The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Sorry, I'm not sure what your point is :/. Granted, my own point is probably not very clear. My contention is that the person I was replying to was not normalising their data. So I used the same idea to claim that more people die while driving than people who shoot themselves in the head. It is clearly more likely for you to die (probability wise) when a bullet goes through your brain, than if you get in a car. It's about probabilities, and I just wanted to point out the fallacy in those statements by (hopefully) having them infer the same fallacy from something that is also intuitively wrong.

Your statistics suck. Suicide by firearm, does not compare to homicide by vehicle. Suicide by firearm, is a goddamned luxury, first world problems, if you don't have a firearm you can't just not kill yourself and just have to suffer, you instead just redirect your car exhaust to the inside of your car, you tie a rope to the ceiling and jump off a chair with it around your neck, you jump off a bridge, you drink bleach. The same number of people who shot themselves, killed themselves in other ways that year, and I wager that "not having a gun" would have simply added the number of group A to group B.

That is a non-argument. The argument is always that guns make it too easy to do this and do that, and automobiles do have the exact same problem. Too easy to assist in robberies. Too easy to commit mass murder. Too easy to commit individual murders. Too easy to commit suicide. Too easy to commit negligent deaths. You all just too damn lazy to have any stricter automobile laws to see what it's like. You can do it too, the average person doesn't need automobiles and we could save the most literal highest percent of preventable deaths a year by reducing and nearly eliminating them. The tragedy in France definitely wouldn't have ha-oh who am I kidding the assailant would have used chemical fertilizer shrapnel bombs for equal or greater deaths if he hadn't an automobile.

In summary, a suicide attempt can be made with housecleaner if not with a gun, a murder can be committed with a knife if not with a gun, a mass murder can be committed with IEDs if not with a gun, but a failure to use a blinker will not kill a little girl in the backseat of a car on her way to school with any other device EXCEPT for an automobile. Eliminate that, and the same person won't be killed by a horse-drawn carriage.

I actually just used raw numbers. You said yourself that 3x more deaths happen by vehicles, than by firearms. (That statistic was either exaggerated or perhaps you have a different source?). I wasn't trying to make a point about firearms being the cause of suicide. I was trying to make a point about how numbers should be compared. Numbers should be normalised. What is important is how many people survive a bullet going through their brain vs how many die. I think you would agree that the death rate for that particular action is pretty high. If you compare that to getting in a car, the rate at which people die from getting in is pretty low. I think you would agree with that too.

Once again, I am not talking about banning/regulating guns, but really I am just trying to teach you about normalising your data so that you don't make such fallacious arguments in the future.

Perhaps I should have used a more orthogonal example so that you wouldn't be confused by the topics. Perhaps the statistics of deaths when using stairs vs underwater cave exploration. There are more people who die because of stairs, therefore they are more dangerous than underwater cave exploration.

Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?

Cars are on the road all the time, always in close proximity and often at high speed, constantly creating opportunities for things to go wrong.

However, as you might guess, it doesn't go wrong very often. Compare this to a gun, where possible incidents are much less common (e.g you don't run around with your finger on the trigger), it's clear that guns are far more lethal.

Yes there is! You can play Trouble in Terrorist town or Murder in gmod/CSGO. Both kind of work like that. In TTT theres three terrorists or so, a detective, and random other innocents. Basically everyone mad dashes for weapons and terrorists attempt to use manipulation to make everyone look the other way. It's a blast to play with friends!

There are also some other games, I can't remember the name now but you play a sniper and need to look for one person to shoot in a party- your target. Either them being an ai or a player trying to act natural. If I can find the name of it I'll tell you!

But yeah trouble in terrorist town is a ton of fun to play and should work like what you'd like.

Your arguments aren't particularly any better. If we go by "automobile ownership to automobile death", compared to "gun ownership to gun death", because not every gun is used to commit a slaying as is true with a car... *crunches numbers*

253,000,000 cars cause 32,600 casualties... and 280,000,000 firearms cause 32,300 casualties...

You know what the sad thing is? By your own patent seal of approved logic, this shows, that firearms compared to automobiles, is like the world having less stairs than it does underwater cave exploration, and the stairs STILL get MORE kills yearly despite having LESS of them EVEN FACTORING IN the people intentionally killing themselves by jumping headfirst down a flight of stairs.

Dangers of firearms compared to cars. The threat society tries to place on them, is NOT drawn to scale. The automobile may seem less intimidating, but it'll kill more people dead, than you'll ever have die of firearms, even the ones that commit suicide.

Which again, for all you boys and girls watching at home, let this be a friendly reminder, do NOT commit suicide by firearm. Eat some of your mommy's pain pills, jump in front of traffic, but do NOT use a firearm because you contribute over 2/3rds of the inflated statistics to an already persecuted device. Bridges haven't killed enough people this year, go boost their K/D ratio. No really, this got kind of dark, do NOT commit suicide, SEEK HELP, but IF you WERE to, and you SHOULDN'T... then just don't use a firearm for the love of bacon. They add those to it's stats, and instead of 11.5k deaths, it has 32k. 32k, 21k being suicides that could have been committed blatantly in the presence of a firearm ban.

Which brings me back to the discussion of assault weapons. Banning those DEFINITELY won't prevent suicides, you need just 1 damn bullet, it could be a musket, it could be a malfunctioning 1887 lever action shotgun with really stale ammo, banning "assault" weapons definitely won't affect 21k of those firearm deaths, and banning firearms in general wouldn't affect 21k of those either. Razor blades and prescription medicine would just see an increase of exactly 21k. Which is the sad part.

Want to talk about ridiculous statistics for just a moment? 250,000 Americans a year die from medical malpractice, that is, simple mistakes that could have been avoided with mistake-free medical work. Between surgeries that weren't needed, medicine mixups, and unforseen mistakes with treatments prescribed, it kills 8x more people than firearms do yearly. The ACA kills more people yearly, than firearms do. Let that sink in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hird-leading-cause-of-death-in-united-states/

I don't think anyones driving any point home by comparing one bad thing to another. The point that should be made here is that : A no bad things at all is way better.
B guns are an integrally bad thing. Though and through. no shortcuts or dilly-dallying about it.

Wow, yeah you addressed my point, thank you.

My point wasn't about the number of caves, it was about the death rate while using a cave vs death rate of using stairs. Really I was just annoyed at the use of absolute numbers when rates are more important when interpreting the danger.

You brought useful numbers to my attention, so thanks for that. One question however, do you think it makes a difference that those guns aren't distributed evenly? I would say that the best metric for comparison would be rate of death while using cars, vs rate of death while carrying a firearm. The absolute numbers are a little less useful since a person can own multiple cars/guns. Point taken none-the-less.

As an outsider, how much awareness is there regarding the high suicide rate using guns? I get the impression that whenever some mass shooting happens the fear mongering begins and conveniently forgets about that :/.

A bit dark but okay xD. I would argue though that guns probably enable things a bit, just because the latency between choice to death and death is quite low. But yeah, I see your point, this doesn't add to the inherent danger of guns.

That's crazy :O. Yeah I think I actually agree with you.

As an outsider, once again, it seems to me that if the goal was to reduce gun violence (even if it's just non-suicide type), there just isn't a direct solution. Especially not one as simple as tougher gun regulation (it erodes the american freedom).

Kind of amazed how this thread now is about "are cars as bad as guns?".
What's next? "is cola as bad as guns?"
Because I am sure that the damage caused to general health by sugar might actually kill a ton of people.

...
Comparing "it killed this many people" is a completely wrong way to go about this.

How much good did cars do in the last 12 month?
How much good did doctors do in the last 12 month?
How much good did ownership of assault rifles do in the last 12 month?

To be fair, assault rifles only do good in the hands of the military, and even then questionably, because "assault rifle" implies it's entire purpose is assault. Many "combat looking" rifles are just "plastic instead of wood" variations of other commonly acceptable-looking rifles.

Ask for how much good do they do per damage, video games "do" nothing positive economically aside, the entire entertainment industry is like that, but we don't ban them.

Furthermore, how much good firearms do, is extremely downplayed. LATimes say 259 justafiable firearm homicides per year occur. Now, they don't even include the ones killed by police firearm, akin to "not counting suicide as a form of firearm death". Now who's the retard? I'm not saying "having an agenda or preference" is bad, I'm saying using misleading statistics is bad. So, we take both those numbers, despite how many the police kill IS rather appauling, I don't want them disarmed, I merely want their use of a firearm in a one-sided situation to cost them their ***.

Anyway, that's 1230. Per 11000 homicide, and 21000 suicide, and 280,000,000 guns in circulation. Honestly, I thought the statistics spoke for themselves, but you make a "new threshold", and I present how it merits up to what you wanted it to, then you "raise that threshold". At this point, we might as well ban automobiles, pit bulls, elective surgeries, non-life-saving medications, video games, fictional media, and anything else with similar unit-per-harm and unit-per-help statistics.

You guys, guns are not the problem. License users, sure. Register firearms, sure. Limit the cost so you don't limit the freedoms of the public, you bet. Guarantee open freedom for everyone to access them until due process is taken to remove their rights (violent felony), absolutely. It's not hard to understand, it's not even hard to explain. What we need to do, is put firearms and training into MORE hands so we DO have better response to attacks, be them bombings, vehicular mass killings, or the such. It isn't just some wild west fantasy, it's a last resort personal self defense. It's like rape-mace, did you know much fewer women with rape-mace get raped, than women without rape-mace? It's true. We all need rape-mace, so assailants can stop raping us of life, belongings, and sometimes, quite literally rape us.

@thetrophysystem
When you say "you", who are you talking to?

Well, are you?

punk?

please tell me you get this refference

Do you feel lucky?

"Guns don't kill people, @cola_colin (s) do"....

Assault rifle just came from the German stg-44 afaik, the storm rifle with literal translation.

The Sturmgewehr

Much aggressive name. So misleading. Wow.

While skepticism in government is universal, having faith in government to provide a benefit to society beyond global affairs is a whole other matter, which I was trying to get at. This is where I believe the boomers differ and why they are unique

As for WWII, people whom I knew who grew up and served during this time have the same mentality as "cooperation is needed".

I do understand what you are implying though with the "if we enforce our will, we get away with it". While I wouldnt necessarily phrase it this way, I think you are trying to imply that this generation was very short sighted. I can agree with this.

Historically, I dont think this short sighted approach to policy wasnt a bad thing all the time. Many social reforms happened under the boomers because they looked at everything with face value. The issue arises when short sighted stances are combined with selfishness and greed.

Cars have more rules and regulations because they are major factor in the economy. While some are actually meant to protect the population, many are an extra source of revenue. Each State creates the traffic laws, while the local municipalities enforce the law. Like many municipalities, they are short for $$$, so they use ticket revenue to supplement the police force. Property taxes can only go so far in providing pension benefits. Plea bargains are a god send for the state.

Relating back to the boomers, many are short sighted in their thinking on guns. Many legitimately believe that their should be no regulation on gun ownership because it inhibits their life. Never mind the ramifications of a lunatic owning a gun.

TLDR: Boomers love "common" sense. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work.


----

Personally, I dont understand why the discussion of guns is taking place. The issues with guns primarily happen in the inner city where criminals use them to shoot each other at the cost of innocent bystanders. You know, the one where a kid finds a brown bag on the curb with a loaded gun?

Nevermind the lunatic who commits a mass shooting. I would categorize them as tragedies that cant be prevented. If a person wants to mow down pedestrians, they will find a way.

The brown bag scenario is preventable though.

Ultimately, removing guns will never happen. Sorry, America loves guns culture. Its engrained in our society whether we like it or not. Rather than talking about the removal of guns, there should be more emphasis put on improving the inner cities where poverty takes place. This implies actually helping the local people by providing them a decent paying job and a good public school to send their children to.

Cars being okay because you can fine people at traffic stops for things some findings show are sometimes made up by the officer to meet a quota that shouldn't exist because you shouldn't NEED to fine people who may or may not break the law... is NOT a good government strategy. Leads to the world's highest incarceration, which we now have.

Vehicle policing shouldn't be a way to constantly squeeze something out of the middle man who can just narrowly afford a car. As dangerous as they are, I'm just excited for the quick progression of self-driving cars. We need those, self-driving cars won't have a bias to try to cut off other drivers or not use blinkers because other cars wouldn't let them in if they did so they just merge wildly.

Take Hillary Clinton for instance, if a drunk driver drives drunk and accidentally kills an entire family, there was no intent to kill anyone, yet they are charged with 5 cases of manslaughter. Hillary Clinton is proven by the FBI to have jeopardized classified information, and is acquitted due to lack of intent. If she drove drunk, that family would simply vanish from the records, she simply is "too big to fail".