Pulaski

The guns or the children?

scrubbedexpat099

Sorry Children, guns do not go off by themselves.

Rhubarb65

My fellow - adopted - countryman, Jim Jefferies just about nails the subject for me:

part 1

part 2

Pulaski

So with 1,300 shooting deaths per year, guns are more dangerous that pools by almost 2:1 (1.84 : 1), but why not adjust for exposure to the risk?

About one third of US homes possess one or more guns, but only 4.1% of US homes have an in-ground pool. Even if we assume that there are an equal number of equally dangerous above-ground pools, there are four times as many homes with guns as there are with pools, so if we adjust for exposure we get 1.84/4 : 1, or about 0.46 : 1. So having a pool appears to be more than twice as likely to get your child chilled as having a gun in your house.

petitefrancaise

except they don't drown in their own pools........

and I would say that most children go swimming a few times a year,if only with their school.
I can't even begin to bother with the maths. How many under 14s in the USA, how many places to go swimming?

Pulaski

And children aren't always shot by guns in their own home either. I suspect that shootings and drownings outside their own home are pretty much a wash.

The point, or my point at least, is that I recognize that both guns and pools present a danger, but that you want to downplay the risk of one because of your personal interest and your "comfort level", and overstate the risks of the other because you find it "scary".

petitefrancaise

I've already said that I don't downplay the risks of pools. I do whatever I can to mitigate the risks. Including asking how other parents planned on keeping my kids safe.

My kids are older and mostly out of my care but yes, especially since I live in Texas, I ask if there is a gun in the house and I've never a had a yes yet.

And it's not a wash. Twice the number of kids shot.

Pulaski

But around four times more homes with guns than pools.

With your grasp of statistics you'd make a great journalist or political speech writer!

scrubbedexpat099

This is about feelings, not logic so numbers do not count.

Steve_

You could say the same thing in almost any country. Obviously gun ownership is much less common in the UK but there's somewhere around 750,000 people in GB who have a shotgun or firearm certificate, or both. Odds are if you know a reasonable number of people, at least one of them owns a firearm. Anyway I'm pretty sure you're talking to a bunch of people who own them right now.

So ask. Maryland has a safe storage law anyway (keep out of reach of minors) and guns are required to be sold not only with trigger locks, but with internal locks on handguns.

Most firearm homicides are at contact distance, hence "gunshot residue". There isn't any from more than a few yards away.

Two people were shot dead in the parking lot outside the supermarket I go to in Calgary a few weeks ago. Supposedly a safe area and Canada has less gun crime, so obviously these platitudes make me feel so much safer. Where I used to work in the UK (admittedly a very unsafe area) I remember once there was a shooting across the street and in the newspaper it said: "armed police officers arrived immediately as they were attending another incident in an adjacent street" The business across the road was also raided by armed robbers once.

(a) you're just as dead if someone shoots you with a flintlock and (b) Maryland has an "assault weapons" ban, what don't you believe it's effective???

Maryland has very restrictive gun laws, more restrictive in some ways than up here, so if that's your plan, it's not going to make a difference. I agree on the healthcare issue but Canadian healthcare is far from perfect.

scrubbedexpat099

US has Black Guns, much worse than anything in the UK.

thinbrit

Do you live in the Austin area?

mrken30

Better than Orange. Or maybe "Orange is the New Black".

scrubbedexpat099

Not sure, perhaps Trump would approve?

mrken30

The show or the color?