jason1637 said:
RolStoppable said:
Alrighty, a gun-related death is not an actual problem.
You have to work on punctuation. Your last sentence says that no waifus are weird, so waifus aren't weird. But you actually meant the opposite, so you have to put a comma after the 'no' to make that clear. Bad English is another significant problem in the USA, there are even people who believe that 'of' is a verb. At one point in my time on this website there was even someone who linked to a website that tried to justify that 'of' is a verb.
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Someone dying is always a problem even if it comes from a gun but i'm saying that it's not the crisis the media makes it out to be. This is more obvious when you compare the numbers to other causes of death.
We all make grammatical errors. It's not an exclusively American issue.
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a) (76%) are by suicide which can't be prevented by gun laws - This is conjecture and generally considered to be false. Firearms are a strong risk factor for suicide because they have a high success rate and they provide immediacy, allowing rash decisions. Gun laws do very much have an impact on suicide rates.
b) 987 (3%) are by law enforcement, thus not relevant to Gun Control discussion - This is extremely short sighted. Think for a second, why did these law enforcement officers rely on deadly force? Often it is because there either was a firearm present or they believed a firearm to be present.
c) 489 (2%) are accidental - This should not be excluded.
d) This is entirely based upon a logical fallacy. Its called the fallacy of relative privation. Essentially it is dismissing an issue by simply pointing at another issue. The good old "Who cares about income inequality when there is a genocide happening in Rwanda". Its not a good argument. Tens of thousands of deaths per year and tens of thousands more injuries should not be ignored because there are other issues. That isn't how the world works and that isn't how the government works. Yes, other issues should be addressed (and many are), but that doesn't mean that this issue should be ignored.
You want statistics, take a look at the homicide rate in pretty much any comparable country. Things don't fare well for America. We can do better.
EDIT: And just for some more context, over 70,000 Americans were treated for non fatal gunshot wounds in 2010. Some more context: Over the course of two years, more individuals die from firearms in America than the amount of Americans who died over the span of the 20 year Vietnam War. Some more context: Approximately 6000 people died from the 9/11 attacks. That is surpassed approximately every seven weeks by gun deaths in America. This is not meant to demonstrate that 9/11 was actually no big deal, but instead to demonstrate the ridiculousness of employing this fallacy.
EDIT2: Actually I'm going to keep going.
It is incredibly shady that they are using a rough estimate for total deaths (30k), but exact figures for things like suicide numbers. Lets take the actual numbers from the source they themselves used:
33,636
That means (assuming all of their other numbers are accurate), there were not 5577 "relevant" firearm deaths that year, but instead 9222. That is a a 65% increase, which is fairly massive, however, that same source states that the actual number of firearm homicides was 11208 (which excludes accidents, suicides and law enforcement intervention) which brings the increase to about 100%. Taking more recent statistics, there were over 14,000 firearm homicides in 2017. Comparing that to the original toll provides a 150% increase.
It is very shady that the first source provides many of these numbers but the individual pulled from different sources and different years for pretty much every one.
EDIT3: Fuck it, I'm already in:
Lets compare some more numbers between the number they used and the number stated in the original source:
Gun deaths: 30,000 vs 33,636
Suicides by firearm: 22,938 vs 21,175
Law enforcement: 987 vs 467 (note, the second statistic here is for Legal Intervention/War, so it includes additional deaths)
Accidental: 489 vs 505
Now lets look at some cities (for these, I have to pull from different sources, but I am using 2013 as my baseline as per the above statistics and note that these are total homicides, not only homicides by firearm (note: Homicides by firearm tend to account for about 66% of homicides, so be sure to cut the right side of the below equations down by 1/3))
St Louis: 298 vs 120
Detroit: 327 vs 333
Baltimore: 328 vs 235
Chicago: 764 vs 415
Seeing a pattern yet?
Last edited by sundin13 - on 19 June 2019