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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • I’m sorry if I misinterpreted the quote about places with legal gun owners having less illegal gun owners. How else should I have interpreted it?

    ok so gun ownership is kind of complicated from a statistics point of view, since we’re mostly concerned with gun violence here it’s important to remember that the vast majority of legal gun owners don’t generally wish to become criminals, compared to illegal gun owners, who may not wish to become criminals, but are more likely to become criminals (for various reasons) even these people are less likely to engage in random acts of gun violence. The most likely scenario in which you get gun violenced is going to be a robbery/mugging or something along these lines, where you were probably already fucked anyway. Gun or not.

    as for statistics:

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ pew article, these are generally good https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9388351/ this one includes per capita rates, which is what i was previously mentioning

    as for illegal gun crimes:

    https://www.npr.org/2023/02/10/1153977949/major-takeaways-from-the-atf-gun-violence-report https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/12/john-faso/do-illegal-gun-owners-commit-most-gun-crime-rep-fa/ most notable for this quote “Congress since the 1990s has had an effective ban on federal taxpayer money being spent on research into gun violence as a public health issue and gun control advocacy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But other government agencies are free to collect data on guns and gun crime.”

    anyway, moving away from this, i would also like to make the point that the US simply having more guns doesn’t make it more dangerous by default in terms of gun violence.

    Yes, a person entering an empty room with a gun on the table is absolutely statistically in danger of mishandling the gun and harming themselves.

    even if this is statistically true, which i will grant in this specific wording, although this is a really specific situation, and a really unusual situation. This is true of everything ever. People have gasoline in their garage, aggressive chemicals, they have similarly spooky chemicals indoors, cleaning agents, bleach, etc… Even just a simple thing like a flight of stairs can be incredibly dangerous. I don’t exactly see people doing much to increase the safety of things like power tools for example, this would be the next biggest, if not the biggest cause of accidental injury in this case.

    my biggest problem with this argument is that guns are randomly singled out, even though gun owners are vastly more likely to be well trained, and very responsible with their guns, as opposed to some dude who owns a circular saw. Or literally every kitchen everywhere that has at least one knife in it somewhere. We don’t exactly teach people responsible knife ownership and handling the second they buy knives.

    Ultimately this just devolves into a situation where you essentially argue for putting people in a padded rubber room wearing a strait jacket to minimize potential self harm. In the above case you mentioned “it increases the chances for mishandling a gun” that may be true, if you handle it. You don’t have to handle it though, you can leave it there, and in my example, we don’t know if it’s loaded or has ammunition at all. The most likely injury to be gained there is pinching your finger in the slide or something.

    There is also an ethical/moral implication in regulating what people can and cannot do, we already tried eugenics, nobody liked it. (an extreme example to be fair) Even if banning guns prevents less accidental harm, i’m not really sure that’s something we should investigate.

    That’s generally what makes dangerous things dangerous, and isn’t the gotcha people on the gun side often think it is. In a world with only guns and no humans there’s no gun violence, hooray.

    i think it’s stupid rhetoric, as with most things on the right. But ultimately, someone mishandling a gun and injuring themselves, is something that they did to themselves. That is neither morally good, or bad, it’s simply neutral. Someone mishandling a gun and injuring someone else is bad, but you could probably sue and win that case. I would also propose you probably shouldn’t hang around, or tolerate bad gun owners either, but what do i know. Someone intentionally using a gun to hurt someone else is already bad, and that was probably inevitable in some capacity anyway.

    I’ll let you have the final word here if you wish, I’m pretty done with this discussion. I’ll just reiterate one last time that this is all you trying to convince me that I should not be feeling more safe in a place that doesn’t allow guns and I think that’s pretty fucked.

    fair enough, ultimately i think you simply have an unfounded fear about guns, you could very easily have the same fear about knives, power tools, dangerous chemicals, heavy objects, people who are simply physically larger than you, all of these things vastly more common than owning a gun, let alone gun violence. As i’ve already stated, statistically, nothing supports this claim, deductively i see no reason why it should matter to you unless you’re like shinzo abe or something. To me this rings to be about equivalent to my fear of spiders. Except i realize that it’s irrational and not based in reality.

    I suppose in closing i mostly want to ask you one question, and that question is why. Are you a generally/highly paranoid person? Are you concerned about every potential event? Or is this simply a fear of guns explicitly, and if it’s the latter, i want you think about why it’s explicitly just guns that scare you, as opposed to someone throwing acid into your face for example.

    Fear by definition is irrational, it is not a mechanism by which you can rationalize a situation it’s a mechanism that drives you to remove yourself from potentially dangerous situations as a method of self preservation, that’s it.


  • if the implied point of this post is to demonstrate that hurricanes have gotten worse over time due to climate change, yes this is objectively wrong, even if the underlying data is true.

    Just because you have the correct solution, doesn’t mean you calculated it correctly.

    To give an example here, let’s say i have a set of 99 numbers, 1-99 and lets say i add one more number, 100, but oops i accidentally add two more zeroes so now it’s actually 10,000

    If i take an average of the extremes (not perfectly analogous here but i’m demonstrating a simple point) of 1, and 10,000 then the average is going to be 5,000 roughly. However most of those data points are going to live within 1-99 so this is an extremely incorrect “demonstration” of the effect here.

    The primary problem here being that we don’t really know what the direct effects of climate change are going to be, just that we know what it will probably do, and if this is the first significant event of this category, we’re about to find out why fat fingering the 0 twice is going to be really unfortunate.

    Now if the point is that “hurricane bigger than other hurricane lol” sure, but that’s a stupid point to make. Again my original example of joplin vs el reno tornados. It’s entirely arbitrary for no reason. It’d be like if i stopped you on the side of the road, picked up two rocks, and went “these sure are rocks aren’t they?”







  • None of what you just said is true. Starting here

    i didn’t line up the specifics very well in most of those examples so i’m curious to see how.

    That’s nonsense, obviously there’s an increased probability with strict causation between being around guns and getting shot.

    let’s say i lock you in a room alone, in that room is a hidden compartment under the floor, and in the floor, is a gun. (may or may not be loaded, or have ammunition) i never informed you of this compartment, and that gun. It would be silly to argue that you’re more likely to be shot. The only person that could shoot you is yourself, and you would need to know about the gun first.

    Obviously this is an extremely uncharitable take on this, so we’ll modify it a bit, same room, same scenario, no secret compartment, there is a table in the middle of the room, and there is a gun on it (may or may not be loaded) is simply being in that room, going to make it more likely for you to get shot?

    And like you said, that’s strict causation. If we’re making the argument that being a room with a gun is more dangerous than not, being in a kitchen is more dangerous than not, even if you’re not doing anything.

    You seem to be pretending that “good guys with guns deter bad guys with guns”. I invite you to provide any source that backs this up.

    i’m not, you’re just making that up. Statistically, the primary causer of gun violence is criminals and people who own illegal guns (now idk if these stats are trustworthy to begin with, so i’ll give you that one) and on top of this, most gun violence is targeted, very very few cases of gun violence are just random acts of violence. The average legal gun owning individual, who conceal carries, is not going to be more likely to do any of these things.

    If i wanted to say that good guys with guns were going to do something, i would’ve said that. I don’t believe in that because it’s fucking stupid, but people also seem to not be capable of understanding that simply owning a gun doesn’t mean you shoot people for fun either.


  • What do you mean? This shows the differences between the two.

    yeah but i don’t really see how that matters. Weather is extremely complicated, and unless hurricanes are a lot more consistent than i think they are, this is a lot like comparing two random tornados together, and then being surprised when one of them is a lot worse than the other.

    If that’s what we’re doing we should compare the tri state tornado to any tornado in the last 10 years and suddenly tornados must be a lot less dangerous now than back when the tri state tornado hit.

    It’s an entirely arbitrary mechanism of comparison. It’s just wrong.

    Even if the point is trying to convey the difference between different storms, i can pick up two different rocks, they’re both different rocks. You can’t really glean something from 2 data points effectively.


  • The different categories are the point.

    are they? storms are not like a magic black box that outputs a specific strength of storm, the point i’m making is that we should be comparing every storm we have since the beginning of recorded history and comparing them to what we’re seeing now, rather than taking one storm from like a decade ago, and comparing it to another now. This is a completely arbitrary description of climate change.






  • this can’t be an accurate or reasonably accurate depiction, these are two completely different storms in a different category after all.

    This is like me comparing the joplin tornado to the el reno tornado.

    (for those that don’t know the joplin tornado was an extremely erratic EF/F 5 tornado that was incredibly strong and just sort of showed up and then lingered over a particular area causing immense destruction, whereas el reno was a massive, very powerful tornado, that was collectively rated to be about an EF/F 3 i believe, although the core itself, and numerous shenanigans it pulled including sub vorticies or whatever the correct term is were much stronger, causing strong localized damage)