If I had one, I would make use of it every day during my commute.
I gather you’re voluntarily unemployed, then.
I hope he gets ironically shot, that would be hilarious
Your argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If you were 10 miles from the nearest road during hunting season, you would see more guns than cars.
FURTHERMORE, the vast, vast majority of people who carry guns–whether legally or illegally, it makes no difference–carry them concealed. I can absolutely guarantee you that you have passed within a few yards of a gun on multiple occasions and never knew it.
Even in terms of overall numbers, your argument makes no sense. While nobody knows precisely how many guns there are in America, the most common estimate is 270 million. On the other hand, there’s about 255 million vehicles in America. In other words, no matter how you slice the numbers, vehicles cause more deaths than guns do.
It isn’t the number of guns any country has that’s the problem, it’s the attitude and culture surrounding them. The ‘guns for personal protection and liberty!’ thing doesn’t exist in Canada. That’s why we have police. But that cycles back to actually trusting our government to not fuck things up enough that we need guns to revolt. Gun violence in Canada is largely gang-related, and if you’re not hanging around the gangs, you don’t need one for personal protection.
And if I lived at the gun range, I’d see nothing but guns being used. Is the statistic of concern the number of hunters being shot during hunting season?
A gun in a safe and a car in a garage are each going to cause zero injuries right? Aren’t we more concerned about how much risk is involved in using these objects?
Flyer, are you the guy who heard that most accidents occur within a mile from your home, so you moved?
Actually, within the context of your hypothetical, that it would reduce gun deaths to zero is a given. Not even remotely debatable.
In the real world, sure. You could turn every single gun not owned by the military or law enforcement into daisies and people would still find ways to kill people.
Putting a bullet in somebody’s body is actually a kind of logistics.
Anyway, my problem with this thread is the all-or-nothingness of it. Give up all guns? If anybody at all is promoting that in the real world, it has to be a tiny minority. Even if we see ‘gun control’ go into effect, I betcha people will still own plenty of guns.
What are the limits now? Can I get a 50mm turret-mounted machine gun? If I designed and built a nuclear missile and were in the driveway every Sunday with a hose and a sponge washing it off and basking in my ability to defend myself, wouldn’t the authorities find a way to take it away from me?
It doesn’t take microanalysis to be extremely put off by someone saying they are ok with schoolkids being massacred if they can maintain their current level of gun freedom.
But not as easily, and not as efficiently, and not as effortlessly. Also (and this might be pertinent in the context of criminal use), not as untraceably.
Not talking about linking murders to murder weapons - it’s pretty doable today to match a gun to a bullet, or a knife to a stab wound. However, contact weapons imply contact assaults, which leaves a lot more trace evidence than a shooting. Evidence that in the age of DNA and fingerprint databases can be used to *determine *whoever did it in the first place from scratch, as opposed to merely confirming a known suspect did it.
Those are impressive numbers, but you gotta wonder how they’d do if they had AK-47s. It’s like wondering about Home Run Baker’s numbers if he hadn’t played most of his career before the lively ball; technology and rules changes can really up your game.
Do you drink? Are you aware that the number of kids killed every weekend by drunk drivers is comparable to the number killed by this maniac?
Would you be put off if the government proposed banning alcohol, or requiring every consumer of alcohol to have an alcohol consumer’s license and recurrent safety training, or perhaps a breath interlock in your car that you have to breath into every 10 minutes to prove you’re not drunk? Maybe a limit on how many bottles of wine and liquor you can have in your house? 5, say? I mean, only a sick twisted deranged alcoholic fuck would ever need more than 5 bottles of alcohol. That seems fine to me. I don’t drink, but I think I know what I’m talking about. We should also ban any alcoholic beverage that has more than 5% alcohol by volume. We don’t need these “rapid-fire” alcoholic beverages that just get you drunk faster. 5% alcohol should be all anyone needs to have a good time.
Or are you okay with schoolkids being massacred so that you can maintain your current level of alcohol freedom?
Statistics lead you astray. In this case, mixing up total deaths over the country with the deaths in a singular incident. The two are not equivalent, nor are people really flustered by the number of deaths totalled by all incidents (be they gun related or car related). What they freak out about is that one guy can kill 25+ people by his lonesome in one sitting if he wants to.
I daresay a person will be stopped before they drink and drive through 25 separate people. And if and when they plows through a fricking crowd, you’ll see the same kind of debate over drink driving than you see over gun ownership when one maniac shoots 25 people. Thing is, while I’m sure our gun apologists are already feverishly scouring the web for crowd-plowing incidents (deliberate or not) to prove that “they happen too !”, they just don’t happen as often, or as often in the media at least. Guns are most emphatically not the reason people go on random rampages - but they sure are the most common denominator in them.
Are you talking about worldwide? Because in the US, you’re off by a factor of FIVE. In 2010, 211 children between 0 and 14 died due to drunk driving.
http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html
Where are you getting your stats?
You’re right, I actually had not found a statistic for the number of children killed by drunk drivers, I had seen how many people in total were killed each year by drunk drivers (10,000), and I assumed that about 10% of these were children. You’re right, I was off by a factor of 5.
In any case, the number of people killed each year by drunk drivers (10,000) is vastly greater than the number killed in random gun violence (a few hundred at most). Yet we are not faced with calls for ridiculously overzealous restrictions on alcohol consumption, a purely recreational activity.
I am not debating that people respond more strongly to the fairly rare mass shootings than to the utterly common and vastly more numerous deaths caused by drunk drivers. I’m saying this is an irrational, emotional response and should not be used to set law and policy.
??? Firearm homicides vary around 11 - 12K per year in recent years. What are you talking about?
Random gun violence, i.e. mass shootings. I am not counting the large number of firearms homicides that would still be homicides if firearms were not available (e.g. enraged lovers in domestic violence situations), as well as criminal-on-criminal violence among youths in urban areas, drug wars, etc.
If you want to compare total numbers, feel free to use the total number of alcohol-related deaths each year, 100,000 or so.
No, it was Shagnasty who switched places with a friend and had sex with his girlfriend. Generally, I don’t discuss much about my sex life here. I’ll simply note that I am married and have a child. You’re pretty much of a dumbass, though, so now that I’ve corrected you on a few things, I’ve interacted with you as much as I care to.