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?
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 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.
I 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.
Well, 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.
I'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.
I think it's also important to highlight like you did that guns don't solve all problems and that with them you can end up in an even worse situation. Just like some people get killed by seatbelts in a way.
Considering the huge backlash against the vaccine due to the negative effects, I would argue most people aren't capable of doing a cost/benefit analysis and understand that.
That 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?
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 worth it? Are guns preventing more deaths than they are causing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Indeed. Given that a toddler isn't capable of "murder," we're talking accidents. Of which there were 486 lethal ones in the US in 2019, the last year for which the CDC has collated the data. Pretty sure there were more than 121 lethal accidents caused by people older than toddlers.
The actual rate of gun deaths caused a toddler (age <= 3) firing a gun was 15 for 2015, in 13 of which the toddler shot himself.¹ True, “murder” is not the right term, but I wasn’t quibbling about that. I’m not sure “accident” is the right term, either, as in every case an adult committed a horrible crime in allowing the child access to the loaded weapon.
If there were 486 toddler gun deaths, then on average, those occurred 1.33 times per day. The frequency of gun-related toddler deaths is literally "every day".
No one said anything like there being “486 toddler gun deaths”. Much less that many deaths caused by a toddler firing a gun, which was the original subject.
The 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.
If 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.
Projecting 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.
By 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.
Your "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.
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.