U.S. Politics 2017 (split fm US Election: 2016)

[kkwd]

The article explained, "The regions and region names in the table are based on the United Nations geo-scheme.

The United Nations geo-scheme is a system which divides the countries of the world into regional and sub-regional groups. It was devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) based on the M49 coding classification.
The creators note that "the assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories.

The UNSD geo-scheme does not set a standard for the entire United Nations System, and it often differs from geographic definitions used by the autonomous United Nations specialized agencies for their own organizational convenience. For instance, UNSD includes Georgia and Cyprus in Western Asia, yet the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and UNESCO include them in Europe."

This explains the United Nations geoscheme for the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_the_Americas

The comparison was USA and Canada.

The comparison was USA and Canada.

USA and Canada are different countries with different systems. Raw numbers like these stats are not of much use. As for the UN, they do manage to complicate things and not get much done in some areas.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

And why just those two countries? The US is subject to social pressures we are not.

 

[mariomike]

Raw numbers like these stats are not of much use.

If you do not like the statistics, why not find some that you do like?

And why just those two countries?

Because this is a US thread. For comparison, I looked at Canada, because that is where I live.

List of countries by firearm-related death rate

USA 10.54
Canada 1.97
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

 

[Colin Parkinson]

and Homicides for the 2 are  1.68 vs 4.68 per 100,000 remove the effect of 2% of the US and I suspect the rest of the US is very close to Canada.

 

[mariomike]

In the United States, the annual rate of all gun deaths per 100,000 population is
2014: 10.54
2013: 10.63
2012: 10.69
2011: 10.38
2010: 10.26
2009: 10.22
2008: 10.39
2007: 10.37
2006: 10.35
2005: 10.39
2004: 10.10
2003: 10.39
2002: 10.51
2001: 10.38
2000: 10.19
1999: 10.35
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

In Canada, the annual rate of all gun deaths per 100,000 population is
2011: 2.05
2010: 2.30
2009: 2.19
2008: 2.25
2007: 2.26
2006: 2.44
2005: 2.59
2004: 2.39
2003: 2.55
2002: 2.61
2001: 2.74
2000: 2.89
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/canada

 

[the 48th regulator]

Latest Statistic Canadada Juristat articles

Homicide in Canada, 2015

Number and rate of homicides at their highest point since 2011

    Police reported 604 homicide victims in Canada in 2015, 83 more than the previous year and the highest number of homicides reported since 2011.Note 2 The homicide rate (1.68 per 100,000 population) increased 15% from the previous year marking the highest homicide rate since 2011 (Chart 1). This was also the largest percentage increase in the annual homicide rate reported in Canada since 1975. The 2015 homicide rate however was 2% lower than the average for the previous decade (Chart 2).
    Attempted murders also grew in 2015 (Allen 2016). Police reported 144 more attempted murders compared to 2014 (from 630 in 2014 to 774 in 2015), and the rate increased 22% from the previous year (2.16 per 100,000 population compared to 1.77). The rate of attempted murder has remained consistently higher than the homicide rate since the 1980s, and these offences have often shown similar trends over time (Chart 1).
    In 2015, police reported 572 incidents of homicide, the majority involving a single victim (95%). There were 21 incidents involving two victims (4%), and the remaining 5 incidents involved either three or four victims (less than 1%). This pattern has been consistent since homicide data collection began in 1961.
    In 2015, police reported solving 75% (451) of the total 604 reported homicides (see Text box 2). There were a reported total of 525 accused persons identified in these homicides.


CDC National Center for Health Statistics

Mortality
All homicides

    Number of deaths: 15,872
    Deaths per 100,000 population: 5.0

Firearm homicides

    Number of deaths: 11,008
    Deaths per 100,000 population: 3.5


If you wish to finds stats on other places like Venezuela or Lichenstein, type it in google, and find it yourself.  I will follow mariomikes direction, and use the same countries for the sake of converstions.

dileas

tess

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

USA and Canada are different countries with different systems. Raw numbers like these stats are not of much use. As for the UN, they do manage to complicate things and not get much done in some areas.

Raw numbers are not of much use only when groups, say, the NRA, fund such measures as the Dickey Amendment.

For those that have never heard of it, the Dickey amendment was passed in 1996 and essentially banned the CDC from conducting studies on gun control in the US. The amendment, "...ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never to fund research that could be seen as advocacy for gun control. Since the 1990s, that provision has commonly stopped any gun studies because researchers don't want to risk losing federal money..."

Dickey himself stated, "And it (cutting off all research on the effects of guns or gun ownership in society) wasn't necessary that all research stop. It just couldn't be the collection of data so that they can advocate gun control.

So you're right, the US needs to study this more. the NRA should really stop advocating for such things!

 

[kkwd]

It can be useful to have a gun on hand at times.

http://nypost.com/2017/10/11/robbery-thwarted-when-victim-pulls-out-concealed-gun/

 

[Jarnhamar]

It can be useful to have a gun on hand at times.

http://nypost.com/2017/10/11/robbery-thwarted-when-victim-pulls-out-concealed-gun/

I don't think many people who have actually used guns in self-defense think they don't work for self-defense.

It's funny to see anti-gun celebrities and politicians preach about the evils of firearms yet surround themselves with armed guards.

 

[kkwd]

A headline from Newsweek.

Trump Is Not A Good President, Must Be Impeached By Candidates Running For Office in 2018, Billionaire Donor Says

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trump-not-good-president-must-000140102.html

Is it going to be a strategy for the 2018 elections to expect to win control of the House and Senate to impeach Trump? Or is it better to have some sound policies? The man mentioned in the article donated 91 million to the past campaign, I thought it was a Democrat principle to get big money out of politics. That is just not big, it is, to quote Bernie Sanders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-56-6kJCs_o.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

It can be useful to have a gun on hand at times.

http://nypost.com/2017/10/11/robbery-thwarted-when-victim-pulls-out-concealed-gun/

Unless the person committing the crime also has a gun and it results in a shoot out. The studies show that ~90% of soldiers in combat prior to Vietnam wouldn't fire their weapon due to personal and social factors. If general society is the same (no training on target desensitization) than pulling a weapon on someone in the 10% (sociopaths) would likely end with that person being shot.

There are certainly individual stories to be found where a robbery or other crime was thwarted due to the presence of a weapon. However, the numbers indicate that the deaths and injuries due to weapons far outweigh this.

 

[blacktriangle]

So anyone that has actually shot and killed someone is a sociopath, huh?

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Raw numbers are not of much use only when groups, say, the NRA, fund such measures as the Dickey Amendment.

For those that have never heard of it, the Dickey amendment was passed in 1996 and essentially banned the CDC from conducting studies on gun control in the US. The amendment, "...ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never to fund research that could be seen as advocacy for gun control. Since the 1990s, that provision has commonly stopped any gun studies because researchers don't want to risk losing federal money..."

Dickey himself stated, "And it (cutting off all research on the effects of guns or gun ownership in society) wasn't necessary that all research stop. It just couldn't be the collection of data so that they can advocate gun control.

So you're right, the US needs to study this more. the NRA should really stop advocating for such things!

This happened because the CDC was playing favorites with the data and stepping out of their mandate. 

 

[mariomike]

So anyone that has actually shot and killed someone is a sociopath, huh?

I find this chart helpful for understanding how sociopaths differ from psychopaths.

 

[blacktriangle]

Anyone with more than a year in the military or anyone who has ever been in a leadership position is basically a sociopath according to that chart.

 

[Journeyman]

The studies show that ~90% of soldiers in combat prior to Vietnam wouldn't fire their weapon....

A popular view from 20'ish years ago.  I know of one 'study' only that says anything close to this, and it's SLA Marshall's Men Against Fire, which has been pretty thoroughly discredited. 

Google " 'Men Against Fire' Discredit" if interested.

 

[a_majoor]

It is interesting to see what happens when people actually go looking for proof of voter fraud. The Green Party's request for recounts in 3 States uncovered lots of irregularities, and there is a constant "drip, drip, drip, of reporting as some intrepid reporters go looking. Another example from NJ:

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2017/10/11/alien-voter-sighting-meet-kassiah-kamara/

Alien Voter Sighting: Meet Kassiah Kamara
BY J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS OCTOBER 11, 2017

Elites and a disgraced attorney general tell us there is no serious problem with voter fraud. The funny thing is, these same deniers never care to look for it. When you actually do the work and look for cases of aliens registered to vote and casting ballots -- you find them.

Meet Kassia Kamara from New Jersey, an alien who lurked on American voter rolls for years, even voting in the 2008 presidential election.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (disclosure: which I head) has been probing for aliens and for documents about their presence on the voter rolls. These probes involve no strange lights outside the bedroom window. No spaceships, and no hybrids. Just good old-fashioned public records requests.

The latest alien sightings were in New Jersey. There, PILF found proof of aliens on the rolls: hundreds of them. The particular findings about aliens on New Jersey rolls can be found at the "Garden State Gotcha" report, published here.

One particular alien sighting in Newark perfectly captures how our honor system for keeping non-citizens off the voter rolls is failing. Then, making it worse, shoddy voter roll maintenance is keeping aliens on the rolls, and even letting aliens vote in our elections.

PILF found that Kassia Kamara, a non-citizen, was registered to vote in New Jersey, not once, not twice, but three separate times at once. Kamara even voted in the 2008 election.

It took seven years for the ineligible records to be discovered by happenstance and fixed by election officials in Newark. Seven years.

Here’s how it happened, according to records obtained in a public records request by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Understanding how the system is failing is a prerequisite to fixing the system.

Kamara initially registered to vote in May 2004. He listed his address and the other basic information required on the voter application. He also checked the box saying “yes,” he was a U.S. citizen.

That’s the honor system we have. Groups like the League of Women Voters threaten, badger, and sue states that seek proof of citizenship.

Later, in October 2004, a Kassiah Kamara registered to vote under the same address and date of birth.

Fast forward to October 2008, right before the Obama vs. McCain presidential election. Kassiah Kamara registered to vote yet a third time under the same contact information. At this point, he has three unique voter identification numbers.

Kassiah Kamara then successfully cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election.

Government documents reveal that Kassiah Kamara was registered three separate times, at the exact same address on Pennington Street in Newark, New Jersey, using the exact same birthdate: June 21, 1986. His three separate unique voter registration record numbers are 101601533, 101578535, and 151015257.

Skip ahead again to March 2011. Essex County received a message from Kassiah Kamara stating:

I'm not a U.S. citizen please remove me from the system.
Oops.

County election officials then discovered that Kamara was registered three separate times. Triple oops. His registration was finally cancelled for being an alien on March 15, 2011, after spending seven years active on the voter rolls and voting in at least one presidential election.

When I speak about events like this, people wonder how this could happen. They assume there are effective checks in the system.

They’re wrong.

If you are tempted to think that “this is just one guy in New Jersey, it really doesn’t matter,” you’d be wrong.

For starters, it’s not just one guy, and nobody knows the full scope of the problem beyond the hundreds of aliens in New Jersey PILF already found. Moreover, these aliens are often lied to by political operatives about their right to vote, and are told they are allowed to register.

When that happens, they set themselves up for deportation.

PILF was back on the ground in New Jersey working on follow-up research for "Garden State Gotcha." Remember, PILF originally found 616 cases of non-citizens interacting with New Jersey's voter registration system. A few counties failed to provide data at press time and required PILF to chase down the reporting counties.

The case of Kassiah Kamara is an excellent example for Congressional lawmakers of the power of the National Voter Registration Act's right for any person to walk into an office and demand inspection of voter records. If you want to find fraud, just look for it.

In cases I’ve worked on around the country, I’ve learned some voter fraud lessons.

If you are an alien who wants to vote, falsely checking the box “yes” will get you on the rolls, almost always without detection.

It's easy to register to vote multiple times, especially under your own name. One bad keystroke can create a duplicate. Omitting a middle name will do the trick, also. Transpose some numbers in your birth date, and you’re good to go. Toss in a maiden name to throw off the scent.

The average voter registration system does not suspect a duplicate registration unless every single entry matches perfectly or almost perfectly. “Daniel” and “Daneil” must be two different people, the system reckons.

Local officials are usually tasked with ferreting out the truth of potential duplicates. And local officials often balk at or bungle the task. It’s just too much work, and they don’t want to be sued by the League of Women Voters or all the Chicken Little organizations who argue that efforts to keep the rolls clean are the second coming of Jim Crow.

An aside and some free advice: you academics and professional activists who push the idea that keeping clean rolls is a KKK plot to disenfranchise minorities should really reassess your strategy. Most Americans think you’re silly. Like Trump and the NFL kneeling mess, you’ve badly miscalculated where the public is on election integrity.

The public is on the side of keeping voter rolls clean and alien votes out of the ballot box. But do please keep pushing the hysteria, because it hurts your cause.

It was easy for Kassiah Kamara to vote. He didn't have to follow a voter ID law that would've flushed out a green card or a New Jersey ID that states "not for federal purposes." He just had to show up at the right polling place.

Throughout PILF’s research in the Garden State, we’ve learned that roughly 75 percent of non-citizens stuck in the voter registration system didn’t seek to register to vote. They were prompted to sign up at the DMV thanks to a Motor Voter law that often sees state officials pushing voter registration to anyone with a heartbeat. Aliens caught in this game of gotcha try to fix it as soon as they try to naturalize, because registering to vote can lead to deportation.

Essex County, New Jersey, voter registration officials were perplexed by PILF’s inquiries that found the alien Kamara on the rolls. One Essex County election official said:

“Noncitizens are getting offered voter registration forms at the DMV --  so what?”
This attitude exemplifies what the election integrity advocates are up against across the country, even from election officials.

 

[Blackadder1916]

This happened because the CDC was playing favorites with the data and stepping out of their mandate.

I'll call horseshit on that, unless you can provide evidence that the "CDC" manipulated data in the study that was the impetus for the NRA et al lobbying Congress that resulted in the Dickey amendment.  To begin with, the study by Kellerman et al, while maybe funded by some CDC grants, was not conducted by that organization.  The results published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) clearly identified the authors of the study and their affiliations (like all good peer reviewed scientific articles) - see below, none employees of the CDC.  Judging from the response to the NEJM article, it clearly struck a nerve among certain organizations and to be fair there were some legitimate questions about method and conclusions, but that is what they mean by "peer review".  That's how scientific research is supposed to work.  On the hand the chilling effect of eliminating any funding that could be used to either replicate or dispute Kellerman's conclusions is not science at all, it's politics.

And to be entirely open about the subject here is the NEJM article
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506#t=article

To get the full picture look also at the links to the references and letters as well as the "correction" link in the right hand corner above the title.

Arthur L. Kellermann, Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes

. . .
Source Information

From the Departments of Internal Medicine (A.L.K., J.G.B., B.B.H.), Preventive Medicine (A.L.K.), Biostatistics and Epidemiology (A.L.K., G.S.), and Pathology (J.T.F), University of Tennessee, Memphis; the Departments of Pediatrics (F.P.R.), Epidemiology (F.P.R.), and Pathology (D.T.R), University of Washington, Seattle; Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, Seattle (F.P.R., J.P.); and the Departments of Biology (N.B.R., A.B.L.) and Epidemiology and Biostatistics (N.B.R.) and the Center for Adolescent Health (N.B.R.), Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

LOL even Kellerman backtracked on his stats when called out on his study.

https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kellerman-schaffer.html

http://www.guns.com/2015/08/24/kellermanns-gun-ownership-studies-after-two-decades/

http://rkba.org/research/suter/med-lit.html

 

[kkwd]

Unless the person committing the crime also has a gun and it results in a shoot out. The studies show that ~90% of soldiers in combat prior to Vietnam wouldn't fire their weapon due to personal and social factors. If general society is the same (no training on target desensitization) than pulling a weapon on someone in the 10% (sociopaths) would likely end with that person being shot.

There are certainly individual stories to be found where a robbery or other crime was thwarted due to the presence of a weapon. However, the numbers indicate that the deaths and injuries due to weapons far outweigh this.

When somebody pulls a gun to accost you on the street you have to assume they are going to shoot you in the face. Now you can take your chance and pray you don't get shot or take matters into your own hands. In the case of the video waiting for the police would not have been an option.