@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.

@zack

**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.

@MelodyCooper @pies

@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.

@pies @zack @MelodyCooper

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.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo I know Switzerland is a favourite example, the second one being Canada, but maybe actually read up on Switzerland before you do it. Certainly not a "get an AR at the grocery store" kind of country.

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo What you gave is the only example you can think of. There are no other countries like that. There are a few where hunting is popular and that makes of a significant number of guns that don't generally cause the murder rate to skyrocket. The rest has restrictive gun laws and high murder rates or a lot of guns and murders.

Why did you choose Switzerland in particular? Is it its similarity to the US? Do you think US should be required to have a purchase licence for any modern firearm!? Should there be a puchase licence requirement for ammo? What are you trying to say, exactly?

@zack @MelodyCooper @freemo ok, too many typos and no edit functionality on my app or server :) But I think you get my point. I give a list of twenty countries where restrictive gun laws work. You only look at the one where there relatively lax - still much stricter than in the US, mind you. You're not looking for evidence.

@zack @MelodyCooper @pies

Again you dont use corelation if your doing honest science on this or any topic like it...

@freemo @zack @MelodyCooper None of us here are doing any science. And lack of control over sales and ownership of firearms is certainly not the only problem that contributes an abnormally high murder rate in the US.

But your insistence that the fact that anyone can buy an automatic weapon in your country has no bearing on murder rate being extremely high indicates to me that you don't really want to learn. You just want to preach.

And that's fine.