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Originally Posted by fluffygrrl
Discussion never was purely "deadlier", it was dangerous.
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I'd say "most likely to cause death" would be a good indication of how dangerous something is, wouldn't you?
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Imho 10:1 is a gross understatement. My money is in 1:50 or thereabouts. So since you like Popper, here's your falsification criteria : Cough up some data about bodily injury in knife/gun confrontations and if it comes under 1:10 I'll concede Internet Defeat on the point. I'm too lazy to go look it up, and so in fairness I can't take you for an Internet Win.
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We already have some data, actually: the San Francisco General Hospital totals for both gunshot and stabbing admissions over the years 2003-2007. (I won't post the image again, you'll have to scroll up)
Interestingly, the numbers for both are fairly similar. If, as you would bet, confrontations involving knives were 50 times as likely to result in bodily injury as confrontations involving guns, that would suggest that in that particular area, confrontations involving guns were about 50 times as common as confrontations involving knives.
That hardly seems likely, now does it? Especially considering how knives are generally more readily available in situations such as domestic disputes.
But, for the heck of it:
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The overall fatality rate in gun robberies is an
estimated 4 per 1,000--about 3 times the rate for
knife robberies, 10 times the rate for robberies
with other weapons, and 20 times the rate for
robberies by unarmed offenders.10 For assaults, a
crime which includes threats, the most widely
cited estimate of the fatality rate is derived
from a 1968 analysis of assaults and homicides
committed in Chicago. The study, prepared for the
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence, reported that gun attacks kill 12.2
percent of their intended victims. This is about 5
times as often as in attacks with knives, the
second most deadly weapon used in violent crimes.11
With one exception, more recent studies have
generally concluded that death was at least twice
as likely in gun assaults as in knife assaults.12
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http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/fireviol.txt