One way would be by prosecuting the owner of a gun if a child is injured or killed by it.
Might be remotely relevant if flat screen TVs were killing thousands of people a year.
That’s not verification.
More people are killed in this country by obesity and sedentary lifestyle than are killed by guns. You aren’t interested in real evaluation of risk/benefit. You just want to crusade against guns.
FAIL. The risk of anyone accidentally being killed by your obesity is nil.
Try again.
You clearly miss the point. As does Kobal.
822 a day, or 300k Americans per year, die of Obesity-related illness.
Guns don’t make the top 15 causes, either accidental or otherwise… at least according to the CDC (note 2007 was the most recent numbers I could find, I’d appreciate a more modern link if anyone has one)
Because the point of guns is supposedly that they make a home safer, while the point of a bucket is not that it makes a home safer.
Now, if you keep guns for recreational purposes, this doesn’t apply to you- but most of the gun owners I know keep them for self-defense.
Exactly, but this is never really about an honest analysis of risk.
People own guns for lots of different reasons. For my part, they are about 50% recreation and 50% political statement. That does not change the fact that can be, and have been, useful for self-defense.
Wrong. There are a ton of studies that show that obese and sedentary parents raise obese and sedentary children, thus putting them at a greater than average risk for childhood diabetes and later on, heart disease.
An analogy:
There is no justifiable reason for anyone to own a vehicle with more than 100 horsepower for daily commuting. All personal vehicles should be along the lines of a Geo Metro.
Also, speeding tickets, accidents (regardless of fault) should have your license revoked and your ability to own a vehicle stripped from you.
This would reduce deaths by thousands, if not 10’s of thousands, in the US.
I’m sure you’ll be on board with this, if safety is such an issue.
Also of note: I am a recreational gun owner. I currently have 1 rifle, and as it is an “antique”, it is not registered in any way that I know of.
I have 3 children, 6, 13 and 15.
As I have no yet had an opportunity to aquire a better “teaching” weapon, my rifle is kept in the basement, in a rifle bag, with the bolt removed. Ammunition is kept in a seperate location.
Also note: My desire for a handgun is driven by my joy in shooting, and my desire to collect. But to justify the expense to my wife, I often site “home defense”. I imagine this is a common thread. 
What does a Harvard liberal know about guns anyway?
Buying me a new Glock this summer! Whoopee!
Some stats from the CDC I found:
Total accidental deaths per year (all causes), U.S…96,000
Motor vehicle accidental deaths per year…43,000
Fatal firearms accidents per year…1,100
(The firearms accidents figure is an all-time low, even though the U.S. population is at an all-time high, and gun ownership is at an all-time high.)
Fatal firearms accidents age 0-5…17
Fatal firearms accidents age 5-14…121
Fatal firearms accidents age 15-24…401
Fraction of all Emergency Room visits that involve firearms accidents…0.2%
Agreed. However, society should do about it is the problem.
No, this is fallacious – probably the fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because something is wrong, there is no reason to call for extreme penalties. So gun control does not have to mean banning all personal ownership of firearms. It means balancing the dangers of firearms against their usefulness. So:
(1) if you own guns for hunting, then you should store them to minimise the risk of accidents.
(2) if you own guns for self-defence, then there should be a question of how useful they really are for self-defence. The answer to that question is not obvious (even though most people seem to assume it is), and should be the subject of good research.
But the studies showed you actually benefit from me owning a gun. Because I can own a gun you are actually safer, whether or not I actually do. The potential for a gun in your house reduces the likelihood that a criminal will enter while you’re home. Banning/prohibiting gun ownership increases the likelihood that a criminal will enter when you are home.
In both cases the sad reality is that the criminal will have a gun. Would you rather he enter when you’re home with your family or while you’re at work and they’re at school?
As a serious proponent of gun rights, I am 100% on board with licensing, mandatory training (provided it is priced similarly to car registration and licensing–that is, minimal-to-negligible compared to the cost of owning a gun), and legal storage requirements. The primary stumbling block to many of these things is the raw unadulterated fact that the anti-gun lobby is full of dishonest, overemotional, scaremongering idiots who have in the past proven they’ll use any excuse or tactic to restrict gun rights.
I’d be curious as to where you live–in my experience, most gun owners use them for sport/recreation, and less than a third of gun owners have a handgun. Granted, I expect this to be the case because I’m small-city/rural.
Meanwhile.
The study is the usual bullshit, for reasons covered upthread. It’s amazing how we can never seem to estimate or study the criminal deterrent effects of guns, but we can always (if we’re some chucklehead with an axe to grind, that is) assume it’s much, much lower than the risks associated with firearm ownership. Also disingenuous and stupid: counting suicide as a “gun risk” rather than a “mental health risk”.
Yes, the figure for vehicle deaths is too high, and probably could be reduced, e.g., by stricter enforcement of laws against DUI, including random testing of drivers.
It looks like the figure for firearm deaths does not include intentional killing with firearms. To be fair, they should be included. Intentional killing with motor vehicles is probably pretty small, and probably included with the accidental deaths anyway.
In addition, you should always be balancing usefulness against dangers. Almost everyone in the U.S. needs to travel in a motor vehicle almost every day. How many really need to use firearms on a daily basis?
Was that in jest? Honestly, I can’t tell.
The thing that makes me uncomfortable about these epidemeological studies about gun ownership is that the vast majority of gun deaths in the home are from suicides. And these are lumped in as to suggest that the numbers are coming from people who misidentified their spouse and shot them in the middle of the night, or whose kids found the guns and accidentalyl shot themselves.
I think this is fundamentally dishonest at least in its implications. I don’t think we’d count suicide by sleeping pills as an epidemeological danger and suggest that sleeping pills are unsafe, right? But guns get a special exception essentially because someone with an axe to grind makes it want to look like guns cause more deaths than they really do.
But the reality is that the presences of guns doesn’t drastically affect the total suicide rate, just the suicide by gun rate. If men want to commit suicide, they tend to choose a gun if available, and if not, something else. But then people with an agenda lump together all of these suicides, suggesting that the gun caused them rather than simply being a convenient tool for that purpose, and then talk about what a menace guns are.
In reality, the accidental/negligent deaths from guns are in the low hundreds in a country with 80+ million gun owners and 300 million people. Not terribly significant. Certainly a much lesser hazard than all sorts of common things you’d think were innocuous.
Guns used in a positive way - for example to stop an in-progress burglar - is difficult to measure and almost never do these agenda-driven studies actually give an honest attempt to quantify the positive impact of guns. So it’s not surprising that when you combine suicide by gun as a “health risk”, as if it were something that could just happen randomly - and ignore the positive benefits that you get a lopsided cost/benefit ratio. But it’s not an honest attempt to quantify the real risk/benefit ratio of gun ownership.
Unfortunately that does happen. Consider the changes to allergy medication as a result of people cooking meth.