Not long ago, a few miles from where I live, an insane person decided to kill herself by taking her SUV over the highway divider and ramming it head-on into oncoming traffic. She died, as did a number of other people in the ensuing multi-car accident.
I also remember growing up in Chicago, when a crazy person decided to kill a bunch of children. She simply waited until recess at the local schoolyard, then floored her Buick into the crowd of kids. This sort of thing happens...
...more often than you might think, although for some strange reason (gee I wonder?) it rarely makes national news.
I content that staunch anti-ginners come in three types: the uninformed, the paranoid, and the control freaks. One of the latter two types actually once said to my face, "Gun owners are inherently fearful people." Oh lord. The fearful people are the ones who think that a gun, which is a completely inanimate object, has some kind of mystical power to make people violent.
Fortunatley, not all people who want to ban guns are so irrational.
Still, after yet another recent "discussion" with a gun-control advocate (who mostly yelled at me and wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise), I managed, finally, to point out that guns kill far fewer people every year than cars. He said this was irrelevant. But I pointed out that if he really cared about violent deaths, which was what he was ranting about, it damn well should matter. Where was his sense of perspective?
Finally, he challenged me to prove it. Well, this part is easy. I don't have to go to the NRA or any other gun rights group to prove it, either. Cars do kill more people than guns. A lot more.
They also kill far more children.
Automobiles are our nation's #1 source of violent death. They outkill guns by a considerable margin, without even counting death and illness due to the pollution they cause. This is not according to gun-rights advocates, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Transportation, as well as anti-gun lobbying groups (yes, I sait anti-gun groups).
Since I spent the effort to dig up the facts for this guy (who, ironically, is a bar owner, but doesn't want to believe cars kill people, let alone booze), I figured I might as well share it here. I hope it helps some of the rational anti-gun types might read it and stop to think for a moment before branding us gun owners as paranoid lunatics. Are cars the same as guns? No. But if we're going to put guns into their proper perspective as a relative threat to life and limb, the figures do matter.
So here, have a look:
Violence Policy Center's Firearm Death Statistics.
USDOT National Center for Statistics and Analysis automobile death statistics.
Centers for Disease Control: Comparative Causes of Annual Deaths in the United States (CDC).
Note that, as I said, the VPC is a firmly anti-gun group. But their own statistics show how low gun deaths really are. Especially if you take suicides out of the equation (a point they usually underemphasize).
Note one other thing: anti-gunners will often claim that thousands of "children" are killed by firearms every year. But notice what their statistics are based on: age twenty and younger.
That means that if a 19 year-old crackhead shoots a 20 year-old crack dealer to get some free rock, that's another "tragic childhood death due to guns." For more reasonable statistics, look at the sources I quote above for annual gun deaths for children under 10. It's around 50 kids a year. While that's horrible, I believe you'll find more kids are killed in swimming and bicycle accidents. And that far more are run over by cars.
None of this means there should be no legal controls on guns. None of it means you're entitled to own a grenade launcher and a flamethrower without a license. The point here, once again, is to get a sense of proportion and reasonable perspective.
I don't fancy I'll convince any rabid control freaks to rethink their kneejerk positions. But I do hope some reasonable folks might look at the information, and consider the possibility that some of us who cherish the 2nd amendment and the freedom to keep and bear arms are not paranoid, are not crazy, are not fearful, and are not violent. Although I am a card-carrying member of the NRA (seriously--it's right where my ACLU card used to be), none of this information is from gun-rights groups.
Cars don't kill people, people kill people!
Let's get it straight, humans are violent mutant apes (and damn dirty ones at that!).We're also too smart for our own good. We'll keep coming up with new ways of knocking each other off. Whether it's a gun, a knife or a sharp stick we're still going to do it. So let's keep it clean, efficient and quick and let law abiding citizens continue to maintain their constitutional rights to keep their homes free from crackheads. We can't let a few bad apples spoil it for the rest of us.
And they'll pry my pickup from my cold dead hands, too!
PS: If you want to commit suicide do it in the privacy of your own home and leave kids and other civilians out of it!
You make some very valid points here. I don't own a gun & have known many people that do. Not one of them has harmed anyone & I have a lot of friends in law enforcement.
I hear of other deaths from deaths related to automobiles more than those deaths by a gun. Alcohol, drugs & addictions kill more people & waste a lives far more as you pointed out.
When the school shootings were making the news so much, my first gut reactions were to get all the guns out of here, to where I have no idea but out of the hands of those sick teens. I mean sick teens in the terms of their minds just didn't go right for their perticular problems they were unable to deal with.
I appreciate you bringing out these statistics Dean.
Janelle, what you won't hear about are the school shootings that didn't happen, or were cut very short by a teacher that happened to have a gun in the trunk of his car. Alas, I can't find a direct reference now, I must have removed it from my Documents folder. In any case, this particular incident started as Columbine did, but (if I recall) only one person was killed, and the shooter stopped, because one of the teachers had a .45 in the trunk of his car. He used this to subdue the shooter.
How very odd that the major media never covered those events where use of a firearm prevented harm... (pious, sarcastic expression)
As Dean has pointed out, vastly more children die from drowning or drinking chemicals than ever do from firearm related incidents.
What he didn't mention is that age, sex, and (blasphemy!!) race are much greater determinants for violence than is gun ownership. I know because I had to give a persuasive speech on the topic of gun control. (ok, I had to give the speech, I chose the topic) Point is that young (15-25) black males are the most violent group. Then young black females, then young white males, then young white females. And that violent behavior tends sharply to drop off after age 30 for all groups.
I also discovered that very few folks have ever tried to use the 2nd Amendment (main reason I don't love the ACLU: silly bastiches can't count up to TEN!) to resist various gun control laws.
But cheer up, Dean, if you've been following the news you've seen that more decisions in favor of the "individual" interpretation of the Amendment II have been popping up, despite the gun-grabbers base & cyncal attempts to ramrod more laws through based on post 9/11 "Fatherland (er) Homeland Security Measures". Folks are beginning to realize that sitting on their collective butts and waiting for the cops to rescue them is not necessarily the most effective method of survival.
"Let's Roll." Rest In Peace, guys.
To say that more children/people are killed by cars, or while swimming, riding a bike or playing with yo-yo's, is a completely specious, spurious argument. The car is an essential part of our lives; we cannot ban it. Other pleasurable activites sometimes end up badly. But guns??? what is their use except to kill people, animals or whatever? Even knives, sometimes used as a murder weapon, have a legitimate use in our society. Unfortunately, most Americans have an Old West mentality. "Guns don't kill people, people do" is a half-truth at best. There are already too many guns out there, and gun control is ineffective thanks to the NRA. But guns without ammunition are useless. So I believe in ammunition control. If you want to shoot your gun, go to a shooting range, I have no problem with that. But compared with other civilized societies, our rate of gun related deaths is astronomical. I think it is a national disgrace.
I know very few people that own guns, but I know many victoms of guns. In my high school, my friend fell victom to the first Seattle Public School shooting at the hands of another young teenager.
Another different friend lost his life to a gun, because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am sick and tired of hearing about the loss of lives due to guns. I am sick and tired of readind it, experiencing it, living it. I don't care if the person that died was a sinner or a saint, the fact of the matter is: guns take lives and America needs some control. There is a difference between hunting rifels and hand guns: hand guns are specifically created to take the life of another person.
Too many deaths are caused each year due to hand guns. How many more people will die before we realize we need to change our way of life? I am a "free" American who exercises my rights each day, but I do not need a gun to do so: all I need is my voters registration card and my college education.