And it definitely makes it less safe for the rest of us in society.
If someone has threatened you with a gun or you live in an area with increased gun violence, I would expect that greatly increases the chances that you'd want to acquire your own. This cohort would already be at a much higher risk of gun death before they owned a gun as well.
There has never been a placebo controlled double blind study on gun ownership. Probably never will be because of ethical concerns.
It probably does increase risk, but I expect the effect size is much lower than 2-3x.
Until then, an attempt to ban all guns is not only a politically infeasible waste of energy, but also seems like a racist attack on the self-defense rights of the disempowered.
You can't discard datapoints you don't like because they're not "responsible" firearm holders.
To overstate the point: You can’t conflate “bought a black market gun, keeps it illegally, has no training, and engages in felonious behavior on a regular basis” with “endured numerous comprehensive background checks, bought high value guns (some specialized) at retail, took hundreds of hours of training from prominent instructors, keeps them for sport and defense, obeys all applicable laws, is a practical expert in said laws, and has committed no crimes”, then when the former happens to kill someone illegally, proceed to average the two and use that to assert “see? owning guns is bad”.
You can’t say that the Americans who want guns for self defense are better off without them because statistically, across the population, they increase danger.
A couple months ago a friend of a friend was killed because a boy from school brought a gun from home to their house to show off and was playing with it. He thought it was empty. It wasn't. Now a girl is dead, a boy's life is ruined, and their families are devastated.
This happens all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am-Qdx6vky0
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/man-shoots...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nra-employee-shoots-himself_n...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-accidently-shoots-self-wife...
(I won't even mention the circular argument in the parent comment)
Link 1: Guy said it was unloaded. Gun safety rule #1 is treat every gun likes its loaded and clear every gun when someone hands it to you so you know personally that it is in fact unloaded.
Not doing either of those things is incredibly stupid and irresponsible.
Link 2: "The man was showing his girlfriend that loaded guns are safe when he died" - The guy was playing with a loaded gun. No legitimate gun safety demonstration would claim that a loaded gun is ever safe. That's not responsible gun handling.
Link 3: Doesn't describe the incident in detail but he pointed a loaded gun at a living thing so its gross negligence.
Link 4: Another questionable gun safety demonstration. Once again no detail but he pointed a loaded gun at a person else it would have been physically impossible for a person to get shot.
It is not standard practice to have live rounds around when you are doing a safety demonstration. They make clearly marked training rounds that have no propellant in them for the purpose of demonstrating loading and unloading a firearm. Using live rounds is not justifiable as "responsible" behavior.
Its disingenuous to use examples of people doing incredibly reckless things in order to argue that "responsible gun owners" regularly shoot themselves or others.
Gun handling is like being the only car driving on a road during the day with clear, calm weather, no animals, and no pedestrians around. It makes it so simple that all you have to do is maintain a sane speed and drive between the lines and there's no way you can get into an accident. Handling a gun is always like that unless you're on a battlefield or something. If you follow simple rules its impossible to hurt someone.
My point was that the supposed "responsible gun owners" also get it wrong.
Else it's more like a No True Scotsman (where a "responsible gun owner would never accidentally mess with their gun, because anybody who does such things is by definition not a responsible gun owner").
If a cop showcasing "gun safety", an NRA employee, and other such cases with more experience and more training than the average gun owning person, are not "responsible gun owner", then I don't know who we can trust to be. And why we should listen to anybody saying "with me it's OK, I'm responsible". After all that's what the cop was saying before he shot himself...
>Its disingenuous to use examples of people doing incredibly reckless things in order to argue that "responsible gun owners" regularly shoot themselves or others.
It's disingenuous to construct an abstract category of "responsible gun owners" vs the "unresponsible" rest, when even the self-proclaimed "responsible" owners, and even safety/gun experts, mess up.
What we do know is that gun owners regularly shoot themselves or others. Even some claiming to be "responsible" (which is something that all do, only an idiot would claim to be irresponsible or admit to it).
Not to mention the whole point is moot. Even if "responsible gun owners" were 100% issue free, the law doesn't give guns to people who are "responsible gun owners" only, it gives them to anybody who passes some basic checks and wants to buy one. Nor does the law follow up with people in their homes to see if they really follow that "responsible gun operation" that they say they do.
You're feigning ignorance and acting as if they are highly trained people dealing with incredible complexity and unmitigatable danger. Its as simple as it sounds. They pointed loaded guns at other people and/or themselves. Its really easy not to do it 100% of the time. Everyone knows its not ok whether they use guns on a regular basis or not.
Everyone should be able to recognize the unusual amount of irresponsibility they showed. You pretending they were above average because they had gun related jobs doesn't make it so.
The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't apply. Its a form of unfair gatekeeping. That's not the case here. These people were ignoring everything about gun safety so its perfectly fair to say they don't fall into the category of people that are responsible.
Your lack of trust that anyone can be responsible with a gun is a separate issue. You should be able to recognize by the actions that led to the shootings that these people are not experts.
That's the same tired argument of C advocates regarding memory safety faults in C: "just program carefully, just don't double free / don't go over buffers, etc". As if those doing those things are consciously doing them, and can just decide not to.
And even less so is that case that someone teaching about gun safety, consciously shot himself with a loaded gun. The reality is that people with the best intentions and training can mess it, and that even more so for people don't have the best intention and training. Also people are faulty, memory is faulty, and just "you're doing it right, just do it wrong" is a naive non-solution.
>The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't apply. Its a form of unfair gatekeeping. That's not the case here. These people were ignoring everything about gun safety so its perfectly fair to say they don't fall into the category of people that are responsible.
If these people (gun owning NRA employee, gun safety demonstrator, and tons of similar examples) can those things happen to them (and ignore safety), anybody can do it.
Even more so when gun safety isn't the issue. Even the most fanatic and OCD-level gun safety follower could just get their gun, when in some anger episode, and kill their spouses. So there's that too.
And it happens by the tons -- unless you're in the mafia or street gang, it's more likely to get it by a gun owning family/friend than by e.g. burglars.
>You should be able to recognize by the actions that led to the shootings that these people are not experts.
That's not even wrong.
My military-trained father-in-law accidentally discharged his handgun inside the house while cleaning it. The bullet ricocheted and could have killed anybody.
It was a manufacturing defect. All those guns were recalled and replaced 2 months later.
He claimed he unloaded it and checked he unloaded it.
A couple weeks later every single one of those guns was recalled and replaced by the manufacturer. The gun, itself, apparently had a defect wherein it could pop a round loose, hold it where you couldn't see it, and then chamber it if you knocked it a bit. I have no idea how this could possibly occur, but the manufacturer actually claimed this and wound up having to spend enough money that something wasn't right with those handguns.
Fortunately, he adhered to standard discipline and made sure the gun was never pointed at anybody. So, when it did go off, nobody was in line of fire. However, it did ricochet and still could have caused quite a bit of harm.
Always adhering to discipline doesn't make probabilities zero--it just minimizes them.
Interestingly, that would be most of them, with the supreme court ruling that the police does not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...