cathouse01
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In most cases of gun control proposed by politicians it is all about control, and guns in the hands of the general population is just a threat to their control. In this case, I think it is more the average Newtonian’s total lack of familiarity with guns. In 1995, sociologist James Wright included among his “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America” the following:
Kareem Shaya makes a great point. In responding to the old argument “but guns are designed to kill people” he says that if that is true "then guns are empirically probably the most defective product you can buy”. He points out that there are now around 393 million guns in the U.S. and each year about 44,000 of them are used to kill people (including suicides), that means that 99.98880407% of the guns out there didn't “kill people”, so logic would say that if “guns are designed to kill people” the vast majority of guns are not functioning as designed.
The people who are opposing the gun shop do so from an irrational fear of “gunz” (hoplophobia as coined by Col. Jeff Cooper). While they usually are the first to throw out the bromide “follow the science”, they refuse to admit that the old saw “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is supported by all the scientific evidence. I’ve yet to see a report of a gun leaping off a table and killing someone on its own.
That “gun ownership is normative, not deviant, behavior across vast swaths of the social landscape”. The idea that guns are normal and normal people use guns may seem common-sense to those of us gathered here, but it’s actually a dramatic departure from the standard social scientific approaches that view guns and gun owners as deviant, and research literatures that are dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. This theme is so constant that the New York Times ran a headline just last week declaring, “Gun Research Is Suddenly Hot”. In fact, the story was about how research on gun violence is suddenly hot. Research on the lawful use of guns is as cold as ever.
Kareem Shaya makes a great point. In responding to the old argument “but guns are designed to kill people” he says that if that is true "then guns are empirically probably the most defective product you can buy”. He points out that there are now around 393 million guns in the U.S. and each year about 44,000 of them are used to kill people (including suicides), that means that 99.98880407% of the guns out there didn't “kill people”, so logic would say that if “guns are designed to kill people” the vast majority of guns are not functioning as designed.
The people who are opposing the gun shop do so from an irrational fear of “gunz” (hoplophobia as coined by Col. Jeff Cooper). While they usually are the first to throw out the bromide “follow the science”, they refuse to admit that the old saw “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is supported by all the scientific evidence. I’ve yet to see a report of a gun leaping off a table and killing someone on its own.