On 8 October 2013 12:57, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 10/7/2013 4:14 PM, LizR wrote: > > Yes of course it's mostly handguns, just as most deaths aren't due to > mass shootings. Handguns are more common (cheaper, and easier to conceal if > you intend to commit a crime). Firearms cause around 30,000 deaths/year in > the US, > > > Of which 2/3 were suicides. I don't think the government has a right to > prevent suicides. >
Good point, I didn't realise that. I agree with you there, although I would be interested to know how the suicide rate compares to countries with less easily available (or certain) methods. Perhaps some suicides wouldn't have carried it through without it being so easy, and would have gone on to overcome their suicidal depression and live happy and fulfilling lives (I managed it. I wonder how I would have fared if there had been a firearm handy...) apparently (plus about 70,000 injuries) - about the same number as car accidents - yet the budget for research into preventing gun deaths is, guess what, only one 20th of the budget for preventing car accidents. That would depend a lot on the accounting. You could say that all police > budgets are for preventing gun deaths due to homicide. And exactly what > would you expect such research to do; conclude that guns that wouldn't fire > would prevent gun deaths. It's kinda the point of guns that they can kill > things. With cars it's an accident. And car accidents kill six times as > many people as guns, 18 times as many if you discount suicides. > > I guess this Wintemute guy in New Scientist got his stats wrong, then. (He's some sort of researcher into this field, too, so a surprising mistake.) He placed the numbers at about equal. Yes, why guns kill people is a no-brainer, which is why most countries don't allow them to be available to everyone in apparently unlimited quantities. But apparently the US doesn't agree with that, and requires people to do research on the subject (and then makes publishing their results illegal, or so I'm told). It's almost as though there's a conspiracy ... oh, wait, there is! Apparently there are 315 million people living in the US, who between them own 300 million guns, and 260 million cars. And about two billion pairs of shoes and 250 million TV sets. So what? Is > there some prescribed, right number for these things? > That's a strange comment. Given that the topic under discussion is guns in the US, and a comparison was made with cars, it seems reasonable to fill in a few extra pieces of gun and car related background information. And obviously these both relate to the population - a million guns in a population of 100,000 would seem more significant than if the population was 1 billion - don't you think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
