Look, Pal, chemically, alcohol is a solution.
If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate.
Ah, I get it now; you are advocating that anyone wanting to sell a gun should have to get a permit from the local municipality, and be subject to the same federal, state and local oversight as the sale of alcohol? Who knew there was so little daylight between our positions? Welcome to the club, gungrabber!
No I get it. You don’t really have any principles. If you like something then you are for it, if you don’t then it should be outlawed.
Scratch a gun-grabber and watch a hypocrite bleed.
Shit, scratch a human, watch a hypocrite bleed. You want to keep your mealy-mouth piety to yourself, that would be great.
And you want to argue a false equivalency between guns and alcohol, but when it collapses, you run back to ad hominem fallacies.
Oh, I’m sorry I nailed your kind so effectively it led to an emotional response. Now back to that question I asked you above:
How do you think gun control laws should be changed?
How is the equivalency false? How are you not a hypocrite?
Hate licorice. Hate it with a passion. OK with me if you chow down on a couple pounds a day, knock yourself out, you anise-seed loving motherfucker! Ever notice how “anise” is so close to “anus”? How come that doesn’t make the news?
Listen, you gonna send your jack-booted thugs to make me eat licorice, you’re gonna get a taste of the hard edge of tai chi!
How do you think gun control laws should be changed?
Ugh with the alcohol comparison. It’s facile and stupid, but that’s to be expected I suppose.
The way we determine if something is risky is the proportion of times that something occurs or is used relative to the number of undesirable outcomes. Certainly a plane can crash, and that outcome is terrible. You might interpret it as meaning that airplane travel is very risky. However, having 1.9 deaths occur per every million aircraft miles flown places the risk in some perspective.
Gallup estimates that American adults consume about 4.2 alcoholic beverages per week, or 218.4 per year. There are approximately 238 million adults in the US, meaning that there were approximately 52.1 billion times that alcohol was used among adults last year.
Thus, the rate of harmful outcome per instance of use is going to be quite small. That’s even before including the instances of underage drinking, which will be disproportionately associated with harmful outcomes, I assume. (Meaning that if we were to develop a ratio of harmful outcome per use using the number above, it would inaccurately shape the ratio to look worse than it is.)
This is all independent of the fact that we do a great deal more to control and mitigate the negative outcomes of alcohol use than we do of firearms.
But okay, I concede. I don’t drink that much anyway, so I join with Kable in calling for the banning of alcohol use in the United States. I also point out again that he really ought to move, since the majority of accidents occur within a few miles of his house.
How many rounds of ammunition did Americans fire last year?
You have to ask me because gun fetishists prevent us from measuring and recording that data.
However, I saw only about five rounds being fired last year. I saw tens of thousands of instances of alcohol consumption.
I shot 200 rounds just yesterday and I think probably shot 80,000 rounds last year without a hitch. So probably both guns and alcohol are used pretty often without an undesirable outcome. Would you agree?
Another false equivalency gambit?
How so?
No. “Pretty often” and “without a hitch” are poorly defined measures.
I’m very confident that private owners did not fire (52 billion + the number of underage alcoholic beverages consumed) rounds in the us last year.
I would also wager that your 80K estimate is like the estimated times a gun stroker uses his fetish object in defense: a dramatically inflated over-estimate.
Millions or billions of times without hurting anyone good enough?
Maybe not, but they shot a lot, and deaths due to guns are a lot less than alcohol related deaths.
I’m a competitive shooter, with a log book. How much do you have to wager?
To reduce the flow of guns into criminal hands. If you have licensing and registration, you can keep track of guns and unless a criminal steals a gun or smuggles a gun in from another country, they will not be able to acquire guns because every gun transfer will be subject to a background check and the chain of ownership will be well enough established that we can figure out who is selling or giving guns to criminals (which will reduce the incidence of people selling or giving guns to criminals).
These events are tragic but they account for a miniscule percentage of all gun murders. I’m interested in bringing down the incidence of gun murders generally. If you can tell me how we can prevent crazy people from doing crazy things, I’m all ears, until then, I’d like to prevent felons, domestic abusers and the adjudicated mentally ill from possessing a firearm.
Historically, legal gun owners “going off the deep end” are not the source of most gun violence. Felons, the mentally ill and domestic abusers are the source of the vast majority of gun violence. We already have laws against them owning handguns but the barrier to their purchase of firearms is so porous that the laws are ineffective.
We don’t need them to. Almost all guns in criminal hands right now were obtained from someone that could legally own them. If you reduce the flow of guns from those who can legally own them to those who cannot, the number of guns in criminal hands will shrink over time, this will reduce gun violence.
I don’t know if it would stop there but I won’t stand in the way of a good idea because it might be followed up with a bad idea.
What do you mean by that?
I don’t need a permit to sell my wine collection to a restaurant or another collector, I can’t sell it to a someone who is underage but other than that, I don’t think there are any restrictions (at least if I sell it to someone in the same state).
Are you on SWAT or something?
Oh, that explains it.
Sure, if we just accept that “a lot” is a meaningless term. If you actually wanted to craft an accurate statement regarding demographics of crime perpetrators and victims, you’d need to post statistics about the proportion of victims and perpetrators in a certain population. As it stands, US women are less likely to be murdered than men and more likely to be raped (we can assume parity in population). Kids in the US aged 13-16 were homicide victims at a rate of about 0.3 per 10k, while 70-74year olds were murdered at a rate of 2 per 10k if my numbers are correct. I think mode victims for violent crime other than rape are 20-24 year old males pretty much everywhere though.
It means exactly what I meant it to mean. Educate yourself: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/a+lot?s=t
Who said anything about victims “other than rape?”