Stopped Motorist Shoots at Deputy...Deputy Handles It

I piss everyone off at some point, it's a skill or something.

It's just a result of everyone being different.
IDIC, baby!

you're right - if we ever get a stretch of five Democrat presidents - and a Democrat house & senate that will be twenty years of uninterrupted control to initiate a gun ban. Good luck with that!

There's an awful lot of assumptions about the long term future of US politics in there. You and I have no way of knowing what the political landscape will look like in twenty, fifty or a hundred years time. We have no way of knowing if there'll still be a two party system in a century, or a constitution, or democracy, or even a US.

What we do know is that globally the tendency is to move away from the idea of an armed citizenry in stable prosperous societies.

Edited. See below

2016 CDC Stats on other causes of death
Number of deaths for leading causes of death

• Heart disease: 635,260
• Cancer: 598,038
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 161,374
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 154,596
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 142,142
• Alzheimer’s disease: 116,103
• Diabetes: 80,058
• Influenza and pneumonia: 51,537
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,046
• Intentional self-harm (suicide): 44,965

Link to a CDC PDF file with 2016 stats. See table 11 for firearm related stats.

Firearm deaths in 2016:

Firearm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38,658
Unintentional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495
Suicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22,938
Homicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14,415
Undetermined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 300
Legal intervention/war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...510

Look at the suicide numbers versus the overall numbers. Bottom line, if you aren't committing suicide by gun, in a country of 300+ million people you are statistically HIGHLY unlikely to die by the gun. If you read the PDF, there are some interesting and enlightening facts on 'mass shootings' as well. The bottom line being that the liberal lie that they are an epidemic happening every day is complete and utter bunk.

4% are justified? Wow.

You do realise not even I've been claiming the high murder rate is due to people killing each other with guns? You seem to be missing the point that societies with guns for self defense have higher murder rates. That doesn't mean the murders have to be committed with the guns, merely that the presence of those guns is associated with increased chance of being murdered.

Do get back to me when you can ban influenza.

Another cool thing if you dig into the data is the statistic that for every crime committed with a firearm, three potential crimes are averted by legal gun-owners. The stat is probably even more skewed than that, because not everyone who deters a bad actor with a weapon reports it afterward.

The fact that people die from all sorts of causes doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to prevent the less frequent causes. In other words, just because heart disease kills more people than cancer doesn't mean we shouldn't try to cure cancer. Similarly, just because more people die from the flu than from guns doesn't mean we shouldn't try alleviating gun deaths.

That's what always baffles me about conservatives. They seem to live in a binary world. "Welp, one bad thing is happening so we can't address this other bad thing." It's either attributable to willful malice or sheer stupidity. Can @Marso's brain simply not handle more than one thing at a time?

Amazing how all those potential crimes don't happen elsewhere.

Almost as if it was bullshit.

Do get back to me when the UK moves from its 'knife ban' to whatever comes next, like the ban on hammers (see what I did there?) or ice picks, or whatever else they want to blame for criminal behavior- other than criminal behavior.

In the meantime, keep moving those goal posts around.

If you don't have guns, then logically, you can't have a stat in your country where legal gun owners deter crimes. Instead, you have more victims and now, apparently, a 'knife ban,' because nobody NEEDS to have a knife.

Jesus spot you are tenacious I will give you that. Granted I'm just a cave man, so I keep my math & reasoning simple!
Here we go! I would say "try to keep up" but you're obviously smarter than me (you have an English accent while I have a Chicago accent) so that would be silly! That said:

according to Marso's data 32,000 die of gunshot deaths annually in the US. Hell I'm going to lump them all together - suicide, criminal activities, all of the reasons - in a population of 312 million.
So I'm looking at it as 32,000 out of 312,000,000 or a 1 in 9,750 chance of meeting my end via gun death.
Yet 635,260 die from heart disease out of 312,000,000 or a 1 in 491 chance of a heart attack. Again I'm not a math wizard but the odds of a heart attack are about TWENTY TIMES GREATER
than eating a bullet. So help me out here spot261 - how do I interpret this data? I'm drawing a crazy conclusion that heart disease is TWENTY TIMES MORE LIKELY than gun death in the US in any given year. How could this be? This conflicts with the amount of concern you devote to gun control (or lack of control).

I'll tell you what - this might be cave-man thinking but 6 feet under = 6 feet under no matter how you die, but I should care TWENTY TIMES MORE about heart disease than about gun death.
And sure enough that's pretty close to how that plays out for me. Any thoughts?

We don't need them for the point to work, the point is we don't have three dead bodies for each of those instances which would have been stopped by a gun.

What we have re total crime figures and whilst lesser violent crimes are higher here (although that's sketchy given the differences in reporting criteria), murders are drastically lower. That's not the US having fewer victims, it's a comparative escalation in the severity of the crimes committed. An assault stops being reported as such once the victim dies. It's not that you have fewer violent crimes, rather it's that more of them end up with a dead body.

If the numbers don't add up to other, disarmed, countries having a higher total risk that reflects the stoppages you claim then the question becomes where the disparity lies and given the authorative nature of those total crime figures then I'm casting first principle doubt on your assertion. You haven't provided a source and more to the point any source you do provide will be spurious given it would be at odds with the actual numbers of bodies, hence the "bullshit" comment.

That's not a victory for the pro gun argument, just the opposite.

As for knives, yes they are increasingly a problem, but what we are calling a problem is that our most dangerous city has just once, for one year ever, had a higher total number of murders (but still a lower rate per capita) than one of your safer ones.

Put that in perspective, what we are calling a "crisis" and a "warzone" is still much safer than what you would call "normal". London at it's very worst would rank as one of the safest places to live in the US.

None of which matters in the slightest, because no one was talking about the number of people killed by guns.

Are you suggesting no one is doing anything about heart disease?

yes you and many others on word forge have brought up that "we can do more than one thing at a time" when it comes to preventing all deaths. I get it, I really do. But since gun death IS THE LEAST OF OUR WORRIES and gun ownership is a Constitutional right (sorry about that!) then let's give gun control the effort it deserves, which is .001 percent of the effort we should devote to the other causes of death.

Yes they should do twenty times more concerning heart disease than about guns since it's a much more deadly concern obviously. But if nobody is talking about how many people are killed by guns then the total must be zero. So now I have zero reason to give a shit about gun control. I think I'll focus my efforts on preventing lightning strikes.

Because yet again it's not just about the people killed directly by guns.

It's about the fact that those guns are associated with a massive murder rate. There's a big difference between the two arguments because one looks at the wider consequences of those guns rather than their direct impact.

I mean, it's only the least of our worries if you purposely ignore all other less likely causes of death. I'd characterize it as much more concerning than lightning strikes (rare and seemingly random) or airplane fatalities (exceedingly rare).

And even with the latter example, airplane fatalities are exceedingly rare because we've actually done something to prevent them. The right to travel within the US is also a constitutional right, and yet we have managed to make travel safer via regulations. The same efforts could be applied to guns. Especially because gun deaths are a mix of both intentional acts and accidents.

Builder stop signs (wood ones or fancy decorative) aren't 'legal' either. I see them all the time, they're the one builders put in subdivisions.

Aren't the stop sings with the white border optional anyway?

Here in California, you'll find that all stop signs are optional unless someone beat you to the intersection. They operate more as a "slow yield" sign.

Looks like the dearly departed was here illegally and had been deported 3 times.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-napa-sheriff-shooting-20190221-story.html

And?

then it shows we as a society were willing to let our children be gun fodder to win a pissing contest and we've become a global disgrace.

My God. @spot261 can confirm this, but didn't your already pretty tight gun laws change considerably after that one bloke shot up and killed a whole class of kindergartners in a primary school around 1996 or so? How the hell did it take another six years after Sandy Hook for teens to push to finally get a handful of states and s few big retailers to raise the age on gun sales?

That's something you're happy about?

Dunblane, I drive through it quite often when visiting a friend in Scotland. There are still flowers placed daily at the site to this day.

sounds like Korea - the bigger vehicle has the right-of-way.

no I'm not happy about it. But since sandy hook oodles of kindergarten aged kids have been killed because they were passengers in DUI related vehicle deaths - so why no mandatory 10 year sentence for a DUI charge? Why is one tragedy worse than any other?

Many would indeed support such a guideline, we have up to 14 years and an unlimited fine for death by drink driving in the UK and I'm fully supportive of that (in fact would welcome an increase).

However the question was never about how shooters are sentenced. It was about the reaction at policy making level.

I'm not saying if a DUI death is involved. I mean if you are caught DUI on any street or road you get 10 years behind bars.
BTW if a gun ban and confiscation began in the US what do you feel would be an appropriate punishment for a gun owner who refuses to give up their weapon? In other words they fully admit to owning a gun, but refuse to tell the authorities where it is hidden. Hell it could be hidden anywhere in the continental US let's say, and they tell the authorities to pound sand, get fucked, etc.