6 years ago
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Gun-related Deaths Have Decreased Overall American Life Expectancy
In 2016, the last year for which the CDC provides numbers, 35,353 people died from gun injuries, the majority of them suicides. In other words, out of every 100,000 people living in the US that year, 12 were killed by a gun, compared to 11 in 2015 and 10 in 2014. “But mortality rates don’t show you how much of your life is lost,” says Bindu Kalesan, a Boston University assistant professor of community health sciences. “Who is dying young, and who is dying old?”
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More guns is the answer. More guns is always the answer. If you own two guns, your left hand can protect you from your right hand by shooting yourself before you shoot you.
Also think of the arms industry. You probably need more than two. Foot guns, then your feet can protect themselves when you try and shoot yourself in the foot.
Makes you long for the good old days, before the discovery of chemistry. You know, back when everyone died from old age and an overabundance of loving kindness.
The second amendment means that every American should be able to have their own nuclear weapons. It's the only real way to protect yourself from government over-reach. Personal nukes. Of course white Americans only.
Also, the good old days where Treponema pallidum loved people to death or madness?
The U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1946 expressly forbids private nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly perhaps, turns out there're a raft of laws, regulations, registrations, licenses, taxes, fees — as well as less obvious means — by which arms are controlled in the U.S. For instance, if it's fissile, it's not yours. Not sure where you're going with the loose talk and the race baiting, but don't worry. I'm not going to report you to the authorities. As far as you know. Out of idle curiosity, you seem pretty set against arms rights. If it's not too prying to ask, are you also against reproductive rights as well? Pardon me if it's too forward a question to ask.
How does that comply with the second amendment? Does it only include arms that are light enough to bear with your arms?
Same place you were when you said that.
Hey, I'm a person from a country other than the USA. It's pretty obvious to us in the "rest of the world" that your gun use is killing you.
"reproductive rights" is a strange and nebulous thing to call it. In general, I'm definitely pro-choice. Doesn't mean I think some of those choices are necessarily good. Also in general, I think politicians should butt out of medicine. Perhaps I include drug use as a medical issue in that.
Although I do think society probably needs to weigh in on issues like designer babies. Is that part of "reproductive rights"?
I'm not the best person to go to for an overbroad interpretation of the Second Amendment. Seems to me settler colonists aren't too picky where they find justification for slavery and genocide. We could nickel-plate and polish the wording of the Second Amendment until the glare became a danger to passing aircraft, it's not going to change human instincts. Will say, though, that our rights don't come from the Constitution. They are merely described there.
Maybe it's more a matter of who, specifically, you'd have go around and take people's weapons. Going door to door, and even using strongly-worded appeals, it would take some doing to collect hundreds of millions of small arms. A few, like the Confederate Air Force and Academi, may not choose to go along with the scheme that eagerly.
Oh, that's a relief. One never knows whether guns nuts or gun control nuts have been personally affected by gun violence trauma. A passing concern for a runaway culture of extreme violence is a great place to be coming from in comparison. I won't make the tired point that it's generally Americans killing Americans, and that it would be by means of pointed sticks and largish rocks if it weren't with firearms, but that's so trite it's already obviously true. Instead, let me suggest a mirrored view.
This inability to separate the gunman from the gun strikes me as a city mouse being appalled at country mice, because the city mouse can't imagine any environment beyond their own. Maybe none of the mice living in the habitrail need combat shotguns with incendiary rounds, but then not everyone lives in a British Dominion habitrail. Consider the U.S. not so much a country, perhaps, as the new corporate headquarters of an out-of-control East India Company.
It's a pet peeve of mine. I don't see, at all, how you can square the one but not the other. Senility may be getting the better of me, but either we have rights or we haven't.
What is this, how-do-you-say, "society?" Are they like shareholders?
We have the right to live and be healthy. I'm not sure how you square that with massive gun ownership!
One of the many problems with designer babies is that their genes will be passed on. It's a matter of being really careful.
Actually making everyone shareholders might work.
You say that as though gun ownership, by itself, is evil. That's a hair-trigger you've got there. Another point of view might be that the reality is that people own guns, for good or ill, and they know perfectly well how they work, what they're for, and how to make them.
Say you city mice figure out between youse who's going to put the bell on the cat and somehow prohibit them. Maybe a bit like our 18th Amendment that finally ended alcohol once and for all. What do you suppose will happen to the price? To the trade in them? To respect for the law? The poor devils that use these homemade gimcracks? The innocents caught in the crossfire of blackmarket criminal gangs? It wasn't pretty during Prohibition, and alcoholism actually is evil.
I suppose once it's done, though, on the upside you can roll up your sleeves and get to work on knives, sporks, fire, blunt instruments and the common cold. Meanwhile, every time either of us even mentions 'gun control' the price-to-earnings ratio of Smith and Wesson ratchets another notch.
You really can't distinguish between owning a weapon and how it might be used?
Get back to me when we, as a species, have agreed to limit the rate at which our carbon emissions are still increasing. We'll have valuable tips we can surely use against the transhumans by then. It'll matter more, too.
Tools and weapons are very different. You can't use a gun to eat your dinner or tighten a nut or travel to work. There is one thing a gun is for: to wound or kill.
Sigh!
While that's two things, at the very least you've failed to include deterrence. No biggy. Some of my most comfortable prior assumptions are cozy delusions too.
I could have said threaten, wound or kill, I suppose. Why is it that Americans always split hairs about technical aspects of guns? That's not an assault rifle, it's a semi-demi-automatic assault rifle class B.