in our country, murder is almost nonexistent if not totally non-existent. Same with upper middle-class, and even white middle-class.

Look, man, I know you lack compassion for people of color.. but those other countries have darkies, too.

Funny thing. They don't have guns, they don't have our levels of violence.

No country is nearly as diverse as ours. Most of our violent crime does come from people of color. You just can't admit that in spite of us posting statistic after statistic.

Do you think we don't have people who came here from Japan or Great Britain? How many murders have you seen from these people now that they have complete access to firearms like any other American?

And the only reason Blacks and hispanics commit so much crime is their out of wedlock birthrates are so high....courtesy of the democrats and the Great Society. Fatherless homes in the Black and hispanic communities are driving the crime rates here.......and are now driving the crime rates in Europe.

I think it's a little more than that. For whatever reason, blacks have major anger control problems. At least over here, many of the shootings and murders involve a guy who got into a fight and lost, or somebody that was in a heated argument. They kill each other for the stupidest reasons. Anger control problems.

This is the issue nobody wants to recognize and acknowledge. For whatever reason, poor inner city Blacks not only use violence in crime but think it is OK to use violence and murder to settle arguments. Often this occurs at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning outside of bars and after hours clubs after drinking and/or taking drugs. Our "gun violence problem" is really a PEOPLE violence problem in the inner cities. Nobody seems to care if they kill each other.

The problem is an out of wedlock birth rate of over 75% in Black homes.......fatherless boys and girls who have no adults guiding them to be civilized........that is the problem but it is also the feature of democrat party policies.....broken homes mean democrat voters...for life.

 

[2aguy]

Kellerman's research was crap too....

Of course it was. It debunked one of your favorite myths about guns making us safer. Just like Bellesiles spiked they myth of heavily armed colonists.

I heard they did a study that owning a gun doesn't make your dick any bigger. I'm sure you will publish a study showing how manly a gun makes you.

You completely ignore that Bellesiles made it all up, was fired for making it all up, and is disgraced for having made it all up? You failed to see that...right?

Wow, you were doing pretty good with your therapy.....you almost are to the point where guns don't excite you sexually, and now you are backsliding....

 

[2aguy]

Do you think armed criminals go out with the intention of getting hurt or killed? Of course not. They don't want to suffer a scratch.

I think if you are desperate enough to commit a crime, you've probably stopped thinking about the consequences.

SO let's review, one more time.

In this corner, you have the drug-addled, hungry, desperate criminal who need some money to get a fix.

And in this corner, you have the nervous, lilywhite gun owner who has probably never pulled out his weapon in anger before.

You guys really want me to believe that in 99.9998% of cases, the end result of that is going to be, "Oh, wow, you have a gun, what was I thinking?"

No. Not at all. Way too many chances for either side to miscalculate in that situation. The very fact that TRAINED POLICE OFFICERS miscalculate so often in these situations (you know, in these cases where you have a ton of excuses about why little Tamir or LaQuan just needed to fucking DIE!) tells me that if this was happening with untrained civilians 1.5 million times a year, we'd have a lot more cases of people being killed.

You are an idiot.....as one gun expert pointed out.....a victim and a cop are two completely different entities....the victim fights to break contact with the criminal, the cop has to pursue and capture the criminal....two completely different dynamics...showing how little you understand of the situation and gun issues.

 

[2aguy]

No, that was your statement to 2aguy when he commented on police enforcement when it came to criminals with guns in your city. 2aguy stated that the Chicago authorities often let people who were carrying illegal firearms off the hook.

yes, that's what they claim.

The reality is, we don't have enough space for the real criminals... but that has little to with the crime problem.

The crime problem in Chicago is because

1) The community no longer trusts our incompetent, corrupt, badly run police department.

2) After the Feds rolled up several of the big gangs dealing drugs, a lot of smaller gangs filled in the power vacuum and are fighting over markets.

3) After McDonald and Heller, most of the sensible gun laws we did have were repealled, resulting in a spike in violence.

The problem in Chicago is the democrat party policies toward crime, and social issues, and the fact that the local aldermen are in bed with the gangs.

 

[danielpalos]

We have a Second Amendment and should have no security problems in our free States.

This is the common law for the common defense:

The defense and protection of the state and of the United States is an obligation of all persons within the state. The legislature shall provide for the discharge of this obligation and for the maintenance and regulation of an organized militia.

Don't grab guns, grab gun lovers and regulate them well!

 

[Soupnazi630]

Kellerman's research was crap too....

Of course it was. It debunked one of your favorite myths about guns making us safer. Just like Bellesiles spiked they myth of heavily armed colonists.

I heard they did a study that owning a gun doesn't make your dick any bigger. I'm sure you will publish a study showing how manly a gun makes you.

Bellesilles spiked nothing.

He was massively debunked and discredited.

Many posters on this thread have demonstrated in detail why he was destroyed

Heavily armed colonists were the norm and that is unchallenged

On the other hand kellerman has not been debunked

These facts are proven but you ignore them

 

[2aguy]

Kellerman's research was crap too....

Of course it was. It debunked one of your favorite myths about guns making us safer. Just like Bellesiles spiked they myth of heavily armed colonists.

I heard they did a study that owning a gun doesn't make your dick any bigger. I'm sure you will publish a study showing how manly a gun makes you.

Bellesilles spiked nothing.

He was massively debunked and discredited.

Many posters on this thread have demonstrated in detail why he was destroyed

Heavily armed colonists were the norm and that is unchallenged

On the other hand kellerman has not been debunked

These facts are proven but you ignore them

On the other hand kellerman has not been debunke

Yes, he has.....he had to go back and redo his research when his "43 times more likely" number failed to stand up to even basic scrutiny..........upon redoing his research he came back with 2.7 times more likely, but even that number was based on biased samples of the most dysfunctional homes...

Here...

First....


Here is the study he did after being called out for bad research the first time....following that is the continuing problems with his research methods...

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506

After controlling for these characteristics, we found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7;

------------

Nine Myths Of Gun Control

Kellermann recently downgraded his estimate to "2.7 times," [18] but he persisted in discredited methodology. He used a method that cannot distinguish between "cause" and "effect." His method would be like finding more diet drinks in the refrigerators of fat people and then concluding that diet drinks "cause" obesity.


Also, he studied groups with high rates of violent criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, abject poverty, and domestic abuse .


From such a poor and violent study group he attempted to generalize his findings to normal homes

Interestingly, when Dr. Kellermann was interviewed he stated that, if his wife were attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection.[19] Apparently, Dr. Kellermann doesn't even believe his own studies.


-----


Public Health and Gun Control: A Review



Since at least the mid-1980s, Dr. Kellermann (and associates), whose work had been heavily-funded by the CDC, published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don¹t.

In a 1986 NEJM paper, Dr. Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their "scientific research" proved that defending oneself or one¹s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counter productive, claiming "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder."8

In a critical review and now classic article published in the March 1994 issue of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Dr. Edgar Suter, Chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), found evidence of "methodologic and conceptual errors," such as prejudicially truncated data and the listing of "the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors."5

Moreover, the gun control researchers failed to consider and underestimated the protective benefits of guns.

Dr. Suter writes: "The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected ‹ not the burglar or rapist body count.

Since only 0.1 - 0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000."5

In 1993, in his landmark and much cited NEJM article (and the research, again, heavily funded by the CDC), Dr. Kellermann attempted to show again that guns in the home are a greater risk to the victims than to the assailants.4 Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Dr. Kellermann ignored the criticisms and again used the same methodology.

He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected state counties, known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.

For example,

53 percent of the case subjects had a history of a household member being arrested,

31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use, 32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight, and

17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required.
Moreover, both the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a very high incidence of financial instability.

In fact, in this study, gun ownership, the supposedly high risk factor for homicide was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being murdered.

Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, history of family violence, living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than a gun in the home. One must conclude there is no basis to apply the conclusions of this study to the general population.

All of these are factors that, as Dr. Suter pointed out, "would expectedly be associated with higher rates of violence and homicide."5

It goes without saying, the results of such a study on gun homicides, selecting this sort of unrepresentative population sample, nullify the authors' generalizations, and their preordained, conclusions can not be extrapolated to the general population.

Moreover, although the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study purported to show that the homicide victims were killed with a gun ordinarily kept in the home, the fact is that as Kates and associates point out 71.1 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who did not live in the victims¹ household using guns presumably not kept in that home.6


https://crimeresearch.org/wp-conten...ack-of-Public-Health-Research-on-Firearms.pdf

In one of the most well-known public health studies on firearms, Kellermann’s “case sample” consists of 444 homicides that occurred in homes. His control group had 388 individuals who lived near the deceased victims and were of the same sex, race, and age range. After learning about the homicide victims and control subjects—whether they owned a gun, had a drug or alcohol problem, etc.—these authors attempted to see if the probability of a homicide correlated with gun ownership.

Amazingly these studies assume that if someone died from a gun shot, and a gun was owned in the home, that it was the gun in the home that killed that person. The paper is clearly misleading, as it fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the gun that had been kept in the home the murder weapon.

Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much higher than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses. Fix either of these data errors and the results are reversed.



The Fallacy of "43 to 1"

The source of the 43-to-1 ratio is a study of firearm deaths in Seattle homes, conducted by doctors Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay ("Protection or Peril?: An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine, 1986). Kellerman and Reay totaled up the numbers of firearms murders, suicides, and fatal accidents, and then compared that number to the number of firearm deaths that were classified as justifiable homicides. The ratio of murder, suicide, and accidental death to the justifiable homicides was 43 to 1.

This is what the anti-gun lobbies call "scientific" proof that people (except government employees and security guards) should not have guns.

Of the gun deaths in the home, the vast majority are suicides. In the 43-to-1 figure, suicides account for nearly all the 43 unjustifiable deaths.
-------

So by counting accidents and suicides, the 43-to-1 factoid ends up including a very large number of fatalities that would have occurred anyway, even if there were no gun in the home.

Now, how about the self-defense homicides, which Kellermann and Reay found to be so rare? Well, the reason that they found such a low total was that they excluded many cases of lawful self-defense. Kellermann and Reay did not count in the self-defense total of any of the cases where a person who had shot an attacker was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, or cases where a conviction was reversed on appeal on grounds related to self-defense. Yet 40% of women who appeal their murder convictions have the conviction reversed on appeal. ("Fighting Back," Time, Jan. 18, 1993.)

In short, the 43-to-1 figure is based on the totally implausible assumption that all the people who die in gun suicides and gun accidents would not kill themselves with something else if guns were unavailable. The figure is also based on a drastic undercount of the number of lawful self-defense homicides.

Moreover, counting dead criminals to measure the efficacy of civilian handgun ownership is ridiculous. Do we measure the efficacy of our police forces by counting how many people the police lawfully kill every year? The benefits of the police — and of home handgun ownership — are not measured by the number of dead criminals, but by the number of crimes prevented. Simplistic counting of corpses tells us nothing about the real safety value of gun ownership for protection.