House minority leader trying to blame video games for mass shootings. Update: Walmart pulls violent video game ads for 2 weeks

[Ganoncrotch]

VAMatt said:

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.

I think I get what you're going for here, which is that people who want to murder will murder with a gun where it's available, but if you didn't have a gun you would go and murder with a knife instead, but if that was the case then naturally Knife crime would be lower in the states where gun murder is a lot higher to kinda balance things out.

Where that falls flat to a degree is that knife murder is also higher in the states than say... the UK which has had a number of very high profile knife attacks in key tourist area's in London in the last few years... but still it doesn't reach the US figures for Knife murders per million (Source https://www.euronews.com/2018/05/05/trump-s-knife-crime-claim-how-do-the-us-and-uk-compare- that source btw, offers a lower number of deaths per million than the one I got from Wiki earlier, it's from 2016 instead of 2017 where my other number came from, but I will concede that number varies depending on the study done and the body reporting)

I wouldn't do a comparison of Baseball bat related murders from UK to US... you guys would lose that as we do not know what the sport is unless you call it cricket and put your leg before a wicket... whatever that means!

Your comment does remind me that of all the places I have been.... the USA has never been on that list! I'm not even sure why, for me traveling via plane is something done so often it's like hoping on a bus, perhaps I should key in a visit sometime!

Gonna just say I know I've posted a lot in this thread and have ruffled a few feathers regarding the US and guns and I really don't mean to come off sounding preachy or cold about what could have been done to save those people.... there have been 2 devastating mass shootings in the states and the place has my condolences on a major level, I can't even imagine the terror it must be for families either there or with loved ones at those scenes and again for vg members from the states I'm sorry if the "statistic" posts seem cold and uncaring to 2 horrible events.