You're coming very much from the prospective of a wealthy American/European, where a $42K prosthetic is an option.
But if you're not covered by very good insurance, which is the case for the majority of humanity, an affordable 3D printed hand is much better than nothing.
And a free/open innovative community working on prosthetics can move much faster than the commercial options, and perhaps innovate past them the way home 3D printing exploded past the commercial 3D printing companies. The commercial guys were too concerned with the expensive/subtle issues, when what people may well care more about is being able to cheaply and easily solve their problem.
You're right that the $42K prosthetic isn't the same as the $50 one. A major difference, which you missed, is that it's myoelectric and active, while the $50 one is mechanical. It turns out that for this patient, the simple, mechanical solution worked better than the sophisticated, computerized one. So it's fundamentally a cheaper, simpler solution.
The rest of the costs pretty much come down to the traditional business model vs. FOSS. If you want to buy a product from a company that you can sue, with MBAs and lawyers and on-staff researchers, etc., you get to pay the big bucks for the product. If you don't have the money for that, or you prefer free/open source solutions for other reasons (such as the ability to modify the designs to suit your personal needs), you can go the Free Open Source Software route, and print your own.
Yes, this relies on volunteer labor to do the printing, assembly, fitting, etc. There are 600+ people registered at http://enablingthefuture.org/ (mainly in the Google+ group). That's the point - by empowering people with FOSS designs and documentation, they can help each other, at much lower cost than paying professionals with all of the overhead that you mention. And it turns out that many of the volunteers work professionally in the field - this is just a new way for them to apply their skills to help patients.
And I'll also point out that your comments reveal some misunderstandings of how rapidly 3D printing has progressed.
- It doesn't cost $10K for a quality 3D printer. You can get a fine 3D printer for $1K, or a cheap one for $300, and the most expensive home 3D printer is $3K. There are some great industrial printers, but it would be stupid to buy an industrial printer to print one thing - there are plenty of people and Maker spaces who already have 3D printers. See http://enablingthefuture.org/c... and register if you're interested. And of course there are service bureaus such as ShapeWays if you really want a high-end printed version. - The materials aren't as fragile as you think. There are 100+ people happily using ABS prosthetics now, and we're finding that printing in Nylon is amazingly durable. You can hammer on Nylon, and just bounces back. Amazing stuff. Hospitals and medical researchers are using 3D printed Nylon now, so using it for prosthetics is pretty reasonable. - If you can print a replacement for the raw cost of materials, that changes the economics. If you can print your own replacements for $1, it doesn't make sense to spend $millions in R&D, and spend vastly more for the prosthetic's materials, because the cost of avoiding breakage far outstrips the cost of the breakage.
All of the designs are published, and open source. So there's nothing being hidden in the video - you can download the models and inspect them to your heart's desire.
If you don't like the music that someone selected, feel free to make a better video!
Interestingly, kids LOVE 3D printed hands. If you go to http://enablingthefuture.org/ there are tons of pictures of thrilled kids. It's cool to be like Iron Man!
The designs are open source, and freely shared, very specifically with no warranty or guarantee. Just like open source software. People who release open source software don't get sued over the software, because they're not selling and supporting it, they're giving it away specifically with no guarantees or support.
I've worked in the airplane business. As screwed up as liability law is, there still has to be actual liability to award damages. So unless someone can prove that food was a cause of a crash, I don't think that the airline food companies are at risk of paying out over a lawsuit over a crash. And more relevant to the 3D printed prosthetics, if you build your own airplane (e.g. any kit plane) you can't sue the manufacturer. That's why in the US kit plates are relatively popular, because they're vastly less expensive than commercially sold airplanes.
And if you download an open source program/design and use it, and it's not suitable for your purposes, you don't get to sue anyone over it. It's been tried a few times, and went nowhere. If you want someone to sue, you have to go the commercial route, and pay more.
Several reasons: 1) Many people don't have insurance, or have insurance that doesn't cover prosthetics. 3D printing prosthetics is a huge enabler for people in the third world, for example. And even in the US, there are plenty of people that the insurance companies don't or won't cover. 2) The ability to make your own, and to customize it to your needs, is very powerful. If you watch the video, the patient was happier with his $50 printed prosthetic than a $40k prosthetic, because it worked better for him. In part this movement is driven by people's desire to make something better than the commercial options.
The site doesn't have any medical information at all. That's one of the advantages of outlawing the "pre-existing condition" scam - you no longer have to tell insurers your medical history to buy insurance. And the web site only needs enough other information to verify your identity and income (for computing the subsidy you qualify for, if any). And since they don't collect any payments, they have no payment info (no credit card numbers, etc.) or any credit history.
And on top of that, once the data is passed to the insurance company and accepted by them, the personal data is purged from the web site.
So all you can get by hacking the site is the partial data from people who haven't completed the process yet. And that's mainly name, social security number, and claimed income. Which is much less information than anyone on the planet can buy about anyone in the US for a few dollars from any credit reporting service - for a few bucks, they'll sell your complete transaction history, credit ratings, income, debt, etc., - all much scarier than the minimal amount of info on the healthcare site.
Actually, the FDA's track record is to be too passive, and rely too much on self-regulation by the industry, which increases the risk to consumers because industry is much more interested in increasing profit margins than minimizing health risks to consumers. Given that, I'd suggest that the FDA needs to be properly funded so that (for example) they can have enough inspectors to make sure that our food chain is safe themselves. That's a problem with Congress, of course, allocating resources away from enforcing the law when it applies to campaign contributors. But hopefully public safety rates somewhere in the political process.
Yes, consequences are an important part of the discussion. Hyperbolic exaggeration of trivial consequences, as if they could wipe out an industry, are not a valuable contribution to the discussion.
This is overall a small matter - a trivial cost regulation, protecting from a small threat. Perhaps we could try discussing that instead of what we're discussing?
The cost is a fraction of a cent per six-pack of beer, making it extremely unlikely to lead to the kinds of negative repercussions you hypothesize - the price of beer moves up and down based on marked issues all the time, without wiping out humanity.
And they're not saying that the beer factors can't sell the feed to the farmers, just that they have to package, and track it the way all other industrial feed is packaged and tracked, so that if there's a health issue they can track it through the food chain. Note that the FDA didn't create this regulation, Congress did, years ago. This is just the part of the process where the FDA does its job, proposes specific rules that do what Congress passed into law, and puts them up for public feedback. And if the public would rather have a risk of contaminated feed to cows being untraceable than pay a fraction of a cent more per six-pack, or the beer companies and dairy farms insist on that risk instead of trivially lower profits, then the rule won't make it through the public feedback period unchanged.
How you balance a very low cost requirement against a low risk should be an interesting debate. But hyperbolic statements that try to spin a trivial cost as if it will wipe out the industry don't do anyone any good.
The maximum possible rational impact would be $30/ton, because if the cost of processing were more than the cost of selling the material, they would stop selling it, which would cost them $30/ton. So it's impossible for the impact of this on a bottle of beer to be more than $30/the number of bottles produced making a ton of this feed.
If it cost $13M to outfit a facility with processing equipment, they would only spend that money if selling the feed were profitable after the cost, in which case the "cost" would by definition be less than $30/ton.
Keep in mind that the "Australian gun ban" was actually a series of changes over time, with different states within Australia implementing different laws at different times, so the impact of those changes was, indeed, spread out over a long time period.
You can try to play statistical games if you like, but in Australia the gun ban has 90% popular support, because of some pretty basic facts, which are regarded there as fairly obvious, like:
"There had been 11 gun massacres in the decade preceding 1996, but there have been no mass shootings since. "
"Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the Sydney School of Public Health and a specialist in firearm injury prevention, has documented that after the laws were changed, the risk of an Australian being killed by a gun fell by more than 50 percent. Australia’s gun homicide rate, 0.13 per 100,000 people, according to GunPolicy.org, is a tiny fraction of that of the United States (3.6 per 100,000 people). It should be noted that our gun homicide rates were already in decline, but the gun laws accelerated that slide."
"In a 2010 paper, economists Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that the law change had led to a 65 percent decline in the rate of firearm suicides. Firearm homicides fell by 59 percent."
And in Australia nobody got upset when former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer warned Australians to “think twice” before traveling to the United States because you are “15 times more likely to be shot dead.” Since, of course, the statistics clearly support the statement. The US is an exceptionally dangerous place to live - to be at more risk, you have to go to countries in complete anarchy or at war.
According to the people who got the NHS passed in the UK, the way they got it done was to silence objectors by "stuffing their mouths with gold". And in the long run it gave the UK a highly effective, efficient medical care system. So perhaps, even though ACA is absurdly complex, it's still an improvement, and we can gradually, awkwardly iterate towards a healthcare system that's at least moderately good. It would be hard to be worse than our per-ACA system, where we spent 2x as much per capita as anybody else on the planet, in return for which we got medical outcomes that were worse than most other wealthy countries. If we only spent as much as the next most wasteful country, we'd still save $trillions, so there's a lot of room for improvement. Of course, since there is a whole industry funded by that waste and therefore dedicated to increasing wasteful spending, it's not going to be easy.
No the founders wrote extensively about this. The point of the 2nd Amendment was that they didn't want the US to have a federal, standing army, they wanted the States to have their own militia. Which they do - the National Guard. The founders never intended to allow random people to form private armies to oppose the government - we're citizens of a democracy, so we're supposed to have elections and abide by the results, not shoot at each other!
So you're advocating that guns in the US should be as unregulated as they are in Switzerland? I agree with you. But you need to learn a bit more about Switzerland, because I suspect that you don't agree with your own position.
As for the Swiss guns in homes keeping them save from Hitler, Nazi Germany planned to dispose of that country's independence after it had defeated its main enemies on the continent first. They weren't put off by the prospect of Swiss self defense - they planned to take the country with just 11 divisions, because the Swiss didn't have much military capacity. But after D-Day, the Germans stopped expanding, so they didn't get to Switzerland. So what saved the Swiss? The US Army (among others).
To be clear, he's just proposing that we return the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment to the founder's intent, and how it was interpreted for the first 200 years of our history. He's making the point that over the last few decades it's been stretched by a stacked judiciary bent on rewriting the law, and saying that Congress can restore the original intent through legislation.
Remember, until the late 1970's, the NRA supported the 2nd Amendment the way it was written and intended by the founders, and how it was understood for the first 200 years of our history. It was only after the "coup" where the gun salesmen took over that they suddenly decided that it needed to be re-interpreted as protecting the rights of felons to buy guns untraceably.
To go a bit further, the founding fathers were strongly opposed to the idea of the US having a standing army, as they viewed that as a corrupting influence on a democracy.
No, you're cherry picking data to try to make an easily disproven argument. There was a short-term increase in crime, but long-term, both went down substantially after guns were regulated.
"Actually, Australian crime statistics show a marked decrease in homicides since the gun law change. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government agency, the number of homicides in Australia did increase slightly in 1997 and peaked in 1999, but has since declined to the lowest number on record in 2007, the most recent year for which official figures are available."
Interesting hypothetical. Back in reality, the statistics care clear - people who live in houses with guns in them are much, much more likely to be shot than people who live in houses without guns. Of course, this makes sense - most gun deaths are either suicides (the majority) or shot by a family member (already in the house). So having a gun in the house just makes those two cases easier, and thus more likely.
I don't think anybody argued your "straw man" position, that lethal self-defense is never necessary. I would argue, however, that based on historical data, statistically the gun you buy for self defenses far more likely to be used in a suicide or to kill a family member than it is to be used to save their lives.
So let's invert your hypothetical: "Do you accept that suicide or murders are sometimes successful? Are you prepared to sacrifice the lives of these people?"
Yep, and the founders very CLEARLY wrote that they intended for the People as a whole to be armed by forming state militia, under control of the states. It's a state right, not an individual right. They were very clearly opposed to the idea of private armies. Remember, they founded a country, not an anarchy.
Taxes are actually relatively low right now - lower (relative to GDP) than they were under Reagan.
Your problem is that your taxes are because corporate taxes (tariffs, etc.) and taxes on the wealthy are down to less than ½ what they used to pay, while *our* taxes went up to cover what they refuse to pay for. So you shouldn't be pissed off at "taxes" you should be pissed off at the people and corporations that are making you pay more than your fair share because it's good for them.
In Australia, gun deaths dropped, and overall violent crime also dropped. You're cherry-picking a brief increase right after guns were regulated, which was then followed by a sustained decline in both gun deaths and violent crime in Australia.
It's absurd to pretend that "the only thing standing between a crazy gunman and an elementary school is a piece of paper" - laws are enforced. If nobody (other than the police) at a school can have a gun, then anyone with a gun is obviously breaking the law and can be stopped. If people with guns can roam the school, the only way to tell that one of them is a killer is that they've just shot someone.
The shooting in the movie theatre illustrated how ineffective people with guns (there were several in the audience) actually are in stopping gunmen, which is to say that they didn't do so. The reality is that a gunman can position themselves, and have body armor, and then then shoot everyone in sight. And that generally speaking civilians without training for combat situations cause a lot more harm than help, because they tend to panic and shoot the wrong people, or fire and miss, etc. There's a reason that policemen and soldiers train constantly, and it's because it's the critical difference that makes them effective.
Also, most gun deaths are suicides. More guns strongly correlates to more successful suicides. Limiting access to guns reduces suicides.
Similarly, letting soldiers on bases carry loaded guns leads to more people getting shot, not fewer. That's why soldiers are only issued ammunition when they need it. I'm pretty sure that the Army isn't anti-gun, but they do like to keep our soldiers alive.
I agree that you're not a lawyer, and deliberately misleading.
Stephens' logic is completely consistent with how the 2nd Amendment was understood from the time of the founders until the 1970's, which is that "the People" as a whole have a right to bear arms by forming militia, but that there's no universal individual right to bear arms that cannot be regulated or restricted in any way.
In practice, we're finding that PLA is too fragile, users are happy with ABS, and Nylon is indestructible.
As for "in the same price range" you can print a hand, and buy all of the bolts and lines, etc., for under $50. Commercial prosthetics are $10-50K. Volunteers and 3D printing is _much_ cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
You're coming very much from the prospective of a wealthy American/European, where a $42K prosthetic is an option.
But if you're not covered by very good insurance, which is the case for the majority of humanity, an affordable 3D printed hand is much better than nothing.
And a free/open innovative community working on prosthetics can move much faster than the commercial options, and perhaps innovate past them the way home 3D printing exploded past the commercial 3D printing companies. The commercial guys were too concerned with the expensive/subtle issues, when what people may well care more about is being able to cheaply and easily solve their problem.
You're right that the $42K prosthetic isn't the same as the $50 one. A major difference, which you missed, is that it's myoelectric and active, while the $50 one is mechanical. It turns out that for this patient, the simple, mechanical solution worked better than the sophisticated, computerized one. So it's fundamentally a cheaper, simpler solution.
The rest of the costs pretty much come down to the traditional business model vs. FOSS. If you want to buy a product from a company that you can sue, with MBAs and lawyers and on-staff researchers, etc., you get to pay the big bucks for the product. If you don't have the money for that, or you prefer free/open source solutions for other reasons (such as the ability to modify the designs to suit your personal needs), you can go the Free Open Source Software route, and print your own.
Yes, this relies on volunteer labor to do the printing, assembly, fitting, etc. There are 600+ people registered at http://enablingthefuture.org/ (mainly in the Google+ group). That's the point - by empowering people with FOSS designs and documentation, they can help each other, at much lower cost than paying professionals with all of the overhead that you mention. And it turns out that many of the volunteers work professionally in the field - this is just a new way for them to apply their skills to help patients.
And I'll also point out that your comments reveal some misunderstandings of how rapidly 3D printing has progressed.
- It doesn't cost $10K for a quality 3D printer. You can get a fine 3D printer for $1K, or a cheap one for $300, and the most expensive home 3D printer is $3K. There are some great industrial printers, but it would be stupid to buy an industrial printer to print one thing - there are plenty of people and Maker spaces who already have 3D printers. See http://enablingthefuture.org/c... and register if you're interested. And of course there are service bureaus such as ShapeWays if you really want a high-end printed version.
- The materials aren't as fragile as you think. There are 100+ people happily using ABS prosthetics now, and we're finding that printing in Nylon is amazingly durable. You can hammer on Nylon, and just bounces back. Amazing stuff. Hospitals and medical researchers are using 3D printed Nylon now, so using it for prosthetics is pretty reasonable.
- If you can print a replacement for the raw cost of materials, that changes the economics. If you can print your own replacements for $1, it doesn't make sense to spend $millions in R&D, and spend vastly more for the prosthetic's materials, because the cost of avoiding breakage far outstrips the cost of the breakage.
All of the designs are published, and open source. So there's nothing being hidden in the video - you can download the models and inspect them to your heart's desire.
If you don't like the music that someone selected, feel free to make a better video!
Interestingly, kids LOVE 3D printed hands. If you go to http://enablingthefuture.org/ there are tons of pictures of thrilled kids. It's cool to be like Iron Man!
The designs are open source, and freely shared, very specifically with no warranty or guarantee. Just like open source software. People who release open source software don't get sued over the software, because they're not selling and supporting it, they're giving it away specifically with no guarantees or support.
I've worked in the airplane business. As screwed up as liability law is, there still has to be actual liability to award damages. So unless someone can prove that food was a cause of a crash, I don't think that the airline food companies are at risk of paying out over a lawsuit over a crash. And more relevant to the 3D printed prosthetics, if you build your own airplane (e.g. any kit plane) you can't sue the manufacturer. That's why in the US kit plates are relatively popular, because they're vastly less expensive than commercially sold airplanes.
And if you download an open source program/design and use it, and it's not suitable for your purposes, you don't get to sue anyone over it. It's been tried a few times, and went nowhere. If you want someone to sue, you have to go the commercial route, and pay more.
Several reasons:
1) Many people don't have insurance, or have insurance that doesn't cover prosthetics. 3D printing prosthetics is a huge enabler for people in the third world, for example. And even in the US, there are plenty of people that the insurance companies don't or won't cover.
2) The ability to make your own, and to customize it to your needs, is very powerful. If you watch the video, the patient was happier with his $50 printed prosthetic than a $40k prosthetic, because it worked better for him. In part this movement is driven by people's desire to make something better than the commercial options.
He knows Obamacare is evil. Don't try to confuse him with facts like "saving people's lives" and "costing less than doing nothing".
The site doesn't have any medical information at all. That's one of the advantages of outlawing the "pre-existing condition" scam - you no longer have to tell insurers your medical history to buy insurance. And the web site only needs enough other information to verify your identity and income (for computing the subsidy you qualify for, if any). And since they don't collect any payments, they have no payment info (no credit card numbers, etc.) or any credit history.
And on top of that, once the data is passed to the insurance company and accepted by them, the personal data is purged from the web site.
So all you can get by hacking the site is the partial data from people who haven't completed the process yet. And that's mainly name, social security number, and claimed income. Which is much less information than anyone on the planet can buy about anyone in the US for a few dollars from any credit reporting service - for a few bucks, they'll sell your complete transaction history, credit ratings, income, debt, etc., - all much scarier than the minimal amount of info on the healthcare site.
Actually, the FDA's track record is to be too passive, and rely too much on self-regulation by the industry, which increases the risk to consumers because industry is much more interested in increasing profit margins than minimizing health risks to consumers. Given that, I'd suggest that the FDA needs to be properly funded so that (for example) they can have enough inspectors to make sure that our food chain is safe themselves. That's a problem with Congress, of course, allocating resources away from enforcing the law when it applies to campaign contributors. But hopefully public safety rates somewhere in the political process.
Yes, consequences are an important part of the discussion. Hyperbolic exaggeration of trivial consequences, as if they could wipe out an industry, are not a valuable contribution to the discussion.
This is overall a small matter - a trivial cost regulation, protecting from a small threat. Perhaps we could try discussing that instead of what we're discussing?
The cost is a fraction of a cent per six-pack of beer, making it extremely unlikely to lead to the kinds of negative repercussions you hypothesize - the price of beer moves up and down based on marked issues all the time, without wiping out humanity.
And they're not saying that the beer factors can't sell the feed to the farmers, just that they have to package, and track it the way all other industrial feed is packaged and tracked, so that if there's a health issue they can track it through the food chain. Note that the FDA didn't create this regulation, Congress did, years ago. This is just the part of the process where the FDA does its job, proposes specific rules that do what Congress passed into law, and puts them up for public feedback. And if the public would rather have a risk of contaminated feed to cows being untraceable than pay a fraction of a cent more per six-pack, or the beer companies and dairy farms insist on that risk instead of trivially lower profits, then the rule won't make it through the public feedback period unchanged.
How you balance a very low cost requirement against a low risk should be an interesting debate. But hyperbolic statements that try to spin a trivial cost as if it will wipe out the industry don't do anyone any good.
The maximum possible rational impact would be $30/ton, because if the cost of processing were more than the cost of selling the material, they would stop selling it, which would cost them $30/ton. So it's impossible for the impact of this on a bottle of beer to be more than $30/the number of bottles produced making a ton of this feed.
If it cost $13M to outfit a facility with processing equipment, they would only spend that money if selling the feed were profitable after the cost, in which case the "cost" would by definition be less than $30/ton.
Keep in mind that the "Australian gun ban" was actually a series of changes over time, with different states within Australia implementing different laws at different times, so the impact of those changes was, indeed, spread out over a long time period.
You can try to play statistical games if you like, but in Australia the gun ban has 90% popular support, because of some pretty basic facts, which are regarded there as fairly obvious, like:
"There had been 11 gun massacres in the decade preceding 1996, but there have been no mass shootings since. "
"Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the Sydney School of Public Health and a specialist in firearm injury prevention, has documented that after the laws were changed, the risk of an Australian being killed by a gun fell by more than 50 percent. Australia’s gun homicide rate, 0.13 per 100,000 people, according to GunPolicy.org, is a tiny fraction of that of the United States (3.6 per 100,000 people). It should be noted that our gun homicide rates were already in decline, but the gun laws accelerated that slide."
"In a 2010 paper, economists Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that the law change had led to a 65 percent decline in the rate of firearm suicides. Firearm homicides fell by 59 percent."
And in Australia nobody got upset when former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer warned Australians to “think twice” before traveling to the United States because you are “15 times more likely to be shot dead.” Since, of course, the statistics clearly support the statement. The US is an exceptionally dangerous place to live - to be at more risk, you have to go to countries in complete anarchy or at war.
I agree.
According to the people who got the NHS passed in the UK, the way they got it done was to silence objectors by "stuffing their mouths with gold". And in the long run it gave the UK a highly effective, efficient medical care system. So perhaps, even though ACA is absurdly complex, it's still an improvement, and we can gradually, awkwardly iterate towards a healthcare system that's at least moderately good. It would be hard to be worse than our per-ACA system, where we spent 2x as much per capita as anybody else on the planet, in return for which we got medical outcomes that were worse than most other wealthy countries. If we only spent as much as the next most wasteful country, we'd still save $trillions, so there's a lot of room for improvement. Of course, since there is a whole industry funded by that waste and therefore dedicated to increasing wasteful spending, it's not going to be easy.
Sure, because the US is a fundamentally less civilized country than Australia? :-)
No the founders wrote extensively about this. The point of the 2nd Amendment was that they didn't want the US to have a federal, standing army, they wanted the States to have their own militia. Which they do - the National Guard. The founders never intended to allow random people to form private armies to oppose the government - we're citizens of a democracy, so we're supposed to have elections and abide by the results, not shoot at each other!
So you're advocating that guns in the US should be as unregulated as they are in Switzerland? I agree with you. But you need to learn a bit more about Switzerland, because I suspect that you don't agree with your own position.
As for the Swiss guns in homes keeping them save from Hitler, Nazi Germany planned to dispose of that country's independence after it had defeated its main enemies on the continent first. They weren't put off by the prospect of Swiss self defense - they planned to take the country with just 11 divisions, because the Swiss didn't have much military capacity. But after D-Day, the Germans stopped expanding, so they didn't get to Switzerland. So what saved the Swiss? The US Army (among others).
To be clear, he's just proposing that we return the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment to the founder's intent, and how it was interpreted for the first 200 years of our history. He's making the point that over the last few decades it's been stretched by a stacked judiciary bent on rewriting the law, and saying that Congress can restore the original intent through legislation.
Remember, until the late 1970's, the NRA supported the 2nd Amendment the way it was written and intended by the founders, and how it was understood for the first 200 years of our history. It was only after the "coup" where the gun salesmen took over that they suddenly decided that it needed to be re-interpreted as protecting the rights of felons to buy guns untraceably.
To go a bit further, the founding fathers were strongly opposed to the idea of the US having a standing army, as they viewed that as a corrupting influence on a democracy.
No, you're cherry picking data to try to make an easily disproven argument. There was a short-term increase in crime, but long-term, both went down substantially after guns were regulated.
"Actually, Australian crime statistics show a marked decrease in homicides since the gun law change. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government agency, the number of homicides in Australia did increase slightly in 1997 and peaked in 1999, but has since declined to the lowest number on record in 2007, the most recent year for which official figures are available."
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/...
Note that they didn't ban guns, they just regulated them, and gun ownership dropped from 7% to 5%. And saved a lot of lives.
Interesting hypothetical. Back in reality, the statistics care clear - people who live in houses with guns in them are much, much more likely to be shot than people who live in houses without guns. Of course, this makes sense - most gun deaths are either suicides (the majority) or shot by a family member (already in the house). So having a gun in the house just makes those two cases easier, and thus more likely.
I don't think anybody argued your "straw man" position, that lethal self-defense is never necessary. I would argue, however, that based on historical data, statistically the gun you buy for self defenses far more likely to be used in a suicide or to kill a family member than it is to be used to save their lives.
So let's invert your hypothetical: "Do you accept that suicide or murders are sometimes successful? Are you prepared to sacrifice the lives of these people?"
Yep, and the founders very CLEARLY wrote that they intended for the People as a whole to be armed by forming state militia, under control of the states. It's a state right, not an individual right. They were very clearly opposed to the idea of private armies. Remember, they founded a country, not an anarchy.
Taxes are actually relatively low right now - lower (relative to GDP) than they were under Reagan.
Your problem is that your taxes are because corporate taxes (tariffs, etc.) and taxes on the wealthy are down to less than ½ what they used to pay, while *our* taxes went up to cover what they refuse to pay for. So you shouldn't be pissed off at "taxes" you should be pissed off at the people and corporations that are making you pay more than your fair share because it's good for them.
You have pretty much all of your facts wrong.
In Australia, gun deaths dropped, and overall violent crime also dropped. You're cherry-picking a brief increase right after guns were regulated, which was then followed by a sustained decline in both gun deaths and violent crime in Australia.
It's absurd to pretend that "the only thing standing between a crazy gunman and an elementary school is a piece of paper" - laws are enforced. If nobody (other than the police) at a school can have a gun, then anyone with a gun is obviously breaking the law and can be stopped. If people with guns can roam the school, the only way to tell that one of them is a killer is that they've just shot someone.
The shooting in the movie theatre illustrated how ineffective people with guns (there were several in the audience) actually are in stopping gunmen, which is to say that they didn't do so. The reality is that a gunman can position themselves, and have body armor, and then then shoot everyone in sight. And that generally speaking civilians without training for combat situations cause a lot more harm than help, because they tend to panic and shoot the wrong people, or fire and miss, etc. There's a reason that policemen and soldiers train constantly, and it's because it's the critical difference that makes them effective.
Also, most gun deaths are suicides. More guns strongly correlates to more successful suicides. Limiting access to guns reduces suicides.
Similarly, letting soldiers on bases carry loaded guns leads to more people getting shot, not fewer. That's why soldiers are only issued ammunition when they need it. I'm pretty sure that the Army isn't anti-gun, but they do like to keep our soldiers alive.
I agree that you're not a lawyer, and deliberately misleading.
Stephens' logic is completely consistent with how the 2nd Amendment was understood from the time of the founders until the 1970's, which is that "the People" as a whole have a right to bear arms by forming militia, but that there's no universal individual right to bear arms that cannot be regulated or restricted in any way.
In practice, we're finding that PLA is too fragile, users are happy with ABS, and Nylon is indestructible.
As for "in the same price range" you can print a hand, and buy all of the bolts and lines, etc., for under $50. Commercial prosthetics are $10-50K. Volunteers and 3D printing is _much_ cheaper.