Summations Only

Here's a Bloom County cartoon I like about the absurdity of following concerns to their ultimate end: Every activity of life carries with it some risk to oneself and/or those around you. I agree that there's no analogy, but for a different reason. The key factor is the incredible irony of purchasing a gun for protection that in reality places you in greater danger. The analogous irony for a vehicle would be purchasing a car for transportation that always takes you in a direction opposite to the one you're going.Among recent participants, with the possible exception of MikeChell I think we all agree that the nation should make the same commitment to gun safety that's been made to car safety.--Percy

Sorry I wasn't clear enough, but I wasn't saying that we should make the same commitment to firearm education that we do to driver education. Personally I think driver education today is inadequate in this country and hasn't made much contribution to the reduction in vehicle fatality rates. Firearm education doesn't seem adequate, either.What I meant was that the same commitment to car safety that resulted in seat belts and air bags and impact absorbing structures should be made to gun safety. I think we should make guns safer. The reason I excepted you from the list of people who think we should make a commitment to gun safety is because in your Message 3532 you said, "No, making guns 'safer' is ... unproductive."--Percy

More guns is not the solution because the data suggests that the more guns, the more gun violence. The likelihood of a gun being used successfully for defense is outweighed by the likelihood of the gun being used against oneself, family or friends.--Percy

Turning schools and churches into armed camps is the anti-answer of the gun lobby. It wouldn't surprise me if they proposed that school and church outings require a designated shooter for defense.It doesn't matter how you slice it. The more guns the more gun deaths. We already have too many guns.--Percy

No, it isn't obvious. I think you must have some Hollywood movie shootout in mind, but the truth is that if someone in the church were armed then there are an entire range of possibilities, most of which still result in many deaths. Police in this country are mostly armed, and they're frequently shot and killed. Being armed is not a panacea.What is clear is that any guns owned by members of the congregation were more likely to be used against themselves, family members or friends than for defense.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

By government do you mean police, military or both?I'm in favor of reducing gun prevalence among the police as circumstances warrant, the military no.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typos.

This thread has been active for over two and a half years with more than 3500 posts, so I guess it wouldn't be reasonable to ask you to just read the thread, so I went through some of my old posts to see if I could dig out some links for you:

• Comparing the Incidence of Self-Defense Gun Use and Criminal Gun Use
  
• Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home
  
• Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
  
• Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home

I spent a half hour finding these and didn't get even halfway through the thread, but I have to stop now.--Percy

I enter Bizarro World reluctantly and with trepidation, but I'm having trouble understanding why you think an armed citizenry would be any match for the military. Don't you need to eliminate not just gun control but weapons control in general so that citizen groups can prepare for the coming attacks by the military by arming themselves with fully automatic weapons, mortars, bazookas and tanks? I'm having trouble seeing how you imagine this playing out. The entitlement checks stop coming, and there's "unrest in every U.S. city," and then what? Don't they call out the National Guard to restore order? And you want the citizenry to be armed so they can do what? Surely you don't want them to battle the National Guard, who are only trying to restore order. I don't get it.--Percy

I'd just like to note that it also seems "unfathomably bonkers" to many inside the US.--Percy

More like agog and dumbfounded. You're saying a lot of crazy things that don't make sense to other people, so your goal should be to put your ideas into a rational context that will show you're not just some kind of kook. Instead you're just piling on more crazy things.Leaving Bizarro World now...--Percy

Today's NYT reports the sad case of a young man shot in the back and paralyzed as he drove away from an apartment complex security guard: ‘Illegal Activity’ Fine Print Leaves Some Insured, but Uncovered. He later died because he was denied medical insurance coverage, which is extremely sad and disturbing in itself, but the insurance coverage issues are not relevant to this thread.The backstory of the article is what's relevant. Oklahoma has a "stand your ground" law, and because the security guard was (he claimed) struck by the car as it backed out of the parking space, it was ruled that he was justified in firing into the car because he thought his life was in danger, even though the car was by then speeding away. Compounding the puzzlement of this ruling, the security guard had marijuana on his person and in his system.What was the young man's crime? He wasn't charged with one. Sympathy over the tragedy would likely have prevented charges being brought even had the young man been guilty of a crime such as theft or using drugs, but it seems that at most he ignored a security guard's instructions (not a crime) and left the scene of an accident (allegedly).--Percy

USA Today has released a brief report on mass killings in America: Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of American's Mass KillingsThey followed the FBI definition of a mass killing as four victims or more. Mass killings occur about every two weeks.Check out the diagram titled "A Timeline of U.S. Mass Killings" around page 4 or so. The size of the red dot is proportional to the number of victims. Hover over the dot for specifics.Family members are most often the victims.Guns are by far the most common weapon, and most are handguns.--Percy

I just happened to turn on BBC World News for a couple minutes before dinner and heard this gem about the Louisiana theater shooting: Europe just doesn't have a mass volume of mass shootings.--Percy

Timothy Egan writes in his editorial Guns and the Two Americas in today's NYT:

quote:

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Rick Perry called gun-free zones a bad idea.

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In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere. Once a shooting starts, the bad guy with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.

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This scenario almost never happens. The logic is nonsense, the odds of a perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely. And even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson shooting of 2011, the armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat to others. In Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.
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If the mall took up Rick Perry’s suggestion, shoppers could roam among the chain stores packing heat, ready for a shootout.
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As a way to make everyday life seem less frightening, the new reality is absurd. But that’s the cost, apparently, of an extreme interpretation of a constitutional amendment designed to fend off British tyranny, a freedom that has become a tyranny in itself.

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--Percy

People are people the world over. There is nothing that makes one set of people in one region any more or less likely to obey laws than any other region. The variable is circumstances, and the one most significant circumstance that exists in the US (firearm homicide rate 3.55 per 100,000) that doesn't exist in other western style countries like Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. (firearm homicide rate much less, maybe an average around 0.5 per 100,000) is the easy availability of guns.--Percy