You do in plain fact and repeatedly, after repeated correction, continue to assert that you have a 1% chance of dying by gun, and that the possession of guns by other people is to blame. I quoted you asserting that.
Yes. And what does that have to do with suicide? Since roughly half of gun deaths are suicides, the average American's probability that the cause of his own death will be a gun
in his own hand is 0.5%. And the average American's probability that the cause of his own death will be a gun
in someone else's hand is also 0.5%.
Obviously those of us who do not have guns are far less likely to die by gun suicide, although the probability is not zero since many gun owners are not careful about storage so their guns could be purloined. One only need to read the obituaries of children who find Daddy's gun in a supposedly secure place and shoot themselves or each other to make that point.
I'm not sure how you came to your bizarre conclusion, but I can't imagine how you could have misinterpreted either my arguments or my data to imply that I believe the proliferation of guns in
other people's homes is a major factor in my risk of suicide. I write for a living and you're the first person who was ever able to twist my words into such a ridiculous statement. The mere assertion that "the possession of guns by other people is to blame" for my risk of suicide is so preposterously illogical
in any context that I'm baffled as to how you came up with it.
Is this the logic of the gun lobby? That sure explains a lot!
Your abuse of statistics, as in that one typical example, is at the level of climate denialists, racial supremicists, intelligent design proponents, and so forth.
Except that my alleged abuse of statistics is a figment of your own dyslexia.
Your actual odds of dying by gun are probably (unless you have a clandestine drug or sex problem) around the level of dying by earthquake, lightning strike, food poisoning, falling, etc.
No. Lightning kills roughly 50 Americans every year. In many years earthquakes kill no one, and even in a bad year they barely match lightning. Falls in the home, especially by people of my age in the bathtub, take a small three-digit toll and far outnumber all other kinds of falls put together. I haven't seen the stats on food poisoning, but if I'll be surprised if it's more than a small four-digit number.
Meanwhile guns kill
thirty thousand Americans yearly. It would take a statistician with Soviet training to make that figure seem comparable to all of these other deaths
combined.
Surgical errors, hospital-borne infections, incorrect prescriptions, okay, now you're up into the big numbers. And these numbers are indeed splashed in the headlines with some regularity so we all know the risks of being admitted to a hospital. Simply getting doctors to stop wearing neckties, many of which are literally
never cleaned despite routinely being close to some astoundingly contagious patients, is a crusade right now.
They are far below your odds of dying in a car crash . . . .
The numbers are: road accidents 30,000; guns 30,000. (These are well-rounded numbers and that 1:1 ratio may be off by as much as ten percent. Woo-hoo.) I would very much love to hear the obfuscations you plan on citing to deny this rather straightforward and well-publicized statistic.
. . . . even after you lowered your crash death odds by raising other people's with your heavy and unstable and visibility curbing SUV.
My Mercedes-Benz SUV is more stable than your grasp of mathematics.
Apparently you think your neighbor's population averaged odds of suicide by gun are appropriate matters for State intervention - even Constitutional amendment to allow preemptive ("precrime"?) confiscation of his firearms from his home . . . .
Nowhere have I offered specific suggestions for curbing gun violence. Well except my oft-repeated wish that we could simply ship all the gun lovers off to their own planet where they could happily shoot each other all day every day until there was only one left who therefore could not reproduce.
I understand the moral, constitutional and practical issues.
. . . . while your boosting of that neighbor's odds of being killed by your car is nobody's business but your own.
Again, all together now, repeat after me: COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS. Motor vehicles have a useful purpose, and in fact it's unlikely that modern Western industrial civilization could survive without them. It would be nice if we could reduce the risk of fatal road accidents... and by golly we have been doing just that for about 3/4 of a century, since rear-view mirrors and safety glass became standard equipment. The per-mile death rate has been dropping for quite some time and within the past few years even the absolute numbers have been falling.
So what have guns got to offer on the "benefit" side of the cost-benefit analysis?
Anybody? I'm waiting.
As I said, they make little men feel bigger. Whoopee. Try paying attention in your high school classes so you can get a better job or maybe even go to college.
They also allow people to bypass the supermarkets and kill their own food. I'd be a lot more excited about that if they were shooting wild boar, Canada geese and deer, three of the most intractable vectors in our race to protect our environment. Unfortunately deer and geese have the perfect protection: they live in the suburbs where even the most macho gun nuts don't go shooting.
And as I've pointed out before, the twisted logic of the National Rifle Assholes has kiboshed the only major safety improvement in guns in the last couple of centuries: electronics that prevent it being fired by anyone but the owner.
I'd really like to hear someone on the other side of this issue try to explain this utter lunacy! This would completely eliminate the possibility of a child finding a supposedly "locked up" gun and shooting himself or his baby sister. What is it about guns that make the gun lunatics not only willing, but
determined to
accept this risk???