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QUOTE=sewktbk;415361]Adult walks into gun store. Retailer checks for criminal record through dedicated judicial information computer system. No record shows. No evidence that adult is a danger to anyone, never has been, so adult purchases gun. No government involvement. No criminalization of the peaceful and law-abiding for mere ownership/possession of a gun.
Wait - how does that pertain to the situation we're talking about? Nobody went into a gun store, these are firearms that are no longer wanted, so if the person who bought them isn't around, the people who have them now never went in a store to get the background check in the first place. There's no need of an amnesty for people who actually bought the guns, they can just sell them if they don't want them.
Bit of a fail there
Training only addresses accidental misuse, so you solve none of the intentional misuse problems. Thats one
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Accidental misuse is what we're talking about here. So... If as you say it addresses that problem, then it's solving the very problem it was intended to.
What did you think it was trying to solve?
Second, If you want to maintain that training should be mandatory to address the dangers that a firearm represents, then you'd have to also be pushing mandatory training for the possession of lets say propane tanks.
Why? When was the last time a propane tank went off by accident when you picked it up and it killed a neighbour? Never, that's when
There's no need because they simply aren't as dangerous. We've been over this - this is just a rehash of your drain-o defense.
See - the thing is tanks have a number of regulations and design elements that prevent accidentally killing people around them. It just doesn't happen. At best they might start a fire and cause damage, but the number of people injured or killed in Canada in the last 10 years due to accidental misuse of propane tanks is pretty close to zero. So there's no need.
I could also bring back my prescription drugs or fork+electrical sockets example...and it would circle back to the same point ;
You misspelled 'pointless'. Again - when was the last time an electrical socket 'went off' by accident and killed someone? They don't. And prescription drugs come in their own child proof 'safe storage' containers when you get them.
You seeing how this works yet? The danger posed by either of those is near zero.
Either adults are by definition responsible enough to make sure they learn about, understand, and share safe handling/storage instructions of such items
Well we know they aren't, it's demonstrable. Which is why as the level of risk of misuse goes up, so do the requirements and regulation around the item. Gasoline is potentially dangerous, but not that dangerous, so we settle for requiring it to be stored in approved containers. Drugs are dangerous, but not that dangerous except to small children, so we put them in child proof containers.
A car is dangerous when used so we require licenses for use, but generally it's pretty safe just sitting there because you need keys etc to do anything with it and generally it's pretty hard to 'accidentally' find the keys, accidentally turn it on, accidentally put it in gear, and accidentally drive it around till you hit someone. There's a lot of safety features built into a car to prevent accident or injury.
a gun however is pretty easy to have an accident with. If it's loaded, it's extremely easy. If it's unloaded but ammo's handy, it's still pretty easy. And such accidents are very commonly fatal, and often not to the person who had the accident but some innocent person who had nothing to do with it.
And if you dislike my examples,
Well it's not a matter of like or dislike - your examples are a joke and I think we both know it. Suggesting a bottle of prescription pills are as dangerous as a firearm is a joke. The very fact you'd offer it as an example shows you havn't thought any of this thru.
I would simply remind you that there are a lot of places around the globe where no mandatory training is required for gun ownership, and gun accidents related to involuntary misuse aren't more common there from a statistical point of view.
Where is that? Certainly not the us.
So in a country like the US, where there are more guns than people (357 million) and where there is no mandatory training of any kind for possession...there were 505 deaths due to accidental misuse of guns in 2015. Thats 0.0001% of all guns.
Well first off, the number of guns is irrelevant. If I have ten loaded guns sitting beside each other a kid can only pick up one at a time anyway.
And second - there IS quite a bit of manditory training in the states. It's not complete as it is in Canada, but it's manditory for a large number of uses. Hunters in most states get manditory training which includes gun safety and such. So - what you'd have to look at if you were doing any kind of meaningful example is the rate of accidents amongst NON trained gun owners in the states and trained ones, because the majority have some sort of training.
To scale it and put it into perspective, if I put you in a group of 20 people...or 100...or even 5,000 people....and I told you I needed to put you all through mandatory training because of a potential problem that might affect 0.0001% of you...you'd all tell me to pound sand. Especially if the core of this training could be summed up in an instructions manual for an object that any adult with a pulse and half a brain already is more careful around and understands to require some level of safe handling in order to not cause a hazard.
You see what you did there, right? You took the percentage of GUNS and then tried to apply that to the percentage of PEOPLE who own guns. Are you suggesting that no American owns more than one gun? That's typical sloppy thinking and reasoning.
Further, deaths aren't the only problem. If you get your leg blown off, it may not be fatal but it's DEFINITELY going to ruin your day and if you're just some innocent person walking by you might think that was a pretty crappy thing to have happen.
So - seeing as you went down that rabbit hole, let's do some real numbers.
The estimated number of gun owners in America is about 30% of the population according to the best and latest research. There's about 318 million Americans. So roughly 100 million gun owners.
Let's take your figure of 500 deaths. It's low - most years it's higher, but what the heck.
It's difficult to find hard numbers on accidental firearms injuries specifically, but we do know that for every fatal firearm injury treated by hospitals there was about 3 non fatal injuries. That's probably lower than accidental alone considering that it includes people who were TRYING to kill others, but we'll again be generous and use that.
So that would give us about 2000 people shot by accident in a year. 1 million divided by 2000 would be about one in every 500 gun owners had one of their guns used in an accidental shooting. Roughly .2 percent. About 10 times more than your numbers suggested.
Now - what we don't know and probably won't be able to figure out is out of those gun owners, how many had relevant safety training and how many didn't, and what percent of the accidents occured with people who didn't have training. But what we CAN see is that there is a tremendous drop in accidents when training is introduced. Virtually every state reports it, and our experience in Canada is similar. For example, in Texas:
Still, Hall and his small staff who oversee the state's hunter education programs, the thousands of volunteer hunter education instructors who annually teach and certify 30,000 students in safe hunting practices and the approximately 1.1 million licensed hunters in Texas have cause for feeling positive about the overall state of hunter safety in Texas.
Over the past four decades, the number of hunting-related firearms accidents have dropped by half and the number of fatalities by much, much more.
In Canada, where training is more prevelant, the numbers dropped even more than 50 percent. Much more actually.
But let's go with 50%. It could reasonably be supposed that requiring training might drop those accidents by 1000 people, and probably fatalities make up a disproportionate number of those.
That's a lot of people who don't need to be injured or killed. In a 10 year period that's 10,000 people who don't have to have their lives ruined. And an even larger number of families and such who aren't torn apart by the death of a child or father or what have you.
Now - whenever you're looking at remedies to that kind of thing, you have to look at a 'cost benefit' analysis. For example, if it took a year of training to achieve that, it wouldn't be practical. If it took 5 minutes, we'd be insanely stupid not to demand it.
Considering that firearms safety training only represents a days Worth of training in the course of a lifetime, that's pretty small potatoes as far as cost goes. It's pretty reasonable to say 'it's worth it for thousands of lives to ask people to give up a day to training".
The problem with you is Apperently you don't actually understand how stats work. They pretty clearly show there is a benefit, and that the cost of providing that benefit is minimal.
And now for the interesting part. Lets assume we DID as a society all agree that we needed to do something about that number and lower it.
You claim mandatory training is an effective way to achieve that.
Well, it turns out I did a bit of research...
Oh good - I love your research
- In 2011, there were 18 unintentional deaths caused by guns in Canada (Statistics Canada, 0.05 per 100,000, total population of 34.34M)
- There were an approximate 7.6 million guns in Canada at the time (RCMP, 2010)
- This means that unintentional deaths were caused by 0.0002% of guns.
ROFLMAO
Well you never fail to deliver.
Virtually everyone suggests that the RCMP number on guns is severely low. Probably about half the real number. do a little MORE research, you'll see why. And we already know the number of guns is not relevant. But let's carry on
Thats right. In a country where mandatory training has been implemented for 2 decades, deaths caused by accidental misuse of a firearm are actually twice as high as the country right next to ours, where no mandatory training measures exists and where the per-capita number of guns is exponentially higher.
Well that's actually WRONG, as we know. Even using your own flawed methodology. We'd be about half theirs. And - not only would we be about half theirs, but on top of it a number of their people also have training.
See - here's the problem with lying and poor thinking - sooner or later someone comes along to call you on it and you just wind up looking foolish.
yes - and thank you for proving my point so thoroughly.
Next time learn how numbers work before attempting to use them
