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Everyone should own a gun, and most more than 1. If we were to maintain public education (which... just no, please) gun education should be standard.
by sharklazer 5y ago
Everyone should own a gun, and most more than 1. If we were to maintain public education (which... just no, please) gun education should be standard.
- ryandvm 5y agoStrange take. In 40+ years, I've never needed a gun to defend myself. Nor do I even _know anyone_ that needed to use a gun to lawfully defend themselves. So why should we all have something that A) the lawful uses of such are exceedingly rare, and B) ends up involved in a lot of unlawful or unintentional killings.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoSo I guess you don't have fire extinguishers in your house, car or place of work, only buy car liability insurance because it's the law, or home insurance because it's required by your mortgage holder? No insurance for your personal property? I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster.
- jonp888 5y agoNot a great comparison. I've never heard of a toddler accidentally murdering someone with a fire extinguisher, yet that's an everyday occurrence with guns.
- AdrianB1 5y agoIs it, really? Are there any statistics to back this up?
- leephillips 5y agoReally? Show us the link for yesterday’s occurrence.
- kevincrane 5y agoThis took me 15 seconds to find, here's a 2-year old and a 4-year old shot yesterday because of a gun lying around at home. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/marietta-man-arrested-after-child-shoots-self-toddler-with-gun https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/marietta-man-arrested-after...
- leephillips 5y agoThat happened on Monday. Today is Thursday. Also, it wasn’t a “murder” (I’ll take a killing, but the victim did not die.) EDIT: I can’t help be curious about what’s in the mind of someone who is so blatantly dishonest. Right at the top it says “Published 2 days ago”, and in the second paragraph it says “Monday”. Is the idea that you assume no one will actually take a look at the link?
- oblio 5y agoJust because it happened slightly earlier doesn't diminish his point, which is that it's a common occurrence.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoIt isn't a common occurrence. There are 330,000,000 people in the U.S. There are more lightning deaths (not strikes) than toddler-firearms killings.
- aflag 5y agoSo your point is that it is not that bad because it really only happen once every couple days? I mean, let's say it happens once a month or once a year. Is it worth it? Are guns preventing more deaths than they are causing?
- leephillips 5y agoNo, neither that nor any of the other countless things that I did not say are not my point. My point is that the claim that a toddler kills someone with a gun every day is false.
- aidenn0 5y ago> So I guess you don't have fire extinguishers in your house, car or place of work, only buy car liability insurance because it's the law, or home insurance because it's required by your mortgage holder? No insurance for your personal property? GP said he didn't know anybody who needed to use a gun. - My wife has used a fire extinguisher - I have been reimbursed by car insurance - I have several friends who have been reimbursed by homeowners and renters insurance.
- Zababa 5y agoI don't know anyone who ever had a fire at their home, but I know a few people that were attacked on the street. Anecdotes are just that, anecdotes.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoWell, there was one friend of mine who I convinced to keep a fire extinguisher in her car, and a week later on her commute she was able to hand it to man who then saved his car from total destruction by engine fire. But I too also know more people who've been threatened with lethal force on the streets than have had reason to use fire extinguishers. Doesn't deter me from keeping a big fire extinguisher wherever I live.
- aidenn0 5y agoI think there's going to be two major sources of differing experiences on this: 1. Where you live. If you live in the suburbs and drive everywhere, there are just very few opportunities for you to get "attacked on the street" as you are hardly ever walking down the street. 2. Disagreement on what situations necessitate a gun. I know a lot of people who think that e.g. robbery is insufficient reason to defend yourself with deadly force. Similarly I've seen people astonished that someone might choose to defend themselves from an unarmed man with a gun, even when that man is larger and is not allowing them to leave.
- kelnos 5y agoI've never had a fire in my home, but I have been attacked in the street. If I had been armed, I expect it would have gone a lot worse for me than it did. I might not be alive to write this post had I had a gun on me then. As you say, though, just another anecdote.
- asdff 5y agoThe odds of a fire in my kitchen, someone dinging my car, and even a tree falling on my home in a storm are all much higher than the odds of me needing to fire a bullet at another human being. In fact something similar to all three of those things have happened to me already at one point or another. On the other hand I've never needed or even heard of anyone who has needed to use a gun. What's wrong with a baseball bat for self defense? I have one in my closet and never had to draw it, but due to its lower lethality if I had to I would have zero qualms about taking a full swing and I think anyone on the receiving end would realize the same pretty quickly.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoAnd if you don't land a disabling blow, could well be lethal, and they step outside your extended reach and use their handgun, then...?
- asdff 5y agoIf they have a handgun chances are I'm dead before I can draw my own and train one on them anyway. I'm not Clint Eastwood and this isn't a hollywood western. Whoever has the drop wins and by definition that's the intruder since I'm not going to spend every second of my life with a gun in my hand.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoProjecting your claimed inadequacies, which I don't believe for a minute especially before you moved the goalposts from home defense ("I have [a baseball bat] in my closet") to a Spaghetti Western, says nothing about actual gun owners.
- kelnos 5y agoBy that logic, we should also have grenades, missiles, and perhaps a tactical nuclear weapon at home, just in case. Probably won't need them, but who knows. > I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster. So what you're saying is that you don't need your guns, but the insurance did come in handy after all. Got it. I feel like you're making the parent's point for them.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y agoYour "logic" is missing the minor detail of required precognition. I didn't start buying personal property ("renters") insurance in the 1980s because I knew I'd need it decades later.
- nradov 5y agoThe vast majority of firearm use is 100% lawful for target shooting, hunting, and self defense.
- sharklazer 5y agoLawful use: 600k-2.5m per year. Gun deaths per year: ~40k. A lot of those being suicide.
- laverya 5y ago600k-2.5m/year is specifically lawful defensive uses. If you count "shot skeet", or "went hunting", or "went to the range", the number of lawful uses goes up a LOT.
- sharklazer 5y agoYes, technically you are correct. But I hesitate to bring that up, because I don’t believe there is ANY moral ambiguity for the use of firearms for sporting purposes. Ambiguity only arises in the face of human conflict. I will defend the ownership, possession, use and carry of firearms on the specific grounds that they ARE tools with the express purpose of hurting, maiming and killing. The specific justification in the US Constitution for citizen ownership of arming of a militia. I also oppose the use of professional militaries as I believe they are corrupt. Fundamentally professional armies have an incentive misalignment: fight for pay, not, fight for something “virtuous”. Therefore “don’t bite the hand that feeds”. Moreover, the rights of the first amendment can only ensured by the use of force, ultimately, by those exercising said rights. The first amendment is meaningless without the second. We can count the rounds fired this year alone probably number great than the whole conflict in Afghanistan, all lawful use, but I want to highlight that a GUN is useful being a GUN, not a hobby tool for target practice. If it’s merely a sporting device, well then you should be happy when they take away the guns as we still have airsoft and crossbows for sporting purposes. No, we defend firearms for what they are and justify them on that use: Force, or the threat of force.
- ch4s3 5y ago
- sharklazer 5y ago1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it. 2. We don’t nuke each other all the time either. But “God made man and Colt made ‘em equal”—the gun is an equalizer. I think people in America think we’re some united hegemony, believing all the same thing. No. We don’t. We all have different views and are pursuing happiness differently. Sometimes this pursuit leads to injury of someone else’s pursuit of happiness. Guns, along with education, give people the means of preventing and give meaningful deterrence to those who would disrupt their rightful pursuit of happiness. Also, guns in the US are used nearly a million times a year to prevent violence (CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...) Finally, regarding unintentional killings: that’s why I said education on guns in necessary. Regarding unlawfulness: you must have your head in the sand to think a criminal isn’t already committed to breaking the law. Guns for everyone.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it. Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger. As much as people like us are horrified by how little education so many people get about their guns, centuries of ergonomic improvements would seem to allow a tremendous number of them to use them safely and effectively in high stress self-defense situations.
- laverya 5y ago> > Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it. > Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger. That is FAR more information than most people have. Even the basic rules of gun safety - never point a gun at something you aren't willing to shoot, treat every firearm as if it's loaded, and keep your booger hook off the bang switch (and outside of the trigger guard entirely) until you're ready to fire - are more than most people know. "How to clear the gun or check the safety" might as well be rocket science.
- briffle 5y agois that so strange? In 40+ years, I have never needed a seatbelt. I do know of 2 people that were prevented from escaping their car because of their seatbelt, and died. yet every time I get in a car, I put one on.
- oblio 5y agoYou've probably used it when braking hard, you just didn't realize it at the time due to the adrenaline pumping through you.
- Glyptodon 5y agoTo begin with you're creating a premise that the only reason gun legality can be justified is self defense, particularly against other people. I do not accept this premise. There are many other premises for gun legality. That said, when I was very young my grandfather had to shoot a number of stray dogs out his car window while driving through a rough pasture because they'd killed a couple calves and were attacking his cows. Some tried to bite the vehicles tires after the first shots. Gun used was a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle. I didn't witness, but saw pictures, possibly originally taken for insurance purposes. He was not, under a very strict definition, defending himself. But it still seems very unproblematic to me. In many ways being adult enough to vote is synonymous with being adult enough to own a gun safely: the ballot box is as capable as any gun of unleashing horrors on the world.
- asdff 5y agoMost people would have just called animal control
- nradov 5y agoIn most US counties animal control responds late or not at all. Obviously you can't seriously expect farmers to just wait around while feral dogs kill their livestock.
- belorn 5y agoThe cost of gun education in public education would be pretty higher than simply increasing funding to animal control in order to improve response times.
- tootie 5y agoSame. I've lived in NYC since the tail end of the crime wave in the 90s. Walked past drug dealers 80 times a day when I was younger. Lived across from a supposed crack house in my 20s. I only personally know of two people were attacked on the street in about 25 years. One was sucker punched and didn't even see who did it before they ran off. The other fought off a very scrawny attacker with an umbrella. I've never been on the receiving end of anything worse than an insult. I don't know a single person who owns a gun and I've even seen one that wasn't in the holster of a cop. My number one fear of living here by a mile is me or my family (my kids walk themselves home from school) getting hit by a car.
- stackedinserter 5y agoIn 40+ years I have never been raped and I don't know anyone who was raped. Rape doesn't exist?
- kelnos 5y agoIn my 40 years, there was exactly one time I needed to defend myself, and a gun probably would have made the situation worse. I would have had too little time to draw it, and likely it would have been wrestled away from me and used against me. The people who attacked me had no weapons (or at least none they felt they needed to show me), so a gun would have escalated things. I walked away from that with a black eye and stolen phone and laptop, but if a gun had been in play I might not have walked away at all.
- solidsnack9000 5y agoIf you're not a criminal, it's actually very unlikely that any of those things will happen. The majority of shootings (more than 60%) are suicides; these are both intentional and generally lawful. Evidence suggests that most of the rest (between 20% and 30% of all shootings) are criminal conflict -- a lot of people with criminal records shooting other people with criminal records. Here again, there is a lot more to the story than just owning a gun. Unintentional shootings are fairly unusual, less than 4% of all shooting deaths. This is in part why thinking about guns has to be very different from our thinking when it comes to "safety" issues, like car accidents (95% of traffic deaths are unintentional). The lawful uses of guns are, in fact, much more common than killings. These include hunting and target practice. Most gun owners will never shoot another person but that doesn't mean they don't use their guns.
- mullingitover 5y agoI'd rather reduce my chances of being shot, which is a thing you can do by simply declining to purchase a firearm[1] > Overall, Branas’s study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-increases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-...
- disneygibson 5y agoYeah, this is the problem with relying on statistics to determine your life choices. Real life isn’t a series of probabilities, it’s a series of events - for which you can prepare for and plan to protect yourself.
- rspeele 5y agoWhile the study did control for factors like socioeconomic status, race, and job, I think it's inherently difficult to control for the idea that somebody is much more likely to carry a gun when they perceive their risk of being attacked as higher. For example, if they frequently interact with dangerous people in their personal lives. I would not be surprised to learn that, say, people who get restraining orders against their exes are more likely to be murdered by their exes than people who don't. Does that mean that getting a restraining order is dangerous? Or does it mean that people in dangerous situations tend to get restraining orders?
- deelowe 5y agoPeople who feel the need to carry a gun, are more likely to get into incidents that involve shootings? Huge surprise there... Did the researchers ever stop to question the reason why someone might be compelled to carry a firearm in the first place? What happens to these stats when high crime areas and suicides are removed?
- hpoe 5y agoBut if you go to the beach 3 times your risk of getting shot by a dog with a handgun in its mouth is 50% higher.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1252/ https://xkcd.com/1252/
- bananabreakfast 5y agoYou sound like a gun industry rep. "Everyone should own a car" is what a car lobbyist says. "Everyone should own a gun" is what a gun lobbyist says.
- pengaru 5y agoEveryone should own a toothbrush.
- standardUser 5y agoThe problem with more guns everywhere for everyone is that there will be more successful suicides, more lethal mass shootings and far more accidents with serious injuries. Plus, I don't want the same 10-15% of drivers on the freeway who speed and don't use signals to also be guaranteed to own a loaded gun they don't know how to use.