I collect smallpox viruses. I keep them high up on the kitchen shelf, so a kid would have to be pretty determined to get at them. Don’t worry, if they escape I don’t think it would kill more than 40,00 people tops. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/gun-deaths.html
Not to mention the well known liberal bias of facts. BTW, you are off by a couple orders of magnitude in the number of dogs.
Oh sorry, 52m dogs, 800,000 bites requiring treatment,224.000 requiring hospitalization
So a one in 65 chance your dog hurts someone
1:260 it hospitalizes someone.
Each year of course, so in it’s lifetime of course is far greater.
You mean that those sources admittedly simply looked at the available stats , looked at others interpretations of the numbers and then took a wild ass guess as to what might be more realistic.
Dogs are dangerous. That’s why there are leash laws, laws about licensing, and in some cases restrictions on what kind of dogs can be kept.
Luckily the number of drive by-bitings is small.
The chances of me using a gun in my house against myself when I’m in one of my moods is astronomically higher than my chance of using it against some cartoon burglars. So no, I don’t need that temptation.
which was a response to the claim of “BANG you’re dead.”
You seem to have serious problems with context.
That makes no sense that you would refer to the line posted by me. I was not the person in the thread to make the claim of “BANG you’re dead”, that was postpic200. The bit of my post that you quoted out of context was in reply to postpic200’s assertion that if you have a bat or a frying pan, then you will be dead.
Your correction is with the person who made the claim, not the person who replied to it.
Look, here you go, I’ll help you out, and give you the response that postpic200 gave
Now, you two seem to have something to work out. Leave me out of it from now on, please.
Can you please cite where you are getting your stats? Especially the “hospitalization” part. Is that just a visit to the ER, or is that actual admission to the hospital. I’m not sure that you are separating the two, but not seeing the source of your info, hard to say.
Here’s the cite I am using here for the following stats
So, yes, guns are far more dangerous than dogs.
This cite is a little old, but I don’t see it being orders of magnitude off.
So, either we’ve gone from under 10,000 hospitalizations to 224,000 in ten years, or you are using a different definition for “hospitalization” than hospitals do.
This one has a nice table: https://www.businessinsider.com/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2018-2
I get lifetime odds as ‘Assault by gun’ 1 in 315, ‘Accidental gunshot’ 1 in 8349, ‘Mass shooting’ 1 in 11,125, ‘Venomous animal or plant’ 1 in 44,459, ‘Dog attack’ 1 in 112,382. Interestingly, ‘Shark attack’ which a lot of people worry about is 1 in 8 million. 
Looking at that list, there are a lot of things above guns that folks should be worried about a lot more than they do. It barely makes the top 20 at 19…and this is for America, home of the gun. Hell, ‘Assault by gun’ is only one down from ‘Riding inside a car, van, or truck’. :eek:
Your chances are much higher if you are in the ocean than if you are in Ohio.
Your chances are much higher if you are around guns than if you are not.
Tangentially related, I had the unfortunate experience of needing to use a fire extinguisher for the first time a couple of days ago. Prior to that event, I would have either disregarded it in our hypothetical situation, or at most, though of using it as something heavy to swing at our intruder’s head.
The noise and the associated volume of horrible powder that came out of it was truly surprising to me. If I were in a situation where I could neither flee nor hide, I would opt for a good looooong blast in the direction of an intruder’s face. While it would not be as incapacitating as getting shot, it would be at least as good of an indicator of discouragement as a baseball bat, IMO of course.
PSA: Make sure everyone in the house knows where the fire extiguishers are. My wife did not, adding the time it took for me to; 1. hear there was a fire, 2. run naked, dripping and soapy to grab the device, and 3. come back and blast the fire.
PSA#2: Full nudity is not the appropriate safety attire for fighting a fire.
Someday, I would like to come over for a beer and a tour of your art collection.
That’s a little confusing. Commonly, “downplayed” is used to suggest that the facts are what they are, but the meaning of those facts are being bent in service of some agenda. Many times in this endless argument, we have seen the same set of facts interpreted to wildly different purposes by the NRA and the Wimpy Liberal Moonbat Alliance.
Are we to take it that “notoriously liberal” sources are making shit up, but the stalwart patriots of the NRA are innocent of such disgraceful behavior? Where, then, may we turn to get the actual facts? In your experience, have the statistics offered by the NRA been proven to be uniformly reliable? Outside of your expert opinion, can you offer us any other support for that conclusion?
For instance, how stupid is the NRA leadership? They appear to be convinced that the powers that be in Putin’s Russia are eager to extend gun ownership in Russia. Personally, my first reaction to this development is that the NRA is too stupid to make its own oatmeal, but perhaps you have a more reliable insight?
The problem is all of these issues are classified and reported differently. For instance, home invasion is not a classified crime.
Stats may be as vague as “firearms involved” which could mean one was there or brandished or discharged or…
So you have people simply interpreting ncvs and FBI stats to fit these publicly used wordings.
The LA times and Washington Post responded to some wildly overestimated NRA guess with the numbers i quoted, but in searching for stats most tend to be estimated at about double tge numbers they used.
Basically it’s their best guess, and obviously biased to the low end.
I’ve cited it already but for convenience;
Sorry, 324,000
The 224 was some burglary related number. I mixed up along the way.
Note that isn’t nearly as much discussion of locking up meds and household chemicals even though poisonings are at number 1 for accidental death on the list I cited.
And again, guns didn’t make the top 10.
While I think we all recognize that risk management is key for all of this, it seems most of the debate is rooted in
Guns are scary
Home invasions are scary
Rather than raw logic or real risk calculations.
I find arguments like this, that utterly ignore the fact that virtually everyone has medicines on hand and far fewer harbor guns, extremely easy to dismiss. They’re exactly equivalent to saying that since the vast majority of people don’t get killed by sharks, it’s perfectly safe to try and go sharkback riding.
If you’re going to cite fatality statistics to determine if something’s dangerous, you have to also account for how many (or few) people encounter the something.
So then we focus on something less common?, seems if almost everyone has poison and the number 1 cause of accidental death is poison, we would logically focus on poison control first.
We don’t because well, bleach isn’t scary.
Guns aren’t scary. Gun nuts are scary in their lack of awareness.
So, LAT and WaPo “…responded to some wildly overestimated NRA guess with the numbers i quoted…”. I take it this is meant to imply and insinuate that the press reaction was, well, reactionary. They interpreted the same (shaky?) data with a conclusion wildly at variance with that of the NRA. By way of rebuttal, they made up equal and opposite bullshit out of the same dubious data.
BUT! (…I like big “buts!” and can’t deny it…) you searched for stats and found that “…most tend to be estimated at about double the numbers they used…”.
And! “…it’s their best guess, and obviously biased to the low end…”. Well, obviously! Clearly wrong compared to a bunch of half-ass data you offer, and some other data you refer to but do not offer.
Pretty rock solid stuff you got there, hoss. “…They (the stats you searched for) tend to be estimated at about double…” Tend, estimated, about…those are terms of approximation. All of this about data you start out saying is flawed by way of definitions and record-keeping!
Flawless argument like that cannot be answered. Its too many for me, I fold. Maybe my cousin in Lubbock still has that .30-.30 of mine, send it to lend strength to Fortress Doublewide. Reprise that Arrowsmith hit…
“Hippy’s got a gun…(chick-a-wang-wang)…Hippy’s got a gun…(chick-a-wang-wang)…”
Point was i cited the lowest estimates of defense usage and it is still a significant number.
While you on the other hand , offer absolutely nothing but hyperbole.
Because you’re clearly offended that estimates from liberal media sit at the low end. Ho lw dare i point that out.
Ah, I see. You are using the term “hospitalized” for anyone who gets treatment at a hospital, rather than the way that hospitals use it, for someone admitted into a hospital as an in-patient.
The way you are misusing the word makes it seem as though the issue is far, far worse than it really is. Someone who goes to the ER for a dog bite got treatment at a hospital, but was not hospitalized. Hospitalization refers to inpatient treatment, and is something done with serious injury or illness. That only accounts for less than 10% of your claim. Kids are a large percantage of these bites, because kids are stupid, and either play too rough, or scare a dog, or approach an unknown dog incorrectly. Still better to let your kid play with a dog than with a gun.
I also have to wonder at the motivations of the author of that article. He conflates bite with attack, as most dog bites are not the result of an attack, but due to rough play or startling them. An attack involves an aggressive dog and more than one bite.
That also includes people like me and others in dog handling industries. I get bit a couple/few times a month. Me being bit a couple times a month means that, given the same statistics, your chances of being bit are even smaller than the overall statistic shows.
So, yeah, gonna stick with guns are far more dangerous than dogs. Having a dog will do more to deter a home invader than having a gun will (dogs bark, even when you are asleep, guns only bark if you pull the trigger).
If your actual concern is about protecting your home, yourself, and your family, a dog is the best choice. If your concern is that you may find yourself in a position where you may legally kill someone, that is when not having a gun may be disappointing.