Originally published at: Very stable genius claims hammers kill more people than guns, dislikes it when Good Liars corrects him | Boing Boing
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Just saw a few idiots on social media making the same easily disprovable claim. Must be one of the talking points in a recent NRA memo or something.
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i even goggle (not google) at the whole “X kills more people than guns therefore guns are OK” syllogism. Let’s say they actually found something that kills more people than guns; i dunno… malaria, heart disease, the grim reaper, whatever… that does not then somehow justify or even strengthen the argument toward more access to murder weapons. (“ey! Cancer kills more than stuffing plutonium up yer butt, so plutonium ought to be 2nd amendment protected!”)
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Right?? I mean hardly any Americans are killed by grenades but that isn’t a very good argument for legalizing grenades.
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This might be true if this was Asgard. It isn’t though.
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then rifles at 455, then blunt objects, clubs hammers. 393. The hammers — that stat is just wrong.
I love that he is quoting statistics. But these statistics vary from year to year. So some times deaths from rifles is less than blunt weapons, and some times they are higher. (ETA - The lady got her talking points mixed up, and I missed it first read. Some years blunt objects kill more people than RIFLES. But if you included ALL firearms, it easily beats out blunt objects for as long as US crime stats have been kept.)
Clearly the bulk of homicides are committed with handguns.
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More than thirty years ago a guy showed me a news article about how a bottle had been used as a murder weapon. He smugly told me than banning, or even putting limits, on gun ownership made as much sense as banning bottles since both could be used as deadly weapons. I asked, “How many bottles are designed solely for the purpose of killing and can kill multiple people in under a minute from a hundred feet away or more?”
I’ll let you know if he ever gets back to me.
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This is a fact. And in the years that rifle deaths are higher, they coincide with Dick Cheney’s hunting trips. Take that, libs!
(and yes, I realize he blasted his friend in the face with a shotgun)
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Ooof. This seems like the (il)logical outgrowth of the oft-repeated claim that “if someone can’t get a gun, they’ll just find some other way to kill someone/themselves” when talking about gun violence/suicide. Because if that were true, and more people have hammers than guns, then more people must be killed by hammers! QED!
Except that whole idea comes entirely from absurd murder mysteries and detective shows (where every murder is premeditated and involves overly-elaborate plans) rather than reality. In reality, both murder and suicide almost entirely consist of “heat of the moment” actions - if there’s not a deadly weapon easily at hand, the odds of anyone dying drop dramatically. Because both attempts to kill decrease, and the remaining attempts are a lot less likely to succeed. Like, with suicide - someone who makes the attempt with a gun is going to be successful 95% of the time; without a gun, the majority of people will survive the attempt. Likewise, when people are having an argument that gets heated, and they don’t have guns, they’re extremely unlikely to go to their tool closet, pull out a hammer and come back to try to murder the other person - much less is that attempt likely to be successful.
This understanding of violence that owes everything to absurd fiction drives me crazy - how do we even have a conversation about this, much less come up with solutions, when people are stuck in a completely fictional understanding of the issue? (It also lays to rest the idea that “people can distinguish between reality and fiction.” No, they can’t. They may - largely - recognize that a story is fiction, but they still internalize much of it into their worldview.)
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So this is good news. America can ban guns and not worry about whether well-regulated militias are necessary to the security of a free state, since they could always carry much more deadly hammers instead.
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But it’s a lot harder for gun-fondlers to masturbate to their hammers instead of their murder-dildoes.
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If they found something that kills more people than guns but we made no effort to solve, then maybe it would be relevant. Like if cars kill more people than guns but we caved to the big-no-seat-belt lobby on regulation and carmakers refused to build crumple zones or airbags, then you would have a point.
Of course there is no such thing. Everything else that kills even a fraction of the people in the US that guns kill is heavily researched and/or regulated.
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Also, you can ask “if you’re in a duel, and one of you gets a handgun or rifle, and the other gets a bottle, which would you choose, and why?”
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The numbers don’t vary THAT much from year to year. The number of people killed by all blunt weapons combined is a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by all types of firearms combined.
I bet you’d have to go back at least a couple of centuries to find a year in which more people were killed by hammers than by guns.
Also who knows what percentage of those “blunt object” killings are hammers anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if baseball bats were a more popular murder weapon than hammers.
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This article (while slightly dated) points out that the US leads the UK by a wide margin in murders by knife even when adjusted for population. Conclusion? we USAians are really enamored with killing each other.
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If you include the hammers used to fire bullets, hammers get a big boost in the killing people stats.
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Also, smoking is cool, does not cause any long-term damage or ill health. Smoke up, Johnny!!
/sarcasm
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I dunno, just think of a hammer as a utility butt-plug…
Good Liars: smarter than a bag of hammers.
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Of course it does, along with guns, there are very strict restrictions on what knives can be carried in the U.K., the only U.K. legal knife that can be carried in public has a non-locking blade less than three inches long. That doesn’t stop knife crimes, which are, by definition, illegal, being carried out with illegal knives, often kitchen knives; of course, they’re not illegal to own, for obvious reasons, but nicking one from the family kitchen, or shoplifting one is the easiest way of obtaining a weapon, and easy to dispose of as well.
Shame, really, I’ve got a bunch of knives collected over the years that I used to carry around in my pocket, or in a belt sheath, that were perfectly acceptable, but now sit unused at home.
If I was intent on really fucking someone up, I’d use a normal flat-blade screwdriver, a couple of minutes work on a kerbstone or a paving stone and you’ve got a chisel edge that’ll punch through any clothing and is easy and unobtrusive to carry.
Knives don’t kill people, people kill people… /s
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