Your claim that gun violence is only a problem due to African Americans in the inner cities and that this is “the worst selection of society”, to use your exact words, needs no rebuttal - it stands on its own as reprehensible dribble.
He didn’t say it was a problem…
You mean despite the fact that it’s objectively and measurably true? And for the record, no I do not hold that African-Americans are somehow inherently predisposed to crime and violence. But only an imbecile would deny that there is an urban underclass, with a culture featuring pathological attitudes towards violence and retribution, that African-Americans find themselves disproportionately trapped in.
ETA: once upon a time the same could have been said of Irish or Italian first generation immigrants, to the point where the first major gun control law, the Sullivan Act, was passed expressly to disarm “those people”.
That sounds great until you look at what ‘we’ actually do. I mean, logically, and based on evidence, we’d ban tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco especially kills a lot more people a year than all the guns put together. Even with the mitigation regulations, we’ve put in this is the case. Alcohol is similarly deadly…and we DID actually ban it at one point, but then rolled it back. Regarding things society allows that are deadly, guns, even in the US are pretty far down the list.
This is going to get into what oxes your gore of course. I mean, I’m a fairly smart guy (well, that’s probably debatable 
), and I know, for a fact, tobacco is harmful. And while I’ve cut back to no more than one cigar a week, I still smoke that cigar a week. Same goes for alcohol, even though I shouldn’t drink I still do. And our society, as a whole, makes the same macro decisions on both of these…while they will, for sure, full stop kill people we still allow it because people want it. Guns are actually in a different category in the US in a way since it’s a protected right, but it still boils down to the same thing…we know the costs, we still choose to pay them regardless.
Turn it around…France and the French can read studies too, yet they choose to continue to do it. That’s the point I was trying to make…societies make these sorts of choices all the time, and often other countries are willing to do things that in the US we choose not to because of studies just like the ones you mention…and vice versa.
Well, laws are not exactly what I was getting at though it’s still applicable I suppose from that perspective. The whole ‘aren’t’ verse your caveat ‘shouldn’t be’ is really the point…because from a society’s perspective it’s the key factor. What societies want and are willing to accept are often the difference between ‘aren’t’ and ‘shouldn’t be’, especially from another society’s perspective. It’s why, generally, I don’t care what other countries do wrt their internal laws or regulations/norms about basically anything, including guns and gun control…because, from the US’s perspective, it’s irrelevant, just as their own laws or regulations in their country means our opinion is irrelevant to them.
Anyway, I feel like I’ve beat this dead horse enough, especially considering I’m droning on based on your last paragraph so I’ll leave it there unless you want to discuss it further. It’s probably not germane to this OP in any case and I feel like I’ve been hijacking to an extent.
Tobacco insofar as it kills people other than the people smoking it is indeed a problem and I’d support continuing to regulate it so that the impact of this is lessened.
Alcohol, again aside from drunk driving which we have no tolerance for, kills the user, not other people.
Guns kill other people. You making the choice to own a firearm can have deadly consequences for other people, not just yourself.
And that’s stupid of them, and if I were French I’d support legislation to ban indoor/public smoking.
Alcohol is also a key factor in many violent crimes…including gun crimes. It’s not just about drunk driving. But the point is that society’s decision to allow it kills people. I’m not trying to split hairs on which kills more people besides the user, as I still think alcohol wins the comparison, but it’s really irrelevant as from a societal perspective allowing any and all of these things are going to cause deaths that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Sigh. Yes. But, see, it’s not up to us…the French have made this decision, collectively, and it has really nothing to do with logic…it has to do with them collectively looking at what they want, looking at the cost, and deciding that they are willing to pay it. From their perspective, your (and my own btw as I agree with you here) opinion is really irrelevant. We don’t live there.
BTW…I don’t actually know that they still do this in France today. 
They did the last time I was there, but for all I know they have stopped doing it. It was just for the purpose of making a point. ETA: and looking it up, you can’t smoke in public in France anymore. So, switch France with China…I know they still allow it, or at least they did as of 2018 which was the last time I was there.
What does this have to do with a discussion among Americans as to America’s best course of action with respect to guns? That’s our decision, and looking at other countries provides evidence that we made a crappy one.
The vast majority of gun deaths kill the user and no one else.
2/3rds isn’t really a vast majority but cool story bro.
Not really. We have different priorities, basically. That is the whole point, not to underscore how crappy our…or their…decisions are wrt what they allow.
This gets back to relative risk and basically, people being really bad at judging it. Guns seem like a huge threat, but when looking at the numbers in the US, it’s well down our own list wrt deaths or injuries caused by something that could be avoided. Hell, in the last 2 years Covid deaths are several times higher than gun deaths, and I’m talking about after we got the vaccine. For the last few months, we’ve averaged a few thousand deaths A DAY, at least 90% of which are or were avoidable if people just got the shot. Figure every 10-20 days you have more deaths due to Covid than gun deaths (aside from suicide) a YEAR…yet folks are doing that. Alcohol kills something like 90-120K people a year (this includes various diseases from alcohol abuse and drunk driving…but doesn’t factor in how many of those gun deaths or the almost 7000 murders from other weapons besides guns that happen each year)…that’s at least 8-9 times more deaths than gun murders. A year. Yet we allow that. Tobacco is even worse wrt deaths, and the estimated number of secondhand smoke deaths is nearly the same as gun murders per year. Yet we allow it. Then there is air pollution from the use of fossil fuels. Want to take a guess how many that is? Coal alone kills more per year in the US than gun murders. Again, we allow it. Is all this stupid? Maybe. Look into these things and you’ll find that stupid isn’t the sole province of the US…some of those mentioned above are significantly higher in some countries, even in developed countries than in the US. It’s all about tradeoffs and what a society chooses to allow despite the cost in lives.
I agree, sort of, with you here. My take is that suicides are a sunk cost wrt a given society. While the method can and will change, society is going to have suicides regardless of the method used. In the US, using a gun is acceptable and relatively quick and painless, and part of our societal norms. If you took away all the guns, people would simply turn to other means eventually. People in countries with heavy gun control or outright bans find ways to kill themselves, after all, so I’m sure our American can-do spirit would also find alternatives.
That’s not necessarily true, though. Suicides are often impulsive - someone dealing with depression has a sudden downward spike in a situation where they have an immediate way to end their lives, and they take it. Often, if there aren’t means at hand to do it quickly, the ideation passes and they can get help, or the method they choose isn’t instantly fatal and medical intervention is possible. Guns being a “quick” method can lead to more attempts, and more successful attempts, than would happen if a gun wasn’t available.
That’s not a U.S. specialty by any means. Gun-owning people rarely have just one firearm, and most people don’t have any guns, everywhere.
Have you read any of the suicide-related studies, linked also in this discussion?
The cool fact is that when an effective and easy-access method of killing oneself is removed, the overall suicide rate drops.
That’s true enough, though I will note that many countries without access to guns or who have heavy gun restrictions have similar levels of suicide to the US. I agree that if somehow, all the guns in the US were magically removed we’d see a fairly substantial initial downturn in suicides that would probably last for years. But, IMHO of course, this would eventually rebalance as people found other acceptable methods. It happened in Australia after all, once they put in their heavy gun restrictions and buyback program their suicide rate did in fact drop substantially.
Much higher, 50,000 vs 15,000.
Preventable Covid deaths, caused by lies from conservative media may be around 500,000.
Moreover, suicide seems particularly prone to fads, to the point where as far back as feudal Japan “Shinju” plays that romanticized double suicide were eventually banned.
I think you’ve done an excellent job of making a pretty fundamental point: that societies, cultures, and nations decide where to draw the line on a surfeit of issues, generally with an imputed awareness of the potential consequences (“informed consent”).
But ISTM that this is an ‘academic’ position that doesn’t properly consider – at least – a US reality:
The US population doesn’t tend to get what it wants where policy can be distorted by money.
A classic example is tax policy.
Even Gallup says that the majority of Americans favor increasing taxes on the wealthy (ignoring for a moment that the system is so incredibly labyrinthine as to confound most good faith efforts at reform).
But many of the issues raised: guns, alcohol, smoking, legality of recreational drugs, health care policy, etc., tend to exhibit varying degrees of discordance between what the public wants and what policies we get.
This is an understandable fallacy, but it’s a fallacy. The “suicide method replacement” theory is just not true; all evidence, over and over, for any number of different kinds of suicides, proves that if you remove an easy way for people to kill themselves, it prevents a lot of suicides.
It’s not just guns. Putting up suicide barriers on popular jumping locations like the Golden Gate Bridge has had a measurable impact on the suicide rate.
Cites: