Three people reportedly shot in Six Flags Great America parking lot

The problem? That I live in reality, I guess.

Your reality is that, as best I can tell, 86 people die a year in burglaries. That's a 1 in 3,837,209 chance, assuming 330m Americans. About 430 Americans are struck by lightning annually (10% of which due). Then adjust the odds based on where you live, which I suspect involves even smaller odds.

All valid points, but guns also exist in my reality, and always will. I don’t know what we’re arguing at this point. In one breath you discredit the pro-gun people’s slippery slope argument, in the next you tell me I don’t need to defend myself in a fantasy gunless utopia.

“That's because you're making the "law abiding citizen" argument. I'm saying you don't need to protect yourself if bad guys also don't have guns. If there's any disconnect, that's it. You can't separate good and bad guys from having guns, so if neither has them, what's the problem?“

Jeff,

if everything was equal and no guns existed at all, there would still be violent crimes. Criminals would find other weapons to use or just bare hands. I think you just enjoy being a contrarian. That’s fine, but you honestly can’t understand why someone would feel safer carrying a gun in certain situations?

I'm not being contrarian, I'm challenging the exceptionalism that some of y'all insist makes the United States different from the rest of the world. To feel safer, you have to first fear something. Why don't people in other nations share that fear? I don't think that it's a stretch to assume it's because bad guys don't have guns in those countries. And even in this country, if your odds of being struck by lightning are greater... yeah, I can't understand why one would feel safer.

Guns. We're here to stay.

Now that's out of the way, here are some fun and interesting things from Pew.

Not that Pew. This Pew.

Some takeaways:

1) Protection is the major reason (63%) people own a gun (when asked in a open-ended question, not a multiple choice survey, which makes it much more credible).

2) Black people (82%!) see gun violence as a far bigger problem than white people (39%!).

3) Most Americans think stricter gun laws are a good idea. Only 53%, though.

4) Actual gun ownership is a more powerful predictor of where one falls on ideas about gun laws when than whether you vote Donkey or Elephant. In other words, gun-owning R's and D's are likely to agree, and vice versa.

Bakeman 31092 said:

Wearing your, ahem, seatbelt

Interestingly, I'm currently in Miami driving a rental that constantly nags until the seat belt is buckled.

So I buckled it and am sitting on it. 🙂

With that said, I have to point out that these kinds of conversations are a lot of fun to follow when you aren't in the thick of it.

And with that said, let me add that I don't own a gun and I'm pretty sure I've never even fired a "real" gun of any kind, but if I thought for a second there was a realistic chance that significant ownership restrictions would go into effect, I would go out and buy as many as I possibly could in all shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors.

And then a week later they'd all get "stolen" so there'd be nothing for anyone to account for.

Jeff:

your odds of being struck by lightning are greater

I’m pretty good about not walking around in thunderstorms.

My takeaway from this whole thread is that we need better thunderstorm education in this country.

Omg, you’re actually sitting on the seatbelt like a petulant child?! That is amazing. I’ll say this much: you never break character.

Lord Gonchar:

So I buckled it and am sitting on it. 🙂

I figured you for a fuse puller kind of guy.

Best part is every single valet during the week except one gave it back to me with the restraint buckled the way I left it.

Which means I was either getting excellent service or they were sitting on it too.

Or both.

Or Maverick.

Lord Gonchar:
Interestingly, I'm currently in Miami driving a rental that constantly nags until the seat belt is buckled.So I buckled it and am sitting on it. 🙂

And yet nobody commented on the dangers of posting to CoasterBuzz while driving, just the sort of hazardous activity that could make you want that seat belt? :)

I'm too lazy to look up the statistics. But I am pretty sure there are more firearms in the United States than there are people. And quite a lot of us do not own guns. Take that for what it's worth. The bottom line is, guns are here, and they aren't going away. To me, that kind of negates the argument that "you don't need a gun to defend yourself." Maybe you don't, or maybe you do; that's not an argument I truly think is worth having. Instead, I think we are at a point where to argue whether a person has a *reason* to own a gun is pointless; in fact the US Supreme Court just said as much in striking down a State law that required permit applicants to answer exactly that question. Nobody asks why anyone needs a full-size pickup truck to drive as a grocery-getter, and those things kill people just as easily as guns do...and more likely by accident.

Like it or not, we're in a position where trying to tackle the "gun violence" problem with gun restrictions is a non-starter. Not because the political will isn't there, but because it isn't a practical solution. The "bad guys" have guns, and know where to get them, and no law we can pass is going to change that. Is that a fatalistic attitude? Perhaps. But I think it's also realistic. This is taking a highway with a 60 MPH speed limit where everyone drives 75 and changing the speed limit to 45 and expecting people to slow down. It feels like you did something, but it accomplishes nothing* but to make life more dangerous for the people who follow the new law.

Personally, I think we need to give up the fixation on guns. We don't have a "gun violence" problem in this country. We have a "violence" problem in this country. We have a culture where, for an uncomfortably large subset of the population, the slightest insult is grounds for the use of deadly force. Because we have a lot of guns, that deadly force often comes in the form of a gunshot, more so than in countries with fewer guns, where such force often takes other forms, and admittedly, is frequently less lethal. But I truly believe that's the problem that needs to be solved. We must restore respect for human life, even the life of people you detest, and return to an environment where deadly force is the solution of last resort, rather than the first. Fix that problem and it won't matter if the nation contains more guns than people. I don't know how we get there, but I do know we won't get there as long as we keep focusing on the gun instead of the violence. It's the violence that needs to stop, no matter how it is perpetrated.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

* We actually did something like that in Columbus. The speed limit on IR-70 was 65 MPH from the eastside split with IR-71 all the way out of town. Noting a high severity of crashes involving semi-trucks on that stretch, the speed limit was reduced to 55 MPH from the split downtown out two more exits, a distance of about 3 miles. On the day that the speed limit was changed there was a serious fatal crash in that section involving a car that had slowed to 55 MPH and a tractor trailer righ that had not. The speed limit change, one could argue, actually increased the severity of that crash, turning it from a 5 MPH closing speed to a 15 MPH closing speed.

--DCAjr

Or instead of blaming the speed limit, why not blame the truck driver who chose to break the law by not slowing down?

RideMan:

But I am pretty sure there are more firearms in the United States than there are people. And quite a lot of us do not own guns.

121 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 residents in 2011. The percent of residents who live in a home with one or more firearms has fluctuated over time but keeps hovering around 42%. In other words more people don't have guns, but the people that do have a lot more of them.

If the guns don't get you then the knives will.

I don't know that anyone has ever killed more than 2, maybe 3 people with a knife at a time.

Nineteen.

Shades:
Or instead of blaming the speed limit, why not blame the truck driver who chose to break the law by not slowing down?

Exactly my point...they changed a sign and proclaimed they fixed it. More than a decade later, the speed limit there is still 55 and most traffic is doing about 70. The law isn't the thing that needs fixing.

Getting back to the violence problem, I'm still not sure how you solve that, but at least we can try to isolate the problem in a useful way.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Shades:

Or instead of blaming the speed limit, why not blame the truck driver who chose to break the law by not slowing down?

Trucks don't kill people, drivers do! Am I right?