Ganoncrotch said:
I'm not sure how your proximity to Chicago comes into play here, are you suggesting that you haven't been shot so that disproves that people get shot in the states, the figure I used which is 12.something per 100,000 is great because it's a statistic per 100k people if you apply those stats to a country with fewer people then as you lower the number of population the stat stays the same so the actual number of people goes down getting shot. You could have a death to guns rate of 100 per 100,000 in a group of 100 people.... would mean that just one of them got shot and killed in a 10 year period, or .1 of a person per year. The fact that across all of the United States that figure is scary enough at 1 per 8,333 but say if you were right, and there was great gun control and protection in half of the states there, which would mean that some states had 0 gun related deaths... say half the states had 0 gun deaths (just throwing out some simple math) but if that was the case, then the States where there was gun deaths would be far more dangerous, pushing their figures up to 1 in 4k which would be terrifyingly high in those area's. Saying that 1 in 8,333 to me is scary high, looking further into this figure I found that a lot of those numbers were self inflicted suicide cases, which I guess makes sense that if you were going to end it all and had a gun at the ready it would be the fastest way to do that job.... but I will say as someone qualified in suicide emergency care, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier for me to cut someone down from a rope around their neck than it would be for me to try and triage a gunshot to the temple, so even if the deaths are suicide in nature if you were to remove the guns from the situation there is a chance that the person might rethink the harder to perform suicide or that EMT crew might be able to save the person from OD/Cutting/Jumping attempt on their own life. But look just from an outsiders point of view, just on paper the death rate in USA to guns is a scary thing, compared to other stuff say for example cars you have 1 in every 4,000 people there will be hit by a car.... not killed, just hit, the number of people who will die to a road accident are 1 per 47k or nearly 6 times less likely than being shot and killed, simple fact of the matter is cars have a ton of checks in place to make sure they're in the hands of the correct owner, driven by someone safe, are checked to be road worthy... and also they're a means to get to jobs and children to school every day, unless someone is using a gun powered flintstones mobile to get to their job, guns do not have the same amount of practical uses as a car. But sorry for the tangent there, my point was today I will likely walk passed the number of people required for one of them to die to a gun if I lived in the states, that thought wouldn't sit well with me if I'm honest. |
I think the point is that the average American has a statistically tiny chance of dying at the hands of a gun in the United States. There is a very very small subset of the population that is at a significantly elevated risk. And even for those at risk, the gun statistic is misleading. If guns weren't available, many of those people would be at an elevated risk of a dying by knife, baseball bat, or some other weapon.
In other words, while your numbers may be technically correct (I'm not sure that they are, as there are numbers that people use to paint a drastically different picture as well. But, for purposes of this conversation, we can stipulate that you're correct) you are painting an inaccurate picture of life in the United States. If you honestly believe that the risk of death by gun is so high in the United States, you are in serious need of a trip here to see how things actually work.
