Do ( D )s sell more guns than ( R )s?

[Yonadav]

The number of things that kill people and the number they kill is aside the fact . Stopping something bad isn't a numbers game .

I agree that it is not a 'game'. But numbers matter. We should obviously devote most of our attention to life saving strategies that will save the most lives and do the most good. Gun deaths are bad. Car deaths are bad. Opioid deaths are bad. Environmental damage done by cars is bad. So if you want to prioritize strategy to save the most lives and do the most good, and that means that numbers so totally matter. If you have a raging fixation on one bad thing at the expense of priorities that would save more lives and do more good, that's a bad thing that should perhaps be stopped.

Let's look at three things that kill around the same number of people.

1) Gun deaths
2) Car deaths
3) Opioid deaths

Gun deaths have declined over the past 25 or 30 years by about half. About 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. The US does not have an especially high rate of suicide, when compared to other nations. So it is unlikely that taking our guns away is going to reduce our suicide rate significantly. People who commit suicide do it with or without access to guns. Apparently, guns are just the preferred method when available. So if you take all of the guns away, you are going to save 1/3 of the deaths caused by guns-- at best. Many of the homicide victims might still be murdered; just not with a gun. And there are only half as many homicides as there used to be.

Car deaths have only declined by about ten percent over the last 30 years. So that's holding fairly steady. Cars are massively bad for the environment, and reducing the number of them is a goal for most environmentalists. And they kill about as many as guns do, so it makes a lot of sense to aggressively target them for reduction. Stars won't fall from the sky and planets won't fly out of orbit if we take half of them out of circulation. Society will adjust. Car pooling will become more widespread. Mass transit will improve. Having a car is not a constitutionally protected right. And the highways are mostly paid for by the trucking industry, and not your tax dollars. We can cut the number of cars in half by revoking the driving privileges of those who abuse them. You didn't signal before doing that reckless lane change? No more driving for you. The people who manage to keep their cars will be far more cautious drivers. Because there will only be half as many cars on the road, and because the drivers of those remaining cars will be the most careful drivers, then traffic fatalities are likely to be reduced by significantly more than half. I think it would reduce traffic fatalities by 3/4.  And there would probably almost never be a traffic jam anywhere.

I don't know what to do about opioids. I have some strange ideas about what to do about all addicts and drug violence. I'll go ahead and spill it. We should just let addicts be addicts. We should provide safe environments for them to be addicts. And by safe environments, I mean pleasant low security prison camps where pharmacists can administer their 'fixes'. Let them have pleasant little houses with gardens and whatnot. Let them have television and internet. We're not punishing them. We're just giving them a safe place to be junkies, where the rest of us are safe from them. If at any time the decide that they want to rehabilitate, then we will move them to a different camp for people who are going through detox and rehabilitation. If they complete rehabilitation, we can help them rejoin the rest of society. If they relapse, it's back to junky camp for them.

 We will shut down the cartels by going to the source and buying all that we need to supply our junkies and then some. That stuff is ridiculously cheap when bought at the source. The street value of drugs smuggled into the US will plunge, and the cartels will basically be out of business. The war on drugs will be over.