The numbers clearly indicate that while our population, and gun ownership is increasing, crime and gun related deaths are in the decline. Guns have safety devices to make them safer than they were 100 years ago. They are less likely to misfire, fire accidentally, or discharge when dropped. But there is always a risk.
That’s true about cars too. We’ve got an ever increasing number of cars on our roads, yet accidents aren’t skyrocketing, and cars today are safer than they were 100 years ago. Yet they still happen, and sadly people do still die. But no one is calling for a ban on cars and return to horses. That’s just stupid.
I get asked all the time, how do you secure a server. I always ask, you want 100% guarenteed security? They say “YES!” I say, take your server, run it through a mill until it’s ground into a fine powder, mix it with cement and make a big brick. It’s now safe. That’s stupid they say, I say yes it is. You’ll never hit 100%. It’s not possible. Unless you do the unreasonable.
Same’s true with guns and cars.
The only way to ensure no one dies from guns is to outlaw them, confiscate them all, and erase the knowledge from the human mind.
So true is cars.
Just as we’d find some other way to get around, so too would we find some other way to kill, and die.
If you really want to make people safer, you need to educate them, and encourage responsibility.
Those 2 alone will save some (not all, but some) of the ones who would be killed or injured because someone left a gun on a toilet, or a bed, or dropped it just so, and so forth. You might even see a 50% decline which in real world numbers is an extra 30-40 people who make it past their 14th birthday. That’s not a bad thing.
Another is to increase penalties for misuse and enforce them. It’s legal for me to have a car, but if I rack up so many speeding tickets I lose my license. If I drive after that, I risk jail and fines. It’s already illegal for felons to possess firearms. When you catch them a second time, make it a harsher penalty. While the penalties won’t really deter the criminal (they don’t really care), taking them out of circulation for longer might save a few more lives too. That might see a 10% improvement, but it’s 10% of a higher number so might save 600-1,000 people.
The next is the hardest one. Dealing with the mental issues.
Suicide is the easiest ironically. Work on boosting our kids self worth, provide more options for the depressed and hopeless and you could see a decrease in those numbers. Might only be 10% but again, real world numbers could save another 300+ lives a year.
Other forms of mental illness are harder to deal with. Stripping people of their rights because they ‘might’ do something bad (at a 0.000007% probability) isn’t something I can support. 1 person does something bad, 10 people do something bad, you don’t strip rights from 300 million. That’s an over reaction. We need to learn more about these things, and work to fix them. No, I don’t have much of a fix here. Outside of a few of our former members and this cat hoarder I ran into last week, I don’t really deal with crazy much.
But no matter what we do, you are not going to eliminate gun injuries or gun deaths, any more than you can eliminate injuries/deaths caused by gymnastics, knives, baseball bats, cars, football, bikes and hopscotch. To fixate on trying to reach 0 is wrong. You can’t do it. It’s impossible. Unless you go the full ban route, in which case you’ll need to use guns to eliminate guns, and then have to trust that the guys left with them will give them up too. If you think that’ll happen….I have this bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.