Gun Violence in America

To be fair, cars get safer every year while guns… are uh… well…

[snort]
Took me a second… only a second, but still…

dooh

turns out I was an artificial intelligence all along.

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It was true as you wrote it though… the rate at which the safety is improving is decreasing. (Talking about the concavity / second derivative of safety over time.)

I assumed that’s what you meant and you were being clever in how you wrote it.

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Nah, I mean, I did really think about making that joke sometime last week, so you do have a good read on my personality. :slight_smile: But not on my post.

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Fair enough!

Yeah the link just took me to Twitter and this was the first video I found but I feel you.

That’s exactly what I was thinking when I first heard that

To take it further, the leading cause of death of minor children isn’t guns at all… it’s perinatal issues and congenitive anomalies. See look… guns are no problem!!!

(I haven’t actually checked the math on that, but I suspect it’s true. By adding 0 year-olds and subtracting 18 year-olds and lumping perinatal/congenitive into a single cause I bet it’s true.)

Within a class, cars and guns have both gotten more user-friendly over time.

They’ve also both become more effective, which of course means something completely different for cars as from guns.

Guns are getting safer. Unfortunately those safety improvements do nothing to reduce the frequency of misuse.

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I mean, their use is to kill stuff.

I would argue that not killing stuff is misuse.

I would say that the intended use of consumer-grade firearms is sport and defense.

Offensive use of consumer-grade guns is misuse.

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Eh, I would say doing illegal things with a tool is different than “misusing” a tool. But it’s semantic.

Similarly I would say “misusing a knife” is when you use it to cut cardboard instead of meat. Though I don’t think it matters if the meat is chicken or human. It’s made to do either.

In any case, a car’s purpose is to go places. So you can make it less deadly, but still go places.
You can’t really make a gun less deadly but still good at being deadly.

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Lynyrd Skynyrd knew this 50 years ago.

This does make me wonder if we’re due for a “crime wave” of “increasing murders” when what actually happens is that we’re selling bigger guns.

The vast majority of shootings are not deadly. So… we have a whole lot of room to improve on that front.

Sports is different from “killing stuff”, at least so far as the sports is shooting targets rather than animals. “Defense” is a euphemism for killing people.

Yup. A friend took me to a gun range and let me play with their AR15. I had about half an hour of instruction, of which maybe 2 minutes was about how to shoot, and the rest was about safety. I was shocked at how incredibly easy it was to put a bullet through the center of the targets. Could I take one of those puppies and kill a lot of people in a crowd if I didn’t care what happened to me after? Absolutely, with no difficulties at all.

interesting perspective. Maybe.

“Defense” is a euphemism for killing people lawfully.
“Offense” is a euphemism for killing people unlawfully.

I’ll concede that the mechanics of the two aren’t very much different. But I stand by my assertion that guns bought by civilians are not intended for offensive use…or at least a desire to use a gun offensively should probably be a disqualification from gun ownership (one that annoyingly isn’t recognized under current in-force interpretations of the Second Amendment).

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Sure, but they are meant “to kill stuff”, which you seemed to be objecting to.