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In the US, how many times has a child picked up a gun and killed someone by accident? More times than grandmothers have defended themselves, or less? Easily le

by hga 10y ago

In the US, how many times has a child picked up a gun and killed someone by accident? More times than grandmothers have defended themselves, or less? Easily less, there are only ~600 accidental firearms fatalities a year, and we managed to get that number down from ~800 in 1980 in a period when both the population and and the number of guns it owns have increased by very roughly 50%. Those warrior cops you cite two examples of? We still had a huge gun owning population back when they were peace officers, it's not guns per se that have resulted in that change. Real estate titles are a very different thing, I submit to you, in that trying to take someone else's land has a much longer and greater pedigree than their weapons, and for entirely different motives.

dalke 10y ago
And how many grandmothers have successfully defended themselves with a weapon? That's the missing side. (And yes, the numbers for that vary from 55,000 to 4.7 million total home defense use - good luck on narrowing it down to kabdib scenario of 80 year old grandmothers.) I believe the higher number includes grandmothers who defended herself with a weapon without firing it, in which case the balance has to include all crimes which were committed with a gun. Really I'm annoyed with kabdib for using a hypothetical scenario to justify personal gun ownership, when for decades everyone has pointed out how meaningless such scenarios are for meaningful policy change. I never said it was "guns per se". I'm well aware of countries like Switzerland and Finland with a high gun ownership, though not as high as the US, and don't have the same sorts of gun-related violence. I agree that real estate and vehicle titles are different things. My point was that I disagreed with the blanket statement "It's no business of the government's what purchases I make."

by hga 10y ago

dalke 10y ago

And how many grandmothers have successfully defended themselves with a weapon? That's the missing side. (And yes, the numbers for that vary from 55,000 to 4.7 million total home defense use - good luck on narrowing it down to kabdib scenario of 80 year old grandmothers.) I believe the higher number includes grandmothers who defended herself with a weapon without firing it, in which case the balance has to include all crimes which were committed with a gun. Really I'm annoyed with kabdib for using a hypothetical scenario to justify personal gun ownership, when for decades everyone has pointed out how meaningless such scenarios are for meaningful policy change. I never said it was "guns per se". I'm well aware of countries like Switzerland and Finland with a high gun ownership, though not as high as the US, and don't have the same sorts of gun-related violence. I agree that real estate and vehicle titles are different things. My point was that I disagreed with the blanket statement "It's no business of the government's what purchases I make."