this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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between legal gun owners, and the statistical chunk of gun violence, yes it does matter.
If you're in a place where legal gun owners are, and where illegal gun owners are unlikely to be (or at least unlikely to cause problems in) statistically yes, you would expect that to make a difference.
Just to be clear, walking into a room that has a gun in it doesn't magically make you more likely to get shot. Walking into a room with a person whose armed doesn't make them more likely to shoot you or for you to get shot, it increases the possibility that you could be shot by virtue of there being a gun now, but that's irrelevant to actually getting shot yes.
You realize we have knives in kitchens right? Does walking into a kitchen automatically increase the chances of you getting stabbed?
it's hard to explain this, because you're essentially operating a rokos basilisk premise here. The very concept of a gun doesn't increase the chances of you getting shot, the gun being nearer to you than it previously was doesn't increase that chance. The gun being next to you or on you doesn't change this. The hands of the person it's in may change it, but that's still a third party variable so we can't really account for that one here. Even if the gun is pointed at you, it doesn't arguably increase the chances that you can get shot, it might be unloaded for all you know. If someone who is aggressing you, or who you are aggressing on is pointing a gun at you, yes that would probably drastically increase the chances of you getting shot.
If you are aggressing someone who owns a gun, or they are aggressing you, it may increase the chances of them pulling the gun on you. But that doesn't necessarily increase the chance of you getting shot.
to be clear here, the only real situation in which you are more likely to be shot, is in which someone is pointing a gun at you, and telling you that they are going to shoot you. Every other situation is going to be several orders of magnitude less significant, and effectively irrelevant here.
None of what you just said is true. Starting here
That's nonsense, obviously there's an increased probability with strict causation between being around guns and getting shot.
You seem to be pretending that "good guys with guns deter bad guys with guns". I invite you to provide any source that backs this up. This is an American myth, and from outside it's obvious that the presence of "good guys" with guns just make the criminal elements more likely to arm themselves. It also is increasingly obvious that a very large portion of the self proclaimed good guys are in fact also bad people just itching for an excuse.
i didn't line up the specifics very well in most of those examples so i'm curious to see how.
let's say i lock you in a room alone, in that room is a hidden compartment under the floor, and in the floor, is a gun. (may or may not be loaded, or have ammunition) i never informed you of this compartment, and that gun. It would be silly to argue that you're more likely to be shot. The only person that could shoot you is yourself, and you would need to know about the gun first.
Obviously this is an extremely uncharitable take on this, so we'll modify it a bit, same room, same scenario, no secret compartment, there is a table in the middle of the room, and there is a gun on it (may or may not be loaded) is simply being in that room, going to make it more likely for you to get shot?
And like you said, that's strict causation. If we're making the argument that being a room with a gun is more dangerous than not, being in a kitchen is more dangerous than not, even if you're not doing anything.
i'm not, you're just making that up. Statistically, the primary causer of gun violence is criminals and people who own illegal guns (now idk if these stats are trustworthy to begin with, so i'll give you that one) and on top of this, most gun violence is targeted, very very few cases of gun violence are just random acts of violence. The average legal gun owning individual, who conceal carries, is not going to be more likely to do any of these things.
If i wanted to say that good guys with guns were going to do something, i would've said that. I don't believe in that because it's fucking stupid, but people also seem to not be capable of understanding that simply owning a gun doesn't mean you shoot people for fun either.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted the quote about places with legal gun owners having less illegal gun owners. How else should I have interpreted it?
You pulled a statistic, please provide a source for it.
Yes, a person entering an empty room with a gun on the table is absolutely statistically in danger of mishandling the gun and harming themselves. The actual meta study referenced here is behind a paywall but people do not behave well when put in a room alone with a dangerous thing. As far as I can tell no one has replicated the experiment with an actual gun, though I'd love to see that. Now I don't want to strawman too much here but you might be tempted to say that the problem isn't the gun but the combination of human stupidity and guns. That's generally what makes dangerous things dangerous, and isn't the gotcha people on the gun side often think it is. In a world with only guns and no humans there's no gun violence, hooray.
I'll let you have the final word here if you wish, I'm pretty done with this discussion. I'll just reiterate one last time that this is all you trying to convince me that I should not be feeling more safe in a place that doesn't allow guns and I think that's pretty fucked.
ok so gun ownership is kind of complicated from a statistics point of view, since we're mostly concerned with gun violence here it's important to remember that the vast majority of legal gun owners don't generally wish to become criminals, compared to illegal gun owners, who may not wish to become criminals, but are more likely to become criminals (for various reasons) even these people are less likely to engage in random acts of gun violence. The most likely scenario in which you get gun violenced is going to be a robbery/mugging or something along these lines, where you were probably already fucked anyway. Gun or not.
as for statistics:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ pew article, these are generally good https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9388351/ this one includes per capita rates, which is what i was previously mentioning
as for illegal gun crimes:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/10/1153977949/major-takeaways-from-the-atf-gun-violence-report https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/12/john-faso/do-illegal-gun-owners-commit-most-gun-crime-rep-fa/ most notable for this quote "Congress since the 1990s has had an effective ban on federal taxpayer money being spent on research into gun violence as a public health issue and gun control advocacy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But other government agencies are free to collect data on guns and gun crime."
anyway, moving away from this, i would also like to make the point that the US simply having more guns doesn't make it more dangerous by default in terms of gun violence.
even if this is statistically true, which i will grant in this specific wording, although this is a really specific situation, and a really unusual situation. This is true of everything ever. People have gasoline in their garage, aggressive chemicals, they have similarly spooky chemicals indoors, cleaning agents, bleach, etc... Even just a simple thing like a flight of stairs can be incredibly dangerous. I don't exactly see people doing much to increase the safety of things like power tools for example, this would be the next biggest, if not the biggest cause of accidental injury in this case.
my biggest problem with this argument is that guns are randomly singled out, even though gun owners are vastly more likely to be well trained, and very responsible with their guns, as opposed to some dude who owns a circular saw. Or literally every kitchen everywhere that has at least one knife in it somewhere. We don't exactly teach people responsible knife ownership and handling the second they buy knives.
Ultimately this just devolves into a situation where you essentially argue for putting people in a padded rubber room wearing a strait jacket to minimize potential self harm. In the above case you mentioned "it increases the chances for mishandling a gun" that may be true, if you handle it. You don't have to handle it though, you can leave it there, and in my example, we don't know if it's loaded or has ammunition at all. The most likely injury to be gained there is pinching your finger in the slide or something.
There is also an ethical/moral implication in regulating what people can and cannot do, we already tried eugenics, nobody liked it. (an extreme example to be fair) Even if banning guns prevents less accidental harm, i'm not really sure that's something we should investigate.
i think it's stupid rhetoric, as with most things on the right. But ultimately, someone mishandling a gun and injuring themselves, is something that they did to themselves. That is neither morally good, or bad, it's simply neutral. Someone mishandling a gun and injuring someone else is bad, but you could probably sue and win that case. I would also propose you probably shouldn't hang around, or tolerate bad gun owners either, but what do i know. Someone intentionally using a gun to hurt someone else is already bad, and that was probably inevitable in some capacity anyway.
fair enough, ultimately i think you simply have an unfounded fear about guns, you could very easily have the same fear about knives, power tools, dangerous chemicals, heavy objects, people who are simply physically larger than you, all of these things vastly more common than owning a gun, let alone gun violence. As i've already stated, statistically, nothing supports this claim, deductively i see no reason why it should matter to you unless you're like shinzo abe or something. To me this rings to be about equivalent to my fear of spiders. Except i realize that it's irrational and not based in reality.
I suppose in closing i mostly want to ask you one question, and that question is why. Are you a generally/highly paranoid person? Are you concerned about every potential event? Or is this simply a fear of guns explicitly, and if it's the latter, i want you think about why it's explicitly just guns that scare you, as opposed to someone throwing acid into your face for example.
Fear by definition is irrational, it is not a mechanism by which you can rationalize a situation it's a mechanism that drives you to remove yourself from potentially dangerous situations as a method of self preservation, that's it.