>For example, if gun ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by those who invade the homes of gun owners, this could cancel or outweigh the beneficial effects of defensive gun use
This study is quote controversial, not reproducible, and Kellerman would never release his dataset for others to check. This lack of credible scientific behavior is what led to the Dickey Amendment. The summary in the 2013 report is being quite kind to Kellerman (who was on the report committee - knowing his research and history I suspect he was livid about this conclusion dismissing his most famous work).
>that until 2018 the CDC was explicitly prohibited from conducting research into the statistics
This is false, which is why Obama called them on it and had them do a study, even though no law was changed. Also during the years 1999-2018 there are CDC sponsored studies on gun violence, which show up on their site and can be found via Google scholar.
Also there are many other national and private sources of funding to do the same research, from NIH (with 10x the budget of the CDC), to Bureau of Prisons to DoJ funding, to many private foundations.
Glocks have matching serial numbers on the plate, on the slide, and on the barrel. Getting the ones off the hardened steel is very hard to do, and most idiots trying to remove the one from the barrel are going to screw up the action.
Also just scratching the surface smooth is not enough, and most people screw that up. The stamping leaves strain marks in the metal under the surface, and these can be recovered from a completely smoothed surface.
>In most (all?) states there's no need for a background check
Have you followed this thread at all? I am fully aware of this, having done many gun transfers.
This thread is about adding universal background checks.
>There's no constitutional right to any of those things, which is what makes the situation different.
It is not different at all - it is perfectly constitutional to require background checks and transfers - that is how the current system is legal.
And all constitutional rights have bounds. 1st Amendment free speech has limits on what you can say, where you can do it, even requiring permits for many cases. 3rd, 4th, 5th Amendments about housing and property - you have a constitutional right to property, but it can be deprived, and many forms are registered and require paperwork to transfer. So it's not at all different from other property registration and transfers.
>so, someone breaks into my house while I am on vacation for three weeks, ignores the alarm, rips open the gun safe, takes a gun, kills someone...I go to jail?
Not if you report it or demonstrate it was stolen. And I didn't write "go to jail" - indicted means they're going to investigate you, just like they do now when a gun registered to someone shows up in crimes. And those people don't "go to jail" if they didn't have the gun.
What it does curtail is people buying guns to give away, because at some point enough guns will show up having been registered to them then used in crimes, and that should be prosecuted. That behavior is what is going to bring even stricter regulations if it is not curtailed by some set of laws.
I'd prefer a decent background check on firearm transfers - I already pass them with zero problem, but it would hinder people that should be banned from working around such measures.
>they would make the behavior in my questions a felony.
They would also stop of lot of existing homicides, which are also felonies already being committed. Your cases are honestly quite contrived and rare, especially against the number of homicides and other crimes using straw purchases.
I think most people would trade common case homicides for rarer cases you pick. The stats are pretty clear on which cases are most common. That is why the support for such laws is so widespread and bipartisan.
Alternatively, we can continue to have mass killings, single killings, and lots of crime by guns bought by people that should have been blocked.
For every person you cherry picked getting raped that would have stopped the assailant with a gun, many more are killed under the current system.
Instead of picking outlying events and trying to put them forth as common, why not look at common events to start with? You'll get much better policy and understanding from that.
>It's only supported by the majority of Americans until you ask them about specific situations and policy implications.
It also seems you're trying to stack the deck in your favor. If you're going to ask questions designed to pull support away with cherry picked circumstances, then you should also ask cherry picked questions leading the other way, like pointing out how many mass shootings are done with guns that bypassed background checks.
So cite your poll please. I'd like to see the questions.
Or you can ask a fairly neutral question, like [1], a poll with the question "How much do you support or oppose each of the following? Requiring background checks on all gun sales"
Also a strawman. Every database I listed is not the "Butlerian Jihad," they're all simple databases to keep track of identities for very reasonable reasons.
>Did I say we should stop using databases altogether?
Claiming this is a reason to dislike all databases coupled with your wistful statement "it's not like the old days..." sure looks like your advocating for the old days.
>Have you considered that maybe there's a middle-ground between collecting, trading, and analyzing every possible scrap of data we can squeeze out of people... and the Butlerian Jihad?
Yes, which is why I mocked your dislike of all such databases (including as you wrote, banks and ISPs) and a weird reference to ancient systems as if they were a better option.
If you thought middle ground was a good solution, you could have simply written that instead of writing two extremes. But you chose the extremes.
CDC report under Obama demonstrated those with guns at home have much less physical injury during home invasion than those without guns.
>People with guns at home kill themselves at triple the rate of normal people.
Those studies are widely known to have serious statistical problems since those with suicidal tendencies also may purchase a gun, completely breaking the independent variable requirement to make such a claim. [1] for example at least addresses that these are real issues.
Also, Japan's suicide rate, without guns, is larger than the US suicide and homicide rates combined.
I think you're pushing as true things that are not demonstrated, and may well be untrue.
>This seems like a reason to dislike all databases that hold this kind of information
Yeah, we wouldn't want the ability to pay people what they're owed, or what they've given to Social Security when it's time for payouts, or what people have criminal convictions for various crimes, or who owns what license plate, or who is registered to vote, because we want all those things to be as wild, wild west as possible. right? No need to track how much money you have in the bank, you can just trust them. No need to track how much you've paid off a loan, you can trust them to tell you when they feel like it. No accountability, no tracking, complete ignorance on everyone and everything...
Or we can have databases because they are extremely useful for a modern, well functioning society, and try to mitigate negatives as much as possible.
>It's not like the old days where an attacker would have to haul tons of paper around and go through it manually.
You mean longer ago than most people have been alive? When things were vastly slower, making them unusable with the numbers of people we serve now? When you paid more for most things since the slowness and overhead of every was also people having to go through all the records manually to get things done?
Good idea. We can set mankind back nearly 100 years, or if we really try, let's push us back before any automation.
>There is no regulation that can actually stop it.
As a gun owner, sure there is. If your gun shows up in a crime, you get indicted as well. That would put a big dent in people being willing to buy guns for others.
Also making sure there are no secondary sales without background checks, which is supported by (I think?) the majority of Americans would help.
Repeat offenders at losing guns lose the right to any guns.
All of these would stop repeat offenders, and if I recall, the majority of straw sales are repeat offenders knowing they don't get in much or any trouble buying guns this way.
>The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.
They're not deciding which ideas are allowed or banned.
They're not stopping anyone else from creating, espousing, publishing any other ideas at all. There's thousands of publishers, and even the very biggest only hold a tiny fraction of the publishing market, so this complaint seems quite overblown.
Should a publisher be forced to publish things they choose not to? I'd prefer not. There's plenty of others. And the internet makes it easy to post any ideas you choose, vastly easier than at any point in history for individuals to make their ideas available to billions of people.
>"We can never criticize something unless we can contemplate the totality of it" isn't constructive or helpful
But you're ok with cherry picking events to suit a narrative when advocating for change? Did you even try to find examples where they were successful in your eyes, or did you simply pick the examples that suit your claims?
>Do you have a proposal for how to conduct such an analysis?
Simply looking at how many customers are repeat customers shows that they're at least doing something their customers are willing to pay for. That's easily a vastly better metric then simply cherry picking examples on one side of an argument.
I'd suspect that current customers are vastly more aware of what value they provide than you'd pick up from news stories, especially if, as you contend, there's no way to know these details from outside views.
They've been around 95 years, 27k employees, 10B in annual revenue, a client list that is incredibly diverse, among every sector of society, among all political parties, and including a huge number of worldwide governments and companies. That alone should make you realize perhaps there is value in what they do, that thousands of customers think so, and that trying to paint them as "McKinsey make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes." is probably vastly short-sighted.
You then double down and claim it's probably even worse if one could see inside.
I would weight the opinions of their customers over those obviously cherry picking examples then making un-nuanced and sweeping generalizations. I am content with that approach. Seems more evidence based.
Cherry picking bad examples is not how to evaluate how often McKinsey "make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes".
Any company the size of McKinsey around as long as McKinsey will have success and failure stories.
The proper way to evalaute is to take all things McKinsey did, normalize for background, and see how it performs compared to other methods of solving the same problems.
Cherry picking to make a claim is the 2nd worst form of evidence, outranked only by outright lying.
>Deviating from buy-and-hold indexing is mathematically a zero-sum game.
If buy and hold indexing is not mathematically zero (which I agree it is not), then plenty of deviations from it are also not zero sum (which is empirically true).
Any stock gives partial ownership of a (hopefully) productive asset. Larger collections of them (like index funds) provide some reduction in volatility, but index funds are by no means the only way to structure risk/volatility tradeoffs.
>If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.
That money comes from taxpayers. If less people work, less pay into it.
>In general this goes the other way.
If less people work today, less will get made today. When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.
The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.
>Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP
Because people are working. Drop 10% of workers, you lose a massive amount of tax base. Expenses are still fixed for many items, which is why when less people work deficit spending increases.
>And it was back to where it was at the height after one year
Because people were getting back to work.
I also never mentioned the stock market as the indicator to measure - that is a strawman you brought up.
Welded over is trivial to recover the serial numbers. See the refs I posted for example.