This is the sort of thing that gun control laws can’t fix. Rather, we must each reject the fantasy of a “good guy with a gun.” We must make the painful realization that one day I may no longer be the sane, rational, good guy. Maybe there will be a time where, for just thirty seconds or so, I really want to kill someone. Maybe the downside of having a gun handy at that time outweighs the fantasy that I am protecting myself.
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BTW I’m a student of Smith and Freud did do it better, but the comparison is not apt.
And so it continues 
Both invented hermetic belief systems (golden tablets and magical goggles versus an introspective system not capable of experimental test.)
Both founded cults which involved handing over large sums of money to the next level up.
In neither case is it possible to be sure whether they were knowingly exploiting their followers or whether they genuinely believed what they were asserting, or something in between.
I think that’s enough to be going on with. I mean, I sometimes often throw ideas in to see if they fly, but I don’t think this is one of my worst parallels.
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Smith didn’t invent all of that, he was a Mason and cribbed a ton of rite.
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Definitely…I saw that immediately. She is Texas through and through. The satanic southern belle look.
Well, Freud pinched a load of stuff from William James, so where does that leave us?
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Sadly, I have to FTFY:
She had those Michele Bachman eyes...
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Where do gun owners draw the line? The dialogue always turns into non-gun owners wanting to take guns away from gun owners. Why?! Gun owners aren’t NRA drones, they’re people. Same as you, same as me. The might have different fault tolerances but they can’t be thinking this is cool.
Why are gun owners not drawing a line?
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Which countries? 'Cause I think if you dig down, you’d find that a) these other countries have rifles, mostly, and I think that’s a big distinction, and b) I’m sure the tragedies are there, just not as numerous because the American population is huge and has nearly twice as many guns per capita as the country in the #2 slot.
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I was thinking Switzerland, specifically, but I don’t disagree with any of your comment.
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No True Texan is not a gun advocate. At most, ~ ten percent of Texans are actually False Flag Texans. Ergo, ninety percent.
No citation needed; simple logic suffices.
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Put your bullet back in your pocket, Barney.
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Incidentally, for anyone interested in Freud (and Halsted, and surgery, and psychopharmacology), this book is a very worthwhile read:
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If you want to have a much greater impact on mortality, ban sugary drinks.
Yeah, quite the straw man. Far as I know, it’s illegal for someone to, in a fit of anger or insanity, force a big gulp down my mouth. Much less an entire nightclub full of people.
1 in 7 Heart Disease
1 in 7 Cancer
1 in 28 Respiratory disease
1 in 106 Suicide
1 in 108 Motor vehicle accident
1 in 123 Unintentional poisoning
1 in 158 Falling
1 in 304 Assault by firearm
To separate suicide from firearm deaths in your list is a bit misleading in a gun violence discussion, by the way, as way more than half involve firearms, and it’s been shown that having ready access to a gun drastically increases the rate of successful suicide attempts. (21,000 in 2011).
And showing how gun deaths compare to things like cancer and heart disease, as if somehow that means the thousands that die by gun violence are not worth bothering about (I’m sure you don’t think it appeared that way, but it did) is kind of horrible. It’s still a fuck load of people, dying preventable deaths often through no fault or action of their own.
Also, “Gun control” is always going to be a tangled, slow, confusing mess to figure out in a big country absolutely swimming in guns, especially when the laws can be totally different across state lines. But it’s a pretty broad category to dismiss as ineffective when the term includes things like a ban on large capacity semi-automatics or basic background checks.
In the case of mass shootings – (which is an even smaller subset of deaths so I’m sure we shouldn’t care, but nonetheless…) – legal ownership seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
From the New York Times
A vast majority of guns used in 16 recent mass shootings, including two guns believed to be used in the Orlando attack,
were bought legally and with a federal background check. At least eight
gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that
did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons.
Oh, and there’s this, which raises some doubt on the parsing of the data in your list and the impression it gives:
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Roomfuls of people don’t suddenly get cancer and die all at once with no warning, or get heart disease and fall over dead on the spot en masse. So comparing congenital or hereditary diseases with someone who decides hey, I think I’ll murder a room full of people, and can do so quite easily by buying a high powered weapon… that’s not an apt comparison at all, no.
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Those also look like age-adjusted risk numbers rather than lifetime risk numbers.
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You’re dead right.
