The Gun Culture is Somewhat In Denial About Gun Safety.

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Yes they are; cars are far more dangerous, especially when operated thoughtlessly. If I'm walking around with a gun on my hip and completely forget about it, no one is endangered, the only time that gun becomes dangerous is when it is manipulated, e.g. when it's drawn from it's holster, at all other times it's harmless. A car, on the other hand, is a multi-ton bludgeon carrying far more kinetic energy than even the most powerful of firearms, that must be carefully controlled at all time lest it inadvertently harm someone in a moment of distraction.

This accident, though tragic, is also an exceedingly rare occurrence, not something to really base a precedent on.



Need to defend yourself? Well I guess it's just your problem that you weren't born large and strong and didn't devote years of your life to martial arts training; I have this handy tool that conveniently allows me to defend myself without devoting my whole life to it, kind of like you have a handy tool that makes personal transportation easier and less time consuming.



I take it you're a fan of the feudal system and brutal Darwinism, then?

Pools.

And as far as I can tell, a firearm is more necessary than a car. We have buses (hell, even out here in the rural land). We don't have instant self-defense offered.

I'd much rather the ability to protect myself than drive myself to work or whatever.

(Arguments based on "need" are subjective and ultimately useless for that reason.)

I feel like this is a assumption that aspies are not fans of guns?
which is wrong like any other generalization of aspies.

Man, I'm more aspie than all of you people and I'm the safest gunnest nut you'll ever see.

In seriousness, I'll discuss firearm safety:

-assume all firearms are loaded and treat them as if they are even if you know they aren't
-when picking up and handling a firearm, keep your finger off the trigger and point the muzzle in a safe direction at all times until your sights are on the target
-make sure when practicing, you have an adequate backstop that will catch (dirt mound for example) or safely breakup/deflect (steel plates facing you) the bullets. The same when hunting (if an animal is in front of a road or any other place that may contain a human, don't shoot). Bullets will also deflect off most things and travel far
-know how it mechanically functions and how to safety utilize said functioning (this is where the individual in this case failed)

You'll find similar things in the manual of any new firearm you buy.

So I fail to see how the "gun culture" is in denial about safety. I've seen far more safety consciousness from shooters than anyone else (whether they're new or not).

Years ago I worked for a guy that trained the police to use automatic weapons and owned a substantial number of legal machine guns, and he used to say that in his years of training various people and units, the safest shooters were civilian competitive shooters, since they can be DQed for any safety violation while competing, licensed carriers, military shooters, and the police where both the most inaccurate and unsafe. The way he put it, he'd rather be shot at by the police than be standing near where someone else was being shot at by the police. Having shot at a number of ranges over the years with uniformed cops practicing on them, I can confirm that general observation.

Also, the gun control movement has lately attempted to re-brand themselves as the "gun safety" movement, which is about as honest as alcohol prohibitionists calling themselves "temperance advocates", not that I'm surprised given their record of dishonesty and abuse of the English language.

Jumping into a pool if required to walk or jog there on a hot day is one way to cool off and not be so odorous so yeah, it might be one answer to that dilemma. However, you are going to have to leave four or five hours early if you have to walk or jog far and better be in good physical condition, too.

If everyone ditched their guns, and I do mean every single person - including all the countries on earth and their defense forces - you would have nothing to fear walking to work because no one would have anything to shoot you with. I suppose they could get bows and arrows but you could have them too. Bows and arrows might replace guns at that point but it is much harder for a two year old to shoot someone with a bow and arrow although they might be able with a crossbow so you would need to ban crossbows along with guns. You could carry a knife but it would be much harder for someone to kill you if all they had was a knife. They could jump out at you but if you are nimble, you can quickly run from them and get away from their knife. If someone had a knife and you had a concealed weapon and they hid someplace then jumped out at you and cut you real fast, your concealed weapon wouldn't protect you anyway because it would happen so fast and they would be hidden until they were on you with their knife.

Cars might be more dangerous in your opinion but we have to have them in order not to starve to death. Not so with guns. A gun isn't going to transport you to where you need to be in order to make the money you need to eat and a car is. Even if you eek a leaving selling guns, chances are you still need some type of vehicle to to assist you in your enterprises.

Let's say an alien species with superior technology, a peace loving species, suddenly appeared and seized every gun on the planet, we would still continue life as we know it, except gunless, of course. If they did the same with cars, we would be in a world of hurt because many people couldn't get to work so they would not have money to buy necessities such as food.

So at the end of the day, cars are much more important to our way of life than any gun.

And if we were involved in a feudal system, the upper classes would have guns. What I propose is no one have guns, period, regardless of class.

^

I'm going to rationally decide to ignore that, rebutting isn't really necessary.

See, your subjective view. I can provide a thousand subjective and valid "needs".

Like, that's what you have a hose for -- if no one had a pool, no one would drown in a pool. If no one had a bath, no one would drown in a bath. You can't treat one as "needed" and the other as not when they're all equally not needed. Blasting a home invader that's intent on killing you is more important than owning a car so you have more freedom for when you get to work -- today, people would understand if you're late due to bus issues (the same with mechanical issues).

Uh, you do know humans are quite capable of killing each other with their bare hands, right? You do know it's very easy to kill someone with a blunt or edged weapon (you do, as you gave an example later on)? The only thing a firearm adds is an inherent range advantage and removing physical size (weaker men and women are equal to the strongest men).

I fail to see what you're trying to prove, other than that circumstance can mitigate the outcome. That's self-evident. Though there's many times when a firearm will even the odds in a self-defense situation -- each one is unique, and adding more "+" variables to the defender, say a firearm, avoiding dangerous areas (which I'm loathe to acknowledge, as that's letting the thugs run the place), and training, adds to success for the defender (which is always at the mercy of the attacker).

I am much more capable because I have a shotgun nearby in case someone breaks into my house. Without it, yeah, I can make do, like you using a hose instead of a pool to cool off (pools kill far more people via accidents than firearms can dream of), but I'd rather have the shotgun.

Wouldn't you?

Your two year old kid isn't going to kill you with his bare hands.
Keep in mind, even with a gun, if someone is clever enough and armed with some kind of weapon, including a gun, they can kill you even if you have one. If someone is determined enough to kill you, unless you have very good tactical training, if they have the means and ability, the odds are they will succeed. It's not a pleasant realization, but a realization nonetheless because there are no guarantees in life.

Getting rid of guns would pretty much eliminate really young children killing their parents since these two cases are the only ones I can think of where children this young have killed a parent. One child is two, the other was five when he killed his mom by shooting her with her own handgun. Same story except one happened in a house in Tulsa, the other in a Wal Mart in Idaho.

There are between 100,000 and 2,000,000 defensive gun uses in the US alone every year; that more than cancels out the handful of parents shot by their children and other accidents, and far eclipses criminal use of firearms.

Are you saying two million people are injured or killed by fire arms in defensive situations every year in the US?

Freak accident. It's up there with a dog shooting someone (which has happened). I'm sure you'll find incidents of little kids causing the death of adults in a number of ways. That's just life, and it's not pointing to any specific problem.

And that's just life again (doesn't matter if they're armed. Someone punching you in the back of the head in the shops is just as effective as anything). You don't want to make it easy for bad people though.

If you're of the opinion that you can't really do anything to help yourself, then that's fine for you to live that way. You obviously don't wear a seat-belt, you smoke excessively, don't get help if you're sick, and do a number of other "unsafe" things, because after all, one specific outcome means all of them are void barring that one, right?

Okay, give me another example of a toddler or any child under the age of six killing a parent. The only ones I can think of are these two with firearms.

Typing in "toddler causes fatal" in gooogle comes up with a helicopter crash (5-year old here):

I'm certain there'd be many other incidents where a toddler did something that caused the death of others that didn't involve a firearm.

Nope, the vast majority of them never get past the brandishing stage, preventing things from escalating to the point where deadly force was necessary. If you want to talk about the evils committed with firearms, you need to take the good into account as well, particularly when you seem so fixated on a particularly rare accident and aren't grounding your arguments in reality in the first place.