Strange take. In 40+ years, I've never needed a gun to defend myself. Nor do I even _know anyone_ that needed to use a gun to lawfully defend themselves.
So why should we all have something that A) the lawful uses of such are exceedingly rare, and B) ends up involved in a lot of unlawful or unintentional killings.
To begin with you're creating a premise that the only reason gun legality can be justified is self defense, particularly against other people.
I do not accept this premise. There are many other premises for gun legality.
That said, when I was very young my grandfather had to shoot a number of stray dogs out his car window while driving through a rough pasture because they'd killed a couple calves and were attacking his cows. Some tried to bite the vehicles tires after the first shots. Gun used was a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle. I didn't witness, but saw pictures, possibly originally taken for insurance purposes.
He was not, under a very strict definition, defending himself. But it still seems very unproblematic to me.
In many ways being adult enough to vote is synonymous with being adult enough to own a gun safely: the ballot box is as capable as any gun of unleashing horrors on the world.
> you're creating a premise that the only reason gun legality can be justified is self defense
What other premise is there, when we're talking about a device that is designed to seriously injure and kill others? It's either a defensive weapon, or, worse, an offensive one.
I think hunting is a totally legitimate use for a gun. I think your grandfather's case is as well, though there certainly are other solutions to his problem, if more difficult and less efficient ones.
Sure, you might want a gun as a collector, or because you enjoy shooting one at a gun range. But I'm not convinced these "recreational" reasons are good justifications for allowing general ownership of a device designed for its lethality.
You hunt? Fine; get a license for that, and you can own guns made for hunting. You need to a weapon as a part of your job (like your grandfather, perhaps)? Fine; same deal: be licensed and restricted to types of guns appropriate for your job. A gun for fun? No, not fine (let the properly-licensed gun range own and store guns, and you can go and shoot them for fun). A gun for self-defense? I don't think it's clear that use outweighs the downsides of having a heavily-armed populace.
I think the thing that gets me the most is that you can walk into a gun store without having seen our touched a gun in your life, and walk out with a gun (modulo whatever waiting period your locality might require). No training needed, no license needed. Fork over some cash, and here's your deadly projectile weapon and as much ammunition as you want. That's irresponsible.
> " A gun for fun? No, not fine (let the properly-licensed gun range own and store guns, and you can go and shoot them for fun)."
Looking at some other comments, and it crossed my mind that this perspective is very urban-centric. If you live in the country, it's pretty safe and cheap to shoot some cans with a .22, but pretty expensive in time (and maybe money) to travel to a range. And it's that way in a way that makes socioeconomic class way more centric to shooting - more like a racket club.
At the same time, arguably concentrating all the shooters in one place might make things less safe: if you do something stupid on your own property with no-one around, there's nobody to get hurt. But if the person next to you at the range is a moron and does something idiotic like shoot at 90 degrees to the firing line trying to check if a round is chambered with their finger on the trigger, doing it at a range is way less safe than doing it in the middle of nowhere.
Now you might argue that people who've been trained won't do stupid things like that, but despite drivers being licensed I still see a lot of stupid on the road and don't really believe that it'd be any different with guns.
I mean "the thing that gets you the most" is pretty much true for literally almost anything. You can go to a store and pick up an TIG welder or a chainsaw, or all kinds of other things no problem, no question, that arguably require much more in the way of practice and training than a firearm.
That said, I don't really get what you think licenses and such accomplish. A gun is 19th century tech that you make in a garage. Anybody who really wants one can make one, all the registration and licensing is mostly a burden on people who are mostly harmless. And it's very post-facto/pre-cog-ish.
I think you're paraphrasing wrong. Preventing the additional loss of thousands of dollars of that year's income and livelihood (on top of the calves that were lost) with a gun is more accurate. And additional loss would have been impactful.
Like another commenter said, this usecase would be covered under a hunting/farming license in most countries. It is absolutely not necessary to have an indiscriminate personal right to carry in cities.
Even in a city I don't really think someone would sit and wait for animal control while a pack of strays attack a pet or try to break into a chicken coop (or something else similar) rather than try to save their animal(s) somehow.
(Though in a city I imagine that means things like throwing rocks or using a shovel.)
In most US counties animal control responds late or not at all. Obviously you can't seriously expect farmers to just wait around while feral dogs kill their livestock.
The cost of gun education in public education would be pretty higher than simply increasing funding to animal control in order to improve response times.
Farms are large and spread out. It could take animal control 15 minutes just to drive from one end of your farm to where you are, let alone from wherever their office is.
The rural US is very spread out and large, and often slow to travel over washed out dirt roads or worse. If you wanted 5 or 10 minute response time across the continental US you'd have to hire and equip 3 or 4 people per every 5 or 10 miles across the whole US, people who'd 95%+ of their time doing nothing.
I can't see how there's any way gun education in public high schools or similar wouldn't be drastically cheaper. Not that I think they're options that should be viewed as policy substitutes or alternatives.
You have the same problem with fire fighters. If you want a quick response time you need to have trained people that can be deployed quickly in the case of a fire.
The solution is neither to have full time employed 3-4 people every 5 miles, nor to accept multiple hours of response time for someone to drive all the way from the nearest station. Some might think air travel solves it but even that would generally too slow when minutes can be the difference between a managed fire and an out of control fire. Instead what we have is people who get paid to be stand-by and are positioned close enough that if they get a call they will deploy and be at the area within reasonable time, but who otherwise have an regular job like being a farmer. It not optimal but it is distinctly faster compared to the alternative.
This is actually the model used for animal control in rural areas. The person being hired is generally a local hunter (ie, many who are farmers themselves) who gotten some training and hopefully get some compensation when there is call. If a car hits an animal and you need someone to track the wounded animal down, it would most likely be a local hunter.
I am honestly a bit surprised by the attitude in this thread and how this model is not more well known.
So I guess you don't have fire extinguishers in your house, car or place of work, only buy car liability insurance because it's the law, or home insurance because it's required by your mortgage holder? No insurance for your personal property?
I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster.
> So I guess you don't have fire extinguishers in your house, car or place of work, only buy car liability insurance because it's the law, or home insurance because it's required by your mortgage holder? No insurance for your personal property?
GP said he didn't know anybody who needed to use a gun.
- My wife has used a fire extinguisher
- I have been reimbursed by car insurance
- I have several friends who have been reimbursed by homeowners and renters insurance.
I think there's going to be two major sources of differing experiences on this:
1. Where you live. If you live in the suburbs and drive everywhere, there are just very few opportunities for you to get "attacked on the street" as you are hardly ever walking down the street.
2. Disagreement on what situations necessitate a gun. I know a lot of people who think that e.g. robbery is insufficient reason to defend yourself with deadly force.
Similarly I've seen people astonished that someone might choose to defend themselves from an unarmed man with a gun, even when that man is larger and is not allowing them to leave.
Well, there was one friend of mine who I convinced to keep a fire extinguisher in her car, and a week later on her commute she was able to hand it to man who then saved his car from total destruction by engine fire.
But I too also know more people who've been threatened with lethal force on the streets than have had reason to use fire extinguishers. Doesn't deter me from keeping a big fire extinguisher wherever I live.
I've never had a fire in my home, but I have been attacked in the street. If I had been armed, I expect it would have gone a lot worse for me than it did. I might not be alive to write this post had I had a gun on me then.
I think it's also important to highlight like you did that guns don't solve all problems and that with them you can end up in an even worse situation. Just like some people get killed by seatbelts in a way.
Considering the huge backlash against the vaccine due to the negative effects, I would argue most people aren't capable of doing a cost/benefit analysis and understand that.
That happened on Monday. Today is Thursday. Also, it wasn’t a “murder” (I’ll take a killing, but the victim did not die.)
EDIT: I can’t help be curious about what’s in the mind of someone who is so blatantly dishonest. Right at the top it says “Published 2 days ago”, and in the second paragraph it says “Monday”. Is the idea that you assume no one will actually take a look at the link?
So your point is that it is not that bad because it really only happen once every couple days? I mean, let's say it happens once a month or once a year. Is it worth it? Are guns preventing more deaths than they are causing?
When the marginal utility gained from investing somewhere else is better, of course.
You're getting all mixed up between normative ("should") claims, and descriptive ("is") claims. Is it good that people die by getting tangled in their bedsheets? No. Is it good that a toddler occasionally accidentally shoot someone? No. Should we spend time on either problem? No.
Yes, the original post was not trying to precisely inform the frequency, just that it's not a once in a generation occurrence, but rather something that happens regularly. By trying to refute the frequency, you're completely missing the argument. That's what me and other people are saying.
In order to have a rational and productive discussion about policy one needs to have some kind of handle on reality, as well as a minimum of truthfulness and respect for the people you’re talking to.
Overstating the incidence of an event by a factor of 20 means you don’t have a handle on reality. Deliberately lying about news events means you’re not truthful. Putting words in people’s mouths and imparting inhumane motivations to them means you lack respect. All of these things happened in just this handful of comments, and, no, I don‘t think I’m missing anything at all.
The phrase "everyday occurrence" does not mean that something literally happens every day, it means that it happens commonly enough that it's not broadly notable.
You derailed this comment thread by quibbling over the specific frequency of these tragic events, rather than focussing on the point - which was that these accidental killings do indeed happen frequently - perhaps more frequently than you realised.
Factor of 20? Who's exaggerating now? If the linked incident happened on Monday, we could perhaps extrapolate that this happens perhaps once every four days, so that's a factor of four.
Seriously, though, maybe this is just a local colloquialism or language barrier thing, but to me, the phrase "everyday occurrence" doesn't mean "something that literally happens every day", it means "something that is common and happens often".
To be fair, cars are probably in their way out too. Their are indeed inefficient and dangerous tools. But yeah, being able to connect cities, people with the best society can offer is a benefit much greater than people using guns to threat one another.
I think it's a lot easier to make a non-destructive positive case for cars, despite the number of people killed in car crashes every day, than it is to make the case for guns, which are devices specifically designed to injure and kill.
Indeed. Given that a toddler isn't capable of "murder," we're talking accidents. Of which there were 486 lethal ones in the US in 2019, the last year for which the CDC has collated the data. Pretty sure there were more than 121 lethal accidents caused by people older than toddlers.
The actual rate of gun deaths caused a toddler (age <= 3) firing a gun was 15 for 2015, in 13 of which the toddler shot himself.¹ True, “murder” is not the right term, but I wasn’t quibbling about that. I’m not sure “accident” is the right term, either, as in every case an adult committed a horrible crime in allowing the child access to the loaded weapon.
If there were 486 toddler gun deaths, then on average, those occurred 1.33 times per day. The frequency of gun-related toddler deaths is literally "every day".
No one said anything like there being “486 toddler gun deaths”. Much less that many deaths caused by a toddler firing a gun, which was the original subject.
The odds of a fire in my kitchen, someone dinging my car, and even a tree falling on my home in a storm are all much higher than the odds of me needing to fire a bullet at another human being. In fact something similar to all three of those things have happened to me already at one point or another. On the other hand I've never needed or even heard of anyone who has needed to use a gun. What's wrong with a baseball bat for self defense? I have one in my closet and never had to draw it, but due to its lower lethality if I had to I would have zero qualms about taking a full swing and I think anyone on the receiving end would realize the same pretty quickly.
If they have a handgun chances are I'm dead before I can draw my own and train one on them anyway. I'm not Clint Eastwood and this isn't a hollywood western. Whoever has the drop wins and by definition that's the intruder since I'm not going to spend every second of my life with a gun in my hand.
Projecting your claimed inadequacies, which I don't believe for a minute especially before you moved the goalposts from home defense ("I have [a baseball bat] in my closet") to a Spaghetti Western, says nothing about actual gun owners.
By that logic, we should also have grenades, missiles, and perhaps a tactical nuclear weapon at home, just in case. Probably won't need them, but who knows.
> I've owned guns for self protection in the same 40+ years and have never needed them for self-protection, but I also haven't needed any of the other above forms of insurance except the last which came in really handy when my apartment was hit by a natural disaster.
So what you're saying is that you don't need your guns, but the insurance did come in handy after all. Got it. I feel like you're making the parent's point for them.
Your "logic" is missing the minor detail of required precognition. I didn't start buying personal property ("renters") insurance in the 1980s because I knew I'd need it decades later.
1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it.
2. We don’t nuke each other all the time either. But “God made man and Colt made ‘em equal”—the gun is an equalizer.
I think people in America think we’re some united hegemony, believing all the same thing. No. We don’t. We all have different views and are pursuing happiness differently. Sometimes this pursuit leads to injury of someone else’s pursuit of happiness. Guns, along with education, give people the means of preventing and give meaningful deterrence to those who would disrupt their rightful pursuit of happiness.
Finally, regarding unintentional killings: that’s why I said education on guns in necessary. Regarding unlawfulness: you must have your head in the sand to think a criminal isn’t already committed to breaking the law.
> 1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple.
I don't know; roller-delayed blowback took me a long time to wrap my head around.
If you're talking the feeding mechanism, the FN P90 has something similar (though the ammunition is stored longitudinally rather than vertically).
[edit]
Oh wait, I see now it's the burst-fire mode, where it doesn't buffer until after the 3rd round has been fired. I remember seeing that a while back; it is crazy.
1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it.
Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
As much as people like us are horrified by how little education so many people get about their guns, centuries of ergonomic improvements would seem to allow a tremendous number of them to use them safely and effectively in high stress self-defense situations.
> > Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it.
> Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
That is FAR more information than most people have. Even the basic rules of gun safety - never point a gun at something you aren't willing to shoot, treat every firearm as if it's loaded, and keep your booger hook off the bang switch (and outside of the trigger guard entirely) until you're ready to fire - are more than most people know. "How to clear the gun or check the safety" might as well be rocket science.
I know a lot of people like to look down on their fellow Americans to the extent they even consider them to be so, but the hardest statistics we have on your concern is fatal gun accidents per year, and they've gone down from 800 to 500, actually 486 for 2019 from the CDC's most recent statistics, as the population has increased by 50%, the number of gun owners has massively increased and the number of guns owned by them has as much as doubled.
The "massive increase" is hard to get numbers for due to our culture war, but no one sane doubts it, and there's obvious reasons for it and the last fact which is on more solid ground, the nationwide sweep of "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes and then add the "troubles" of the 21st Century starting with 9/11. And how many states went "Constitution Carry," we don't need no stinking licences this year? We're up to 21 total per Wikipedia.
Another question is how many fatal gun accidents were intentional suicides that the medical examiner, for whatever reason, didn't want to enter as such.
I know of one which was blatant second degree murder, but the perp was a "friend" visiting with a few others to the victim's home, all around 14 years old. Taking a gun on its way to the safe you found in a part of the house no one was supposed to be in, pointing it at your "friend's" head and pulling the trigger was ruled an unfortunate "accident."
See a bunch that just so happened to occur while the gun was "being cleaned," you can even begin that without emptying the chamber so you can work on the barrel.
Surprisingly, no. The number of misses at very close range in high-stress situations is very high. Hit rates for cops are in the 25% - 50% range, and that's with training.
It's easy enough to get a gun to fire. Hitting the right target requires practice.
I know NYPD had guns with really heavy triggers, far past anything reasonable. Lighter triggers (not really light, standard) and red dot optics would probably help a lot.
The vast majority of cops don't train very much, and requalification is often minimally difficult. Overall the civilian population is probably better trained.
This is also biased by big cities that have extinguished their gun culture, NYC in particular. That has grave consequences, shall I say.
I mean, an evergreen category of unintentional discharges is people pulling the magazine, and then accidentally firing the chambered round because they thought the gun was empty.
Notoriously, Glock pistols don't have a magazine disconnect, and their field strip procedure is to drop the magazine, rack the slide, pull the trigger, then pushing the slide lock to remove it. Skipping one of those steps has put a lot of holes in walls over the last few decades.
It's a gun. It's supposed to be dangerous! Owning a gun without knowing how it works is bad.
I don't see that number on that site. Instead, I see:
> The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violenceexternal icon indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.
That's equivalent to saying we have almost no idea how often guns are used defensively.
is that so strange? In 40+ years, I have never needed a seatbelt. I do know of 2 people that were prevented from escaping their car because of their seatbelt, and died. yet every time I get in a car, I put one on.
Same. I've lived in NYC since the tail end of the crime wave in the 90s. Walked past drug dealers 80 times a day when I was younger. Lived across from a supposed crack house in my 20s. I only personally know of two people were attacked on the street in about 25 years. One was sucker punched and didn't even see who did it before they ran off. The other fought off a very scrawny attacker with an umbrella. I've never been on the receiving end of anything worse than an insult. I don't know a single person who owns a gun and I've even seen one that wasn't in the holster of a cop. My number one fear of living here by a mile is me or my family (my kids walk themselves home from school) getting hit by a car.
600k-2.5m/year is specifically lawful defensive uses. If you count "shot skeet", or "went hunting", or "went to the range", the number of lawful uses goes up a LOT.
But I hesitate to bring that up, because I don’t believe there is ANY moral ambiguity for the use of firearms for sporting purposes. Ambiguity only arises in the face of human conflict.
I will defend the ownership, possession, use and carry of firearms on the specific grounds that they ARE tools with the express purpose of hurting, maiming and killing. The specific justification in the US Constitution for citizen ownership of arming of a militia. I also oppose the use of professional militaries as I believe they are corrupt. Fundamentally professional armies have an incentive misalignment: fight for pay, not, fight for something “virtuous”. Therefore “don’t bite the hand that feeds”.
Moreover, the rights of the first amendment can only ensured by the use of force, ultimately, by those exercising said rights. The first amendment is meaningless without the second.
We can count the rounds fired this year alone probably number great than the whole conflict in Afghanistan, all lawful use, but I want to highlight that a GUN is useful being a GUN, not a hobby tool for target practice. If it’s merely a sporting device, well then you should be happy when they take away the guns as we still have airsoft and crossbows for sporting purposes.
No, we defend firearms for what they are and justify them on that use: Force, or the threat of force.
I don't have any particular interest here, as I'm quite ambivalent about guns but the 600k-2.5m is hotly debated and comes from phone surveys. The CDC cites Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence (2013)[1] when reporting that number. The source says it may actually be as low as 100k uses per year.
Funny thing, the first study was done by a gun control group, and long before shall issue concealed carry made self-defense a lot more common by allowing it outside the house. Their number, which did not include a person using a gun more than once a year: about a million.
But it doesn't matter, it's an unalienable right enshrined in the Constitution, "and if it saves just one life...."
If you're not a criminal, it's actually very unlikely that any of those things will happen.
The majority of shootings (more than 60%) are suicides; these are both intentional and generally lawful. Evidence suggests that most of the rest (between 20% and 30% of all shootings) are criminal conflict -- a lot of people with criminal records shooting other people with criminal records. Here again, there is a lot more to the story than just owning a gun. Unintentional shootings are fairly unusual, less than 4% of all shooting deaths. This is in part why thinking about guns has to be very different from our thinking when it comes to "safety" issues, like car accidents (95% of traffic deaths are unintentional).
The lawful uses of guns are, in fact, much more common than killings. These include hunting and target practice. Most gun owners will never shoot another person but that doesn't mean they don't use their guns.
In my 40 years, there was exactly one time I needed to defend myself, and a gun probably would have made the situation worse. I would have had too little time to draw it, and likely it would have been wrestled away from me and used against me. The people who attacked me had no weapons (or at least none they felt they needed to show me), so a gun would have escalated things.
I walked away from that with a black eye and stolen phone and laptop, but if a gun had been in play I might not have walked away at all.
So why should we all have something that A) the lawful uses of such are exceedingly rare, and B) ends up involved in a lot of unlawful or unintentional killings.