Not at all. Guns are way worse.
As I pointed out upthread, the average American encounters hundreds or thousands of people actively using their cars every single day whereas most people encounter guns only rarely.
To say that a gun represents the same danger as a car is like saying walking on a sidewalk is more dangerous than playing with high explosives because more people die doing the former than the latter.
Ok, but are you taking into account the experience of collectors with dozens of guns around their home? They must run into them all the time, and I’ve heard that as the experts on the minutiae of guns they are the only ones whose opinions on them can be trusted.
It’s almost as though I said “let’s take the argument at face value.”
They’re only #2, but they try harder?
Serious question: Why? Why take that argument at face value? The argument wasn’t put forth in good faith. so why would we do that?
Regulations on emissions?
To illustrate that, even in the most generous case that you can make while respecting the facts, there’s a wide disparity between how we treat child motor vehicle injuries/deaths and how we treat child gun injuries/deaths. Because clearly, some people who don’t already accept that notion are reading, and maybe illustrating that will engage their critical thinking skills.
I disagree. I think the only thing taking bad faith arguments at face value does is to lend legitimacy to those arguments. The media does this all the time, especially with Trump. It’s not helpful.
The best counter I’ve seen recently to this is when Kamala Harris was asked about Trump’s claim that she had just recently “turned black” during her interview with Dana Bash. She shook her head and said, “Same old tired playbook.” And then said nothing else. Bash asked her if that was all she was going to say, and Harris said, “Next question.” Harris acknowledged the ridiculousness of the argument without lending it credibility by responding to it at face value. Had she instead said “I’ve always identified as a black woman. I went to Howard University, a historically black college, and joined AKA, the first historically black sorority in the United States,” all of that would have been true, and would have refuted Trump’s statement, but it also would have been treating Trump’s statement as if it were worth responding to, and it wasn’t.
Nitpicky arguments about whether guns are the number one or number two cause of death of some defined group of young people are similarly not worth taking at face value and responding to in good faith. It legitimizes bullshit, and I, for one, have had quite enough of that.
I’m guessing that “broadly defined” means that it includes getting hit by cars and being a passenger in a car crash? What happens to the figures if we count those as two separate categories?
Yep. It completely ignores the fact that in every other well-off country, guns are not even in the top 10 causes of death of childrens’ deaths. It’s a really really bullshit point to make.
You missed the part where, in USA, you NEED a motor vehicle in most areas just in order to get groceries and hold down a job. That’s it’s own whole problem, and I disagree with our approach, but it does somewhat explain why we’ve decided these machines are a necessary part of daily life and the best we can do is minimize the danger. Which we do, improving safety features and putting policies in place.
Guns, however many people might disagree, are simply NOT a necessary part of everyday life, and so it seems pretty macabre to treat them as such.
That’s an absurdly slippery slope you’ve constructed there. I hope it was as edifying for you as defending the idiot MAGAt in the original post.