Morning, all. Happy Tuesday.
Good morning, Joe. We're learning about assault rifles today. And speaking of being assaulted, Scott's around here somewhere.
And we AR not talking about assault rifles. READ MAN READ we are talking about Non Assault Rifles.
I am reading. And in between Zzzz's I'm giving a shit. The intent was to get a rise out of you and it worked.
So in reality you have just been being dishonest to us? Typical fuk'n politician.
How so? By the way, guns kill.
That's just what "they" want you to believe.
...and the bullets. Bullets kill people. Ban the bullets!
And baseball bats. Oh, and bricks. And cars kill more people - by a long shot - than guns. So get rid of the cars.
Actually, gun deaths and car deaths are almost identical. In fact, gun deaths will like pass car deaths in a few years, if they haven't already.
Take out suicide, and cars win hands down.
Why would you take out suicide?
Because suicide rates remain stable regardless of gun availability or control. The rate doesn't diminish or surge if you increase or decrease the availability of guns. So it's an irrelevant statistic to the discussion.
The discussion was gun deaths v. car deaths. You can't just take out parts of that anymore than you would take out car deaths due to malfunction. That's when you start manipulating stats just to backup your own view point. Though, puts you well on your way to becoming a politician.
I disagree, both with your thesis and with your characterization of my intent. But we'll disregard the latter and focus on the former. A fundamental rule of statistics is comparing apples to apples.
If our intent is to simply discuss the ways people die, then we can lump everything together. No issue.
If, however, we are going to discuss the validity or effectiveness of legislative or regulatory constraint to prevent deaths, then we have to categorize carefully the statistics we compare. No amount of regulatory control has ever reduced the rate of suicide. A relatively stable percentage of people are determined to off themselves and do so by any means necessary. So they are irrelevant to any discussion of regulation, be it of cars, guns, knives, pharmaceuticals, or belts.
I didn't mean for this to even become a thing. I was merely pointing out that your original statement - "And cars kill more people - by a long shot - than guns. So get rid of the cars." - was incorrect. Taken by itself, without adjusting anything, it is a false statement. Didn't expect the "liberals are changing/controlling urrvrything!!" angle. Though, I probably should have.
I didn't fire the "liberals" shot, so I'll let you and Tex deal with that one. And yes, my statement about cars is a false statement if context isn't considered - it was said ironically and had nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with the absurdity of arguments that come from both sides of the gun issue.
The fact remains that any given person is more likely to die in some form of a car accident than by gun violence of any sort. And while there are by orders of magnitude more guns available in the US now than in any period of history, rates of violent crime in general are at historic lows and rates of gun violence are decreasing, not increasing. That gun violence gets greater media exposure does not indicate that gun violence is surging, in fact, it is more newsworthy because less of it happens. The notion that rates of gun violence increase with the proliferation and consumption of guns not only has never had any substantiation, but in fact - according to the numbers - the opposite appears to be true.
When we do dig into gun violence, we find that so-called "assault weapons" (a politically biased and unfounded descriptor, but we'll let that slide for the moment) are utilized in only a very, very small number of cases. If you're going to get shot, the likelihood is you'll be shot with a handgun, and it will be an el cheapo .22 or 9mm, not a rifle, and certainly not a comparatively spendy military-style rifle. I submit that this fact does indeed suggest a limited application of regulatory redress can perhaps reduce the already small percentage of violence - not gun control, but poverty control.
But poverty control is hard, and hard for politicians to promote their careers on, so there's little attention given to it. Guns are scary. Guns are something that politicians can make themselves look good on. So we get gun control propositions rather than anything remotely related to increasing the economic opportunities of American citizens. And increasing economic opportunity is the only way to decrease violence. To put it in terms of gallows humor that is nonetheless true, those of us who can afford to buy better guns are much less statistically likely to shoot anyone.
