Everyone's kids are (statistically) paying for everyone's freedom in blood - for example your freedom to drive a car, use encryption and speak in public places could be used to run them over, exchange child porn, and teach them swear words respectively.

I know it's really hard to wrap our head around the idea of objective worth of human lives but we already have calculations for the statistical value of life[1]. We only need to do a similar calculation for our freedom and then we can objectively determine when it's worth it to trade lives vs freedom. At some point (if not there already) a few lives is going to be statistically worth less than the freedom of the entire population.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

Not gonna get into discussing the objective worth of a human life, but I'll note that the entire population cares about their kids, not so much about their freedom to carry guns. Those caring about the latter are a vocal minority (or at least a subset, I don't have the statistics at hand).

That's 1 of the reasons kids are usually valued more with these calculations. I'm not advocating for gun rights here. I'm not from the US and I prefer that civilians don't carry guns at all. Maybe I should have said that outright first so I don't just get down-voted and dismissed. I'm talking about freedom in a more general sense. Gun rights is not even the freedom being taken away by this type of surveillance.

I'm not sure what freedom in the more general sense means here. When focusing on a specific freedom, you'll often find that it's at odds with somebody else's freedom. E.g. I'd say being able to roam public spaces without fear to die is a freedom worth protecting (and it seems you agree).

Gun rights is the freedom that could be taken away (other countries have done it with great success) instead of installing body scanners, so that's why I brought it up here.

Oh, well, if we already have the calculations (and a Wikipedia page!), they must be right.

Would you rather we don't have these numbers help us with decision making? Do you have a better system in mind? Should we just never discuss or think about risk/reward trade-offs as soon as it involves a single life at risk?

I also don't get where the Wikipedia snark is coming from. I know that Wikipedia pages are not perfect but It's still a pretty good reference for a lot of things. I often trust Wikipedia articles for any given subject as long as it is well-sourced and not political just like this one.

They're certainly not free from dying at school.

As I have several children I feel the concern. I feel the same concern when they ride in a car with friends... which they are way way more likely to die from.

Do I stop them from riding with friends? No, because it's in their best interest. Freedom and growth comes with a necessary risk.

Instead of worrying about the weapon of choice, I'm more concerned about why people want to murder. Let's try to fix that.

So just because riding in a car with friends is a fine tradeoff to make, gun violence must be too? How exactly is it a necessary risk? Most other civilized countries seem to do fine without it.

Would you support a targeted form of gun control? For instance, if statistically it could be shown that 13% of the population were responsible for >50% of all gun crimes, wouldn't it make sense to focus on removing access to guns on that group first?

No, that would conflate socioeconomic factors with race and be unconstitutional, for good reasons.

I would get rid of the second amendment. There may have been good reasons to introduce it back in the day, but at some point it's time to move on. As I said civilized countries don't need this.

>conflate socioeconomic factors with race

Not sure what you mean. Please elaborate your thoughts...

> and be unconstitutional

Guess what else is unconstitutional?

Surely you must realize that the practical way forward with gun control is to slowly increase restriction over time?

Jumping directly into an outright ban / constitutional amendment situation is a waste of effort.

Having said that, shouldn't these increasing gun restrictions seek to reduce gun deaths by their maximum ability? For instance, I would imagine you support restricting drunk people from driving as a sensible way to reduce car-related deaths? Therefore why would you be against targeting specific groups who produce a majority of the gun-related deaths?

What chance of government-mediated genocide does it take before accepting an extra ~8000 murders/year makes sense? Not very high, in my opinion. (And that assumes that half of all gun homicides go away, and aren't replaced by other weapons)

One genocidal government killing 0.5% of the US population every 250 years is 8000 deaths per year if my math is correct. With how everyone seems to be complaining of the US's recent descent towards fascism, I find it rather disingenuous to argue that a genocidal government is less likely than that.

Let's drop the pretense: you're specifically asking about removing black people's access to guns.