Sunday, February 24, 2013

Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains: The Nation’s Silent Mass Disaster

National Institute of Justice

If you ask most Americans about a mass disaster, they’re likely to think of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or the Southeast Asian tsunami. Very few people—including law enforcement officials—would think of the number of missing persons and unidentified human remains in our Nation as a crisis. It is, however, what experts call “a mass disaster over time.”

The facts are sobering. On any given day, there are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the United States. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish under suspicious circumstances. Viewed over a 20-year period, the number of missing persons can be estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
Pro-gun folks love to demand statistics and proof. Well, how about this? I'd say we can easily double or triple the gun violence statistics if we include missing persons. If only a small percentage of these cases involved gun play, and I would think it's more than that, then the well-know stats of 600 accidental firearms deaths and 15,000 firearms murders a year are woefully under-reported.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

24 comments:

  1. My opinion? You're speculating and nothing more.

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    1. What's wrong with speculating. Is your contention that there is not one single increase in the numbers we keep referring to?

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    2. Nothing at all wrong with speculation as long as no attempt is made to pass it off as proof or evidence. Regardless of who does it, speculation becomes a problem when we lend our speculation more weight than it warrants. It can go from "I have no proof, but it just seems reasonable to me" to "the more I look at this the more convinced I become" to "how can it not be obvious to any thinking person" to "this is how it is"...all while still lacking supporting evidence.
      Please be specific. Which numbers? It is my contention that generally any increase or decrease in anything needs to be documented by reliable sources if it's going to be quoted as authoritative. Even then it's still subject to questioning.

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    3. But, you're ok with DGU numbers that are 95% hearsay? In this though, you accept nothing.

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  2. Mike we do but you seem to forget that the, FBI puts all gun Homicide on one bunch. You may claim other wise but I have posted the link to this claim on your page before, I have also shown links from the FBI showing as gun sales go up crime goes down. You have yet to show one gun law that has done the same. Yes it is possible if a city or state as X numbers crime and I mean ALL crime and Y number of crimes year after you can see weather it went up or down.

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    1. One more time I'll point out that correlation does not equal causation.

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    2. I've pointed that out, too. Here's another truth: Lack of correlation shows lack of causation.

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  3. Oh and by gun homicide I mean self defense, police shootings and yes murder. The FBI bunches it all into one group, don't really know why but they do. if you like I will re-post the link to show you.

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    1. I would speculate that they do this because it is easier--this way they just take all homicide reports and tabulate them without having to watch the cases and wait to see if it's ruled a justifiable homicide at a later date.

      This explanation would be in line with the lack of follow up exhibited in other cases such as arrests based on false accusations that are never taken out of the NICS database and cause false denials followed by permission to sell when no matching conviction can be found.

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    2. The point of my post is that those numbers are vastly under-reported.

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    3. Mike, you said "The point of my post is that those numbers are vastly under-reported" How vastly and what is your basis for such a claim?

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    4. How vastly, I don't know. What do you think? How much are you willing to admit, in the name of honest debate?

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    5. I'm willing to admit that I simply don't know. I'm also willing to not make decisions based on data I don't possess. Will you commit to the same?

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    6. Ahh, you're playing hard to get. Be honest. Don't you think some of those missing people are victims of gun violence?

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    7. No, I'm not playing hard to get. I'm trying to make a point. The point is this, neither you nor I know for sure if they are victims of gun violence or how many, if any, are such victims. Of course they might be. They could be any number of things. We simply don't know. Since we don't know, we have no basis, other than what we are inclined to believe anyway, for making any speculation as to how they might impact "well known stats". Now, we might be able, over time, to find out. So far, to my knowledge, no such effort is under way.

      My experience tells me this: People on both sides of almost any debate are frightfully impatient. The scientific method, combined with study replication, over time, can provide us with real, usable data (assuming reliability and validity are present). The problem is that "over time" part. Many people aren't willing to wait that long. Instead, we rush to do someting (I'm not limiting myself to gun control here) only to decide later that it didn't work like we hoped it would.

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  4. And how many people are missing that don't want to be found. What a better time to go missing than in the middle of some sort of disaster.
    Any number of people can go missing, intentionally, for a wide variety of reasons.

    orlin sellers

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    1. That definitely accounts for some. Just like murders that are never detected account for some.

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  5. Since you require no evidence to support your beliefs, I'm sure this makes complete sense to you.

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    1. Greg,

      In your opinion, would it be permissible to convict an individual or a collective body, for the alleged "homicide" of an individual or group of individuals, without the evidence of a single (particular) identified body? If the prosecution does not present any particular human remains which is traceable to a particular individual (regardless or the numerical amount of human remains which may be utilized as evidence), and furthermore charge individuals who did not personally terminate any of the purported victims themselves with a crime against an abstract concept, is such justifiable under "democratic" conditions? So readily is blame placed for some deaths in a now obscure Indochinese State.

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    2. It's possible to convict someone of murder without recovering the body, but there has to be good evidence. But Mikeb is speculating without any evidence here.

      But it should come as no surprise that you dismiss so lightly the events in Cambodia.

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    3. Ah, yes, the Khmer Rouge. That lovely group of people who thought nothing of killing approximately 2,000,000 people in a failed effort to make an unworkable system work.

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    4. Sorry guys, your attempt to deflect attention away from my point by bringing the Cambodia situation into it is bullshit. We're discussing US gun control vs. gun rights. The millions missing in Cambodia do not detract from my point that our gun violence stats are strongly under-reported.

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    5. E.N. brought up Cambodia. But Mikeb, you have no point here. You made a wild claim without supporting evidence. There's no way to address that claim other than to call it what it is. When you have evidence, we can evaluate it with you.

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    6. You assign motives quickly. Speaking only for myself, I was responding to a specific comment and nothing more. If you want to know why I say something you need only ask.

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