Reply to Shockingly graphic photo essay on the destruction caused by AR-15's in today's WP

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
He can claim he didn’t mean to draw comparisons, but he still picked that specific cause of death. Just weird and frankly a little gross.

I wonder if Mr Registered Democrat would at least support keeping guns out of the hands of the deeply mentally ill and domestic abusers. [/quote]

I picked it out of the list of low-incident causes of death because it’s a good example of something that (I would imagine) practically nobody has ever dealt with firsthand, and certainly nobody irrationally loses sleep over.

I doubt that my acquaintance who has a rifle-related panic attack upon hearing sirens has considered that the paramedics are MORE likely rushing to resuscitate her husband who was doing that. Actually I may have to use that line to mock her hysteria.

Yes, I ABSOLUTELY would suggest going REALLY hard after anyone who tries to buy a firearm in violation of any of the stipulations on the ATF form 4473. That form includes straw purchases, anyone adjudicated mentally defective, drug users, and misdemeanor (or greater) domestic violence.  And for that matter, expand the 4473 list to include a lot more exclusions for theft, burglary, DUI, etc.  Then give hard prison time to anyone in violation.

As much as the stories of “someone suddenly snapping” grab the headlines, they are extraordinarily rare statistical outliers.  Almost all violent crime is committed by a very small number of aberrant individuals with a long history of aberrant behavior.  [/quote]

You may be a math guy.  But you are not an engineering guy.  When we design a system or anything else, we don’t only look at the statistics and compare across statistical families.  We look at risk.  Which is probability (what you are talking about) multiplied by impact (how catastrophic is it).  In the case of mass shootings, the impact is very high.  The dead victims of course, but also the emotional upheaval, the loss of a perceived sense of security, the tearing apart of communities, etc.  Kids dying for no reason at all tends to provide a sense of trauma that you don’t seem to be able to appreciate.

The story of 5 high school seniors losing their lives in a white water rafting accident and the story of 5 high school seniors being victims of school shootings does reduce I guess to the same story - 5 lives snuffed out way too early.  But the impact of those deaths on the families, the communities etc is not the same.  Also, nobody would stop the victims families from banding together to create a warning for a particular rapid, develop rules to try to keep rafters safer, get state lawmakers to levy additional requirements on white water rafting companies.  But the gun lobby has made it almost impossible for victims of gun violence to do anything meaningful.  [/quote]

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