Iowa State Senator Celsi is a demoncrap. Need I explain more?<\/p>\n
Research on firearms contradicts senator; guns used in defense are a deterrent<\/a><\/p>\n State Sen. Claire Celsi’s anti-gun column<\/a>, published in the Register’s community editions on March 17, is filled with distortion.<\/p>\n Her biggest whopper is that “the rate of suicides in the United States is 10 times higher than any other country on Earth.”\u00a0In fact, the United States annual suicide rate\u00a0typically ranks in the 30s<\/a>.<\/p>\n She claims that the proposition that good guys with guns stop crime is a fantasy.\u00a0In fact, successful defensive use of guns is more common than their use in crime.\u00a0The National Academies of Science found<\/a>:\u00a0“Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence\u00a0\u2026.\u00a0Almost all national survey estimates \u2026 of annual uses range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million \u2026in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008. \u2026 Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was \u201cused\u201d by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have\u00a0found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”<\/p>\n Celsi misleads by lumping together all firearms deaths, as if accidents, homicides and suicides were the same thing, to write\u00a0that “rates of\u00a0death from firearms among ages 14 to 17\u00a0are now 22.5% higher than motor vehicle-related death rates.”<\/p>\n In fact,\u00a0an apples-to-apples comparison<\/a>\u00a0shows that the 2018 accidental death rate from firearms among ages 14 to 17 is 0.23 per 100,000, while the accidental death rate for motor vehicles for that group is 6.48 per 100,000.\u00a0The rate of death for firearms accidents among ages 14 to 17 is actually 96% lower than motor vehicle-related accidental deaths rates.<\/p>\n The unintentional firearms fatality rate, now 0.15 per 100,000,\u00a0has declined over 94%<\/a>\u00a0since records began to be kept in 1903.\u00a0Fatal gun accidents rank as one of the lowest causes of injury.<\/p>\n While\u00a0the number of privately owned guns\u00a0increased 92%<\/a>, from 185 million guns in 1993 to 357 million in 2013, the firearms homicide rate decreased by 49%.\u00a0Firearms homicides increased<\/a>\u00a0from 2015 to\u00a02017,\u00a0but decreased in 2018<\/a>, a trend expected to continue for 2019.<\/p>\n There is an increase in suicides, but the problem is far more complex than the presence of firearms.\u00a0The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that, while the number of suicides increased from 1999 to 2014,\u00a0the percentage of suicides committed with firearms decreased<\/a>\u00a0during the same period.\u00a0Assuming that each of the 24,432\u00a0firearm suicides in 2018<\/a>\u00a0involved one firearm per suicide, those 24,332 guns represented less than one-hundredth of 1 percent\u00a0of the 357 million firearms in America.<\/p>\n As for Celsi’s proposition that “good laws will keep us safer,”\u00a0 economist John Lott found\u00a0“stricter gun laws are associated with more total deaths from homicides and suicides.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Iowa State Senator Celsi is a demoncrap. Need I explain more? Research on firearms contradicts senator; guns used in defense are a deterrent State Sen. Claire Celsi’s anti-gun column, published in the Register’s community editions on March 17, is filled with distortion. Her biggest whopper is that “the rate of suicides in the United States … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44664,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions\/44664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}