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There are more civilian-owned guns than people in the US. The exact number isn't known but let's ballpark it very conservatively at 400,000,000. There are about
by homonculus1 7y ago
There are more civilian-owned guns than people in the US. The exact number isn't known but let's ballpark it very conservatively at 400,000,000. There are about 13,000 homicides by firearm each year, including justified ones but let's also conservatively ignore those. Now to be extremely conservative let's make the ridiculous assumption that those homicides are evenly distributed throughout gun-owning population, and not correlated to any particular individuals, demographics, or social circumstances.
So then having assumed guns are the problem in the first place, and not say, violent urban gangs, your neighbors' still only have at most a 0.00325% annual chance of being used to kill someone. I don't know what your threshold is but to me that's firmly in "not going to kill anyone" territory. A trailer next door being ugly, though, is guaranteed!
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI wasn't trying to start a gun control debate. I just found the contrast between the defense of personal rights and restricting the rights of others interesting in this case.
- homonculus1 7y agoYou're right, in general a lot of people pay lip service to higher principles when it's convenient, but as soon as the issue is something they don't like then there are all kinds of vague second-order reasons why the mere potential of another person's rights are harmful and must be restricted. Zoning laws and gun regulation are both great examples. But as another commenter pointed out I suspect that there's actually more overlap between these particular issues than otherwise, they're both hallmarks of well-off suburbanites who want protection from the rabble.