Here’s some.
It is more than 50% likely that the person (if any) killed by your gun will be you.
If you have the gun for self defence, you will wait, on average, 35,000 years before you get to kill a bad guy. (70 million self defenders only kill about 2,000 bad guys per year)
Its very contentious and I personally would be happy with re-certification for all drivers every ten years or so. I think its a good place to start. My dad and his brother both lost their pilot’s licenses due to health issues.
If his wife had a gun, maybe she wouldn’t have been shot.
You seem to have missed the first part of my statement.
I like to call this the Violence Lottery, and it’s the reason I no longer carry my sweet Benchmade axis-lock stabbin’ knife.
Or, always been an idiot, but just got lucky til now. Chambering a round in an automatic pistol isn’t a thing you should really do unless you’re about to fire it at something, or intend to fire it at something right soon. Doing so and then putting the gun in your pocket puts you in the straight-up numpty category.
I did three weeks of army cadets before I realised I didn’t like being shouted at, marching, or armies, and even I know enough about guns not to fucking do that. Someone who’s presumably been carrying a pistol around longer than I’ve been alive ought to know better, if only through muscle memory.
In other words, the human condition.
Agreed. But in a political environment where every tiny proposed adjustment in gun laws causes gun advocates to lose their minds over the slippery slope to a gun ban, this simple idea is DOA.
he and his wife got lucky and are in stable condition at the hospital.
I assume that’s only physically stable (since they’re obviously not mentally stable).
Well, quite.
That’s a low blow.
Agree. I grew up with guns around the house (and have a FOID Card, but don’t own one yet). This is a guy who did not treat the gun with the respect it deserves as something that can kill you and everyone you hold dear.
So, in some cases, the only answer to a good guy with a gun is an EMT with a pressure dressing.
I should remind you that the majority of the country (not a slight majority, but 80 to 90%) wants sensible gun control. Gun advocates aren’t the ones who need placating if they want to continue to be gun owners.
You know, there are a lot of people on BB, including me, who support gun rights, and don’t have any problem with them posting articles like this. I think the BB readership is much less monolithic than you think, and are generally capable of reading an article and coming to their own conclusions.
Well, if everyone in the church had a gun, he wouldn’t have needed to take his out to show them what a gun looked like, and none of this would ever have happened. Q.E.D.
For maximum safety, people should be issued with guns at birth, like social security numbers.
Also, they should just shoot other people at random. Some 70 million Americans have criminal records, which is more than 1 in 5. If everyone’s packing, that means that there’s a better than 20% chance that you just shot a ‘bad guy with a gun’. I think those odds are acceptable. What do you say, America?
Well, guns do make you bulletproof, or at least that’s what’s implied by Republican politicians.
Above or below the gunshot?
@Quinquennial: noted, though I did not mean to imply otherwise. The point of what I wrote not to discuss the pros and cons of gun control, nor speculate about the popularity of gun control measures. I only intended to focus on the needless polarization and divisiveness between conservatives and liberals (or whichever other popular, antagonistic positions) that I think this sorts of article helps generate and perpetuate.
I think it is needless because (as you said) a strong majority of the country wants sensible gun control. Even further, I think most of us can actually agree on what “sensible gun control” entails…if so many of us weren’t so wrapped up in the political nonsense of pointing fingers and name-calling, which is what I think this sort of article encourages. I think the comments posted in this thread in the first 20 minutes serve as evidence supporting this.
Why does Boing Boing need to be objective and neutral? They are not a news gathering organization. They are a cultural blog that often discusses current events.
Religion and guns are old bedfellows. Religious fundamentalism even more so. People with the kind of critical thinking skills that allow them to believe a magic man in the sky is responsible for everything and people who think putting a gun with a chambered round in their pocket tend to share a lot of the same space on the venn diagram of ‘why we can’t have nice things’
