this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
297 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43897 readers
1045 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fair enough, though a person with a gun is much more likely to shoot me than a person without a gun. Any measure to reduce the amount of people in my vicinity carrying guns has my full support. If 1/1000 (number pulled out of my ass obviously) gun owners end up shooing someone, and you reduce the amount of people around me carrying guns from 1000.to 10, you've just dramatically increased my statistical probability of living a full life.
I actually looked and couldn't find the murder rate in the population of gun owners with basic googling but the actual number doesn't matter when it's being compared to 0.
According to a quick Google search, 3 in 10 American adults say that they currently own a firearm; that's around 82,000,000 gun owners in the US. Last time I checked, there were around 45,000 annual gun deaths in the US, of which just under 2/3 were suicide. That leaves somewhere around 18,000 deaths that are homicides of some form (which also includes legal self-defense). So it's far, far less than 1/1000 gun owners that are going to shoot someone (other than intentionally shooting themselves, and IMO that's a different issue entirely).
But, sure, if in your opinion that only correct number of gun deaths is 0, then yes, removing guns and collectively forgetting how to make them is the only solution. Just like if your opinion is that the only correct number of traffic deaths is zero, then the only reasonable solution is the completely elimination of all means of transportation other than feet.
You've done your division twice there, it seems. The ~45000 is the number after you take away the suicides.. So pretty much 1/2000, so I guess I was pretty close.
Of course the only correct number of gun deaths among civilians is 0, do you disagree with that? As for your comparison to vehicular deaths, let's remember the context here. The question is whether or not I feel safer in a place that doesn't allow guns or one that does. So you should really be asking if I think it's better to walk on the sidewalk or in the road shared with cars. Of course I might still get hit by a car on the sidewalk, but where would you feel safer?
I absolutely do disagree, yes. If my life or safety is being threatened by someone, then I absolutely have the right to use any level of force necessary to defend myself, up to and including lethal force.
BTW, the way that you state that question is a form of manipulation. It's a common tactic used in high-pressure sales.
Ok, I don't agree, it should be up to and including the amount of force necessary to incapacitate whoever is threatening your life. Stun gun and handcuffs yes, handgun no.
Btw the way you drew a false comparison between my argument and road safety is called false equivalence and is an informal fallacy, while we're discussing each other's debating techniques rather than addressing the points made.
First: Stun guns are ineffective. I've used one on myself; it tickles. The basic principle of a stun gun is pain compliance, and if the person you're using it on has a high pain threshold, they're utterly ineffective A taser has, at best, two shots. Thick clothing, bad contact, or simply missing means you're SOL. It's pretty easy to find video of cops trying to taze someone, and failing. Pepper spray works--depending on the brand--but it very dependent on things like wind speed and direction, and how old your canister is. ...And you're pretty likely to end up pepper spraying yourself if you don't practice with inert canisters.
Guns just work. Period.
And no, it's not a false equivalence. Cars have utility value, as do firearms. Cars can be used legally, and they can be used illegally, as can firearms. There are millions of cars that are used legally and safely every day, much like firearms. It's not a precise parallel, but it's sufficiently close for the purposes of this argument.
Guns also mostly end up harming the owner, but with a side effect of death, unlike the stun gun. Immediate Google results shows stun guns to be about 90% effective, which I'll take over your anecdote.
It's a false equivalence in this context which you keep ignoring. The question is about a place that explicitly doesn't allow guns. Again, to make the equivalence work you have to compare me walking on a road that doesn't allow cars to me walking on one that does, and obviously I feel safer on the one that doesn't, even if someone can break the rules and bring a car.
Google is 100% wrong. A Taser--not a stun gun--shoots barbed darts that are connected to the handset by thin wires. When you have good contact--that is, they aren't stuck in clothing instead of piercing the skin, and they're far enough apart--they're going to create strong muscle spasms, like a whole-body TENS unit. (Which, BTW, isn't that painful either, IMO, but you do lose a degree of voluntary movement. ) A stun gun works only when it's on contact with bare skin, and only works through pain-compliance. E.g., it "hurts", and the idea is that a person will want the pain to stop. Except that they don't really hurt.
This is a Taser.
This is a stun gun.
Ask any person that actually does serious self-defense training for high-risk situations, and they're going to say the same thing; you can not rely on a stun gun. A Taser will work, but you have exactly two shots, and getting both darts to make solid contact can be very iffy. Oh, and they only work as long as you keep your finger on the trigger; as soon as you let it go, the assailant is back in business. Tasers work in law enforcement because they usually work in teams and groups rather than singly.
they're more likely to have the probability of shooting you in an extremely bad encounter. If you have an encounter that bad with someone, you're going to get fucked up one way or another, and it's probably you who caused the problem, since you'd be the common denominator here. Otherwise it's basically just up to random statistics or not as to whether you get gun violenced.
Statistically, speaking, a person with a gun is more capable of shooting you than someone without a gun. I would be willing to be the number of gun owners that have shot a person is probably less than 0.01%
also this isn't accurate since it would mostly matter on who shoots you, rather than a gun owner shooting you. Most of the gun violence in the US is done via illegal or unregistered guns. I.E. not legal license carrying gun owners.
I know the rough per capita numbers per 100,000 people iirc, is about 5-30 varying per state obviously. But states like NYC and cali have some of the lowest, with random buttfuck nowhere land no gun law states having upwards of 30. To be clear, this is a 0.0003% chance at the highest level. Most of which is probably going to be avoided by simply engaging in basic self preservation behaviors. Since most gun violence isn't just random acts of violence.
Look are you really trying to argue that the amount of people with guns in my vicinity is irrelevant to my chances of getting shot?
between legal gun owners, and the statistical chunk of gun violence, yes it does matter.
If you're in a place where legal gun owners are, and where illegal gun owners are unlikely to be (or at least unlikely to cause problems in) statistically yes, you would expect that to make a difference.
Just to be clear, walking into a room that has a gun in it doesn't magically make you more likely to get shot. Walking into a room with a person whose armed doesn't make them more likely to shoot you or for you to get shot, it increases the possibility that you could be shot by virtue of there being a gun now, but that's irrelevant to actually getting shot yes.
You realize we have knives in kitchens right? Does walking into a kitchen automatically increase the chances of you getting stabbed?
it's hard to explain this, because you're essentially operating a rokos basilisk premise here. The very concept of a gun doesn't increase the chances of you getting shot, the gun being nearer to you than it previously was doesn't increase that chance. The gun being next to you or on you doesn't change this. The hands of the person it's in may change it, but that's still a third party variable so we can't really account for that one here. Even if the gun is pointed at you, it doesn't arguably increase the chances that you can get shot, it might be unloaded for all you know. If someone who is aggressing you, or who you are aggressing on is pointing a gun at you, yes that would probably drastically increase the chances of you getting shot.
If you are aggressing someone who owns a gun, or they are aggressing you, it may increase the chances of them pulling the gun on you. But that doesn't necessarily increase the chance of you getting shot.
to be clear here, the only real situation in which you are more likely to be shot, is in which someone is pointing a gun at you, and telling you that they are going to shoot you. Every other situation is going to be several orders of magnitude less significant, and effectively irrelevant here.
None of what you just said is true. Starting here
That's nonsense, obviously there's an increased probability with strict causation between being around guns and getting shot.
You seem to be pretending that "good guys with guns deter bad guys with guns". I invite you to provide any source that backs this up. This is an American myth, and from outside it's obvious that the presence of "good guys" with guns just make the criminal elements more likely to arm themselves. It also is increasingly obvious that a very large portion of the self proclaimed good guys are in fact also bad people just itching for an excuse.
i didn't line up the specifics very well in most of those examples so i'm curious to see how.
let's say i lock you in a room alone, in that room is a hidden compartment under the floor, and in the floor, is a gun. (may or may not be loaded, or have ammunition) i never informed you of this compartment, and that gun. It would be silly to argue that you're more likely to be shot. The only person that could shoot you is yourself, and you would need to know about the gun first.
Obviously this is an extremely uncharitable take on this, so we'll modify it a bit, same room, same scenario, no secret compartment, there is a table in the middle of the room, and there is a gun on it (may or may not be loaded) is simply being in that room, going to make it more likely for you to get shot?
And like you said, that's strict causation. If we're making the argument that being a room with a gun is more dangerous than not, being in a kitchen is more dangerous than not, even if you're not doing anything.
i'm not, you're just making that up. Statistically, the primary causer of gun violence is criminals and people who own illegal guns (now idk if these stats are trustworthy to begin with, so i'll give you that one) and on top of this, most gun violence is targeted, very very few cases of gun violence are just random acts of violence. The average legal gun owning individual, who conceal carries, is not going to be more likely to do any of these things.
If i wanted to say that good guys with guns were going to do something, i would've said that. I don't believe in that because it's fucking stupid, but people also seem to not be capable of understanding that simply owning a gun doesn't mean you shoot people for fun either.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted the quote about places with legal gun owners having less illegal gun owners. How else should I have interpreted it?
You pulled a statistic, please provide a source for it.
Yes, a person entering an empty room with a gun on the table is absolutely statistically in danger of mishandling the gun and harming themselves. The actual meta study referenced here is behind a paywall but people do not behave well when put in a room alone with a dangerous thing. As far as I can tell no one has replicated the experiment with an actual gun, though I'd love to see that. Now I don't want to strawman too much here but you might be tempted to say that the problem isn't the gun but the combination of human stupidity and guns. That's generally what makes dangerous things dangerous, and isn't the gotcha people on the gun side often think it is. In a world with only guns and no humans there's no gun violence, hooray.
I'll let you have the final word here if you wish, I'm pretty done with this discussion. I'll just reiterate one last time that this is all you trying to convince me that I should not be feeling more safe in a place that doesn't allow guns and I think that's pretty fucked.
ok so gun ownership is kind of complicated from a statistics point of view, since we're mostly concerned with gun violence here it's important to remember that the vast majority of legal gun owners don't generally wish to become criminals, compared to illegal gun owners, who may not wish to become criminals, but are more likely to become criminals (for various reasons) even these people are less likely to engage in random acts of gun violence. The most likely scenario in which you get gun violenced is going to be a robbery/mugging or something along these lines, where you were probably already fucked anyway. Gun or not.
as for statistics:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ pew article, these are generally good https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9388351/ this one includes per capita rates, which is what i was previously mentioning
as for illegal gun crimes:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/10/1153977949/major-takeaways-from-the-atf-gun-violence-report https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/12/john-faso/do-illegal-gun-owners-commit-most-gun-crime-rep-fa/ most notable for this quote "Congress since the 1990s has had an effective ban on federal taxpayer money being spent on research into gun violence as a public health issue and gun control advocacy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But other government agencies are free to collect data on guns and gun crime."
anyway, moving away from this, i would also like to make the point that the US simply having more guns doesn't make it more dangerous by default in terms of gun violence.
even if this is statistically true, which i will grant in this specific wording, although this is a really specific situation, and a really unusual situation. This is true of everything ever. People have gasoline in their garage, aggressive chemicals, they have similarly spooky chemicals indoors, cleaning agents, bleach, etc... Even just a simple thing like a flight of stairs can be incredibly dangerous. I don't exactly see people doing much to increase the safety of things like power tools for example, this would be the next biggest, if not the biggest cause of accidental injury in this case.
my biggest problem with this argument is that guns are randomly singled out, even though gun owners are vastly more likely to be well trained, and very responsible with their guns, as opposed to some dude who owns a circular saw. Or literally every kitchen everywhere that has at least one knife in it somewhere. We don't exactly teach people responsible knife ownership and handling the second they buy knives.
Ultimately this just devolves into a situation where you essentially argue for putting people in a padded rubber room wearing a strait jacket to minimize potential self harm. In the above case you mentioned "it increases the chances for mishandling a gun" that may be true, if you handle it. You don't have to handle it though, you can leave it there, and in my example, we don't know if it's loaded or has ammunition at all. The most likely injury to be gained there is pinching your finger in the slide or something.
There is also an ethical/moral implication in regulating what people can and cannot do, we already tried eugenics, nobody liked it. (an extreme example to be fair) Even if banning guns prevents less accidental harm, i'm not really sure that's something we should investigate.
i think it's stupid rhetoric, as with most things on the right. But ultimately, someone mishandling a gun and injuring themselves, is something that they did to themselves. That is neither morally good, or bad, it's simply neutral. Someone mishandling a gun and injuring someone else is bad, but you could probably sue and win that case. I would also propose you probably shouldn't hang around, or tolerate bad gun owners either, but what do i know. Someone intentionally using a gun to hurt someone else is already bad, and that was probably inevitable in some capacity anyway.
fair enough, ultimately i think you simply have an unfounded fear about guns, you could very easily have the same fear about knives, power tools, dangerous chemicals, heavy objects, people who are simply physically larger than you, all of these things vastly more common than owning a gun, let alone gun violence. As i've already stated, statistically, nothing supports this claim, deductively i see no reason why it should matter to you unless you're like shinzo abe or something. To me this rings to be about equivalent to my fear of spiders. Except i realize that it's irrational and not based in reality.
I suppose in closing i mostly want to ask you one question, and that question is why. Are you a generally/highly paranoid person? Are you concerned about every potential event? Or is this simply a fear of guns explicitly, and if it's the latter, i want you think about why it's explicitly just guns that scare you, as opposed to someone throwing acid into your face for example.
Fear by definition is irrational, it is not a mechanism by which you can rationalize a situation it's a mechanism that drives you to remove yourself from potentially dangerous situations as a method of self preservation, that's it.