Gun Safety Rules

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Sounds right, at any rate.

Somebody should tell the 'libyooorawls' to ban cars. They pollute our beautiful planet and kill more people than those nasty old guns.

:)

Cigarettes kill more Americans in a year than died in the entire Vietnam War.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Cigarettes kill more Americans in a year than died in the entire Vietnam War.

Better ban those, too!

Oh, wait, they've taken us seriously, Crakkerjack. Good thing I don't smoke...

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

As I recall, adjusted for the number of people who own guns in America compared to cars, you're about 20 times more likely to die in a car accident driving to the range than by an accidental discharge of a firearm at the range. If you don't bump the rate up to account for the fact that not everyone owns a firearm, it's even rarer.

Now mind that I'm not against gun ownership, but that's not a meaningful comparison and I'd question how those numbers were calculated.
You'd need to compare actual rate of usage between the two, not overall numbers, and even then it's still quite a bit of apples and oranges.

After all, you don't have any accidents when you car is locked up in your garage, just like you don't have any accidents when your gun is locked up in its gun case.

[rosignol]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Better ban those, too!

Oh, wait, they've taken us seriously, Crakkerjack. Good thing I don't smoke...

They're taking us seriously? Best not to say anything about swimming pools or bathtubs, then... some things are worse than death.

We may die, but we'll die clean! XD

[rosignol]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

After all, you don't have any accidents when you car is locked up in your garage [...]

You'd be surprised...

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

And many, many, many criminals use Guns at default. Just from a game mechanic perspective, how many criminals do you know that get 200+ hours of practice with guns? Let's say that a typical criminal gets in a gunfight every month (which is actually ridiculously frequent; in reality, it might happen twice a year, even to an inner-city drug dealer). The average gun fight lasts a lot less than a minute, but let's pretend it's a full minute to be even more generous. That still means that it would take said criminal 1,000 years to acquire a single point of Guns. :)

Actually, organized crime is known to organize shooting lessons for its members.
According to the book Gomorra, the camorra (the mafia of Naples) even trained young boys to overcome fear and surprise caused by enemy fire... by having them wear bulletproof vests, and repeatedly shooting them with handguns.

So if it is true that a drug-dealer won't be a sharpshooter (a drug dealer outside of the U.S. isn't even likely to own a firearm), a dedicated thug working as "muscle" for a criminal investigation is likely to have received some sort of training.
He might very well be more used to actual gunfights than all those policemen who work mostly at their desk (and who arguably have only Guns (sport), not actual Guns skill).

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Now mind that I'm not against gun ownership, but that's not a meaningful comparison and I'd question how those numbers were calculated.
You'd need to compare actual rate of usage between the two, not overall numbers, and even then it's still quite a bit of apples and oranges.

After all, you don't have any accidents when you car is locked up in your garage, just like you don't have any accidents when your gun is locked up in its gun case.

I just took the yearly deaths for car accidents and compared them to yearly deaths for gun accidents in the US from the CDC or whatever. Then doubled (IIRC) the amount of firearms deaths based on the best statistics I could find indicating about half of households have one or more firearms in them, under the assumption that pretty much everyone has a car. As far as usage goes, I assumed that in general you had to actually be in the presence of a car or gun being handled in order to die from it.

Anywho, as you note it neglects all the people that don't die by guns because they're never around them, and neglects the fact that even gun owners use cars a lot more than they handle their guns. I did try to account for the first case, by tweaking gun deaths to represent ubiquitous ownership like we have for cars.

As for the second, I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that "if you own both a gun and a car, you are 20 times more likely to be accidentally killed by a car (not necessarily yours) than a gun (not necessarily yours)."

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

I just took the yearly deaths for car accidents and compared them to yearly deaths for gun accidents in the US from the CDC or whatever. Then doubled (IIRC) the amount of firearms deaths based on the best statistics I could find indicating about half of households have one or more firearms in them, under the assumption that pretty much everyone has a car. As far as usage goes, I assumed that in general you had to actually be in the presence of a car or gun being handled in order to die from it.

Anywho, as you note it neglects all the people that don't die by guns because they're never around them, and neglects the fact that even gun owners use cars a lot more than they handle their guns. I did try to account for the first case, by tweaking gun deaths to represent ubiquitous ownership like we have for cars.

As for the second, I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that "if you own both a gun and a car, you are 20 times more likely to be accidentally killed by a car (not necessarily yours) than a gun (not necessarily yours)."

But car ownership isn't ubiquitous. Just comparing the number of cars to the number of people gets about 80% ownership but many households own multiple cars so we can bump that down a bit when making a comparison (as the 50% statistic is the number of households that have at least one gun).

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by lexington

But car ownership isn't ubiquitous. Just comparing the number of cars to the number of people gets about 80% ownership but many households own multiple cars so we can bump that down a bit when making a comparison (as the 50% statistic is the number of households that have at least one gun).

Really? Only 80%? I just assumed that only 1% or something like that wouldn't own a car in the US and figured I could throw it out as negligible. Shows me what I get for assuming.

[rosignol]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Really? Only 80%? I just assumed that only 1% or something like that wouldn't own a car in the US and figured I could throw it out as negligible. Shows me what I get for assuming.

There are a couple of metro areas (NYC and Chicago are the usual examples, maybe SF, definitely not LA, tho) where mass transit is ubiquitous enough that it's actually more practical to not incur the costs of owning a car.

In most of the country, yeah, having your own wheels is the way to go.