re: #48 Political Atheist

Public policy lives in the home for us law abiding types. We have laws to comply with that overlay our decision tree about home safety and defense. Or we risk jail. That makes public policy and personal decision inseparable.

Not really what I was talking about. What I was talking about is for the average law-abiding gun owner, the gun is more dangerous than it is ever going to be helpful.

Low information gun owners as a concept is a lot more dangerous than low information voters. And your statistic is a small amount of information all by itself. It needs a lot more filled in, which might include what I pointed out in #45. That stat is one point of information among many and should be regarded as such. The policy or personal decision does not start and stop at that stat. Most Americans don’t own guns at all. Many gun owners bought them for hunt and sport not defense.

I’m sorry, I’m really not getting your point. For most people, owning a gun is more dangerous than not owning a gun. That’s true for hunters, too, even if they didn’t buy the gun to increase their safety.

Hopefully with good policy fewer people will own guns for the wrong reason or negligently. Very few people apply for CCW as compared to the overall population. So your stat is already significantly reflected in gun ownership rates. One way to reduce defensive gun purchases is to reduce crime rates. Maybe that’s the best way in the long term.

My point is that many, many, many people these days own guns for the wrong reason— just out of pure ‘I want that’, or for self-defense, etc. My wife’s relatives, who are sweet people but classic low-information types, just bought a brace of guns and that terrifies me since one of them is a diabetic who regularly goes into insulin shock and an 82 year old who’s got the beginnings of dementia. Anyway, Wayne LaPierre and the other nutjobs managed to scare up enough shit for them to compulsively buy guns and it really sucks.

Oh, and crime rates have fucking nosedived and people are buying more and more guns. I think it might be a smaller percentage of people buying more and more guns, so that’s nice, except for the more and more guns part.