Carrying and using a knife

[LtMedTB]

Well there goes the argument proported by so many *ahem* lying cocksmokers saying that most violent incidents involve the use of ETOH. For some reason, that didn't seem like bullshit at the time...guess you can't trust nothin' no more.

In my own anecdotal experience as a full time paramedic for over 10 years, most violent incidents involve alcohol. In fact, a shocking percentage of all EMS calls involve alcohol. I don't know about homicides. Those are a little harder to classify. The most common seem to be suicides and drug related killings.

[Garland]

In my own anecdotal experience as a full time paramedic for over 10 years

The most common seem to be suicides and drug related killings.

Sometimes experiences don't weigh in against the numbers...
Most of the suicidal callers I take are lucid...which seems to go against empirical studies and any educated guess.

Also...lunar lunacy...I get a shit-ton more calls on nights with full moons...and it's NOT illusory correlation there, there is a direct correlational relationship. But all the scientific data seems to point the other way. Go figure.

[LtMedTB]

Sometimes experiences don't weigh in against the numbers...
Most of the suicidal callers I take are lucid...which seems to go against empirical studies and any educated guess.

What is a suicide caller? Like a suicide hotline or something? There's a big difference between suicidal ideation and putting a pistol in your mouth and pulling the trigger. My point is that alcohol and violence go together like peanut butter and jelly, and I don't think people who say so are lying cocksuckers.

I should also mention that while arguments over money or property might be the proximate cause of a homicide, that doesn't mean alcohol isn't involved.

[LtMedTB]

[A]nytime you can walk away from a fight it is NOT self-defense. Self-defense happens when you have no other choice but to fight or run the risk of severe injury or death.

I don't necessarily agree with this. I think situational awareness and risk management is a critical part of self defense. Maintaining your personal safety is your first line of defense. There may also be tactics that fall short of physical contact that can be construed as self defense.

It's not always binary (either you fight or you run the risk of severe injury or death). Sometimes there's risk in fighting and sometimes there's risk in not fighting. If you're to the point of fighting for your life, I would wonder in hindsight if it was preventable.

[figgis]

Originally Posted by TTEscrima
I dunno when/where you went to college, but I think someone was pushing a personal agenda because that's way off the normal murder statistics, in 2004 for instance of 14,121 murders only 139 involved alcohol, usually money and property arguments are the leading cause at 44.4 percent of murders.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offen...me/murder.html

Well there goes the argument proported by so many *ahem* lying cocksmokers saying that most violent incidents involve the use of ETOH. For some reason, that didn't seem like bullshit at the time...guess you can't trust nothin' no more.

Actually, what TTEscrima said is just wrong. Reading the stats :-

1. That 139 figure isn't for deaths "involving" alcohol, but for those classed entirely as "drunken brawls" - which I'd take to be fights that happened only because both opponents were literally drunk, rather than any fight in a bar. Bar fights will probably overlap heavily with "Other arguments", "Unknown" etc which together add to about 10,000 deaths.

2. "Argument over money or property" is listed as leading to 218 deaths, far from the leading cause of death

3. TTE appears to have misread "Law enforcement cited that arguments, including those over money or property, were the cause for 44.4 percent of the murders" in such a way that he skipped over the vital "including".

While a professional academic may have a political agenda, at a decent institution his work will have at least to have to survived reasonable peer review. Your prof, who probably had access to extra data, may well have been right.