This is interesting. I'm often told that having a gun in my house, no matter how safely stored, magically increases my family's odds of dying by gun, but I'm never told that having a bike in my garage similarly increases their odds of dying on a bike.https://twitter.com/bakermind/status/1078762129862217730 …
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Also, while I'm at it, this guy also says something here that is false but commonly held. There is good reason to believe that most defensive gun uses go unreported b/c the gun is never fired, i.e. the gun has a common, nonviolent, de-escalatory use.https://twitter.com/bakermind/status/1077263668713185280 …
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I grew up in a gun culture and anecdotally I can report hearing many many stories of a gun being displayed to end an escalating conflict, & of course no cops are called and the incidents don't show up as a stat anywhere and remain anecdotal. Tough to know how common this truly is
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But my point is that "guns have no purpose other than to kill" is patently false. The last time I was back in Louisiana getting a tire fixed, a guy in there was telling us about his granddaughter being a victim of road rage & discretely displaying a pistol to end the incident.
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These stories are a dime a dozen, but there is no way to quantify them.
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This is true, but even this commonly cited fact isn't quite right. Guns don't magically make people suicidal. They just increase the risk of suicidal people succeeding at it.https://twitter.com/bakermind/status/1078765489382281216 …
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I don't see this. I think a kitchen knife or chainsaw or some other thing that requires a measure of intentionality to cause harm is a better analog than flammable fabrics or something that could passively enter into a dangerous state.https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/status/1078765884624261120 …
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Re: suicide & guns, I do want to acknowledge that the best evidence for any real impact of the AU gun ban is in the death by suicide numbers there. I've done many threads on that ban & what it does & doesn't tell us, but there does seem to be a modest drop in suicide fatalities.
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I think it's probably true that not everyone who kills themselves with a gun would replace & succeed if a gun weren't available. Combine the gun's effectiveness w/ fact that 90% of failed suicide attempts don't repeat, & u can see where there's probably a real impact.
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End of conversation
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Look at the number of people killed by dogs or horses or bees. Look at the number of people killed by cigarettes or Junk Food. Compared to these things - guns are insignificant.
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I think of it in terms of the activation energy hill. With a gun, the amount of effort to go from "safely stored" to death is relatively small compared to a lot of things
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I don't see the bike one. But I do see a penumbra of danger for guns, and, similarly, say, flammable chemicals and furniture that isn't flame-retardant. The point is that someone else's abuse or misuse of the object can cause a hazard. (The extent of this is another matter.)
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