Guns don’t fire until the trigger is pulled — News at 11 ?
Don’t ban guns; Ban trigger fingers?
This is going off the rails.
The original statement was that we manage to keep poisons away from kids, why not guns?
It’s very hard to find a direct comparison: there are vastly more reported poisoning “exposures”, but the vast majority of those amount to literally nothing: they aren’t even followed up on. We have no idea how many gun “exposures” there are, because while you call poison control when both you and your spouse give your kid a dose of antibiotics on the same morning. When you find your toddler with their hands in the purse where you keep your gun, you don’t call anyone. Hell, your toddler wings you but you think you can heal on your own, you don’t call anyone. So I don’t think we can draw comparisons there.
We can go to the other extreme and look at deaths. The Snopes cite in the OP suggested that around 50 kids age 1-3 shoot someone, and in about 2/3 of those cases, someone dies (in about half, it’s the toddler themselves). However, that data is hand-compiled from manual searches of newspaper articles: I think at most we can say that at least 35 people a year die at the hands of toddlers holding guns. There are likely cases that don’t make the news, or were missed.
For poisoning deaths, we have reported CDC stats (Can I get a cite on those?) that 90 kids aged 0-4 die of poisoning each year. Now, the cite I listed early said that about 16% of poisoning deaths were from gasses/fumes, so assuming that hold true, that’s more like 75 kids a year. We’ve also expanded the age range by two years, and it’s not clear to me whether or not that includes things like parents giving infants too high a dose of Advil or things like that. Certainly deaths under a year are not generally going to be matters of inadequate supervision. And while 2 is peak age for poisonings, and included in this range, I kinda suspect 4 year olds are more likely to shoot people than 1 year olds, and if the shooter age range went up, the number of deaths would go up significantly.
So at the end of the day, we have toddlers finding guns killing at least 40 people and toddlers fining poison killing at most 75, and probably less. This is despite the fact that potentially poisonous substances are found throughout virtually every house and putting random things in your mouth is a much more common child behavior than pulling a trigger.
So yeah, I think the statement “We do a better job keeping toddlers safe from poisons than we do from guns” is a pretty reasonable claim.
Haven’t we had posters on this forum claim that they didn’t need to secure their guns because their kids were trained and would never touch a gun without permission, even if the weapons were left out on the table?
Yes, but their accounts haven’t been active for quite some time.
It is a debating technique called “Whataboutism” recently popularized by a leading politician over here. Your wonderful comedy export, John Oliver, did a great explanation last week on Last Week Tonight.
Well worth watching.
Either trigger lock in place exept when the gun is in the hand of a licenced adult, or jail time.
Of course no gun nut would go for such thing.
There’s nothing about that in the cited article, but even if this were somewhat true, so what? Other countries have gang problems without the corresponding gun carnage. Here’s what the cited article does say – the well-established fact that a gun in the home is an intrinsic hazard and that the societal danger is proportional to their numbers:
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends doctors ask parents whether they keep a gun in the home, and Nelson agreed that pediatricians “do need to try to engage those gun owners.” … But, Wesson said, “The more guns there are, the more people die of gunshot injuries.”
So you claim that excessive gun violence is due to gangs even though other countries also have gangs. And over here, this other guy claims excessive gun violence is due to crazy people even though other countries also have crazy people. Well, which is it, gangs or crazy people, or are you guys just scrambling for excuses? And why don’t these same things cause anywhere even close to the same level of gun violence in other countries?
It’s almost amusing in a tragic kind of way to watch this silly mad scramble to find any excuse to account for all the gun violence except the guns themselves and their abundance and ease of access – any excuse except acknowledging that it’s a problem having too many people with too easy access to too many guns.
Shockingly, the United States ranks 46th in the world when we consider the death-by-guns per gun rates … see the list on Wikipedia “List of countries by firearm-related death rate” …
Surprise surprise … the first-world nations with higher rates: Japan, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Ireland, Israel … so, the USA’s 1 in 10,683 is about normal compared to Western Europe … bad people do bad things with guns at about the same rate everyplace? …
Right. Not sure where you stand, but I am sick of hearing about “tragedies” where kids get a gun in the house and shoot someone by “accident.”. Yes, these are both accidents and tragedies. What get’s me is that at least in news headlines the parents do not seem to be punished (beyond losing the victim of course). I’m too lazy to look but I do remember multiple “this was a tragedy, parents already lost the victim, it does no good to add further punishment.”
I don’t know, maybe some deterrence if you said negligent parents went to jail?
I don’t think that the government should tell you how to store your firearm. That said, if there is an accident, as a responsible gun owner you are then responsible and liable for civil and criminal proceedings.
Shocker. Kinda like when there are more cars, there are more vehicle accidents. Since the US has something in the ballpark of 1 firearm per person, the *absolute *firearm related death rate is a serious problem.
I know I know, absolute vs per capita can spin things in a different direction.
Yup. For starters, you seem to want to jail all those people that carry their firearms around with them daily in a holster.
Exactly right. Which supports what I just quoted in #67: “The more guns there are, the more people die of gunshot injuries.” Which belies the arguments made by the gun crowd that it’s really all about gangs, or crime rates, or something else – anything else – anything but guns! And this is exactly why you have statistics like this.
Where I live, these assholes would be jailed for a long time. You may not agree. The question becomes whether you seriously want to curtail gun violence or whether you have a different agenda.
I’m unclear on a few points:
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Where do you live?
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What are those guys doing that makes them “assholes”? They appear to have chamber flags in their rifles. Is there some additional context I’m missing?
Why would it matter when the circumstances – specifically the ones I describe below – would apply to every other developed country in the world?
Yes. There’s a recent story I recall out of Toronto as an example of context. Someone was observed on a downtown street with one of those things, and subsequently entering a building. In Texas this would just be called an afternoon stroll with one’s beloved assault rifle. I don’t know if the thing he was carrying had a chamber flag in it. I don’t think the police cared if it had a chamber flag or a chamber pot in it, they closed all access roads to the area, the entire area was locked down, and the SWAT team was called in. A manhunt subsequently ensued.
So I believe there are some small cultural differences in gun attitudes elsewhere in the world that you may not be sufficiently attuned to, which result in these vastly different gun-fatality and gun-injury statistics that we see. You may prefer a different balance of gun-waving freedom versus the freedom to not get shot. I’m with those who give high priority to the freedom to not get shot by gun-toting lunatics who carry highly lethal weapons around for no rational discernible reason except that they can, and boy, it feels good. Or those who stockpile them in their homes until they crack from some kind of mental stress and go out and shoot their boss, or their ex-wife, or random innocent people.
Looking at that I absolutely don’t know what you are seeing, where you got 46th from, and what you mean.
It’s that bad.
If you click the second column, descending is quickest, it has the gun deaths per 100,000 rate.
Honduras 67.18
Venezuela 59.13
El Salvador 45.6
Swaziland 37.16
Guatemala 34.10
Jamaica 30.72
Colombia 25.94
Brazil 21.2
Panama 15.11
Uruguay 11.52
United States 10.54
After that the rest with much lower rates of killing. Much.
Mexico, 7.64 — Finland 3.35 — Israel 2.09 — Germany 1.01 — Japan 0.06
How on earth do you consider these rates above the USA’s 10.xx ?
I’m certainly not blaming America for their gun violence nor it’s love of guns, those other countries above it on the table are it’s peers — and I don’t want Americans disarmed. But inadvertently false statements don’t help the case for arming toddlers.
Guns are not very good at math.
I thought watchwolf49’s metric was fairly clear:
He’s pretty clearly talking about sorting the last column in the table he cites in descending order. The one labeled “Firearm-related deaths per gun per year”. Doing it that way, USA appears to fall in 46th place. There’s plenty to quibble with about that measure, but I’m a bit surprised you didn’t even comprehend the point. Is it clear now?
Yeah, statistics are that way … “what do you want the numbers to say?” …
The United States is a violent place to live, just taking the guns away doesn’t change that … as it stands right now, 99.99% of gun are stored and held is responsible ways and do not cause death or injury … ten bucks and a pressure cooker and one can kill a hell of a lot more people in a very short period of time, all the ingredients are available at your local Wal-Mart …
We’d save more social grief by outlawing booze …
“Per gun”? What’s the point of that? Guns don’t kill people - people kill people (or so I am assured). “Per capita” is a more accurate measure.