Accidental death by firearms 600 ('10) 554 ('09) Suicide by firearms 19,308 (2010) 18,735 (2009)
Murder by firearms 11,015 (10) 11,493 (09) (Out of a total of 16,065 fatal assaults in 2010)
Legal intervention 405 (10) 395 (09) - it’s not clear to me that these are all firearms deaths. Let’s assume they are since that is better for the gun argument.
Undetermined intent firearms 246 (10) 232 (09)
So let’s add these up for 2010.
Firearm murders 11,015
Accidental gunshot deaths 600
Sub total 11,615
Suicides 19,308
Undertermined 246
Total 31,169 deaths by guns, except by legal action.
Compare now to legal intervention of 405
11,615/405 = 28.68 or approximately 29:1. So in 2009 “bad” gunshot deaths outnumbered “good” gunshot deaths 30:1 (actually a tad higher) and that number improved to 28.68:1 in 2010. Still, almost 30 bad over “good” and that ignores suicides.
The total number ratio would be 76.97:1, or 77:1. Basically there were more legal action killings and fewer murders in '10 than '09, but more suicides, which is understandable given the economy.
If we imagine a magic knife – the Felo De SeBlade – enchanted so that any person who sees it is driven to plunge it into their breast, it’s obviously fair to call it attractive insofar as suicide is concerned.
But if the SeBlade is kept in the middle of the Joshua Tree National Park, it won’t account for many deaths.
Guy with two silver stars who tries to help vets with PTSD gets killed by an Iraq vet with PTSD, yeah, sounds like the trash taking out the trash.:rolleyes:
The guy with the shiny dongle was the one who got murdered, smart guy. I remember you being pretty rational, but you’ve totally lost it in this thread. Did your wife leave you for a pistol or something?
Would it be out of line to suggest that trying to help a guy with PTSD or some other unspecified mental illness by saying “Hey let’s go shoot stuff” and handing him a gun might not have been the most brilliant idea?
Maybe. I don’t know. Not at all sure anybody really does.
Fear and stress, we learn, changes the brain. The brain itself, the physical makeup, the wiring. We don’t like this fact, it screws up our fantasies about citizen soldiers who go off to war, win, come back and forget all about it. We believed it and kept on believing it despite evidence to the contrary.
It may be that this was all a form of “manly” amateur therapy, “walk it off”, do a bunch of manly things so you aren’t such a sensitive wimp. Or not, at this point, we have no real idea.
The best way to approach the “wounded warrior” problem is not make men into warriors. Certainly, it may be necessary, WWII leaps to mind, of course. But Korea? Viet Nam? iraq? We like to bandy about platitudes, like war being the absolutely last resort, but our history shows we don’t mean it. Let’s start by meaning it.
How will that help our current problem? Maybe not much. How do you untie an agonizing knot in the brain? But at least we can offer the comfort that what happened to them will not happen to their sons and daughters. And if it must be so, that we have exhausted every possible alternative.
Peace is the answer. Not an easy answer. But the only answer.