I don’t avoid guns due to a fear of crime. I avoid guns due to a fear of negligence.
Every single day, someone in my family does something negligent, but ultimately harmless. Oops. Now there’s an extra dirty dish. Oops. Broke a coaster. Oops. Dirty towel. Oops. Got sprayed with water.
Putting a gun in that situation would be pretty dangerous.
I suppose some households could keep guns responsibly. Mine could not, despite my personal practices.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It’s very amusing to read such things from outside the American hellscape.
SPRUNT@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s a good argument, but it’s entirely flawed because American policy is that the children have no worth until they pay taxes.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
To compare dead children to the cost of failing to check government power, we can reduce both to life-years lost:
🔫 Current Cost: Child Firearm Deaths in the U.S.
🏛️ Hypothetical Benefit: Preventing Tyranny
Assume a worst-case scenario:
Estimate risk:
In fact, high civilian armament may reduce stability:
📊 Expected Value Calculation
📉 Conclusion
Even with favorable assumptions:
Bottom line: The ongoing cost vastly outweighs the hypothetical benefit, and high armament may worsen long-term stability rather than protect it.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
tongue in cheek of course but it still makes a point
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Record gun deaths?
testfactor@lemmy.world 1 week ago
While preventable child deaths are obviously terrible, I feel like this could be overextended.
Like, how many child deaths has McDonald’s caused vs guns. I’m too lazy to do the math like the other guy, but I’d presume it’s comparable. (Although I suppose by the time it catches up to them they’re no longer children.)
Idk, you see things like, “leading cause of death in children” and it makes the number seem huge, but it’s less than 100 kids a year. And it looks like around 400/yr die from drowning in swimming pools. So if we really care about the children, we should bad swimming pools? They kill 4x the number of kids than guns.
I’m not saying guns are great. But using child deaths as part of the argument just feels like a great excuse to ban literally anything you just don’t like.
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Accidental deaths from firearms can be reduced by making people get obligatory training and requiring storage in a gun safe, when not carried.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Okay? So how many years does that push the “break even point”? Do you see how this doesn’t engage with my point in the slightest?