Not just that, but my first husband had guns but I didn’t use/touch them. So we were a gun-owning household, but didn’t both fit into the “gun-owning” category.
XT: Do you think the same percentage of Americans drink as own guns? Because unless you think this is true, you can’t compare rates of incidents between the two groups and view it as anything remotely approaching equivalent.
You seem to be missing this blindingly obvious point, which was the whole reason for Hentor’s post. Your derision and scorn seems … a bit inappropriate, given your inability to fully grasp this concept.
Well let’s look at it then.
In my city, it’s illegal to drink in public accept for in designated areas. Would you agree with a similar regulation against having a gun in public?
Okay, I think I see where we’re not connecting.
Say that there was one gun owner in the country and 10 drinkers. The drinkers kill 5 people a year.
The one gun owner kills 5 people a year.
So if we had the same number of each the five gun owners would kill 25 people, right? So from a public policy standpoint, guns are worse, because fewer people are causing more deaths.
The only reason the number is close, is that there are fewer gun owners.
You would look dramatically less foolish here if you would understand that that was exactly the point! Gah, I try to get out but they keep pulling me back in!
Yes people spend less time exposed to tiger risk in the US than they do to elevator risk. So, it would be stupid to say that elevators are more dangerous than tigers because they are associated with more deaths.
Since you have explained the very problem, you should now understand the problem with your statement that alcohol is more dangerous than guns because of a higher mortality rate for the former.
Please don’t make me come back to this issue again!
In many gun owning families you have multiple people in a ‘household’ that own guns, which sort of counters the fact that in yours you didn’t. My own anecdote is that my brother in law owns guns. He has several guns that are his, his wife has several that are hers, and their kids all have their own guns (generally .22s). In my experience it’s unusual for a gun owning ‘household’ to only have one person in the home who owns or uses the guns.
Even if you are right and this balances out, however, are you seriously saying that the tigers to elevators analogy is in the same ball park as guns to alcohol use?? Good grief, it’s hard for me to fathom anyone defending that ridiculous post, but maybe I’m missing something here…or maybe the desire to make it work and to handwave away the alcohol to guns analogy is really that strong right now on this subject. 
There are similar regulations. You can’t bring a gun into a bar, for example.
Public. Not private. As in, anywhere outside of your home or an establishment that has a license to serve (analogue - a gun shop or firing range). The one exception is at a picnic in a park, at least in my city - so maybe we can carve out a “gun park exception”. Deal?
Please, feel free to tell me what the blindingly obvious point is then.
As for your first question, I think that they are roughly equivalent, though as I’ve already said, not one for one. And, again, MY point didn’t have anything to really do with the rate, but with the comparison of an item that a large percentage of the population wants, that is regulated and that there are laws to attempt to mitigate it’s harm, but that society has accepted a certain amount of risk concerning.
I’m getting tired of typing the same thing in every thread where people feel the need to bring alcohol into this discussion, so I’ll just copy/paste:
You can’t take a fire arm into most national parks. You can’t take a fire arm into most public buildings. You can’t bring a fire arm onto most Indian Reservations. You can’t take a fire arm into a school (K-12 or college). There are all sorts of restrictions that you don’t seem to know about.
So, again, it seems roughly analogous to me.
The point of the post was to list some ridiculous comparisons that fail in the same way as the alcohol to guns comparison fails, in order to illustrate how ridiculous the original comparison was. Are you unfamiliar with this rhetorical technique?
You are expressing exasperation that someone used a ridiculous comparison when that ridiculous comparison was the entire point of the exercise.
So the post doesn’t really need defending since it seems to have been quite successful on its own.
[QUOTE=HoboStew]
I’m getting tired of typing the same thing in every thread where people feel the need to bring alcohol into this discussion, so I’ll just copy/paste:
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure you think this is a killer point, worthy of reposting but, sadly, it’s not. The costs alone of your monumental proposal would be prohibitive. Anything else?
Which was, you know, why I treated it with derision and scorn. Yeah, I got that he was going over the top with that. I’m exasperated because people are actually defending what I doubt Hentor himself was all that serious about. At least I HOPE he wasn’t serious about it.
Almost everyone in this thread aside from you has been trying to do this since the original post, but admittedly not to a great deal of success thus far. Not sure why we keep failing unless of course there is willful ignorance playing a part in the process.
Ironically, I feel much the same way at this point, if you change ‘we’ to ‘I’. Of course, if you HAVE a point, feel free to make it. Use small words…maybe I’ll get it then.
Derision and scorn should really be left for those times when the person employing them has some level of understanding of what is being targeted.
Exactly…which is why I used them when I did. Is there a point to any of this back and for repartee, or did you want to just keep it going?
Maybe, can you prove that? Even still, what about the second point? Soon this will all be moot because our cars will drive themselves, do you have a backup false equivalence lined up? Let me guess, swimming pools?
Of course I know about them. Although it’s also pretty obvious to me that the place you can legally drink (venues with a liquor license and private homes) are fewer than the places you can legally carry a gun. But YMMV.
I’m sure you are also aware that many states legislate a minimum sale price on alcohol - would you support a minimum price on ammo?
And drinks that combined alcohol and caffeine were recently banned by the FDA - would you support a restriction on what types of guns are allowed to be sold?
Listen, we get your (and others) point - alcohol is dangerous. Driving is dangerous. Lots of things we do are dangerous and we live with it because there is a continual trade-off between freedom and safety. This isn’t news to anybody. But the fact that we allow alcohol consumption and driving and swimming pools doesn’t somehow mean that we can’t require registration of handguns or limits on magazine capacity or even trigger locks or RFID safety devices on new handgun purchases. I’m not saying these are all good ideas, but analogizing to alcohol is both nonsensical and also doesn’t even support the point you’re trying to make - the presence of restrictions and regulations on alcohol sales and consumption supports the notion of placing restrictions on guns and ammo (sales, possession, safety, liability).