Correct, they have a responsibility. They don't always fulfill it. If a small child is killed, yeah, it's the gun owner's fault.
No argument. If you want to own or use anything that is more dangerous than a cotton ball, you have an obligation to learn how to operate it responsibly. That includes firearms, and I have always been a firm proponent of firearms education. Look at my other posts.
Come to think of it, you can be irresponsible with a cotton ball, so add them to the list.
Look at the post. I never said I didn't want guns for protection. I said different people accepted different tradeoffs.
Your choices are your own, and no one should have the ability to control that as long as it does not affect my right to do the same. Gun bans don't just affect
your choices, however, they affect
mine as well. If you are willing to trade off the only realistic method of protecting your family from an assailant (force on force) in order to protect them from a tool used to implement force on force, when there are available means of insuring the safety from those implements, that is your choice. For or against, it's all the same.
Just don't attempt to regulate my ability to do the same, and that
specifically is the objective of gun control as it is defined by the left.
It's about 200 kids a year per a quick search. I didn't say it's common enough to offset the chance of personal attack.
200 children a year is a statistically insignificant number. Would you be willing to apply that exact same logic to any other reason for child deaths?
It's real that someone might threaten me. It's also real that the gun might be stolen, used against me, picked up by a depressed family member, etc.
I'll add the comment that you mentioned suicides ( which account for almost half the deaths by firearms in the US each year, and are constantly included without caveat by the left ( since if you took those out of the statistics, that omission alone would wreak havoc with their claims).
A suicide that uses a gun is categorized as a serious suicide, as opposed to a "cry for help" suicide. That means that they are determined and committed to taking their own life. If you merely remove the most available choice, the vast majority will simply revert to the next most available choice.
If you magically removed every firearm in the US tomorrow, it would not greatly impact the number of serious suicides. Therefore suicides should not be included in any statistical analysis regarding legislative gun control. The left just uses it to artificially inflate their figures.
Just as real as it might go off accidentally as your house is struck by a falling jet plane. Neither implies that the threat of aggression is lessened, only that you haven't taken steps to lessen the probability that those reasons would become a factor in the decision for or against ownership.
I'm sorry but the logic is flawed.
It's statistically insignificant to you but might not be to someone else. I'm finding figures of about 200 per year. Like I said, different cultures, different tradeoffs.
No, math doesn't change according to ones culture. The Native Americans in Ney York had a culture that said a box of beads was worth more than Manhattan Island. That didn't alter the fact that it was a bad deal.
OK. About how many kids are killed each year by first aid kits? Kids die at home from multiple reasons; does that mean we shouldn't address any of them?
You're right. the number of children killed each year by first aid kits would probably be less than statistically insignificant.
But once you take the supplies out of the box, and call them "stuff for boo-boos" or whatever, they begin to have great statistical significance.
Many more children are killed or injured each year by common household items than by guns.
Here are some links to sources I think you will find unimpeachable:
http://realestate.msn.com/10-kid-safe-home-tips-to-help-mom-worry-less
http://www.cdc.gov/SafeChild/ChildhoodInjuryReport/b_Summary.html
I don't know anyone who wants to take your guns away, Chuck.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There is a movement in Washington right now which is attempting to do just that, not to mention people who openly advocate a total gun ban, or the people both in and out of Washington who advocate a total ban, but realize that that making the statement overtly is a bad tactic which goes against the majority opinion, and therefore couch their desires in terminology that doesn't sound so draconian but has the same objective.
Well, in my formative years I never needed a gun in self-defense, and didn't meet anyone who did. There were times I had to elude people following me but fortunately no close-range attack.
In my formative years, I didn't either. The chief difference, apparently, is that
I didn't have to elude anyone. Neither did my little sister (I am assuming your are a woman, my apologies if that is not correct).
The relevant data is not how responsible you and your friends are, but how responsible the preponderance of households are.
No argument there,either. The question is just how responsible are the people in the preponderance of households.
Judging from the statistics, they're pretty responsible. The really big question, IMO, is what to do about those who are not responsible (and who make up only a small fraction of the total number of people who possess firearms). The current laws in debate ignore this, and concentrates on a blanket application that would affect responsible owners far more than it would irresponsible ones.
The fact that there are responsible gun owners doesn't neutralize the fact that there are irresponsible gun owners. It sounds to me like that's your argument.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that it is more effective to implement measures targeting the irresponsible sector without unduly affect the responsible ones. A blanket approach dealing only with the firearms themselves has proven ineffective in the past. I cannot see how it would magically become effective now.
The household cleaners are out of reach of a dachshund, not hard to accomplish.
Then, obviously your dachshund is not as smart as a child. Or even as smart as a cat I once cohabitated with (you don't
own a cat), who ws abled to open child proof cabinets. I thought there were mice in my apartment, since every time I bought a new bag of CatChow, a hole would be chewed into it within days. I found the true culprit after placeing a number of mousetraps in the cabinet, and came home to find one of them gripping Psycho's paw. The vet said that no bones were broken, but Psycho was not happy with my original decision to booby trap his snack repository anyway.
From then on, I kept the bag in the refrigerator, under the logic that he was unfamiliar with Archimedes theory of leverage and was too small to leverage the door open using only his own muscles.
After all, he was only a cat. And one who preferred watching TV to reading. I guess I should be glad I didn't subscribe to the Science Channel.
