It was God’s will
/crazy
Which ones? I’ve lost track.
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That’s not what makes you an extremist. Don’t wrap yourself in sanctity at this point - I’m not opposing any decrease in needless death, and what you are arguing for is very specifically a forceful intervention by government to decrease legal access to guns. In my opinion, that could easily cost a great many lives. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re right, but stop shifting the goalposts and trying to shove everyone else off the moral high ground; as @PrestonSturges has repeatedly pointed out to you, that behavior poisons the discourse.
I’ll tell you what I think is working: education, nutrition, and environmental justice (by which I mean reduction of lead). Smarter, healthier, well-informed people make smarter, healthier decisions. Of course we in the USA are actively destroying our public education system - firing school librarians and music teachers and teaching to politically motivated tests while forcing the most at-risk children into the prison system - so I’ll freely admit that we may have already abandoned the best possible course, which is education. But that’s what I am lobbying for, and more importantly that is what I am physically exerting myself to achieve. I’d love to count you as a fellow-traveler, if you can give up excoriating me for lack of anti-gun ideological purity.
[quote=“Humbabella, post:324, topic:67542”]
Self defense isn’t in the UN declaration or the Bill of Rights. The fact that we deem self-defense as an acceptable legal defense for what would otherwise be violent crime - and how we judge what is valid self-defense - varies from place to place. If there is a culture in the US that believes that this ought to be considered a human right, then I don’t think there is much agreement on that in the rest of the world or among human rights advocates.
And a basic right of “armed” self-defense seems really out of left field. That sounds like if I was mugged I could sue the government for not having provided me with a gun in advance.[/quote]
I was speaking of natural law, not paper laws; apologies for the lack of clarity. The inalienable and natural right of armed self-defense was established the first time a cro-magnon woman found a rock under her hand and bashed in the skull of the cro-magnon man who was assaulting her. That natural right is recognized under the laws of every government I know of - although the Quakers, and a few similar groups, hold that you shouldn’t defend yourself if that defense would cause harm to another.
I am not a Quaker. If you are, I respectfully submit that we will never come to a meeting of minds on this issue; I think failing to oppose an immoral force is ethically wrong, and that it inevitably leads to the pernicious and evil principle of “might makes right”. I should not be able to use my size and strength to force you to do my will, and it makes me happy that others should have whatever is necessary to prevent this, up to and including lethal weapons. (I don’t carry weapons that leave the hand, personally, but that’s because I don’t need any. I’M HUGE. OK, not really, but big enough, anyway.)
YOU ARE LIKE A GOD. I hope these people are for reals, because I am giving them money. And I am very happy to be proven wrong on this point!
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Why do we make these arguments?
Unsecured TV’s kill and injure way more toddlers
I mean, ,maybe the toddler definition is different than the children in the article, but 43 causulties is 1.34 x 10-7th of the us population and even a low % of toddlers.
If we really regulated every object that killed 43 people in a year they way we propose regulating guns then we would all have to wear a harness in the bathroom.
Now, there are large numbers of gun deaths in America and we can regulate to reduce those but 43 isn’t a big % of that either.
Yes, but it comes back to the fact that televisions, swimming pools, cars, staircases, etc., etc., etc. are all not primarily intended to kill people, and that all of the above (apart from televisions) are restricted and/or licensed in some way, and there is the necessity for the owners to have insurance which covers accidents in which they are involved.
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Feel free to look through my posts on this thread. I’m not suggesting any kind of forceful confiscation of weapons. I know that would only lead to more deaths.
As I said earlier, “Gradually choking down the supply over decades while immediately reducing the supply of new weapons and ammo would go a long way in reducing gun violence.”
I’m not stupid or blindly idealistic enough to think we can solve this issue in a few month or years. No amount of wanting the death rate by gun violence to go down significantly is going to make that happen, no matter how many people speak out for it. We have an uphill battle to get very basic reforms passed when it comes to gun control. I’ll take what ridiculously insignificant steps we can take to get us even an inch closer to preventing a few more deaths.
Unfortunately, as long as there is general possession of guns in this country, there will be mass shootings and toddler deaths by guns because if the guns are accessible, they will be used by those who are angry but can pass all manner of psych evals or those who are too young to know better because their parents, despite whatever amount of education they get, will still be negligent.
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shivers with anticapation J-John L-Lock?!!! please say yes
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How many kids a year are killed by Happy Meal Toys?
From the CDC 2000 Death Index
Car occupant: Deaths 14,813 Lifetime odds: 1/242
Falls: Deaths 13,322 Lifetime odds: 1/269
Accidental poisoning: Deaths 12,575 Lifetime odds: 1/281
Assault by firearm: Deaths 10,801 Lifetime odds: 1/331
eh, several of those things aren’t true. I don’t remember licensing my staircase. I am not sure but I think the home insurance doesn’t necessarily exclude firearms but I don’t have a gun at present so… I don’t know that for sure.
Some guns are designed to kill people. others are designed to kill animals. they are also commonly used to shoot at targets for recreation.
Meanwhile Tylenol kills more than 100 people a year. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/tylenol-overdose_n_3976991.html
And people buy it and give it to children!
Look, I have posted about gun control before. I support gun control to decrease deaths. Only if serious efforts to understand the causes and create policy that reduces those deaths then fail, would I consider supporting an all out ban. But it seems almost no one is interested in that first part. It’s just “think of the children” and then suggestions of policies that have nothing to do with saving children and then when that doesn’t work ban guns.
My other problem here is that a really big chunk of the deaths from guns are young men. 18-24 largely minority and the conversation really doesn’t even seem to pause to talk about what might reduce the deaths of those young men. The coverage is all about kids and suburbanites caught up in public mass murders. Not to mention that those most likely to die in a mass murder are the victims of chronic domestic abuse. Yet again, another groups barely mentioned in the discussion of the problem or potential solutions.
Also, the CDC says that tainted food causes >2,000 deaths a year but we can hardly get anyone to pay attention because they are focused on the “menace” of GMOs.
And then of course there are probably another 100,000 a year or more killed by medical errors…
What number is 1000,000?
I see you’ve edited down to 100k. Why not a mil?
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I’m sorry I made a typo. If you’re trying to imply something you should say it instead of being pouty.
The real number is probably around 500,000 deaths a year due to medical errors.
Are there laws against falling?
J/k
Thx for the stats.
I haint got to pouty yet. I was still on whiney and not even to complainy. But srsly, why not a mil?
Nosocomial infections = 100k deaths per year or thereabouts.
Iatrogenic deaths = another about 100k per year.
Measured, it’s about 200k. But my gut says it’s closer to a mil, due to the way things get coded and swept under the rug at hospitals.
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They don’t collect firm numbers of deaths caused by errors, but I think that by the time you’ve 4 or 5 surgeries there’s a good chance of getting the short straw. My father died last year after a double bypass because they “could not restart his heart” but he’d already had a pacemaker for two years. Did they have a pacemaker technician there in the operating room? Do they really run the full diagnostics on the pacemaker like they are supposed to and make sure the current from the electrocauterizer or OR defibrillator didn’t wipe its memory? How does somebody’s heart simply “not restart” when they have a pacemaker?
I unfortunately have direct experience with this, which may or may not be helpful. Although please don’t take this as doctorly advice by any means. Years ago, I had the fortune to attend firsthand a triple bypass surgery. To slow the heart in the chest cavity, after cauterization of all bleeding vessels in the skin/musculature/divided sternum and pericardial areas, a large bin of sterile crushed ice was brought in. Ice was literally scooped into the chest cavity to cool the heart, slowing it, and make it possible to hook up perfusion.
Perfusion damages blood tremendously. The veins harvested from the patient’s legs don’t always inflate, even though they are inspected and the best sections are chosen and cut out for use. These veins are then sewn on, bypassing the plaqued cardiac arteries, the ice removed, blood O2 increased as much as possible, then perfusion removed, aorta sewn and then the heart needs to be restarted. All of the above is incredibly traumatic to a person’s body, especially someone who had been living with a heart condition for some time previously.
The surgeon I was helping had trouble restarting the patient’s heart after all of that work which took north of 3 hours. The heart simply would not start. He used paddles to jolt it and it would go for a little while and then kind of peter out. So, what he did was stand there with a gloved hand for 20 minutes poking the heart with his index finger. Every time you jab a heart, it beats. He looked at me and said, wryly, “Polish pacemaker.” I barely chuckled. I didn’t want the patient to die and I was feeling nervous and helpless. After 20 minutes of Polish pacemaker, the patient’s heart kept going on its own and they stitched him up.
So many factors are at play in one of these surgeries. So many things that the patient can roll in with, so many things that can happen in that OR. I am sincerely sorry about your father. It is awful. You would think that after doing CABG surgeries for many decades, that this would be utterly routine. But I know, having seen it with my own eyes, that there are just enough variables in one of these surgeries that they could stack up in such a way as to elude the grasp of even the most talented surgical team.
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There is no such thing as “natural law” unless you’re discussing the speed of light, the nature of gravity, etc. All human law is culturally determined. We can agree that there are certain things we think should be allowed or given to all human beings as legal rights but there is nothing inherent or “natural” about it unless you believe in a deity that hands down laws.
But there are building codes and if your staircase is being built in a new property or replaced in an existing one, you have to get a permit, often submit plans, and it has to be inspected when it is done or your city or county will enforce its removal (at least in the USA).
Yeah but the latter is not what they were designed to do. They were designed to kill animals. Shooting targets is simply a stand-in for that. It is practice.
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They weren’t; that graph uses multiple Y scales (US on the left, Australia on the right). Even before Port Arthur, Australian gun fatality rates were massively lower than the US.
Culture probably played a role, but handgun restriction was likely the primary cause. Rifle-based mass shootings get the attention, but if you really want to reduce gun deaths you need to go after the domestic violence handguns.
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Read more cog sci and get back to me. 
The work done since 1950 on the physiological basis of the psychology of color perception is fascinating, for example.
Seriously, there are patterns of human behavior that are no more culturally determined than the effects of gravity, and this was one of the pillars of US jurisprudence long before the theory of the embodied mind. You can disagree (I think Maslow famously did) but you’ll need more than dismissive hand-waving as an argument - history, archeology, anthropology and quantitative psychological research all strongly support the idea that evolution favors an instinct for self-defense in vertebrates (Maslow apparently re-labeled any instinct that can be trained away as a drive, but I’d be just as happy with that language if “instinct” offends.) Healthy, sane humans will defend themselves and their clan, it’s a natural law driven by the survival of offspring.
All that being said, it makes sense to view any invocation of “natural law” with suspicion, since we’re really still trying to figure out just what it is (it’s probably hard for a fish to see water) and the principle’s been invoked to justify all sorts of ridiculous sophistry in the past.
Hopefully all that made sense… I just woke up.
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