We focus on problems due to their relative threat divided by their perceived benefit. This is not confusing or hard to understand.
I have a question for gun-owning home defenders (I own several myself, and I’ve asked myself the same thing):
Suppose you’re sound asleep, and you’re awakened by the sound of a door or window breaking, followed closely by men in masks yelling, “Police, show me your hands!”
It’s too dark to see them clearly, especially if they shine a bright flashlight in your eyes. So you can’t know whether they really are police.
You know the police have no reason to raid your house, but there are several reported instances of police getting the address wrong, or pranksters calling in a phony emergency at a random address.
What do you do? If you go for a gun, they will almost certainly shoot you, whether or not they are the police. If you surrender, and they’re not real cops, you’re in the same boat as somebody with no guns.
What do you do?
Ah, yes
4.7 million bites
800,000 sought medical treatment, of those;
324,000 warranted treatment in a hospital.
I believe this was the original source;
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5226a1.htm
Which puts 6000 as hospitalized.
Fatalities are very low at around 20 per year.
Bear in mind this was in response to the dangers of accidents with children.
Which is still greater than the number of children (19 and under) treated for gunshots.
Note 6 percent of 1300 are unintentional
Putting the chance of accidental death to kids from dogs or guns as very low (tiny) but still four times higher at about 80 for guns.
In both cases some small risk management would bring the chance to near zero.
As mentioned , avoiding aggressive breeds or handguns alone drop those chances 75 percent.
Other simple steps bring it to almost nil.
The most obvious step being not to have a gun in your house, of course.
That just means that they didn’t wait for an appointment with a GP, but rather went to the ER
Much lower than your earlier number.
Total, not just kids.
As most of the “treatments” for dog bites is neosporin and a band-aid to placate and over anxious parent, while treatments for gun shot wounds tend to be a bit more involved, we are talking apples and durians here.
So? Kids committing suicide is a bit of a problem too. I get that gun lovers don’t want to count the suicide of adults that are expedited by a gun, but it really seems as though giving kids easy access to an easy way to off themselves should count for something.
You are conflating again. You are using the stats for the total population for one, and the stats for kids only for the other.
Right, and the risk management is to keep guns out of the hands of kids. A good way to do that is to not have one in the house.
You can also manage risks more effective if you know about them. You let your kid play over at your neighbor’s house, because they don’t have a dog, or they do, and you’ve checked it out and it seems friendly.
What you do not know is that your neighbor keeps a gun in his couch cushions.
Which risk do you consider to be more manageable?
This thread is all about avoiding the handguns, so yay! we agree. Avoiding handguns is the best way to protect your children from injury or death.
Not conflating, of the 6k hospitalized they are nearly all children ,as one would expect ,injuries increase in severity and frequency as you go down in age.
6k hospitalized by dogs
6k treated for gunshots ( total, not just accidental)
I think you’ll find that just as most dog attacks occur in the child’s home, most gun accidents do to.
Guess the best way to avoid then is not keep dogs …
But you like dogs, so more power to you. I’m going to go ahead and assume you are a responsible dog owner and not try to force you to relinquish your dogs for the safety of your children.
I expect the same sort of treatment with my guns, unless I prove to be irresponsible by commiting felonies or something.
And you still have 20 total deaths to the 1300 just for children to deal with. Even if you are only counting the accidental, that still makes them several times more lethal. As I don’t know if anyone has ever committed suicide by dog, I do think that should figure in, even if only for children (unless you are for children having easy access to a means of suicide), and dogs aren’t used in murder very often, so the gun homicide figures should count as well.
You go through a whole bunch of manipulations and caveats to try to make the numbers appear to be in the same ballpark, but even with all of your stretches and manipulations, they still are not.
There are different breeds of dogs, with more and less ability to cause harm. There are not different breeds of guns that have less harm. A chihuahua can be annoying, and they can actually cause a bit of damage if they decide to be nasty, but they are not going to kill you. Even your smallest gun is lethal.
Don’t have kids, but, in any case, unlike a gun, a dog can be trained to be non aggressive, really in the face of nearly any provocation. If you stick your hands in my dogs mouth and try to get her to bite you, you will only be harmed if you are allergic to her drool. I was taking her for a walk one day, when I ran across a kid, around 6 or 7 with who I assume was his mother was watching from the porch. He asked if he could pet my dog, so I said “Sure,” and had her sit. He reared back and punched her in the face. She just looked at me and back at him, he was actually in far more danger of hospitalization from me than from my dog in that moment.
Can you train a gun to not be aggressive? Can I train my gun to not harm anyone, no matter how careless or provocative they are?
Here’s a fun difference. If my dog gets out, even if it was not my fault that it gets out, and it bites someone, then I am responsible for it. If your gun gets out and hurts someone, then you do not think that you should have any responsibility for the harm that it caused.
By something you mean also by not properly securing them, allowing children unsupervised access, or use it carelessly in a way that threatens public safety?
Train your guns to not bite, keep them on a leash when you are out, and if they get loose and hurt someone, then the blame falls on the owner, then you can start to compare them to dogs.
You have certainly not convinced me that dogs are more than, or even nearly as dangerous guns, and I have provided reason for why a dog is going to be more of a deterrent than a gun to potential home invader or bugalurs.
So, once again, staying on topic with the OP’s question, should I not be allowed to have a gun, and am concerned about home invasion, then I would get a dog, and sleep very soundly.
Actually, we do have a focus on poison and it (and other poisons) are scary. At least scary enough that pediatricians invented Mr. Yuk.
Yet in some states, there are attempts to stop pediatricians from asking that scary question “Do you have guns in your home?”.
I’m not even going to entertain this zoomorphism hyperbole.
Yes I can use risk management to reduce the risks to near zero, just as you can.
And yes as I’ve shown many guns are far less likely to be involved in hurting anyone.
And 1300 Is all child (up to 19 years old) deaths from guns. Unintentional ones amount to about 80.
So, giving the reasoning of , what if your kid has an accident with it and kills theirself as justification for why it’s not a good idea to use in the oh 100,000 (conservatively) defensive gun uses just doesn’t clear.
The benefit in that scenario Is heavily weighted in favor of having vs not having.
Your thousands of times more likely to protect yourself or family then have your kid have an accident .
Dogs are great deterrents and companions, I have nothinng against them. In fact they may be one of the two best choices for home defense. Certainly better than pepper spray. I just personally don’t want to feed them or deal with their poop anymore.
True, just not the extent of gun discussions.
I see no harm in that question especially if a doctor bound by HIPAA is asking.
In fact prompting education for parents or children in any danger can really only be a good thing.
The best person to ask that question and advise some education would be a pediatrician, just as it is for poisons.
My own son died from NEC, which kills about 2000 kids a year.
You’ve probably never heard of it though, it certainly doesn’t make the news.
Probably could easily drop that number In half if it did.
In a thread about guns, are you likening guns to a disease?
If you want to save 1000 kids a year or many many more there are hundreds of more fruitful topics that merit discussion that are ignored compared to the amount of discussion given guns.
Ignoring the context that my post was in response to can give you any conclusion you’d like.
I’ve thought about this. It’s one reason “no knock” warrants should be outlawed.
You’ll have to first explain what you mean by that. I used no hyperbole whatsoever, so I’m not sure what you are even referring to that you do not deign to address.
You are trying to make the claim that dogs are as or more dangerous than guns. Every statistic and study you have tried to pull out has shown the opposite.
Now I did ask if you had any way of preventing your gun from causing harm should it fall into the wrong hands, as I can do with my dog, and whether you were willing to take responsibility for the actions that you gun takes if it leaves your possession, as I am expected to take responsibility for my dog should she be lost or stolen.
From your response, I take it it is a firm “no” to both?
No, you have not, not at all.
Compared to 20 deaths for everyone from dogs, from all purposes.
And, since you seem to “not even entertain” the question asking whether or not you feel that children should be given access to a easy and convenient means of suicide, I will take it that you are pro-child suicide.
Like I said, I get that gun lovers like to claim that those who would like to see less injuries and deaths from guns add suicides in to pad the numbers, even though it has been explained to them on several occasions that that is not why we would add those numbers, and that they are effectively calling us liars about our motivations, but it seems you extend that to children as well.
Heh, talk about padding numbers. If you get into an argument with someone, and it looks like they are getting ready to punch you for insulting their sister, and you flash your gun at them, that would be counted as a defensive gun use.
If you see someone who scares you, even though they have done nothing wrong, and you flash your gun at them, and they cross the street to get away from you, that would be counted as a DGU.
I’ve read some of the self reported DGUs that were people just breaking the law and intimidating someone that they thought was scary.
Tell you what, I’ll use the same criteria and math that DGUs use for how effective dogs are at preventing home invasions. When my dog barks in the middle of the night, she was warding off someone who was looking to invade my house, so she prevents about 3-4 invasions a week. 150 to 200 a year. There are about a hundred million dogs in the US, so that means that dogs prevent a couple hundred million home invasions a year.
In certain circumstances, maybe. The the stats show that your kid is more likely to be killed than you get to use your gun to repel an invader who will probably not kill you.
So, yeah, if your concern is that you may find yourself with someone in your house, in a prime position to be shot and killed with no legal consequences to yourself, then making sure that you have a gn on hand to not miss out on that once in a hundred lifetimes opportunity makes sense.
If your concern is actually the safety of your and your family, much less so.
Add in the chances that your kid doesn’t kill himself, but rather another kid or adult, or that you gun is stolen or lost and is used by a criminal to threaten, harm, or kill another family, and the weighting doesn’t seem so much in favor of keeping that gun in the home.
No, you are not. You have now used the rather dubious number of DGUs in total, and used that number as the number of home invasions to compare against the number of children killed by guns. That’s just not how math works.
Tell me, how do the stats break down if a criminal steals a gun from your home when you are not home, and uses that gun to invade another home where he uses your gun to kill the family?
And guns are not good deterrents, as you cannot deter anything if people don’t know you have it, and you cannot use it unless you are home, awake, sober, understanding what is going on, and able to access and open your gun safe. Then you have a chance, but if they have a gun too, then, unless you are the sort that depends on the luck of misfires or misses or surviving a gun shot wound, then you have increased the chances that one of you end up dead.
Then you are unlike many gun proponents that resent that question being asked, and will lie about the answer.
Tell that to your fellow gun owners, you sill get more than a little bit of pushback.
And this thread and topic is about guns and gun control, and specifically, how one would protect themselves or their family should they not have access to a gun. You have veered it off about kids, trying to show that kids are safer around guns than dogs.
Guns have nothing whatsoever to do with prenatal nutrition, medical costs and availability, or the genetics that cause tragic deaths.
That is a topic for another thread that you are welcome to start any time.
You didn’t quote anything, so no one has any idea what your post was in response to.
Not entirely outlawed. Outlawed certainly for drug raids and other “planned” events, where LEO’s primary motivation is to preserve evidence.
In some cases, rare as they may be, if there is a question of safety of a prisoner/hostage, or otherwise believe that someone may be harmed or killed if there is warning given, that is the case when a no-knock is justified, IMHO.
Well, who conducts armed raids on drug dealers, besides cops? Other drug dealers, or just ordinary street thugs. No clue where that fits in the array of statistics offered in these arguments.
We are advised that the NRA’s estimation of defensive gun use are “…wildly exaggerated…”, that the MSM estimations are wrong by reason of bias, and then we are given “100,000” as a “conservative estimate”. At the same time as we can be assured that statistics are, at best, vague and open to interpretation, we are given authoritative pronouncements disdainful of our ignorance.
For instance, of the American gun owners, how many would definitely say they were “target shooters”, and how many are protecting themselves from ravening hordes of Goths? Dunno, in my social set, bongs are more likely that Berettas. Lot less dangerous, too. You don’t want the kids to find your bong, but the threat level is lower. Much lower. Way down there, by comparison.
So, what is to be done? Dunno, perzackly, but any argument based on such statistics is bogus, suitable only for the GED Debate Squad. Maybe we should just be grateful that the NRA doesn’t have a position on vaccination.
Wait. They don’t, do they?
They’re good with it, as long as the syringe is in the shape of a gun.
And yet the only counter arguments are feelings.
Even disproven ones.largely directed at claims i never made.
Great debating all right.
You don’t see the problem? You start out from a couple of sensible positions, that available statistics are weak due to problems of “classification” and such. An entirely reasonable criticism, to be sure.
Then you tell us that the NRA’s estimations are “wildly exaggerated”. So far, so good. Then that the Times and Post got it wrong because of liberal bias. Well, OK, bias is something you can accuse, but cannot prove it true just as I cannot prove it false. But then, it can’t be evidence, can it?
And then this final gem, quoted above. Which you tell us is a “conservative” estimate. To our wonderment, you pretty much say you got the real shit, and can assure us that the actual facts are somewhere above that!
From whence? Sez who? You tell us who’s wrong, and why. Then you tell us that you know who’s got it about right, but not quite. The real truth is a bit above that. But for whatever reason, you won’t tell us where you got your number. And, more importantly, you won’t tell us how you know its an underestimate!
Why not? You got, you bring. You got?