ACK!!! Are you trying to give me an aneurysm!!!
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I am a progressive and I find the Gun debate so wanting. Itâs a complex issue and both sides shout simple answers at each other. It always strikes me as shock doctrine politics.
I support universal background checks and waiting periods for guns likely to be used in suicide, but I donât think those policies will really address the largest sources of gun violence.
I donât really care one way or another about assault weapons bans because a very small number are killed by assault weapons. They are mostly collectors items. Which is why when the previous ban expired, nothing happened.
âA complete firearms ban is unfeasible.â People who donât own guns generally think there is no reason to believe that statement. People that own guns have a different opinion.
I was looking at alcohol statistics the other day. its something like 88k deaths a year from Alcohol vs around 30k from firearms. You could probably get people that donât drink to support a bad on hard alcohol, but you would never get a big number of drinkers to support it even though it could probably prevent as many premature deaths as any proposed gun regulation. I think the difference in opinion between owners and non owners is important in the discussion.
We need to address a host of issues. Yes, proliferation of guns via continuously funded buy back programs, voluntarily and stipulated programs to remove guns from the homes of domestic abusers, teenagers, and those suffering from mentally illness. We need to end the criminal drug war and work to reduce and eliminate other black market industries through both policy and enforcement. That policy needs to address economic opportunity for those most pushed into black market economies and funded treatment for those caught in drug related crimes. Throughout the process we need to change the culture that says gun violence is ever heroic and that learning about guns helps young men learn character and responsibility.
orâŚ
more guns! - Less guns! - Fuck you! - Fuck you!
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The number of people who own guns is decreasing, even though the total number of guns owned increases - that is, thereâs a group of hard-core gun collectors with bigger and bigger collections as more people reject gun ownership.
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Sure, when guns are easier to get more people use them in suicide, but despite having more guns than virtually any other country in the world out suicide rate is average to slightly below average.
It may not really be that people âreject gun ownershipâ it may be that we have been seeing increasing urban populations and decreasing rural populations.
People in cities canât conveniently hunt or target shoot so they own nearly as many guns as those that can. I imagine a smaller number of people are also owning more and more of the nations 4 wheelers. that isnât because anyone is rejecting 4 wheelers.
The only problem with this shirt is that youâd be guaranteed to get least get people threatening to shoot you for wearing it.
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The entire issue of gun control is a distraction from the deep social and economic problems in our society.
This is the only reason I care about the issue at all. I have no personal stake - I do not own a gun, I do not want to, and Iâm not particularly comfortable around the things. But I can see that we have serious problems with poverty, inequality, racism, authority, masculinity, individualism and alienation. Few people want to look deeply at these kind of problems, because they reveal very uncomfortable truths about our entire way of life. They remind us that our society is built on a foundation of violence, and we are a participant in that violence.
Normally we donât care that people are being killed. But when the murder is so spectacular that it captures our attention (e.g. a mass school shooting), some political response is necessary. So the political establishment has manufactured a controversy around the âgun control issueâ to distract us from the actual changes that would be needed to make our society more peaceful.
The reason they want a distraction is that if we were to place the blame for mass-murders on the factors I listed above, we might be moved to make social changes from the bottom up, which would threaten the wealth and power of those in charge.
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Err⌠No it isnâtâŚ
And do you see any patterns in the countries with higher suicide rates?
(And there is no way in hell Saudi Arabia is at 0.4)
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They already are. Four magazines in just this list.
Two are tested with fused deposition modeling on a Stratasys Dimension SST printer. One seems to work with many common printers, one is uncharacterized and I donât have time to dig deeper at this moment.
Magazines are a printing-friendly part. Not much of mechanical loads compared with the rest.
And once selective melting of metal powders, or wire welding deposition, if possible combined with precision machining (you can do both with the same CNC machine if you have exchangeable heads), all bets are off.
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Bad grammar doesnât kill people, people kill people.
OR
Itâs all about ethics in linguistics
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O RLY? (ha)
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Yes, thereâs a different rural/urban population split, and rural dwellers are twice as likely to own guns, but both urban and rural populations have increasingly been rejecting gun ownership. The percentage of rural dwellers reporting having a gun in the house now is less than the total average was in the '70s, when about half of households reported gun ownership. Even in rural areas itâs not even 40% now, according to some polls. Also itâs about 40% handguns, so itâs not all about hunting. There are also plenty of people driving 4x4s who never leave the cityâŚ
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I donât think that gun control is an intentional political decoy from this issue, I think it is a proxy issue. My position on American gun control is not that is there were fewer guns then there would be fewer murders, but that if America were the kind of society that was willing to have fewer guns to get fewer murders then there would be fewer murders. American society has a deeply built in idea that problems are solved with violence, and I see it built into all kind of anti-gun-control positions.
In particular, the way people talk about self defense. The idea that if someone is threatening you or stealing from you then you have a right to shoot them is the same justification that is used when police kill. Basically, lives are throwaways, and one bad action forfeits them. And that gets baked into a prison system that treats prisoners as sub-human. Stand your ground laws are a legal enactment of the idea that lives can just be thrown away - they say you have no responsibility to think of alternatives to taking a life, and that if someone else starts something you have every right to escalate it.
The gun control debate is one in which one side says, âChildren are dying, canât we do *somethingâ and the other sides says, âNo, we can do nothing.â If we can swallow that, then we can swallow inaction on poverty and health care too.
I agree that gun control or no gun control isnât going to make a big difference to America. Trying to pass gun control without buy-in from the people is silly anyway. Prohibiting things that can be concealed, manufactured on the sly, and that people want doesnât work. But I donât think itâs really a distraction, I think itâs a microcosm.
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I looked at several sources actually, including that one. I didnât see an average posted anywhere but the 10-12 per 100k looks to be in the middle of the pack across several articles. Countries like Japan and France look like they are consistently higher. So do northern countries like Canada, Russia and netherlands etc. It seems to be that guns may have some impact, but not as big an impact as say, sunlight and economics.
No doubt some closed countries lie about their numbers of suicides. They probably also lie about their number of homicides. War torn countries seem to show lower suicide and homicide rates, either because those become less frequent or because they get lost in the shuffle of larger issues.
So I did the math, Wiki has the global deaths from suicide at about 1 million. The world pop is about 7.2 billion. Divide and multiple by 100k and you get 13.8 suicides per 100k. That would mean at the 10-12 per 100k. Good old USA is below average.
One last point, cause this is honestly a huge topic itself. Lethality of gunshot suicides vs. attempted suicide is orders of magnitude higher, if you group methods by tool.
http://lostallhope.com/suicide-methods/statistics-most-lethal-methods
This article directly references jumping and asphyxiation, but the narrative draws a very clear line to, âif you make suicide harder to do, you will have dramatically less of themâ. I think the same lessons can be applied to firearms.
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I might like it fine, if I knew what NFA meant. If my opinion mattered, I would be fine with anything that actually stops most of the slaughter. Arming all the little kids is not the solution, and it seems to be the only answer Wayne LaPierre will permit.
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Yeah, thatâll really bolster their cause, threatening pregnant women and kids wearing a t-shirt they donât like.
Sure guns are more lethal but method is also highly correlated with gender. Men seem to bottle things up and then choose the most lethal means available. While women seem more likely to share and make a less lethal attempt at hurting themselves.
No doubt, having a very lethal method very available probably play a role in the number of suicides. But given the numbers it doesnât seem to be one of the larger factors in the end results. Maybe some stats that compare suicide rates to rates of depression could give more information on how big a factor guns are.
On a side not the list of lethality that rates time and agony is interesting because guns seem to be the most humane way to end your life short of large amounts of explosives.
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This is getting dark fast. Or an interesting engineering challenge. Sometimes hard to say which 
Cheers, and sincerely have a good day.
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