Does this make you safer?: A glock 19 handgun.
Courtesy crossprocessedsoul
Tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case McDonald v. Chicago. Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country; McDonald (and others) argue that this violates their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
In addition to the legal arguments, voices on both sides of the issue also talk about safety. Advocates for stricter gun control claim that reducing the number of guns on the streets will reduce the number of gun-related deaths. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence recently released their annual survey of state gun laws, giving their highest marks to those states with the strictest regulations.
Others argue the opposite. They claim that gun-control laws only affect the law-abiding citizens who obey them. Criminals still have weapons, but the public is defenseless, leading to more deaths than if the public were armed.
Various people have tried to resolve this issue over the years, with little success. When the Brady list came out recently, blogger Jay Tea noted that some states with strict gun laws (such as California) actually had higher rates of gun death, while some states with looser laws (such as Utah) had much lower rates. (The "rates" are gun homicides per 100,000 people, and not total deaths. This allows us to compare large states and small states fairly.)
However, Mr. Tea failed to note that the reverse is also true -- that there are also states with strict laws that have low rates of gun violence, and states with loose laws that have high rates.
So, which is it: do gun controls make you safer, or put you in more danger?
To address this issue, we pulled out our old friend from math class, the coefficient of correlation. We last used this in an attempt to see if there's a connection between warm winters and warm summers (there is). This formula looks at two sets of numbers and determines how closely connected they are. Do they both move up and down together (a positive correlation)? If one moves up, does the other move down (a negative correlation)? Or, is there zero connection between them? So, we crunched the numbers, using the Brady Scorecard and the gun homicide statistics, and we found...
Nothing.
We came up with a coefficient of 0.00187. This tells us there is absolutely no connection between the Brady scores and the gun death rate: a state with strict laws is just as likely to have a high rate as a low one. The same goes for a state with loose laws.
The highest possible coefficient is 1.0. That indicates a direct one-to-one connection. In a complex system with many variables, such as human behavior, you want a score of at least 0.5 to say there is a strong connection, and a score of 0.3 to say there's even a weak connection. This score, however, was almost a perfect 0.
So, what does this all mean? Simply that neither side can use this as an argument. Gun-control advocates cannot use it to argue that regulations save lives; gun-control opponents cannot use it to argue the opposite, that regulations are dangerous.
Now, this all hinges on the Brady scoring system. It is possible that other ways of quantifying "strict" and "loose" laws could produce different results. And none of this has any bearing on the legal and Constitutional arguments being made. All we can say is, that in this case, the math is unambiguously neutral.
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A long shot: This goose hunter had plenty of success using the Quiet Gun on a hunt. The extended shaft of the shotgun includes vents that slowly release gases that cause loud sounds of typical shotguns.
Courtesy The Quiet ShotgunI used to live in a small town along the Mississippi River. Each fall, on the opening day of every waterfowl-hunting season, I’d be rattled awake at sunrise with the booming of shotguns of hunters getting in their first shots of the season. To put in mildly, I was never enthused to hear the start of another hunting season.
With increased housing development of rural areas, the noise of hunting is encroaching on the quiet and relaxation of people wanting to live in the country. But Wendell Diller, a Twin Cities area hunter and inventor, has come up with a device to reduce those conflicts. Here's a link to his website about his latest invention: the Quiet Shotgun.
I saw a report on his quiet gun on a recent episode of Minnesota Bound. While the main focus of the report was on hunting mentorships for urban kids, the guns they were using in the goose hunt were Diller’s Quiet Gun shotgun. Click here to see the guns in action in the video report.
Here’s how the shotgun works.
The Quiet Gun reworks gun technology to reduce a shot gun’s usual boom to the “whoof” similar to an air-rifle. Diller likes to describe the sound as “an air-rifle on steroids.”
To do this, a barrel extension is put on to the shotgun. Along the extension are port holes that allow the high-pressure gases of the shooting action explosion to leak out along the chamber rather than erupting out in one loud belch at the end of the gun.
Buck luck: This hunter used the Quiet Gun to bag a deer.
Courtesy The Quiet ShotgunThe extension also greatly reduce the amount of kick a shotgun fires back into the shoulder of a hunter. How effective are these guns? Quiet Guns are being used with the group Capable Partners – a group for disabled hunters who’ve been proficient in both hunting trips and trap shooting events.
So far, the Quiet Gun is not commercially available yet. And for safety concerns, Diller strongly discourages anyone from experimenting with this new shotgun technology on their own.
So what do you think? Is this a good application of science for easing a growing problem with the outdoors sports? Will the Quiet Gun be featured in a upcoming Coen Brothers’ film? Share your thoughts here with other Science Buzz readers.
Bulletproof woman ignored by biased media
in Life Science, Structure of Matter, Flow of Matter and Energy, and Human Organism
They stop bullets: But only—ONLY—after the bullets have had a go at Croatian supercheek.
Courtesy chriskeefeThe news item goes thusly: a Croatian couple gets on the wrong side of a gunfight (the middle side) and is fired upon. A bullet ricochets off the woman’s cheek, and hits her husband in the mouth, striking his false teeth. The man spits out the bullet, terrifying his attacker, who makes like a banana and splits. The couple, uninjured, makes major news outlets. Headline: “Man catches bullet in teeth.”
Indeed, the guy sort of did catch a bullet in the teeth. And I won’t argue that that isn’t kind of awesome, but the local police believe that things worked out so swimmingly for the false-toothed man because the bullet lost so much of its speed after hitting his wife in the cheek. Remember, the woman was uninjured…
What are Croatian women made of? There’s the real story: Bullet bounces harmlessly off woman’s face.
So… Science blog, science blog… Well, we have firearms physics and ballistics in general, as well as material sciences. The composition of the teeth, of course, is relevant, but also what could that cheek be made of that it could repel a bullet so well? I initially assumed that she might be a Kevlar woman, but I believe Kevlar is intended to absorb the force of a projectile to bring it to a stop, and I’m not sure if Kevlar ricochets are common. The cheek may be composed of a similarly impenetrable, yet more bouncy, material.
While we’re here, let us consider this compilation of high-speed footage of various objects being shot. Note that none of the objects are cheeks or teeth, as the results are apparently much less dramatic.
The British government is encouraging schools to allow young boys to play with toy guns. Their studies have shown that such play helps boys’ development, by allowing them to experiment with risk-taking behavior in a safe environment. This in turn helps their intellectual development.
Ouch: This clean hole to the skull was made by a gunshot to the head of an Inca battling Spanish explorers some 500 years ago in what it today's Peru.The National Rifle Association will probably object to these findings, but a oldest known shooting victim in the Western Hemisphere was recently found in Peru.
Archeologists near Lima found a skull with a clean, neat hole in the skull while excavating a pile of bones. It’s believed that the shot was fired some 500 years ago. They’re ruling out a recent gun shot striking the bones, since a blast from a gun today would have shattered the aging skull bones.
And the story adds up to the victim being hurt from a shooting. The bones of the excavation are from the early 1500s on ancient Incas who were massacred by Spanish conquistadors.
So how can the researchers be so sure it was a gun shot? New technology helped dig up the old story.
A scanning electronic microscope was used to analyze the hole. It found fragments of a musket ball embedded into the bone around the hole.
In total, the archeologists have found the remains of 72 Incas in the area and all show signs of violent injuries, suggesting that a large battle took place between the native people and the European explores.
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