RE: 20 dead in Orlando gay club shooting
June 13, 2016 at 9:40 pm
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2016 at 9:42 pm by dom.donald.)
(June 13, 2016 at 4:59 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:(June 13, 2016 at 4:03 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: You quoted murder statistics when discussing homicide even as you mention that the one is a subset of the other. You are equivocating the two terms.*Sigh*
End of argument.
All murders ARE homicides but all homicides AREN'T murder why don't you understand that?
Huggy, I see your point. But you were quoting the statistics to demonstrate that there are four times more vehicle related 'homicides' than gun-related 'homicides'. You didn't quote 'homicide' figures for gun-related deaths: you quoted 'murder' statistics. While it is true that murders are homicides, you agree that murders are a subset of the total gun-related homicides, therefore the 1:4 ratio you initially quoted isn't true. The imbalance of the two figures was the sole reason for quoting them, to prove your point. The fact that it's not accurate undermines your point.
Having said that, yes, you do have a simplistic point that 'deaths are deaths', so we should be doing something about road safety.
The point is that we DO do things to improve road safety, but given the number of people and vehicles involved, the cost and scale of the infrastructure, the size and complexity of the industries involved, and the sheer number of of influencing factors, makes it a time-consuming and expensive enterprise to make a noticeable difference. Banning cars would be one solution, but it would have a massive social and economic impact and result in the collapse of the country.
On the other hand, given the obvious correlation between the number of guns and the homicide rates, with one relatively cheap law change you could most likely make a substantial impact on death rates, without having any noticeable effect on the economy. It won't solve the whole problem, but it seems like a 'quick win' to me, after which you could re-assess the influence of other aspects of the social problems that lead to gun deaths.
