@Shepherd, always happy to have the conversation with you - the level of respect is always high, even when we differ
(*caveat: I didn’t dig hard for the most current stats because I’m at the office and our internet access prevents us from accessing sites that contain “unsafe” material, so the numbers below are perhaps not perfect, but I’m running with them… *)
Based on your stats, about 62,500 people a year are denied a purchase. to @Dawn’s point, I know several who have been incorrectly denied, but don’t have any stats, and I’ve never asked this rather personal question of anybody, so I can’t quantify the quality of those denial decisions.
Not sure how to use your 735 in a million number… is that per million ‘in their lifetime’? so about 4,000 murders per year. (328 million US citizens, with 735 per million murderers, with an average lifespan of 60 years). Of those 4,000 the most recent stat I could find said about 35% of those are firearms murders… so about 1400.
speculating that if that’s the case, we’re denying 62,500 people a year a firearm to theoretically save 1400 lives… and those lives might 1) have been saved if the victim had a firearm, or 2) might have been murdered anyway, but some other weapon would have been used.
For me, this is where it gets really murky as to the value of the background check… the numbers above show only a 2% leverage on reducing murders (62,500 denied versus 1400 murders per year, potentially but not certainly prevented… or possibly committed anyway with some other device)
Where I’m going with it is this: What if we took the money that is spent on background checks, federal databases, people to administer and run that system, et.al. and used it to offer free mental health services and other interventions such as anger management or relationship counseling or child and teen diversion programs… or even to improve the identification and prosecution of the murderers in unsolved cases (since repeat offenders is a real thing)… what would our % leverage be?
The 62,500 to 1,400 ratio of 2% indicates to me that we’re not getting very effective use of our money and it could be used better. To add to that picture, the other 98% of the restricted folks weren’t likely to become murderers anyway (according to the murderers-per-million stat you provided, if I used it correctly)… and that goes to support my contention that most of these kind of laws end up mostly to punish the uninvolved.
I know that there’s a lot of “what if” in here… and that the available stats may not be accurate given that stats about firearms are particularly vulnerable to distortion, cherry-picking, and manipulation. It’s not possible to predict what leverage that money would provide if it were used differently. I’m just skeptical about presenting a single statistic (like the number of denials over a 16 year period) without a full understanding of what that actually means (like how many of those were false denials, if there are time-relevant trends, if the people denied were repeat-offenders or subsequently committed murders anyway, etc.).
And yes, absolutely there are many other factor that come into play (training, home security, and all the rest). That said, firearms are the great equalizer in self defense, and there is no doubt in my mind that some folks have lost that battle because they were denied the tool they needed to succeed. How many? I don’t know. But I think we really should be looking for ways to punish the uninvolved less, and directly address the perpetrators more, and to spend our money where it most directly intersects with the actual problem - that 2%, not the 98%.