It's a good thing we forced companies to provide all these benefits like healthcare and retirement plans. It makes old people desperate to have a job, and employers desperate not to hire them.
I know how to use Microsoft Office, but I don't put it on my resume, because I don't want my job to involve a lot of MS office duties. Am I being unethical?
Yes the distribution is not even, but that number is over the whole US population, not just drivers. So if you calculate the number of accidents per people who actually drive a car, it's actually much higher.
So why then do you think it would be unreasonable to have similar regulations like Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Singapore etc etc?
Did I say that would be unreasonable? Why do you think that I think that?
That's a very stupid comment. Of course it's more tragic when a toddler shoots its mother, rather than when a mother falls off a ladder and dies. It's hard to even imagine how you could think otherwise.
Why is it more tragic? Can you even articulate it?
I suspect that you, personally, find your own argument meaningless. I mean, if I convinced you that a toddler killing his mother is more tragic, that wouldn't actually change your mind about guns. So it's not only wrong, it's dishonest, because it's an irrelevant non-sequitur to your true motivations, whatever they are.
Why do you think I need my mind changed about guns? You don't even know what my position on guns is.
I think the elephant in the room is that the US, being a modern western democracy, is compared to other modern western democracies, and the glaring difference between them is the third world gun violence rate. So logically, some people would like to try and fix that.
I would like to fix it too, but I don't see why wanting to fix gun violence should be a good excuse to abandon reason.
Second on the list is probably the road deaths, because that also stands out as way above everyone else. It seems your love for the concept of freedom (not actual freedom, because it's hard to be free if you are dead) far outweighs common sense (ie attitudes to seatbelts, helmets, and guns).
I do appreciate freedom, but I don't recall ever citing that as a reason for opposing gun control or even opposing gun control at all. So I am not sure why you presume to know what my concept of freedom is.
One died in a completely preventable way, the other died while taking one of many calculated risks in life.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Many if not most accidental gun deaths are preventable in some sense, but so are car accidents. Look at how many people die from texting while driving. Just from the numbers, texting while driving is probably much more risky than owning a gun.
Furthermore, the preventability of a death should not affect it's level of tragedy. If a baby is killed by finding a gun (preventable), or it's killed by an allergic reaction to a bee sting (not so preventable), the end result is the same.
And the fact that you feel that one is more tragic than the other is exactly the kind of attitude that I am trying to change.
When 9/11 happened, there were a lot of victims and they were compensated for their loss. Aside from normal life insurance payouts, there were additional payments made to the families of the victims. Often these payments were proportional to the salary of the victim. So if you were rich and died in 9/11 your family was paid many millions of dollars. If you were poor, you maybe got hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you died in a car accident on 9/11 your family got nothing.
What I am saying is that people are irrational and unfair in their assessment of tragedy.
People were very kind to donate their money 9/11. Many charities like the red cross tried to save some of the money for future tragedies in which people were less likely to donate, but this was a controversy and people wanted their money to only go to 9/11 victims.
There have been psychological studies that have found that people are willing to donate more money to help one child than two children. Someone might be willing to donate $10 to help one child, but only $5 to help 2 children. I don't expect people to be willing to donate $20 to help 2 children, but it is irrational to be willing to donate less than $10 to help 2 children. This is a flaw in human psychology that must be overcome. Just like other human psychological flaws like confirmation bias, and attribution errors.
It is very avoidable, and it is also very avoided. 43 instances is not that many. Dying from falling off a ladder is also very avoidable as evidenced by the fact that it appears to be very rare (i.e. highly avoided) given the prevalence of ladder usage.
Given the number of people that own guns, and that there are only 43 instances of death resulting from a toddler getting a gun, it seems that people are doing a reasonably good job of keeping guns away from toddlers. Or at least they are doing about as good a job as people trying not to die from falling off ladders.
Or what about the random basement dweller who only targets kids who aren't on facebook. You'd better put just a few pictures of your kids on facebook just to be safe.
Beg to differ. There's a large difference between "what was he doing on that ladder anyway" and "why did that kid have a gun?"
That is a big difference. What I am saying is that that difference isn't in the level of tragedy of the death.
Lets say you took 50 people who died in accidents from guns (group A) and 50 people who died in some other kind of accident (group B). And you were able to resurrect one of the groups. Would it make sense to say "We should definitely resurrect group A, because their deaths were more tragic, and bringing them back to life would do more good be reversing that tragedy"?
As I said, I am not opposed to gun control. I think we should take every reasonable step we can to mitigating gun violence. And I am also not saying that the number of gun deaths are insignificant. I am just saying that our reaction is disproportional (by both sides).
Personally, I'm glad that I live in a country where we don't carry guns. The equivalent of a mass shooting here would be someone running around slashing people with a sword.
Heard of any such incidents lately?
I would like to point out that we live in a much more peaceful world now. A few centuries ago you would be much more likely to be killed by a guy with a sword than you are to be killed by a guy with a gun in America's most dangerous neighborhoods today.
I don't have statistics, but I am pretty sure swords have killed more people per capita in human history than guns have. The 20th century was maybe the most violent century in terms of absolute numbers, but it was the least violent century in history if you take population into account (even with ww1, ww2, and everything else that happened).
This statistic...
52 people died this year from falling off ladders....is small compared to...
More than 30,000 people are killed by firearms each year in this country
More than 30 people are shot and murdered each day
Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15-24 year-olds
And the primary cause of death among African Americans of that age group
I was comparing the 52 accidental ladder deaths to the 48 accidental toddler shootings.
So yes, we should prosecute people for negligence if their toddler acquires a firearm. But it doesn't seem that this is so common an occurrence to require a major change in society.
Our gun laws should be focused on the things that happen a lot. (i.e. not terrorism, not mass shootings, not toddler shootings, etc).
Of course there are murderous people all around the world, and accidents will always happen. But most types of guns (especially the ones US'ians seem to like to carry) are tools designed to make killing easier. So either US'ians don't know how to handle guns safely (in which case they should not be allowed to carry guns) or they rather like shooting each other (in which case they not should be allowed to carry guns).
We obviously don't know how to handle guns safely. We also don't know how to drive safely. We are a bunch of dumb people. I would say we are rather lucky to be living in such a surprisingly functional society considering the people who comprise it.
We probably shouldn't be allowed to have guns. But given who lives and votes here, the only way that will happen is if we are conquered by another country, which ironically we could actually use lots of guns to defend ourselves from.
Saying the US should get rid of its guns is like saying the middle east should get rid of Islam.
It's not getting less attention. It's getting much more attention. I am saying that we are focusing a disproportionate amount of attention on gun deaths as a preventable cause of death. Just like "conservatives" focus a disproportionate amount of attention on terrorism as a preventable cause of death. You are just not very likely to be murdered with a gun (or with anything especially by a toddler or a terrorist or in a mass shooting).
1 death is 1 too many, except it's really not in a country of 320 million people who are all going to die mostly of other things.
If you had the choice to completely eliminate accidental gun deaths or reduce traffic fatalities by 10%, you'd save more people by doing the latter.
And I will reiterate that I am not saying we shouldn't try to reduce gun violence. I'm not a "gun rights person". I don't own a gun. I am a person who doesn't like to see public policy being guided by emotion rather than reason.
You should definitely go to prison if you continue to be a danger to society, but I don't believe that felons should lose their constitutional rights (i.e. voting, gun ownership, etc). If you are just mentally incompetent that's a different story.
I'm not even a conservative, but the reading of the 2nd amendment as a right of the government to arm it's own forces seems rather silly.
If you are going to gut the constitution, do it right and just repeal the 2nd amendment. The supreme court gets a lot of stuff wrong, but that wasn't one of those things.
I love my country, but if you don't think it's insane that small children are shooting people on a regular basis with weapons, legally purchased or not, you are part of the problem.
There are 320 million people in this country. 52 people died this year from falling off ladders.
Yes it is important to have sensible laws surrounding firearms, but it is possible to overreact even when people have died.
Of all the causes of death, being shot is pretty low on the list. You could probably save more lives by make driving a little bit safer.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't try to reduce gun deaths. I am saying that a death by a gun is not more tragic than a different kind of preventable death.
A death caused by a toddler finding a gun is not more tragic than a death from falling off a ladder.
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It's a good thing we forced companies to provide all these benefits like healthcare and retirement plans. It makes old people desperate to have a job, and employers desperate not to hire them.
I know how to use Microsoft Office, but I don't put it on my resume, because I don't want my job to involve a lot of MS office duties. Am I being unethical?
Maybe employers don't like hiring people who think all new technologies are retarded?
Yes the distribution is not even, but that number is over the whole US population, not just drivers. So if you calculate the number of accidents per people who actually drive a car, it's actually much higher.
So why then do you think it would be unreasonable to have similar regulations like Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Singapore etc etc?
Did I say that would be unreasonable? Why do you think that I think that?
That's a very stupid comment. Of course it's more tragic when a toddler shoots its mother, rather than when a mother falls off a ladder and dies. It's hard to even imagine how you could think otherwise.
Why is it more tragic? Can you even articulate it?
I suspect that you, personally, find your own argument meaningless. I mean, if I convinced you that a toddler killing his mother is more tragic, that wouldn't actually change your mind about guns. So it's not only wrong, it's dishonest, because it's an irrelevant non-sequitur to your true motivations, whatever they are.
Why do you think I need my mind changed about guns? You don't even know what my position on guns is.
There are 5.4 million traffic accidents each year in the USA. That's 1 car accident for every 59 people every year.
I think the elephant in the room is that the US, being a modern western democracy, is compared to other modern western democracies, and the glaring difference between them is the third world gun violence rate. So logically, some people would like to try and fix that.
I would like to fix it too, but I don't see why wanting to fix gun violence should be a good excuse to abandon reason.
Second on the list is probably the road deaths, because that also stands out as way above everyone else. It seems your love for the concept of freedom (not actual freedom, because it's hard to be free if you are dead) far outweighs common sense (ie attitudes to seatbelts, helmets, and guns).
I do appreciate freedom, but I don't recall ever citing that as a reason for opposing gun control or even opposing gun control at all. So I am not sure why you presume to know what my concept of freedom is.
One died in a completely preventable way, the other died while taking one of many calculated risks in life.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Many if not most accidental gun deaths are preventable in some sense, but so are car accidents. Look at how many people die from texting while driving. Just from the numbers, texting while driving is probably much more risky than owning a gun.
Furthermore, the preventability of a death should not affect it's level of tragedy. If a baby is killed by finding a gun (preventable), or it's killed by an allergic reaction to a bee sting (not so preventable), the end result is the same.
And the fact that you feel that one is more tragic than the other is exactly the kind of attitude that I am trying to change.
When 9/11 happened, there were a lot of victims and they were compensated for their loss. Aside from normal life insurance payouts, there were additional payments made to the families of the victims. Often these payments were proportional to the salary of the victim. So if you were rich and died in 9/11 your family was paid many millions of dollars. If you were poor, you maybe got hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you died in a car accident on 9/11 your family got nothing.
What I am saying is that people are irrational and unfair in their assessment of tragedy.
People were very kind to donate their money 9/11. Many charities like the red cross tried to save some of the money for future tragedies in which people were less likely to donate, but this was a controversy and people wanted their money to only go to 9/11 victims.
There have been psychological studies that have found that people are willing to donate more money to help one child than two children. Someone might be willing to donate $10 to help one child, but only $5 to help 2 children. I don't expect people to be willing to donate $20 to help 2 children, but it is irrational to be willing to donate less than $10 to help 2 children. This is a flaw in human psychology that must be overcome. Just like other human psychological flaws like confirmation bias, and attribution errors.
It is very avoidable, and it is also very avoided. 43 instances is not that many. Dying from falling off a ladder is also very avoidable as evidenced by the fact that it appears to be very rare (i.e. highly avoided) given the prevalence of ladder usage.
Given the number of people that own guns, and that there are only 43 instances of death resulting from a toddler getting a gun, it seems that people are doing a reasonably good job of keeping guns away from toddlers. Or at least they are doing about as good a job as people trying not to die from falling off ladders.
I don't know why anybody is so fucking stupid to bring their family in public. Don't they realize that everybody can see them?!
If there is a guy who is sexually attracted to rocks, how important is it to make sure that no pictures of rocks end up on facebook?
Or what about the random basement dweller who only targets kids who aren't on facebook. You'd better put just a few pictures of your kids on facebook just to be safe.
Beg to differ. There's a large difference between "what was he doing on that ladder anyway" and "why did that kid have a gun?"
That is a big difference. What I am saying is that that difference isn't in the level of tragedy of the death.
Lets say you took 50 people who died in accidents from guns (group A) and 50 people who died in some other kind of accident (group B). And you were able to resurrect one of the groups. Would it make sense to say "We should definitely resurrect group A, because their deaths were more tragic, and bringing them back to life would do more good be reversing that tragedy"?
As I said, I am not opposed to gun control. I think we should take every reasonable step we can to mitigating gun violence. And I am also not saying that the number of gun deaths are insignificant. I am just saying that our reaction is disproportional (by both sides).
Personally, I'm glad that I live in a country where we don't carry guns. The equivalent of a mass shooting here would be someone running around slashing people with a sword. Heard of any such incidents lately?
I would like to point out that we live in a much more peaceful world now. A few centuries ago you would be much more likely to be killed by a guy with a sword than you are to be killed by a guy with a gun in America's most dangerous neighborhoods today.
I don't have statistics, but I am pretty sure swords have killed more people per capita in human history than guns have. The 20th century was maybe the most violent century in terms of absolute numbers, but it was the least violent century in history if you take population into account (even with ww1, ww2, and everything else that happened).
This statistic... 52 people died this year from falling off ladders. ...is small compared to...
More than 30,000 people are killed by firearms each year in this country
More than 30 people are shot and murdered each day
Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15-24 year-olds
And the primary cause of death among African Americans of that age group
I was comparing the 52 accidental ladder deaths to the 48 accidental toddler shootings.
So yes, we should prosecute people for negligence if their toddler acquires a firearm. But it doesn't seem that this is so common an occurrence to require a major change in society.
Our gun laws should be focused on the things that happen a lot. (i.e. not terrorism, not mass shootings, not toddler shootings, etc).
Of course there are murderous people all around the world, and accidents will always happen. But most types of guns (especially the ones US'ians seem to like to carry) are tools designed to make killing easier. So either US'ians don't know how to handle guns safely (in which case they should not be allowed to carry guns) or they rather like shooting each other (in which case they not should be allowed to carry guns).
We obviously don't know how to handle guns safely. We also don't know how to drive safely. We are a bunch of dumb people. I would say we are rather lucky to be living in such a surprisingly functional society considering the people who comprise it.
We probably shouldn't be allowed to have guns. But given who lives and votes here, the only way that will happen is if we are conquered by another country, which ironically we could actually use lots of guns to defend ourselves from.
Saying the US should get rid of its guns is like saying the middle east should get rid of Islam.
It's not getting less attention. It's getting much more attention. I am saying that we are focusing a disproportionate amount of attention on gun deaths as a preventable cause of death. Just like "conservatives" focus a disproportionate amount of attention on terrorism as a preventable cause of death. You are just not very likely to be murdered with a gun (or with anything especially by a toddler or a terrorist or in a mass shooting).
1 death is 1 too many, except it's really not in a country of 320 million people who are all going to die mostly of other things.
If you had the choice to completely eliminate accidental gun deaths or reduce traffic fatalities by 10%, you'd save more people by doing the latter.
And I will reiterate that I am not saying we shouldn't try to reduce gun violence. I'm not a "gun rights person". I don't own a gun. I am a person who doesn't like to see public policy being guided by emotion rather than reason.
You should definitely go to prison if you continue to be a danger to society, but I don't believe that felons should lose their constitutional rights (i.e. voting, gun ownership, etc). If you are just mentally incompetent that's a different story.
I am talking about losing custody through state intervention not death.
The fact that there are good reasons to be on a ladder doesn't make falling off and dying less tragic.
In Soviet Russia you control internet.
This phenomenon is not unique to liberals.
I'm not even a conservative, but the reading of the 2nd amendment as a right of the government to arm it's own forces seems rather silly.
If you are going to gut the constitution, do it right and just repeal the 2nd amendment. The supreme court gets a lot of stuff wrong, but that wasn't one of those things.
I love my country, but if you don't think it's insane that small children are shooting people on a regular basis with weapons, legally purchased or not, you are part of the problem.
There are 320 million people in this country. 52 people died this year from falling off ladders.
Yes it is important to have sensible laws surrounding firearms, but it is possible to overreact even when people have died.
Of all the causes of death, being shot is pretty low on the list. You could probably save more lives by make driving a little bit safer.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't try to reduce gun deaths. I am saying that a death by a gun is not more tragic than a different kind of preventable death.
A death caused by a toddler finding a gun is not more tragic than a death from falling off a ladder.
I don't think it is a deterrent. It is removing a dangerous person from society.
You shouldn't lose your second amendment right. You should lose your child.