First, a moment of silence for cougar 58…
Okay, now that the real nutter is gone, I think it’s time to summarize the problem with this debate: we been focusing on the wrong things. All this back qnd forth about details, emotionally. On both sides. Public policy, regulation, and law should not be based on niggling details and appeals to emotion. It must be based on sound data and reliable science used to calculate the “acceptable risk”. This is the standard way the government considers banning a product or service or substance. How many people are likely to die?
So start there. How does being killed by a dog, any dog at all to start with, stack up against other causes of death as far as lifetime risk? My googling tells me that without considering anything else, just raw calculation of population, deaths, and life expectancy, it’s somewhere between 1-150,000 and 1-300,000, depending on who you ask and hte numbers you are working with. That’s over a lifetime, by any dog, without considering any other factors.
Then we start filtering to be more accurate in the assessment. For instance, bike accidents cause thousands of deaths every year, resulting in a much higher liklihood of dying from a bike accident than from a dog attack. But if you never ride a bike in your entire life, then your risk drops to zero.
With dogs, one of the biggest factors affecting an individual’s lifetime risk of dying from a dog attack is whether they choose to live or work with them. If you are never around them, your chance of being killed by one drops almost to zero. (Since dogs are mobile and can come to you, whereas a bike can’t attack you…). Age is another. Once you are older than about 15, your risk drops enormously. Then there’s a number of other factors that have a smaller but still meaningful impact on the risk.
Finally we get to breed, which cuts the risk again, even if we operate on the assumption that every single report of killer dogs being pit bulls, they are still not responsible for all of the (extremely rare) deaths.
Someone else can crunch these numbers more precisely, but I think it’s extremely reasonable to state that for people who do not themselves choose to own “pit bull type” dogs or associate with such dogs willingly, the risk of death over a lifetime is easily 1-in-however-many-millions-suits-you. I think 1-100 million is probably true.
But even if it is merely 1/million, that is considered an acceptable risk by pretty much any standard.
The risk is obviously higher for those of us who choose to put ourselves in the path of pit bulls, in the same way the risk is far higher of dying from guns if you own one, tobacco if you smoke it, ATVs if you ride them, etc. But I’m an American, and as such I have a great deal of freedom to do many things that endanger my life while posing an extremely low risk to yours if you are making different choices than I am.
It is not reasonable to expect, demand, or seek legislation to try and achieve zero possibility of death or serious injury from a pit bull or anything else that you choose not to have in your life but others do.
This is the only thing that matters. Some of you are apparently very scared of pit bulls and would cross the street to avoid them. You are entitled. But in the context of our legal system, our history, our behavior generally and the actual statistics, you have absolutely no leg to stand on to seek to ban any breed or type, because the stats do not support you.
That is the only genuine way to argue this honestly. Quibbling about all the rest of it is useful for many purposes in regard to the dangers OF dogs and TO dogs and how to reduce them, but it’s total masturbatory bullshit when it comes to arguing for the legitimacy of banning, cuz it just ain’t legitimate.
