CDC study agrees with the main premise of this book.
Handguns, suicides, mass shootings deaths, and self-defense: Findings from a research report on gun violence. – Slate Magazine.
Rare indeed is the article that will somehow manage to surprise both the pro and anti-gun crowds at the same time, but this one at Slate probably does just that. Of course, it surprises the different groups for slightly different reasons. You see, Obama directed his minions at the CDC to conduct a study to research gun violence, supposedly to lead to recommendations regarding legislation. Well the results are now out, and they are truly shocking. Shocking to the pro-gun crowd because a government entity that was obviously supposed to declare guns evil and recommend a ban actually re-affirmed what most of the pro-gun crowd has been saying all along. Shocking to the gun-grabbers on the left (such as everyone employed by Slate) because… well, it re-affirmed most of what the pro-gun crowd has been saying all along.
That said, this particular article still occasionally attempts to frame the issue in an inaccurate and incomplete way. Here are some brief highlights, followed by my response:
“the U.S. rate of firearm-related homicide is higher than that of any other industrialized country: 19.5 times higher than the rates in other high-income countries.”
Irrelevant. What matters is the overall homicide rate. There are plenty of other industrialized countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S., their murderers just use weapons other than guns. Also, the “19.5 times higher than the rates in other high-income countries” is incomplete and misleading. Which other countries? Surely they don’t mean 19.5 times higher than every other industrialized country. I’d also be interested to know how they determining which countries count as “industrialized.” None of those questions are clarified in the report itself, this statistic comes from another report they cite. For the record, according to Wikipedia, the overall homicide rate in Russia is over twice that of the U.S., despite handguns being illegal. Brazil’s homicide rate is four times that of the U.S. (in Brazil, all guns must be licensed).
“Overall crime rates have declined in the past decade, and violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past 5 years,”
Meanwhile, “firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009.” Accidents are down, too: “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”
All things the pro-gun lobby has been emphasizing, which the media have largely ignored. While the gun-grabbers try their best to paint the picture that crime, gun crime, children dying from guns, and accidental shootings are becoming increasingly more prevalent every year, the actual reality is that they are all in decline. Right now is the safest time to be alive in America (at least in terms of your likelihood to get shot) in at least 50 years, despite the fact that over the last few decades, access to guns and the ability to carry guns has been greatly enhanced in most jurisdictions. The left offers no reasonable explanation for this trend.
“handguns comprised 72.5 percent of the firearms used in murder and non-negligent manslaughter incidents.”
“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,”
More evidence that the government/media obsession with “assault rifles” is a complete and total smokescreen. Banning so-called assault rifles would have absolutely zero effect on over 70% of gun deaths.
From 2000 to 2010, “firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearm-related violence in the United States,” says the report.
Lumping suicides in with victims of “firearm-related violence” is a pretty cheap and sleazy way to over-inflate the numbers. Nobody claims that someone who slashes their wrist is a victim of knife-related violence.
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report.
This one right here really should end the debate once and for all. This is basically the entire premise of the pro-gun argument, as made by John Lott in his amazing book “More Guns Less Crime.” Guns save more lives than they end. Period. Even the CDC now admits it. Statistically, Americans are more likely to use a gun to protect themselves than they are to be killed by one.
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Absolutely destroys the leftist myth that having the gun in the house or introducing one into a violent situation “escalates” the situation and makes it more likely that you will be seriously injured or killed. Statistically, attempting to use a gun in self-defense is a winning proposition. I’m not sure exactly what counts as “other self-protective strategies.” This is also not explained in the study, as it comes from a different report the study cites. Assuming it covers absolutely every other strategy (attempting to defend yourself with a different kind of weapon, attempting to flee, attempting to obtain help from a third party such as the police, etc.) then we would have a situation where the absolute safest thing you could do if you are the victim of a crime is pull out a gun.
The prevalence of firearm violence near “drug markets … could be a consequence of drug dealers carrying guns for self-defense against thieves or other adversaries who are likely to be armed,” says the report.
They don’t provide a lot of statistics on this particular point, but generally speaking, gun violence is much higher when drugs or gangs are involved. So, if you happen to own a gun and are not involved in any drug or gang activity, and avoid locations where drug or gang activity are present, you are even less likely to be a victim of gun violence than the “average” statistics might indicate. Also of note: the overwhelming majority of drug-related violence is caused by the prohibition of drugs and could be instantly reduced if the government would admit that we own our own bodies.
“In locations where individuals under restraining orders to stay away from current or ex-partners are prohibited from access to firearms, female partner homicide is reduced by 7 percent.”
This paragraph falls under the heading “Denying guns to people under restraining orders saves lives.” The obvious inverse, given the defensive gun use statistics explained above, would be that denying guns to those who file restraining orders costs lives, but this is not mentioned. Often, when restraining orders are involved in domestic situations, time is a critical factor. A potential victim might need a gun to protect themselves right away, and might not have the time to get a license, get a background check, sit around for the waiting period, get required training, purchase trigger locks, etc.
Slate’s author concludes the article by stating:
These conclusions don’t line up perfectly with either side’s agenda
He may be right if you demand “perfection,” but I would say that these conclusions are about 90% in support of what responsible gun owners have been saying all along. This article basically reads like a summary of John Lott’s work, and this study (let me remind you again, it was conducted by Obama’s cronies at the CDC) should be considered a complete confirmation and validation of Lott, the NRA, and everyone who has ever argued that guns save lives and reduce crime.
The inspiration for this post came from a Facebook post by the Motley Fool in which they were advertising 
‘Crack baby’ study ends with unexpected but clear result – Philly.com
US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses | Ars Technica
Dude, Where's My Freedom? 
Economists Oppose Immigration Because “Dey Took Our Jerbs!”
The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage: How Guest Workers Lower US Wages | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS.
Don’t let the big words and the scientific sounding rhetoric fool you, this piece by Hal Salzman, B. Lindsay Lowell, and Daniel Kuehn is built entirely around fallacies, faulty premises, and good old fashioned nationalism. At the end of the day, these three highly educated gentlemen advance an anti-immigration position not significantly different from the mob of lower-class townspeople on a widely known episode of South Park.
Essentially, they oppose the expansion of the H-1B work visa program on the grounds that too many foreigners are entering this country legally and stealing jobs away from well qualified, middle-class, white Americans. The entire piece seems to operate under the premise that computer science graduates are entitled to a job with a high salary. Oops, did I say computer science graduates, I meant computer science graduates who happen to be American citizens. The rest of the world can go kick rocks. Are you a brilliant, well-educated IT professional who has committed no crime other than happening to have been born in India? Well too bad for you Sonjay, this is our economy and these are our jobs and if we let you in, why you just might commit the terrible crime of doing great work for a low wage. We certainly can’t have that! Think of the devastation it would wreak on the economy if the quality of labor was kept constant while the price of labor was able to fall! (Note: Don’t actually think about this if you are a Keynesian, you just might get the dry heaves.)
I also find little support for the allegation that recent graduates won’t be able to find “the types of jobs that will allow these graduates to pay off student loans, much less enter the middle class,” while the piece links to a chart showing that the average salary for programmers and computer and IT professionals has never dipped below $50,000 since 1992. According to the census bureau, median household income (keep in mind that many households have more than one individual who works) was about $53,000 from 2007-2011. In this exact period of time, the “Computer and IT Salary” was over $70,000. I think that safely puts computer and IT professionals well into the middle class. There are plenty of college graduates out there with just as much student loan debt who will be entering fields with significantly lower prospects of employment and high pay, yet this piece somehow expects us to cry for the poor IT professionals who are only making $70,000 a year because those dastardly foreigners are coming over here and are willing to do the same jobs for less than that amount.
Of course, nothing is stopping any American college graduate from accepting the same “lower” amount that foreigners accept. Foreigners are at a natural disadvantage in the American job market. The average hiring manager would almost certainly prefer an equally qualified American to a foreigner, assuming the costs were equal. The American is almost certainly fluent in English, and familiar with the cultural and social norms of the United States. Because of this disparity, foreigners have to be willing to accept lower wages in order to compete in this job market. They are not evil for doing so. They are simply acting according to their own rational self-interest. That said, there is nothing stopping an American graduate from accepting a job offer at the same rate of pay that foreigners are typically willing to work for (well, other than a sense of entitlement that is).
The authors ask: “ Can anyone argue that prioritizing access to good employment for high-skill domestic workers is not in the national interest?”
Why yes, I most certainly can. You see, labor is a good just like any other. Restrictions on immigration are the direct analogue to tariffs on physical goods. A protective tariff is designed to make foreign imports more expensive for the direct purpose of making domestic goods more competitive than they otherwise would be. This, of course, has the effect of raising the price of these goods for the population as a whole. Small groups of producers benefit at the expense of the entire population who consumes the good in question. The authors of this piece are demanding that immigration into the United States be restricted on the same grounds, for the same reasons.
The reason that it is “not in the national interest” to protect domestic IT professionals from the “threat” of low-cost foreign competition is that lower labor costs in the IT industry will lead to one of two outcomes (likely a mixture of both). Either the savings can be passed on to the consumer (thus lowering the cost of all products which depend on skilled IT personnel, which is basically everything), or the firms themselves can keep the savings as retained earnings, (thus increasing the wealth of stockholders, either through dividend payments or re-investment into the company, potentially leading to new products and innovation). “Protecting” us from low-cost foreign labor serves the exact same purpose and function as “protecting us” from low-cost foreign imports. It benefits a very small and select group of people at the expense of society as a whole. I wonder if the authors of this piece would so enthusiastically argue in favor of high protective tariffs on physical goods…
Another quite stupefying aspect of this piece is the repeated insistence that somehow, allowing more immigration violates “market” principles. This is an absurdity. The market has absolutely no regard for imaginary lines drawn on a map. Markets have no use for various political jurisdictions, which offer nothing but restrictions on market activity. One of the headings of the piece asks: “Isn’t Ours a Market Economy?” Well, in terms of the labor market, the answer is no. Immigration restrictions of any kind represent government interference into the labor market. In a true free market, laborers would be able to enjoy complete freedom of movement, and employers would enjoy the freedom to hire whomever they please, regardless of their nation of origin. They wouldn’t have to go begging Congress to allow them to hire more foreigners, they’d be able to just do it.
The article closes by stating: “Before asking government to intervene in labor markets by handing out more guest worker visas and green cards to STEM graduates, we should ask for audits of shortage claims and workforce impacts as a first step toward developing evidence-based policy on this issue, an issue critical to the nation’s future.”
In this case, they have it completely backwards. Crafting a more liberal immigration policy is not an “intervention” into labor markets. It is the exact opposite. The fact that skilled workers from other countries must obtain special permission from the government to come work for American companies is the intervention into the labor markets. Any action that increases the freedom of movement among laborers in any field is the exact opposite. It is the removal of a government intervention.
It’s quite a shame to see such a profound misapplication of basic economic principles appear in an article by three men who almost certainly should know better. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they do in fact know better, they’re just attempting to confuse and mislead the general public in order to advance their political ends, but I’m not entirely certain. Either way, this article completely misrepresents the concept of “intervention,” argues in favor of protective tariffs known to reduce economic efficiency, and appeal to nationalistic and xenophobic urges to stop foreigners from “taking our jobs.” It is disappointing that such a piece can be considered legitimate economic analysis.