Among the small circle of co-workers I talk with every day three of them have guns, and two of those people have just one gun.
Are animals a better example? According to the humane society 47% of US households own at least one dog, and 46% own at least one cat.
Imagine a day in Elementary school when they teach kids in class that if their pet or a friend's pet pulled their ears flat, showed their teeth, puffed up their fur, and started growling or hissing it was time to leave them alone and back away slowly. Would anyone protest that class because they don't have a dog, so they know that their kids will never see a dog?
According to these three sites while children are 60 times more likely to need medical attention for a dog bite compared to a gun shot, in the us a child is 25 times more likely to be killed by a gun than killed by a dog, so similar levels of education seem prudent.
I don't know where I learned that if an animal was frothing at the mouth and acting strangely it may have rabies and be aggressive, and that they should be avoided and an adult found immediately. It was probably in Elementary school, and in the US you are probably at least a million times more likely to find a gun than a rabid animal.
As I said previously Guns =/= Cars
It's just an analogy to explore the idea better. If forced to choose one I would obviously choose traffic safety. But we can actually teach a lot of different safety ideas.
Given the danger I don't think teaching kids not to handle firearms on the basis that they are not likely to ever encounter one holds up. I think that likelihood is enough to consider.
I do see an argument from the POV of wither those programs actually WORK. And wither those programs promote interest in guns. I think those points need to be examined closely.
In the year since Sandy Hook there's been 24 school shootings. How many could have been prevented by safety training do you imagine?
The safety training isn't meant to prevent school shootings, so I don't think it'd have prevented any. The problem it addresses is the one of kids playing with improperly stored guns they've found and accidentally shooting themselves or someone else.
In the year since Sandy Hook there's been 24 school shootings.
What.
Maq wrote:In the year since Sandy Hook there's been 24 school shootings.
What.
Actually Salon reckons 26.
If someone told me there were 26 school shooting worldwide and all them in the US I wouldn't be surprised.
Quick googling gave me estimates of 250 million cars in the US and 270 million guns. Also, a large number of people own guns without bragging about it.
Unfortunately for your example, ownership of those 270 million firearms aren't spread out like the ownership of automobiles. Firearms are concentrated in a portion of the population that has been getting smaller for decades. And within that shrinking slice of Americans, about half only own a single firearm while the other half are tooling up like David Koresh.
The US gun stock: results from the 2004 national firearms survey[/url]]
Concentration of Ownership
Almost half (48%) of all individual gun owners, corresponding to 13% of the US adult population, reported owning >4 firearms. Household ownership followed a similar pattern, with 41% of firearm-owning households reporting ownership of >4 firearms (table 2). The 20% of gun owners who owned the most guns possessed about 65% of the nation’s guns.Number of Guns
The actual number of guns reported in our survey varied depending on how the question was asked and who answered the question. Individual firearm owners (n = 702) reported owning an average of 6.6 (95% confidence interval (CI) 5.2 to 7.9, median 3) working firearms. On further examination, it seemed that individuals who owned >4 firearms (with an average of 12 firearms per person) were greatly affecting the mean. When outliers representing the top 3% of gun owners (those owning .25 guns) were removed, the average number of working firearms per owner was 5.0 (95% CI 4.6 to 5.4).
There are countries where you can assume your child will never see a gun, the US is emphatically not one of them. As evidence I submit the hundreds of children every year that accidentally shoot themselves or others.
That hundreds of children accidentally shoot themselves every year is only proof that a percentage of gun owners are irresponsible jackasses who endanger everyone around them. Rather indoctrinate every child about firearms, why don't we simply not give firearms to idiots?
You are demanding that the entire nation should change so that it becomes unnecessary to teach all children about guns "just in case". Honestly, it probably should, but until it does, teaching children how to deal with it is just good sense.
Again, I don't trust any pro-gun group enough to let them talk to children about guns. That's because they aren't about gun safety and are solely expanding the number of guns and gun owners in our society, something science (and basic reason) tells us is a very dumb thing.
Nor do I trust those groups to create a program that would be at all appropriate for the majority of victims of handgun violence: teenagers in cities. Waxing nostalgically about how your granddad taught you to shoot back in the days of Mayberry has no place in a modern gun safety program for children.
Nor do I trust those groups to create a program that would be at all appropriate for the majority of victims of handgun violence: teenagers in cities. Waxing nostalgically about how your granddad taught you to shoot back in the days of Mayberry has no place in a modern gun safety program for children.
Is that what happens at safety programs? The ones I went to must have missed that part of the syllabus then.
Is that what happens at safety programs? The ones I went to must have missed that part of the syllabus then.
I think he objects to any part that doesn't include absolute, bowel-loosening terror.
Is that what happens at safety programs? The ones I went to must have missed that part of the syllabus then.I think he objects to any part that doesn't include absolute, bowel-loosening terror.
So children should be taught that guns are magical anti-crime problem solvers then? That we should ignore all of the research that says a household with a firearm is so much more likely to result in someone getting shot or killed versus anything good happening?
There are solid reasons the pro-gun crowd don't want any research done about firearms.
So children should be taught that guns are magical anti-crime problem solvers then?
Yep, no bowel-loosening terror = not acceptable. If it's not profoundly anti-gun, it's not a good gun safety program.
Cars are much more dangerous. You'd be far better off championing seatbelt usage. You'd save a lot more lives.
Malor wrote:Is that what happens at safety programs? The ones I went to must have missed that part of the syllabus then.I think he objects to any part that doesn't include absolute, bowel-loosening terror.
So children should be taught that guns are magical anti-crime problem solvers then? That we should ignore all of the research that says a household with a firearm is so much more likely to result in someone getting shot or killed versus anything good happening?
There are solid reasons the pro-gun crowd don't want any research done about firearms.
Please goto a safety class and see first hand what happens in one before stating baseless claims about them. Hell goto 2 or 3.
Anheuser-Busch does plenty of ads about drunk driving, while Missouri is one of the few (only?) states with no open container laws. The last thing I would want is an organization whose real goal is to create a large customer base for gun companies to have anything to do with teaching kids about guns, as innocent as said lessons purport to be.
OG_slinger wrote:Malor wrote:Is that what happens at safety programs? The ones I went to must have missed that part of the syllabus then.I think he objects to any part that doesn't include absolute, bowel-loosening terror.
So children should be taught that guns are magical anti-crime problem solvers then? That we should ignore all of the research that says a household with a firearm is so much more likely to result in someone getting shot or killed versus anything good happening?
There are solid reasons the pro-gun crowd don't want any research done about firearms.
Please goto a safety class and see first hand what happens in one before stating baseless claims about them. Hell goto 2 or 3.
I had to go through gun safety class back in the mid nineties before I was allowed to use the guns my father gave me... and while it wasn't at the level OG's stating, it was quite jingoistic ra ra guns r great interspersed with generic common sense knowledge like "don't point this end in someone's face." I was only 15-16 at the time but I remember feeling like I wasn't really learning anything. It's entirely possible we just had sh*tty instructors, though.
Also, the class ended with a prayer, though I think that was more a Midwest think than a gun thing.
My inner-city elementary school covered gun safety. It wasn't run by the NRA but it covered identical material. Stop, leave the area, tell an adult, etc. This was circa 1989, so we had a DARE program too. Can't speak to the efficacy of either, but we had police officers come teach both.
I think ours were held by the DNR. This was rural Iowa, mind you.
I learned gun safety on a range, in the Scouts, from a grizzled old Army sergeant.
Loved that guy. He took it very, very seriously. He would treat you very well if you showed you understood just how serious a thing it was to pick up a gun, but if you screwed around, even a little, he'd bark something fierce at you, and if you did anything actually *dangerous*, he was extremely unforgiving. I saw many, many kids, um, I guess we'd call it permabanned these days, but back then it was just "get off my range, and don't come back."
Target shooting is a lot of fun. I actually preferred the .22s we used in Scouts to the larger guns I used later; larger-caliber guns make me nervous, even when I'm doing the shooting, and it's just on a range. I'm a good shot, and I know gun safety very well, and I still don't like the large ones all that much.
But even so, I still wouldn't want them banned. The vast majority of gun violence in this country happens in the poor communities that are under siege from the police in the War on Drugs. Stop that, and gun violence would largely disappear as an issue. Among wealthier communities that *aren't* at war with the police, gun violence is exceedingly rare.
You guys have no clue how the Eddie Eagle program works. I've explained it in an earlier post. There is no other material in it besides safety. There is no other agenda other than telling kids to not touch guns and go get an adult.
If you have evidence otherwise, post it.
The vast majority of gun violence in this country happens in the poor communities that are under siege from the police in the War on Drugs. Stop that, and gun violence would largely disappear as an issue. Among wealthier communities that *aren't* at war with the police, gun violence is exceedingly rare.
Ummm. I don't think that's a fair statement to make. You're collapsing too much into 1 argument. Show me these school shooting locations and tell me they were poor communities fighting with the police.
This has probably been posted before.
Taken across society as a whole, the school shootings are not relevant to actual risks. The kids are in much more danger from being driven around by their parents. Humans are very bad at understanding and correctly prioritizing relative risks: we give school shootings ridiculous amounts of mental weight, when children are actually in far more danger from a tremendous number of other things.
If you want to actually reduce gun violence in this country, just stop the War on Drugs, and the great majority of homicides will just vanish. School shootings might still happen, but FFS, more people have died just on Tennessee freeways just this year (about 950 when I last saw the billboard.)
The actual problem is the gun homicides in the poor communities; that's where most of the deaths happen.
No, the actual problem is people who brush away mass murder as statistically insignificant and suggest that guns don't actually play a role in gun deaths.
I have to side with Malor on this. As sad as it is to say, we're many dead kids away from school shootings being a problem.
Statistically, anyway.
It's like being terrified of thyroid cancer on the deck of the Titanic.
and suggest that guns don't actually play a role in gun deaths.
You're right, that would be bad. But I didn't say that.
What I said was that guns aren't that significant in terms of overall deaths. They are already an extremely minor threat among the middle class and affluent, and sans the War on Drugs, gun deaths would mostly disappear into the noise.
It doesn't matter how you die untimely, just that you do. Being shot, dying of pollution- or chemical-caused cancer, dying in a car crash -- they're all the same in the end: you're still dead, when you shouldn't have been.
Guns are only a significant problem because of the War on Drugs. Take the profit out of controlling street corners, and there's no reason to kill anyone over them anymore.
If we stop fighting an actual war, one that's being waged against our own citizens, on our own soil, the victims will disarm.
No, the actual problem is people who brush away mass murder as statistically insignificant and suggest that guns don't actually play a role in gun deaths.
But they're very profitable mass murders, so we won't do anything about them because, hey, gotta die of something--just hope it's a something that can be used to stoke paranoia and improve someone's FY.
As sad as it is to say, we're many dead kids away from school shootings being a problem.
The first half and second half of this sentence seem contradictory. Is it sad? Then it's a problem.
Is it as big a problem in the US as car related deaths? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean you can't address both. That's falling into the same logic trap of people that say we shouldn't address women's issues in Western countries because they have it so much worse in the Middle East.
If you're going to address it, address it right. Stop the actual cause of the violence, the war we're fighting on our own soil.
People having guns is not a problem. It's using them to kill people that's the issue. If you fix that, there's no need to infringe on a whole country's Constitutional rights.
You are allowed to try and solve both problems.
Guns are only a significant problem because of the War on Drugs. Take the profit out of controlling street corners, and there's no reason to kill anyone over them anymore.
While I don't particulary think the war on drugs is a good thing, I am not convinced ending it will have as large an impact as you seem to be implying.
I do agree on the point that school shootings especially, and gun violence in general are given disproportionate weight compared to other ways of dying.
You are allowed to try and solve both problems.
Not only that, but because 99% of the country CAN'T end the gun war, but CAN lobby their local school districts for gun safety classes with approximately a one million times higher chance of success, it makes sense to address that problem before ending a multi-decade, billion dollar industry.
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