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So 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 w

• leephillips 5y ago
  No, 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.
  • kevincrane 5y ago
    What's the appropriate frequency for a child to accidentally kill or maim someone before it becomes "okay"?
    • leephillips 5y ago
      It can never be okay. What an astonishingly absurd and gruesome notion.
      • aflag 5y ago
        Yes, the original post was not trying to precisely inform the frequency, just that it's not a once in a generation occurrence, but rather something that happens regularly. By trying to refute the frequency, you're completely missing the argument. That's what me and other people are saying.
        • leephillips 5y ago
          In order to have a rational and productive discussion about policy one needs to have some kind of handle on reality, as well as a minimum of truthfulness and respect for the people you’re talking to. Overstating the incidence of an event by a factor of 20 means you don’t have a handle on reality. Deliberately lying about news events means you’re not truthful. Putting words in people’s mouths and imparting inhumane motivations to them means you lack respect. All of these things happened in just this handful of comments, and, no, I don‘t think I’m missing anything at all.
          • phpnode 5y ago
            The phrase "everyday occurrence" does not mean that something literally happens every day, it means that it happens commonly enough that it's not broadly notable. You derailed this comment thread by quibbling over the specific frequency of these tragic events, rather than focussing on the point - which was that these accidental killings do indeed happen frequently - perhaps more frequently than you realised.
          • kelnos 5y ago
            Factor of 20? Who's exaggerating now? If the linked incident happened on Monday, we could perhaps extrapolate that this happens perhaps once every four days, so that's a factor of four. Seriously, though, maybe this is just a local colloquialism or language barrier thing, but to me, the phrase "everyday occurrence" doesn't mean "something that literally happens every day", it means "something that is common and happens often".
            • leephillips 5y ago
              In my comment below I liked to a WP article the gives a rate of 15 per year (almost all self-shootings) Once per day would be 24.33 times as frequent. Your method of "extrapolating" is innumerate.
              • deleted 5y ago
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    • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
      When the marginal utility gained from investing somewhere else is better, of course. You're getting all mixed up between normative ("should") claims, and descriptive ("is") claims. Is it good that people die by getting tangled in their bedsheets? No. Is it good that a toddler occasionally accidentally shoot someone? No. Should we spend time on either problem? No.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• Zababa 5y ago
  I personally don't need a car in my day to day life. We should just ban them. Do you see how many people get killed every year?
  • aflag 5y ago
    To be fair, cars are probably in their way out too. Their are indeed inefficient and dangerous tools. But yeah, being able to connect cities, people with the best society can offer is a benefit much greater than people using guns to threat one another.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I think it's a lot easier to make a non-destructive positive case for cars, despite the number of people killed in car crashes every day, than it is to make the case for guns, which are devices specifically designed to injure and kill.
    • Zababa 5y ago
      I don't think it is. "Injure and kill" may be precisely what you want to do if you're in a self-defense situation.