Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. urges students to arm themselves

It is like you are reading President Obama’s talking points - weird. One could argue that the reason why the number is low for those killed by terrorism in the US is because of gun ownership. You are also ignoring the fact that we are discussing carrying a firearm in a church. So, in order for your stats to mean anything, at the very least, you would need to compare accidental shootings outside of the home - which is where most accidental shootings occur. You could even take it further and ask how many accidental shootings in a church - which I found there to be one news story of a fatality in an accidental church shooting in the past several years. There may be more, but at a quick glance, that is what it looks like. I would also argue that the reason to carry is not to just stop terrorist. I have yet to meet a licensed concealed carry gun owner who was looking forward to shooting someone. Instead, everyone that I have talked to - and that is a bunch in our rural area - state that they hope they never need to take out their weapon for that purpose. I am bothered less by your anti-gun mentality and arguments, then I am by your characterization of the men in my church who carry a concealed weapon.

[GregH]

Bob Nutzhorn wrote:

As some of our SI commentators have said - I am the greater threat than a terrorist. Yikes - that is kind of frightening to actually write out!

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/08/maine-school-official-apologizes-fo…

​I don’t expect any apologies from our commentators though.

No, I won’t apologize. Question for you Bob. In the past five years, how many people were killed in the US by terrorists and how many were killed by gun accidents caused by gun owners?

It’s worth noting that deterrence of terrorism is only one of the reasons for concealed carry, the far bigger reason being dealing with other criminals. Along those lines, there is a huge problem with “that which is not seen”; what would the crime rate be if we didn’t have a few million people out there who might be armed? As Jim notes, there is abundant evidence that it makes a difference. It’s worth noting that the firearm murder rate has halved while the number of firearms out there has doubled. Clearly somebody is getting religion on how to safely store and use firearms, or else the correlation would be the opposite.

It’s also worth noting that if we choose terrorism in the past five years, yes, we avoid that big problem from 2001….there is a touch of cherry picking there, no? Plus, it still does not address the question of what the rate of terrorist incidents would have been had terrorists not needed to deal with a fairly large pool of people who might be able to respond. See the issues here?

Really, what needs to be dealt with here is the rate of incidents regarding permit holders vs. the benefit of allowing them to be in a given area at a given time. I would assert that the reality is that the list accumulated of problems is greatly outweighed by the benefits of having armed citizens in these areas. The benefits are statistical, as Jim notes regarding Chicago, and the risks are anecdotal, and that even with the Brady Center’s list that includes a fair number of people who weren’t really licensed carry permit holders.

Joe, it actually turns out that this is not true. The only way you get there is for some very creative accounting of what a mass shooting is, and some very iffy methodology. Here’s a National Review article about this. It’s more or less crowdsourced data with no particular care taken to differentiate a mass killing in public from the murder suicides that happen when families break up, and would last about 15 minutes or less in peer review.

Now it does turn out to be true that the United States has higher firearm murders and deaths than other nations, but when you look at a Pareto of what’s linked to the deaths, you more or less find that the biggest contributor is “perpetrators whose parents were not married at the time of the perpetrator’s birth”. If you factor that out, murders in the U.S. are pretty much as low as those of Japan, where….surprise surprise….their culture does not encourage out of wedlock births, and their government (unlike ours) does not provide financial incentives for the same.

Patrick Moynihan’s warning from 1965 is as telling as it ever was, really.