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@stormy178@mastodon.stormy178.com @MelodyCooper
And when someone staps someone or beats them with a bat do we cry about how bats are legal... Yes there is a problem, but absurd solutions like making guns illegal is obviously not the answer.
@freemo @MelodyCooper I don't know if they're the answer, but taking guns away from people results in fewer gun deaths. Yes, there will still be bat deaths and hammer deaths and what have you, and we can generalise that as blunt force objects. You can't get rid of blunt force objects. Getting rid of 99% of guns is trivial in comparison.
**Exactly** now your getting it. Fewer gun deaths doesnt mean fewer deaths overall (and in fact can mean **more** dewths). And thus thr problem with using gun deaths as a metric or goal.
@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper Fewer gun deaths usually also means fewer deaths in general. It doesn't have to, but it does.
Obviously higher birth rate also causes more deaths :) But having a gun allows for more opportunities to intimidate and hurt people with it, opportunities that are often not available to people who's best available weapon is a kitchen knife.
It also allows for some opportunities that aren't really possible with blunt force objects and blades, such as deadly accidents and mass killings. There's very few multiple death stabbings and almost no baseball bat suicides.
And I have yet to hear a good argument for risks related to harder access to guns that isn't based on there being very easy access to guns.
Poland has 40 million people and the number of mass shootings that can be counted on one hand within the living history. The same is true for the great majority of countries. US is a special case for many reasons - lack of social safety net is a big factor in violence in general, so is the mass incarceration - but you could only makes things better if you make sure a crazy person can't easily purchase an automatic rifle.
The data suggests otherwise from what ive seen. But if ghats the case you want to make then make it. Dont provid unrelated data that doesnt say that.
@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper US has an incredibly high murder rate for its level of income. Source is mentioned.
Yes, yes it does... not particularly relevant (unless you have more to add), but it surely does
