Yeah, that uptick seems to be universal for western countries. US, Europe, Australia, etc. They all experience an uptick in the 2001 recession, then a gradual decline, then another uptick around '07 or '08. Nobody can prove that the economy is the culprit, but that’s the suspicion.
Prior to '01, the US and other countries experienced a steady decline after the mid 80s.
There is a fundamental difference here. Deaths associated with the above come generally from misadventure, by the user, during the intended use of the item.
No-one walks into a school armed with a ladder, swimming pool or bottle of Jack Daniels with the intent of causing falls or drownings or alcohol poisoning.
If all the guns deaths in the USA were suicides or accidents that affected only the user then I suspect you’d hear much less of an outcry.
Cars are the closest to offering the immediacy of harm and death to others that designated weapons do. How well controlled are they compared to guns? (in terms of regulating usage and design) How much time and effort goes into making them safer for users, passengers and pedestrians?
Can’t argue with you there!
Now all we have to do is mandate that all guns be left by themselves, and we’re good. 
That’s an interesting new tack to try. It’s not that we have to protect people from guns, the important thing is to protect guns from people!
I applaud your innovative thinking!
Another example - oven suicides.
There was a lot published on this during the debate on putting suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge. IIRC they found that people who jumped off the bridge and lived never tried suicide again for the most part.
IIRC, most of the survivors reported that they changed their minds at almost exactly the moment it became too late, long before even hitting the water.
IOW, the conditions that can lead one to suicide take some time to build up, but the act itself is impulsive. If the means to follow through are less readily available at the moment of the impulse, then obviously the likelihood of completing the act is lessened.
There is a lot of debate about why suicide rates went down during that time, and it’s completely false to say the rates haven’t changed since. They started going up again in 1975, and contined to do so for about 20 years afterward.
So, does that mean that in countries that have very rigid gun control, that in fact their suicide attempt rates are a lot higher than in the US, since we come in somewhere in the middle of the pack wrt suicides per 100k? I’m genuinely curious how that works, not trying to win a point or be snide or whatever. I look at the suicide rates of other countries, many (most really) that have rigid gun control, some with outright bans of guns to the majority of their citizens and yet their rates are higher than ours, or on par (the UK is a touch less). Using your logic here (which I admit makes sense), to me that would mean that there are a lot more suicide attempts in these other countries than here…right?
I don’t know if there are more attempts, or just more people willing to jump off buildings and step in front of trains.
It ain’t Murica that Ah hate; it’s all them damn people IN it.
Other factor are present, such as the propensity to commit suicide in the first place. There’s a higher than average rate in the northern latitudes in winter, for instance. There’s also variations in alcohol consumption. You mention the UK as an example, where an above average amount gets drunk, and presumably a higher percentage of those are depressed drunks. There are also other means to commit suicide, such as the former coal gas method already mentioned, and those need to be controlled for too if you’re trying to extract a useful conclusion not available to you by simple sense.
One thing that people seem to miss when they extend this kind of logic is that NONE of the things you mentioned were designed solely for the express purpose of killing. Guns were.
Guns were designed to fire a projectile. To say a target pistol was “designed solely for the express purpose of killing” is a lie.
Does the target pistol fire a projectile capable of killing someone? Was the target pistol designed first, and then people said, “hey…we need to make this powerful enough to kill a living being?”
Or was the lethal aspect scaled back for the target pistol?
Unless I’m mistaken, the target pistol came AFTER all those other firearms used in wars.
The target pistol may not have been designed to kill. But since all these others came before the target pistol, and they WERE designed to fire projectiles for the purpose of killing living things.
And the fact that you have to specify one type that ISN’T designed to kill supports my assertion before.
And, with all due respect, I don’t appreciate your attempt to paint me as a liar. You can cheerfully go fuck yourself.
:smack:
‘Nuclear weapons were designed solely for the purpose of beginning a nuclear fusion reaction to produce a large amount of energy output’.
So if we stop making guns, then killing will stop? Maybe people would stop thinking about killing? I think fireworks evolved from artillery science, so fuck celebrations, right? In fact, I do believe guns have been occasionally used by primitives to hunt food, but perhaps we have grown beyond those savages.
The next Olympics would be a fine venue to grind this ax. You’ll find lots of people firing off guns and not actually killing anybody. But I suppose we all know that they secretly want to hit human targets; why else would they do it?
So the folks who designed the target pistol didn’t intend it to be used to kill, but somehow it inherited the history of its fore bearers? That’s like saying Swiss Army knives or box cutters were designed to kill or Indy cars were designed to drive on dirt roads.
Was the target pistol invented ex nihilo? It just somehow happened to be similar to a weapon, but is in reality nothing like it? :rolleyes:
Seriously, the nitpickery is silly. Guns were invented to cause damage to people and things. Right? Arguing that is pure pedantry.
Ok, but so what? What does it matter that guns were designed to kill but the other things weren’t? Are the people killed more/less dead depending on whether the tool was designed to kill or was mis-used and killed anyway? Did it change that fundamental fact somehow? Alcohol kills a lot more people world wide every year than guns, but that’s ok because alcohol isn’t designed to kill?? I guess I don’t see the logic in that, or in the fact that while guns are designed to kill, it’s how they are used (being only a tool) that’s important in the end. If you kill someone with a tool, whether the tool is designed to kill someone or not, they are still dead…so, it boils down to your motives in doing so in the end, not the tool used.
YMMV, of course, but to me that’s the critical factor involved here. And, actually my point was more about people being really, really bad at assessing risk and judging probability.
[Moderating]
Telling other posters to fuck themselves is a violation of the board rules. Please refrain from doing this in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]