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Biden renews call for assault weapons ban after ‘tragic and senseless’ spate of July 4 shootings
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Explain why they don’t count as gun deaths please.
Gun deaths aren’t the number that’s important. Homicides are
If one of my family or friends shot themself or was shot due to the negligence of a "responsible gun owner", I would consider that important.
Accidents are different than intentional suicide.
Does it matter that Kurt contain shot himself in the head any more than layne Staley OD’d on heroin? No, it doesn’t.
Take the shotgun away and contain would just find another way to kill himself
I'd say that the immediate effectiveness of a shotgun blast to the head means that suicide by firearm is harder to save someone from than from an overdose. Narcan is ineffective against buckshot.
You’re missing the point. He wanted to die. He will find a way. You can ‘save’ him only so many times before he succeeds.
Also, if someone wants to die, who are you to tell them they aren’t allowed?
If Cobain was saved from an overdose and received the help he needed, who knows what could have happened? A talented influential musician and an outspoken supporter of gay rights might still be with us. Instead he had access to a shotgun.
I explained why your "point" wasn't valid.
What’s important isn’t up to you to decide. A gun death is a gun death. They ALL count.
I think the main reason that some people are against counting suicides and accidental deaths is because it puts the lie to the narrative of the responsible gun owner.
Every time someone shoots themself in the head, or a toddler shoots a sibling, it's because of an irresponsible gun owner. Usually an irresponsible gun owner that considered themself to be a responsible gun owner.
And every gun owner considers themself to be a responsible gun owner.
Everyone is a responsible gun owner until they aren’t. It’s all anecdotal. Just like how every time there’s a news story about a person that went psycho and murdered their family- there’s always an interview with a neighbor that says they were the most mellow person they ever knew.
ALL gun owners think they’re the responsible one, and the bad one are irresponsible. It’s how they’re able to rationalize the ideology that guns are good.
Personally, as someone who thinks guns can be dangerous to everyone in anyone's hands (even the most experienced and safe can have a heart attack or find themselves in some other situation where being safe with their gun might suddenly be lower on the priority list than others around you might like it to be), I don't like including suicides in that stat because it makes it easier to disqualify.
It's just the way our minds work. If one has a position they believe in and some conflicting information comes up, unless they want to believe otherwise, they'll latch on to any angle they can to disqualify it.
Including suicides makes the stat very easy to disqualify. They can be painful but they aren't scary and don't seem random when they aren't close to home, plus that whole line of thought that they'd just find another way if they didn't have guns.
Though, also personally, I don't see why accidental gun deaths should be disqualified. If anything, they are worse than deliberate murders and assaults, because that "find another way" argument applies to deliberate attacks but doesn't to accidental shootings. Accidental shootings are 100% "the only reason anyone died here was because there was a gun present".
I don't like preemptively weakening my position based on what I expect unreasonable people to do. If someone wants to talk about how they think suicides don't count, I'll be happy to have a conversation about why they think someone who kills themself with a gun is a responsible gun owner.
My dogs are howling like they heard something. Funny, I didn't hear anything.
Just because you want to take guns away from black people doesn’t mean you need to attack me
It's refreshing to see someone admit that when they say "gang bangers shooting each other in the streets" they mean "all black people" like you just did.
That’s what you said. Your dog whistle hiding as a dog whistle
If you want to know what I’m talking about, it’s the illegal drug trade. You want gun violence to go down? Legalize drugs.
Bam, tens of thousands of lives saved from gun violence over night
Everyone knows what you were talking about in the first place. This sort of childish "say something racist and then call anyone who notices a racist for noticing" shit is why I'm so glad that I left reddit. Hopefully it won't flourish here.
Suicide is not what first comes to mind when someone talks about gun violence or shootings. Nobody said they don't count - just that it's misleading.
It isn’t misleading at all. A gun death is a gun death to anyone who doesn’t have a bias.
It's just many of those deaths probably would have occurred anyways wether there is a gun ban or not.
There are lots of ways to commit suicide, guns are just convenient. Now some of those deaths probably wouldn't have happened because they may be spur of the moment decisions in a dark period, but many still would have.
Not like the deaths of children who find their parents gun in the closet or the deaths of 5+ people in a grocery store with an automatic weapon.
While it's true that some of the people that kill themselves with a gun would find other ways, the majority wouldn't. MOST suicides are spur of the moment, and having quick access to a deadly weapon makes those attempts far more successful. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html
Damn you’re cold. That’s 21,782 people’s lives we’ll never get back. Just this year. And we’re going to sit here debating whether their life is worth including.
No empathy like conservative empathy.
These disingenuous folks will tell you these folks would’ve killed themselves anyways, but they say nothing about the fact that most people kill themselves over financial or medical hardship while they shrink the social safety net to be just big enough to catch CEOs with golden parachutes.
Bias? The point is that you're not as likely to just be randomly shot at the street as those statistics might make it to seem.
For me, it’s not about fear it’s about empathy. Seeing that number I didn’t think “oh no I’m going to get shot.” I thought, “that’s a lot of lives lost and families and friends impacted for the rest of their lives. A lot of permanent loss for the country. How can we have a meaningful impact that number?”
Yeah no I 100% agree that those numbers are insane and if it was my country I'd definitely want something done about it.
It's just that these statistics are often pulled out when talking about mass shootings for example and in that context including suicides and gang violence is a bit misleading in my opinion especially when the "true" numbers are just as horrific on their own.
I think in the US a lot of murders probably get classified as suicides, accidents, and self defense to avoid launching an expensive, dangerous investigation, so I would also say that suicides are overreported.
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just what you think?
Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.
The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.
Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.
So there's absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn't even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.
To be clear I can't stand the carnage and think it's one of the country's biggest faults. That being said, I'm not sure how what you've presented shows suicides as over reported. Suicide in a place likely to be found results in more accurate counting of suicide not extra deaths counted as suicide. Homicides being counted as missing persons doesn't over count suicide, it under counts homicide. Police shootings actually likely under count suicide since no police shooting is going to be labeled "suicide by cop". The qualified coroner thing is actually pretty crazy and a lot of places require little or no actual pathology knowledge, so who knows.
All this to say when we boil these tragedies down to numbers, when the discussion is assault weapons bans, suicides probably don't belong in the discussion. Disproportionally few suicides are committed with guns targeted by assault weapons bans. That doesn't remove suicide from the gun deaths discussion at all. If I might offer an unsubstantiated opinion of my own, I believe suicidal people are probably more likely to benefit from mental health intervention than the serial killers who are mass shooters. (Which is the only acceptable solution to the right, not that they're willing to pay for it.) Those a-hole attention whores ARE increasingly using guns that would likely be targeted in an AWB, and they're doing it because it helps grab the headline and gets the president to talk about how terrible what you did was. In the meanwhile this is going to remain political fodder for politicians and cannon fodder for the rest of us.