It doesn’t really matter who created a joke; at some point Milton Berle will pass it off as his own.
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that should be in the original thread. Which is too unfunny.
I mean, really, people? The OP has farce right in it – how can you not crack jokes?
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Fine! I put it back. Now I know how…!
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There are not 100 million gun owners in the US.
I am not focusing on people who have “killed someone in self defense” if in fact that has ever happened.
I am focusing on, as I said, “intentional gun deaths” which includes any intentional use of a gun with intent to cause or disregard of a serious risk of causing death.
I also noted that many of those uses are by people who (at least until that moment) called themselves “law abiding citizens.” Some examples: Adam Lanza (law abiding citizen until he wasn’t), Michael Dunn, etc.
Sheesh: some guys can’t take a joke.
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Talk to his wife, she’s the one who really runs things.
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Your definitive statements got me thinking. Let’s say that you are 100% correct that you have the inherent right to own guns. We can all acknowledge that at the time this right was constituted, they had never considered the possibilities of the enormous lethality of the types of weapons that we have today. So, given that, do you consider it your right to also own a grenade launcher, or a mortar, or a howitzer, or a large caliber machine gun?
I’m hoping that you can accept that some limitations can, and should, exist to limit easy access to the more lethal types of weapons. If you can agree with those limitations, we are simply discussing the practical applications of common sense limits on the more readily available weapons. The point would be to lower the total numbers of weapons in circulation, to ensure proper training in their use, and the safe storing of them to prevent accidents, and not to remove them from your ownership. Does that seem unreasonable?
I should note that I own a gun or two, started hunting at a young age after excellent gun safety training, and enjoy target shooting to this day, although my interest in hunting has waned.
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I may have misread his intention. That specific segment he singles out isn’t hardly worth mentioning.
Gun accidents are much less common than car accidents. Car insurance is for driving on public roads. You can drive all you want on private land. Most ranges are on private land (though I will say Missouri has some very nice public ranges.) At any rate, the suggestion of liability insurance does NOTHING to stop violent crime. The number of accidents (many of them being self injury) per year I don’t think really warrants something like that. Most peoples home owners insurance covers accidents on your property. I don’t see how its going to make anyone safer.
Again - gun handling is INCREDIBLY simple. There are 4 basic rules. People get careless. Just like people speed, cross 4 lanes of traffic, and cut people off. It’s not that most people who have accidents don’t know what they did was wrong, it’s that they didn’t care to exercise the proper caution. You can’t legislate that.
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and yet far more likely to be deadly.
If you are correct that gun accidents are very rare then the insurance will be very cheap! That’s the great thing about it – insurance companies in a competitive market will very accurately price out the likelihood of you going postal (competition will drive the price down to just where they are slighly more likely to make a profit than a loss), and your price will reflect that.
So if you are right that guns are safe and accidents rare, you have nothing to fear from insurance. It would be great to find out.
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Then you will have one hell of reloading being done in the garages. It’s an easy, meditative work, pleasant in its way.
And a general safety going down, because of lack of experience. The more rounds you shoot, the better grasp of the problematics you have. You should shoot at least a couple dozen, before you form an opinion if you like guns or not. I had a number of things I changed opinion on after trying them.
If suicides aren’t counted, and they shouldn’t be, you end up with fairly low per-gun premium. (Also, how to calculate insurance payoff for a suicide? On a crime? What to do with unregistered guns? Isn’t the added cost just an additional incentive to have unregistered ones?) So maybe wouldn’t work as well as you think. Though may be a somewhat good idea, generally. Possibly with the option to lower one’s premiums by being subjected to repeated training. Possibly including virtual-reality tests of a range of crisis situations; I’d go for one even to just find out how I would react.
Traceable ammo, not a biggie for me (the question is how you’d handle reloaders). But biometric locks and other additional complexity are a reliability problem. The bad guys will bypass them; look at a gun mechanism and you’ll see that wherever you put the lock, it can be removed easily. The good guys will be subjected to a measure that will increase the probability of the weapon to fail when needed. Batteries fail, sensors have limited success rate on reading (ever had a fingerprint sensor that works 100% time? Even RFID cards sometimes need a bit of a nudge), wireless links get jammed (especially if the adversary knows the frequencies and protocols), and circuitboards and chip packagings are prone to all sorts of problems.
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We’d rather have no violent crime, but surely knife crime is preferable? The perpetrator has to get within arms reach of the victim and the weapon is less efficient at killing in unskilled hands. China has school knifings instead of school shootings because firearms are hard to obtain but the death toll is generally low.
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[quote=“dan7000, post:150, topic:50099, full:true”]
There are not 100 million gun owners in the US.[/quote]
Depends what poll you look at. I’ve seen 125 Million to 75 Million. But the numbers aren’t hard, so I quote the number in the middle. Pew poll had it at 37% of households. Even low end, thats 75 million people not hurting anyone everyday.
If that has ever happened? Do you never read the news? It has happened. I know someone personally. We just had 4 individuals rob a gun store locally. The owner shot 3 of them before he was killed. His wife survived.
Yeah - until we get that preemptive crime unit up, I am afraid people aren’t guilty till they do something wrong. Unless you advocate some sort of authoritarian society that treats everyone like potential criminals, which I am sure you aren’t.
eta:
Jesus. And which potentially dangerous activity or object would you go after next?
The danger from cars isn’t even close to that of guns if you factor in “time spent actually using said device.”
Case in point: a daily city commute may mean encountering thousands of people driving their automobiles at the same time. You’re not likely to see that many people discharging firearms at the same time unless you’re in the midst of a very large military conflict.
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Wrong
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Unfortunately, fictional case studies have shown that while shotguns are quite effective at dealing with small-scale zombie infestations (e.g., within the walls of a puzzle-filled mansion that is the facade for a secret bioweapon research facility), large-scale zombie outbreaks render firearms in general more dangerous than useful; such scenarios are more capably handled with a crossbow or machete, or in a pinch, a screwdriver.
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If you can think of any product that when used as intended results in the death of a human being I will support mandatory insurance for that product.
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"The bad guys will bypass them; look at a gun mechanism and you’ll see that wherever you put the lock, it can be removed easily. The good guys will be subjected to a measure that will increase the probability of the weapon to fail when needed. "
Seriously if you want to avoid looking like you are living in the Mad Maxx fantasy world you just have to stop pretending life is a movie where three are “bad guys” and “good guys.” As you said, nobody is a criminal until they are. The way I see it, anybody with access to a gun has the potential of being a really bad guy. And people without access to guns are much less likely to be (or become, if you prefer) really bad guys.
The article cherry-picked data, for people for under 25 years, which is not indicated in the headline. Which is slightly biased on one side by most of the demographics not actively driving cars, and less slightly on the other by including inter-/intra-gang violence that’s rather heavy in that demographics segment.
The other, smaller, sin was linear extrapolation of the data.
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