It’s darkly amusing just how many gun owners have convinced themselves they are the responsible ones that the statistics don’t apply to right up until their deaths.
I don’t think it’s a meaningful distinction. Guns increase your risk of injury and death no matter who you are.
I think it’s not a well defined term but to me when people say it they seem to be describing a person who can own a gun without increasing their own odds of injury or death and to me that’s not a thing. The overwhelming majority of gun owners will not die from homicide or suicide, but that doesn’t mean their odds aren’t increased.
Yes, most things in life have a risk/reward structure to them. Having a pool definitely makes you or someone you love more likely to die, but pools are fun to have.
It’s definitely possible as shown by all the other countries who have done so (or at least massively reduced their prevalence). I think people would say we lack the political will to do it and that’s currently true, but also no reason to give up.
But it is able to be meaningfully defined by things like registration requirements, background checks, required safety training, safe storage laws, taxes, insurances, etc. The same tactics we use to legislate out the stupid on the other things that have already been brought up. All things that gun control advocates (and majority of the polled population) favor.
I mean, anything is technically possible. It's just not likely. And I disagree that it's just political will preventing it happening here. There is also a numbers/scale issue as well. I think it's a fairly safe statement to make to say that "Guns will never be prohibited/confiscated in any meaningful way" again in this country. The '94 assault weapons ban is as far as we will ever see, and I doubt that anything will ever come close to that again.
I agree all those things help. They do not come even remotely close to identifying all or anywhere even close to all of the people who are going to be ‘idiots’.
I’ve always been very clear that I do not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good and would welcome any and all additional restrictions on guns, even if they don’t go as far as I would like.
Thought I posted this last night after your last post to me but apparently didn’t
If you fully understand the math that means you understand you're doing something for the sake of self defense that makes you more likely to die. lol. That's even worse! Like I said, I fully understand your position here, it's just stupid. You have every right to do dumb things if it makes you happy and emotionally validated!
To that end, I will add this.
As I have suggested to you over and over, directing your efforts to ban guns is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. The major problem with guns and why the subject is a major political issue I because they are used by people who feel they are owed some form of respect they are not getting and are bent on causing society as much pain as they can to get even. Their goal is to assert self importance via the acquisition of the only kind of attention they feel capable of achieving, mass negative attention via the media. They are determined to tell the world they exist and the reason for this is because they have been made to feel they are nothing, that they do not exist.
This is the risk I look at. Do I want to exchange the risk of being killed with my own gun or me killing someone with it over the fear that something might happen where a loved one or an innocent might die that I might have saved because I own a gun. I can live with the idea I could accidentally kill myself with my own gun or even everyone around me. What I don’t want ever to live with is the murder of a loved one or an innocent I might have saved by means of the fact I own a gun.
That's a lot to live with. Why would you?
How likely is this to happen, Moonie? It seems you live in unreasoning fear, just like conservatives with their big giant amygdalas, courtesy of your fearful ego. Don't you preach transcending this? If you see a gun in your mirror, throw it away.
Wow - you want to make it more likely for your loved ones to die so that you don't feel as bad about it if they do.
No, that is not what I said nor is it really implied in what I said. In no case would I ever not feel grief at the loss of a loved one. What I said was that I rate the chances of something bad happening via my own guns to them based on my own situation, while above the risk an unarmed person takes with the people around them, it is still so sufficiently unlikely that I choose instead to live with the intention to be able to prevent the insanity of violence in others from succeeding with me and mine if I can. In either case I judge the likeliness of either of these things coming to pass as not worth much concern. On the one hand I give up some safety. On the other I forfeit an ancient genetic imperative and abandon all notions of personal responsibility I have to prevent injustice where I can. I believe in the right of self defense and the maintenance of that right by society as an extension as a proper way to address the fact that we have created a world full of people bent on destruction because they were conditioned to hate themselves. In my view, compassion extends right up to the point where there is an obvious intent to kill you in gratitude for your consideration. Not to respond to the violence of others perpetuates it occurrence.
Fear is a survival mechanism, an evolutionary adaption to cause fight and filght instantaneously. With the evolution of consciousness and forethought, the capacity to size up a situation and predict the outcome, a capacity for rational analysis was born. Now we could decide if jumping would take us out of the frying pan into the fire, that we might be in the grip of halunation, the imagining of fears that simly are not real.
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