This difference doesn’t affect the objective reality: that alcohol is broadly comparable to firearms in terms of the harm it does to society and injuries / deaths that users thereof inflict upon others.
USA deaths in 2019 from mass shootings: ~417
USA deaths in 2019 from alcohol: ~98,000.
USA deaths in 2019 from drunk driving: ~10,000
USA deaths in 2019 from firearm murders and accidents: ~11,000
USA deaths in 2019 from firearm suicides: ~21,000
You’re willing to just shrug and ignore it as a fact of life when someone has a few too many drinks and kills a family of three on their drive home from the bar. Others are willing to shrug and ignore it as a fact of life when some lunatic kills three people with a gun. People in this thread expressed contempt and disbelief at the latter point of view but almost certainly hold the former without realizing the contradiction.
My point is, there’s really no substantial, objective difference between these scenarios. The difference is only in your emotional perception of them, in that you perceive firearms deaths as a much bigger problem because you think firearms are inherently bad and alcohol is innocuous.
And my only real goal here was pointing out that the people who are willing to overlook firearms deaths as part of the cost of living in a free society are not callous, inhuman monsters, because it’s exactly the same calculus that many people apply to deaths from other sources that don’t produce the same highly polarized emotional response.
Upon reflection, I’d also like to make the point that I don’t think we should set public policy based on people’s perception of the moral purity of purpose of various inanimate objects.
As I’ve said before - are the people killed by drunk drivers any less dead because the driver didn’t mean to kill them?
You haven’t given sufficient information to ascertain the level of danger from scenario 2. For example, how secure is that safe in which you store the rifles? Do you even keep it locked? (More than one gun owner doesn’t.) A cheap gun safe might be made of 14-gauge stamped metal bent and folded around sheetrock; that isn’t exactly the same as plate steel, and there are videos on YouTube of gun safes being opened in two minutes with a relatively small prybar. How many people, and what kind of people, know about your collection of rifles and how you store them? How many people have keys or know the combination? How trustworthy are those people? How do you transport them to the county shooting range, and how many people know how and when?
These are just a few of the questions that need answering before anybody can “objectively” judge the risks and dangers.
These factors are all made irrelevant by the answer to the question “How many stolen rifles are used to commit violent crimes?”, the answer being “basically zero”.
Nobody’s claiming it does. The thing is just that this is entirely besides the point. What firearms do is to upgrade a person’s capabilities by adding a handy point-and-click interface for murder. They give their owners a huge amount of power over others—not just over life and limb, but also control over their actions, threatening their autonomy. We might trust them not to exert these powers, but they’re there. Alcohol, by contrast, at best downgrades a person’s ability to safely handle certain machinery.
It’s on this basis that they need to be regulated differently, and that a comparison in terms of numbers of death is simply a red herring: they confer different capabilities, and affect other people differently. As @Babale above notes, in the case of drunk driving, it’s really the cars that give people potential power over others—they augment a person’s capabilities by adding mass, speed, and resilience. A person in a car massively outranks a person without one in terms of power (whereas a person under alcohol typically has their powers—of coordination, of standing upright, of not puking their guts out—reduced). That’s why granting license to operate cars is subject to a vetting and training process.
Take, for instance, smoking: even when I was still a smoker, I was in favor of banning smoking in public buildings, because there, a smoker exerts an influence over others that they themselves have little power to effectively counteract. It’s this asymmetry—the ability to exert power over, and even end, other people’s lives, in a way that needs only an instantaneous decision, just the barest intent—that means firearms need to be considered differently. The relation between me and a person near me with a gun is something very different than between me and a person near me with a bottle of beer; trying to paint these with the same brush is either highly motivated reasoning or a refusal to accept simple facts.
Though the number of US deaths by suicide is slightly less than the number of US deaths due to influenza and pneumonia, you don’t often find people who work in suicide prevention having to deal with “YeaBut … the flu and pneumonia kill even more.”
It’s not bad enough that the US GDP seems to thrive on profiting from misery (“perverse incentive”) – probably more than any other advanced economy. But think about where that’s taken us when it comes to guns. What we hear every day isn’t so much the thrill of going to the range and shooting at paper targets for two hours. What we hear is fear – pounded into our brains, in every possible contrived scenario, and in every possible way – fear of Other, fear of people with darker skin than ours, fear of Fascism, Tyranny, Communism, Socialism, crime, and Marxism (just to name a few).
Then, imagine if Planned Parenthood’s primary marketing theme was that the solution to “the abortion problem” is more abortions.
It’s very, very strange, and produces no end of cog-diss for me.
What it is, is a disingenuous argument. The premise that “Other things cause more deaths than guns, therefore people who try to promote actions to mitigate gun deaths are somehow hypocritical or motivated by irrational gun hatred rather than data” is so fundamentally dishonest it’s disturbing how often it gets trotted out.
The fact - as supported by lots of data - is that gun deaths of all kinds are a serious problem in the United States. And unlike all those other things that cause lots of death - cars, swimming pools, alcohol, cigarettes, etc - only guns* have such a disproportionately large number of advocates actively working to hinder efforts to bring gun death numbers down. All the others may have some folks - usually those with a vested interest in increased sales - complaining about restrictions but with guns it’s millions of users demanding the right to be as irresponsible - sorry, I meant “free” - as they want to be with their weaponry, no matter the cost to others.
I can own as many cars and types of cars as I want without any background checks licenses or registration with the government. I buy as much fuel as I want whenever I want and I can use any type of fuel I want to in my vehicles. As long as I’m on private property I can drive as fast as I want in whatever manner I want for as long as I want. There are no requirements for how I store my vehicles and if someone steals my vehicle they and they alone are liable for what they do with it while I am reimbursed by my insurance company for the loss (if I chose to have insurance). I can build my own cars to do whatever crazy thing I want and customize it in any way I want. I can build and sell cars to whoever I want whenever I want and I can buy cars from whoever is selling.
If I chose to take my vehicle in public I should have a license but up to 3% of drivers don’t have one. The police are not allowed to pull me over to check if I’m licensed unless I do something else illegal. 80% of the population is granted the license when they are children and never have to retake the test except for verifying their eyesight. The test is available with a couple of week appointment in multiple sites around every city and county, costs less than $50, and has about a 50% pass rate with multiple tries allowed (more fees also allowed).
I should also have insurance but up to 30% of other drivers don’t and again no one gets to check unless I do something wrong. People insure themselves against others that don’t have insurance but can also raise and lower their coverage at their whim. Even if you do something wrong multiple times you can still get insurance and there are insurance plans so that even the poorest can afford them.
All in all it sounds pretty wonderful to me. I wonder why the people looking to regulate guns don’t copy cars?
Interesting that so much of your focus is on people getting away with breaking the laws and acting irresponsibly rather than on mitigation of actual risk to others. I’ve often been told that such things are proof that the laws are ineffectual and therefore any efforts to improve the laws and their enforcement are futile. Perhaps we should instead reduce the restrictions on car ownership and usage, as is often suggested with regard to gun laws?
Admittedly, should enforcement become more rigorous it’s a little harder to “lose” a car in a “boating accident” than a gun, but I’m sure responsible, law-abiding car owners would think of something.
I think that’s because saying “my hobby is responsible for about 40,000 deaths a year” is a pretty poor argument for why the hobby should continue as it has before. I mean, lawn darts caused a few thousand injuries and a few deaths over decades, and they were banned, and they’re certainly “arms” under the 2nd amendment.
So the only sensible explanation is that guns are somehow more important than just as a hobby. Which brings out all of the fear and self defense, and tyrant defending arguments.
There is no VALID argument for personal gun ownership, exception being the hobby of hunting down and killing animals, I suppose.
What there IS, is a lot of people, almost all white, almost all male, who feel that having the means to kill other people instantly is the hill they are going to die on. And like arguments for slavery, for sexual harassment up to and including rape, and a few other things I could name, there is no VALID argument, except that men have found those things extremely gratifying and the destruction they cause is irrelevant to that gratification. And they will throw up any and every ridiculous lie, whataboutism, notmeism, call to patriotism, virility, tradition and anything else that they can think of, and shout it endlessly.
And that silence about mass shootings? It’s not ennui. It’s despair.
Snakeheads are a really cool fish (see below), and as someone who dabbles in the aquarium hobby, I would love to keep one of the more colorful variants in a large tank someday. Of course, snakeheads are illegal in my state (and potentially the whole country), because irresponsible morons buy monster fish when they’re only a few inches in size, then release them into ponds and waterways when they outgrow their tanks.
But as a responsible citizen, I can look at the harm caused by idiots releasing fish into the wild, and understand that a ban on the snakehead trade is a good thing. Other fish should be much more restricted than they are (the humble goldfish and the common pleco are two monster fish that people don’t realize are monsters, and they end up in our waterways far too often. Plecos in Florida are a huge issue) while some restrictions don’t make a lot of sense (piranhas aren’t actually very dangerous at all, and the odds of them surviving in California waters are next to nill, yet they’re illegal here, while their much larger cousin, the Pacu, would be far more of an issue, and due to their size often end up released - but they are totally legal. But I digress).
But if escaped fish were killing 40,000 people a year, I’d give up the fishkeeping hobby and call for it to be banned, despite the joy it brings me.
