7 dead, 7 wounded in Santa Barbara shooting rampage

I'm not "proposing" anything, because I know there's no chance in hell anything will get done.

That doesn't change the fact that I think gun-rights people are assholes who think that particular freedom is worth an astronomical body count. It's other people dying, after all.

 

I don't know. It didn't require a Constitutional amendment to rape and pillage the Fourth, so who knows?

Show me the "death by journalism" stats and we'll have a real conversation about it.

 

a) stop concern trolling

b) No matter what the mythic Founders put into writing, some rights aren't as important as others.

 

I'm not a "gun-rights people" type (having never owned a firearm of any sort), so I am hesitant to speak for them, but ...

I'm pretty sure gun-rights people don't think that way.

 

I'm pretty sure they don't realize they think that way. But they do.

I've asked many, many times for one of them to tell me a tangible benefit to our gun ownership laws that outweighs the risk of tens of thousands of deaths. I'll let you know when someone sacks up and actually gives an answer - any answer, let alone a reasonable one - besides "because freedom."

 

Well, first they'd ask you to prove that there are 10s of thousands of deaths that would be prevented by restricting gun ownershpi

 

Bingo.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

 

Hey, you said gun-rights people don't think that way. I offered you a very prominent one (just ask him!) who made it very clear that he does.

 

Was looking for a link, but I can't find it. There was a peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Public Health that covered 30 years and all 50 states and said for each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlates to a 0.9 percent increase in the firearm homicide rate. Here's the abstract:

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409?journalCode=ajph

Going to the Germany example I cited earlier, it has 4 million legal gun owners and up to 25 million guns on the streets. It averages 903 firearm deaths per year among a population of 80.5 million, or 1.10 per 100,000 residents.

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/germany

In the U.S., I can't find how many legal gun owners there are, but there are upwards of 300 million guns on the streets. It averages slightly less than 32,000 firearm deaths per year among a population of 307 million, or 10.3 per 100,000 residents.

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

 

Pfft, studies. Studies can be found to say anything.

My sister's friend posted a story on Facebook about her neighbor's teenage daughter fending off an attack from a rapist with her gun. *That's* compelling evidence.