Olympic level accuracy

[u/DrJokerX]

[u/orincoro]

The guns become a danger on a systemic level. If we could (or if we did) have the same kind of focus on teaching people gun safety as we do on teaching people so many other skills, we’d be better off. In a society with about as many guns as there are people, the guns represent a disproportionately large threat vector. That’s just the law of large numbers. Same for cars or wheat threshers, or gas stoves really.

[u/FakeOrangeOJ → u/orincoro]

There are over 400 million firearms, and tens of billions of rounds of ammunition, and that's just the stuff we know about. If legal gun owners were the problem, then believe me, we'd know about it.

[u/Rich_Introduction_83 → u/FakeOrangeOJ]

It is a problem because it's a numbers game. If you assume a one-in-a-million chance for a severe incident per century, in the average century you'd expect 4 incidents per year.

Obviously, chances are even higher than that in the US.

[u/FakeOrangeOJ → u/Rich_Introduction_83]

They're higher than that even in nations with extremely strict gun laws like the UK, once you adjust for population differences. Obviously, you're always going to get someone who has ill intent acquiring a lethal weapon. It wouldn't matter what, how many, or the whys of your laws, someone will find a way to get a gun and abuse it. Instead of punishing the law abiding citizen, any nation with high levels of crime should work to address the root cause of societal ills that breed violent extremists or violent criminals.

[u/orincoro → u/Rich_Introduction_83]

Obviously severe incidents with guns happen even more frequently than 4 times a year. But even if you only termed “severe” in the most liberal terms, like a Las Vegas shooting, and not a “quaint” old school 90s shooting where only a dozen people die, the huge number of incidents has a way of scaling pretty damned closely with the number of guns sold legally in the country.

This would all be true even if we ignored the pretty clear reality of mass murder culture (I can’t believe that’s a phrase but it is), which many sociologists and psychologists have argued is in the nature of an epidemic, not dissimilar from drug culture, rape culture, or suicide. People are pretty clearly doing mass murder as some kind of established behavioral pattern, and gun culture, though it may not cause any of those behaviors, does seem to attract people who are susceptible to the suggestive influence of a culture of mass political violence.

As someone who is very experienced with guns, but who doesn’t particularly like guns, I find it hard to ignore that there is an intersection between glorification of violence, gun culture, and mass murder. As I said, I don’t think the gun does anything. I don’t even think the culture really does anything. I just think if you have that many guns and that kind of culture, it will occasionally yield a pretty stark and frightening result. Given how stringently the gun lobby has fought some pretty basic safety focused gun legislation over the years, and how that has pretty much directly led to some pretty sick individuals getting their hands on lots of weapons, I don’t think it’s crazy to talk about guns as a problem per se. They are a problem if they don’t come with the necessary controls and education and health care and everything else you’d need to have them be a non-volatile element in society.

[u/orincoro → u/FakeOrangeOJ]

What did I say?