calmstateofmind :
Some of that may be true, but we're not talking about aircrafts, or car bombs, or concocting homemade explosives, we're talking about handheld, househeld guns that are manufactured by billion dollar companies, distributed to most every idiot; legally. Go to Walmart, or even just be aware of the general public you encounter throughout the day, and with each person you see ask yourself, "Would I trust that person with a gun?". 'No' will be the answer about 90% of the time.
We are talking about mass-casualty incidents with the Newtown shooting. Mentioning other incidents which are much more lethal is absolutely germane to the argument. Concentrating on firearms, a much less major cause of mass-casualty incidents, is not very productive if what you really want to do is limit the death count in mass-casualty incidents. However it makes for a great political issue which is why it is being brought up instead of the far more destructive means.
Okay. The US has 315 million people, Japan has 1/3rd of that, yet Japan has a 1/120th of the guns death that we do. Similar finding for other countries as well. And we're not talking about suicides, we're talking about homicides. If someone wants to kill themselves, really, gravity can take care of that. Guns have nothing to do with the reason for suicide, yet guns are the reason why its so easily possible to walk into a school and masacre a group of people. How possible would that have been with any other, lesser lethal, weapon? A lot harder, and thus a lot less probable to happen. That's my point, guns make it easier, much easier to kill.
It would be much easier to use explosives or a fire to kill a lot of people than to use weapons. To this day, a bombing
in 1927 is the highest mortality school attack ever committed. If we really want to address mass school casualties, we need to look at mass methods like arson and explosives rather than individual methods like weapons.
Tell me then, what were guns invented for? To kill. For war. Nothing more, nothing less. The chinese invented gun powder and it took off from there. It's not been until more recently that using guns have become a "past time sport". Target practice...practice, for what? To shoot a real target. Why do most of the paper targets have a silhouette of a person on them? Interesting.
Most targets are NOT person silhouette targets. Some handgun targets are but most other targets are not. Most are either concentric circles ("bull's-eye"), a gridded square, or are little circular clay discs (shotgun targets.) Bow targets are usually circles or sometimes silhouettes of game animals. There are also a ton of bottles and cans used as targets too. Believe me, I shoot thousands of rounds a year and am around a lot of other shooters. Not that many use the defensive handgun person silhouette targets, they are not nearly as cheap as the other targets and they require a very large target holder. In my experience most rounds fired are at tin cans and bottles, followed by clay shotgun discs, then circular or gridded rifle targets.
The majority lifetime of guns have been used for the application of war and killing and hunting; all of which don't hold a place in civilian life (we've advanced beyond the average person needing to buy a gun to hunt their food. Hunting is a "sport" now, for most). What you're talking about is comparable to taking a Siberian tiger as a pet in a suburban environment; it's out of place for it's nature, and so is a gun in the hands of the average person. And it's not even like they're buying it knowing they're going to use it! Most people buy a gun for the "what if" scenario; meaning, they are buying out of fear, and companies are healthily profitting off of that fear.
There is nothing wrong with hunting, it is absolutely needed to manage wildlife populations. If you live in an area like I do which is in the top five for deer-vehicle collisions annually, you'd understand. Guns are not uncivilized, guns are a major factor in what allowed civilization to develop. That and math/engineering, beer (in the fact that beer was boiled and thus the first form of purified water), plumbing/sewers, and fire.
You're right, most people shouldn't be on the roads. But a car and a gun aren't even close to comparable, and I'm not going to spend my time on that battle.
You're right, cars and guns aren't even close to comparable- cars kill many so more people each year. I work in a hospital. Apart from drunks and the very elderly falling from standing, nearly everybody who comes in as a trauma is in a car, motorcycle, or bicycle wreck. Period. Gunshot injuries are very rare. And yes, they bring the dead ones in for us to pronounce so we see them all. Shoot, we easily see more stabbings and beatings that gunshots too.
You're talking in extremes, whereas I'm talking about practical, everyday situations. And that's correct, I'm not defending my wireless network with a gun; I do it with AES 256 bit WPA2/PSK encryption, and that works just fine. And I lock my doors as well, and the dead bolt and lock works just fine. None of that has anything to do with buying a weapon so lethal all I have to do is point and squeeze. If you're that afraid of where you live or the people that live around you, maybe you should just move.
It is far from "point and kill" with a firearm, again, I work in a hospital. Certain weapons hitting in certain spots will do that regularly but that's not what we see. We don't see too many point-blank shots to the chest or through both brain hemispheres with full-powered deer rifles like a .308 Winchester or a 12 or 20-gauge shotgun slug to the same places. That will nearly always kill somebody. It's generally a .22 to a limb or to the guts, which nearly all of them make a full recovery in little time. Or it's a 9 mm put in the same places, with pretty similar outcomes. We do see some people with superficial wounds from small birdshot due to hunting accidents- they almost always do well too. Shoot, we even have a lot of failed suicides by handgun that we see. Guns are not the supremely lethal things you think that they are. I'd easily say cheeseburgers kill a lot more people that guns do, and don't even get me started on cigarettes. Those things are pure death...
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