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It's not just children's safety. Even as crime rates and violence rates have decreased monotonically since at least the 1980s, people grow more and more clamoro
by wyager 10y ago
It's not just children's safety. Even as crime rates and violence rates have decreased monotonically since at least the 1980s, people grow more and more clamorous about "safety" from essentially negligible causes of death like terrorism or assault rifles. We've spent billions of dollars on the TSA, which by all indicators doesn't even do much to prevent (the negligible amount of) terrorist activity. Similarly, in 2015, only 248 people were killed with rifles (no idea which percentage of those were homicides, and which percentage of those were assault rifles). Yet how much legislative time was wasted arguing about trying to ban them?
"Safety" has become somewhat of a "semantic stopsign" in political discourse.
- paulddraper 10y agoI'm curious, where did you get the gun data? Most places I look at don't differentiate by gun type. (Which is strange, considering how much regulations differ by gun type.) Anyway, usually it's roughly 60% suicide, 10% defense, 25% homicide, 5% accidental.
- wyager 10y agoFBI. https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by-Weapon-Type https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by-Weap... The FBI and BJS usually have pretty good criminology data.
- paulddraper 10y agoWow, Quandl is AWESOME! Graphs, data export, programming language bindings...