Running out of reality to blame, they got to make stories.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Regardless of the rest, this is like saying that guns would be confiscated because someone shot 10 people at a shooting range.
If it were a regular occurrence that people were driving cars through classrooms, like it is with shooting into them, then the conversation around regulating cars would look a lot more similar to the one about guns.
The biggest difference is you need to have a license for a car and it needs to be registered, and in most places you have to have insurance to cover any damage you may cause. None of this is true for gun ownership, despite a car being nearly required for life in the US and a gun being a toy for most people, or at best a tool that is used for one particular job.
I agree and made a similar comment on this post but you can buy a car without a license in every US state. It's the driving part that requires a license. It's a nitpick but still applies given the conversation around gun control is focused mostly on the purchase side of things.
About 45,000 people are killed in motor vehicle crashes each year, and that's nearly double the number of homicide--which includes negligent homicides--committed with firearms.
How many hours of car driving are there before a death?
How many of those deaths from cars are intentional?
What would happen to the economy if we remove cars Vs guns? (Public mass transit would hopefully get better)
If you did it all at once? The economy would crash, and we'd have a depression that would make The Great Depression look like the Dow having a minor downtick. Too much of the US population lives too far from where they work to get to work without a car, and building the infrastructure so that even suburban areas could get to jobs would be difficult.
On the other hand, personal cars--and commercial vehicles--are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, both from burning fossil fuels, and from the production of the vehicle itself. Even switching to all electric vehicles will not make them emission-free over their lifetime (although it will certainly help), nor would going to solely mass-transit. Looking at projections for climate change, and taking into account the direct emissions alone from motor vehicles, the number of deaths indirectly caused by them is going to be sharply increasing. So, IMO, banning all personal internal combustion engine vehicles would make a lot of sense, even if it would crash the economy for a decade or three, because that would significantly help with climate change.
Ok. I guess I was really trying to address your point of 45k car deaths being double the number of gun murders.
Saying let's ban guns because they kill people, and then saying let's also ban cars because they kill twice as many people is, I feel, a flawed argument.
Most countries in the world get by with no civilian (or very few) guns. Bar a few small islands, there are no countries that get by without cars.
I don't think that's relevant, because we, in the US, have 250 years of recognizing that it is an individual right to be keep and bear arm; other countries don't even recognize an individual right to self defense, and I would hope that we would agree that's morally repugnant. Relatively speaking, very few countries have real, robust protections for free speech and political discourse, and I would hope that we would agree that protections for speech--even speech that is revolting to all sense of morality--need to be protected in order for democracy--such as it is--to remain even remotely functional.
If we're looking at overall harms, banning IC engines entirely would do far more to address global mortality rates than ending civilian ownership.
If we want to reduce the harms of guns, specifically, then rather than eliminating a civil right, why not address the conditions that cause people to engage in violence? If you remove the tool, rather than correcting the underlying cause, then you simply shift the means of violence rather than reducing or eliminating it. Even countries with fairly high individual firearm ownership--Switzerland, Finland--have very low rates of violence, because they simply don't have the same underlying problems that we seem to celebrate in the US.
That's where I get so hung up; you wouldn't treat pneumonia with cough syrup, you'd treat it with antibiotics. Treat the disease, and the symptoms go away on their own. And the great part is, if you treat the disease, the all of America is a nicer place.
The UK most definitely recognises a right to self defense.
It also has laws covering free speech, and the limitations, such as offensive or hateful language - https://care.org.uk/cause/freedom-of-speech/free-speech-law
I'm sure you'd agree in a civilised society there's no need to go around threatening people, or being abusive towards people based on their race, religion, or sexual orientation. After all the US' very foundation was to escape religious persecution!
As for the prevalence of violence in the US vs Switzerland, yeah fair enough. If you can change the underlying culture, good on you! However, a gun will kill a lot of people a lot faster than a car or knife!
Take the average person who will cause a fatal car crash next year, and ask them what they use their car for every day.
Now take the average person who will shoot someone to death next year and ask them what they use their gun for every day.