nice.
who benefits when your fellow man becomes your enemy?
I think my favorite âOh the irony!â gif is about worn out by nowâŚ
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Well, depending on your age, place of residence, and the current state of your health, they may be among the most likely things to kill you this week. Depending on your situation they may be far and away the most likely thing to kill you this minute.
Iâm completely with you and @Mister44 on this thread mostly being in poor taste. Someone died in an accident. It sounds like they may have been doing something that is more accident prone than what I do in a typical day, but that doesnât make their death laughable to me.
But wow is this frustrating. @Ryuthrowsstuff gives us the basics of gun safety in a couple of sentences, the biggest point of which is that you donât point a gun at anything you donât intend to shoot. That makes pointing a gun at your own face either fantastically absurd or awfully depressing. Assuming itâs the former in this case, I understand why @MattAttac et al are sarcastically anticipating the response of the NRA.
Guns are dangerous and people accidentally killing themselves or other people with them is definitely evidence that they are dangerous. A significant part of the danger is that people who handle guns irresponsibly mostly do so because they think the way they handle guns is responsible (just like a majority of dangerous driving is done by people who think they are good drivers). Sharp knives are dangerous, band saws are dangerous, live electrical wires are dangerous. Iâm statistically incredibly unlikely to electrocute myself on live wires accidentally, but no one would ever disagree with any of those statements. Suggesting that guns arenât dangerous is completely irresponsible, and thatâs a huge part of the problem.
I get that calling for the banning of firearms, or of concealed weapons, and/or calling gun owners stupid is a super unhelpful response to this accident (ban on guns, to me, is a âwar on gunsâ which would go about exactly as well as the war on drugs). Itâs just that Iâve been trained to wait anxiously for the beyond-unhelpful responses of the gun lobby whenever something like this happens. Imagine we lived in a world where the NRA used this accident to reminded everyone that accidents happen and that every who owns or handles firearms shares in the responsibility to reduce those accidents so we can avoid tragedies. If that were the tone of the gun-rights groups then groups that advocate banning guns would seem shrill by comparison. Right now I donât think they do.
ETA: On the other hand, banning the sale of objects as gun holsters when they would holster the gun at an angle were it would likely point at you or another person, rather than mostly at the ground, wouldnât be completely outrageous. I mean, some people honestly need protection from themselves.
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Thatâs right. Which is why the Saudis donât let women drive. Keeps them safe from not only from getting in wrecks but keeps them from getting raped if their car breaks down on the road side. I never would have thought you two would have so much in common. But safety is a top concern. Saudi Arabian historian says Western women drive because rape 'is no big deal to them' | Daily Mail Online
The gun industry is male centric, but it isnât exclusive. Pretty much every where I have gone people are ecstatic to have female shooters join in. There is a niche market of stuff catering to women in the form of women friendly guns (both colors and design) and accessories like purses and the like.
Though I will give you that like many male centric markets there are childish ads of women in bikinis with guns or what ever. But I think there is a big difference between bad marketing and people thinking they are some how inferior. At any rate, not everyone who is a gun owner or in the NRA think the same way.
As for others living in fear - people carry donât live in fear (generally). They are prepared for the worst. Everyone prepares in some way, from having a blanket in your car if it breaks down, to having enough food and water for a few days, etc. There is nothing wrong, weird, crazy, or paranoid in taking precautions. Painting someone as some nut job waiting for some invisible boogy man isnât an accurate portrayal of most people.
Accidents do happen. Sometimes they happen to the person other than the gun owner. But that is a very, very unlikely event. You are much more likely to be a victim of violent crime than an accidental shooting. You are even more likely to die or be inured driving home, though I doubt you give that a second thought.
So anyway, maybe contact this person and tell her sheâs just being brainwashed by the sexist gun lobby. I am sure she has some insights I donât have.
ETA - derp - I forgot the link Redirecting...
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Good thing this didnât happen in Montana, since there was probably a hole in the bra allowing her nipple to be exposed.
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Yes, yes. Thatâs why the number of shooting deaths in countries with fewer guns is just as high as in the US - oh, wait, it isnât.
But, I love the âyou are all going to dieâ excuse. You can dismiss pretty much anything with it. Clean water? Screw that, you are all going to die anyway. Vaccinations? Healthcare? Safer cars? Building Codes? Food Safety? Laws? Anything? Nope, you are all going to die anyways.
Besides, only around 30,000 people die in the US by gunshot, which is way less than the number of people terrorists kill in the US which is why conservatives are all over terrorism, but not the over abundance of guns - oh, wait, somethingâs wrong with that calculation. I wonder what it could be? HmmmâŚ
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Your statement of the obvious is not enlightening because what you said there is, yeah, obvious.
And your continual downplaying of both overt and covert sexism and of the heightened risk of death brought about by higher rates of gun ownership, and your deployment yet again of the tired canard that âother things in life are dangerous too!â (what, no swimming pool comparison?) are all, sadly, unsurprising.
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ORLY?
also
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On the subject of guns, rape and sexismâŚ
âIf these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.â
@OtherMichael, yeah, Everett. Charming place.
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But I bet she felt REALLY safe just before the damn thing killed her.
Mod note: Stay on topic
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that thing looks really uncomfortable.
Oh God, now youâve done itâŚ
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Only if itâs some rationale directly related to your job.
(Bodyguard or bounty hunter, maybe? Wait, I got it - 00X Agent for MI6 ⌠wait, thatâs British, not 'Murican ⌠hmmmâŚ)
AFK rules. Everett for ever. Also roller derby.
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I just got some gun homicide rates from the Guardian and made a scatter graph for OECD countries. Itâs a pretty weird thing to look at. Basically, Mexico is such an outlier for murder rate that it really dominates the discussion. But when you take out Mexico the US is such an outlier that it seems crazy. The trend lines (various methods) with the US and without Mexico all look very much increasing. With Mexico best fit polynomial is basically a downward-opening parabola because at the US point it looks like gun ownership greatly affects gun killings, but at the Mexico point it seems to have less impact.
I think there is a very good case to be made that gun ownership doesnât substantially increase gun homicide (I realize gun deaths is a different problem than gun homicide, itâs just the stats I found), but to make that case you have to say, "The problem isnât guns, itâs just the US (and, even moreso, Mexico). Like there is just a crazy culture of killing each other. Maybe the US has less of a problem with guns than it has with using violence to solve problems (a cultural tendency to use violence to solve problems would fuel a cultural desire for guns - the causal relationship could be reversed).
The same problem happens when you look at terrorism. In Norway Anders Breivik was a terrorist (who was sensibly prosecuted for the crimes he committed under existing laws). Would he have been one in the US? Or just a âmentally ill personâ because he wasnât Muslim. In every other developed nation mass shooting pretty much universally make national news because they are rare. In the US unless there is a manifesto, an act that would be national talk in Canada or England goes totally unnoticed.
There just doesnât seem to be a way to compare apples to apples when it comes to guns in the US. Although, maybe the problem is that there just doesnât seem to be a way to have a sensible conversation about anything American.
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Perhaps. If it were someone operating an earth compactor thatâs modified to be especially efficient at rolling over children. Thatâs more of an apt metaphor.
âSomeone with a machine specifically designed to rapidly kill people manages to rapidly kill peopleâ
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Iâll blame the person who fired it. Absolutely no problems doing that. She was both irresponsible and completely at fault. The fact that she was also the victim is fortunate (compared to the victim being, say, someone standing nearby), but irrelevant to the allocation of blame.
Iâm not sure why there would be debate on this.
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I think it is a very worthwhile point. People invest a lot of time an energy getting worked up over how dangerous they are, but the numbers reflect that it is a very small number of users who use them for crime, and an even smaller number that accidentally hurt themselves or others.
But donât let rational thought get in the way of the full on self righteous hate.
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So true, only around 30,000 people per year - or approximately ten 9/11s every year. And it isnât like very many people died on 9/11 - oh, wait, a fuckload of people died in 9/11. NevermindâŚ
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