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I can't take a pool to the local cinema and kill everyone inside. It's an irrelevant comparison.

To be exposed to the risk of drowning in your pool I actually need to go to said pool. This is not different from exposing myself to any other risk of my own free will.

My free will has no bearing on if someone wants to bring a gun to a public place and murder me and everyone else around.

That's only a valid comparison to mass shootings, which are a tiny, tiny percentage of gun deaths.

By comparison, referenced in my other comments, if someone really wanted to kill everyone in a theater they could do it with a container of gasoline, or a pressure cooker. Newtown could have been accomplished with a sword, given the size difference of the attacker to the victims.

Anyone who wants to kill you can, with any number of objects readily accessible. This is only evident to some people when they think of an object like an AR-15 because they don't think about all the other ways they could be killed.

Lethality of all of those other methods is significantly below that of a semi-automatic rifle.

The fact more people are killed outside of mass shootings by guns is irrelevant. Mass shootings are a good enough reason to get rid of them, it's a risk people shouldn't have to live with.

> Lethality of all of those other methods is significantly below that of a semi-automatic rifle.

That's just not true. In Somalia, U.S. Army soldiers actually complained about how the AR-15 round (5.56 NATO) wouldn't take down enemy combatants in a single shot.

Compare that to, say, the bombs used in the Boston Marathon. It's a night and day difference. If you're trapped in a crowded nightclub that's on fire, your odds of survival are abysmal.

People survive serious gunshots every day with proper medical attention. One of the big issues in the Orlando shooting was the 3 hour wait before any of the victims got medical attention.

To be fair, that's either because the projectile wasn't capable of fragmentation--m193--due to velocity or other reasons and the lethality of the weapon depends on fragmentation.

But you also need to be able to penetrate even light-armer/heavy clothing in actual combat situations, it's a matter of balancing the two.

> In fact, children under 15 are about 40 times more likely to die by swimming pool than by an accidental firearms discharge [0].

You know, it's not really the accidental discharges I'm worried about. It's the mass shootings.

Also, you appear to be misquoting that article. The 40x number is scaled by the number of pools/firearms, and so is saying "an individual firearm is less likely to kill a child than an individual pool" (although firearms are vastly more common than pools).

And, finally, that article uses "86 children killed by accidental firearm discharge in 2000" as its primary metric. The top google hit [0] for "How many children are killed each year by guns?" gives a value of 1,500.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+children+are+killed...

It looks like the 1,500 number includes all deaths of children under 18. However -- without going into that particular dataset -- these numbers are normally inflated by gang violence and include 17-year-olds killed in shootouts with police. I'm certainly interested in more data, but it's hard to find summary datasets that aren't slanted.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. But I think those 17-and-unders are still children, and I'd prefer them alive and with a chance to regret their gang-banging ways.

Then you should probably disarm the police too.

agreed.

The Happy Land Fire killed 87 people, not a shot fired. Timothy McVeigh killed 189 people with fertilizer... and that was in 1995 -- under the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994.

I don't understand arguments like this at all. Is the argument that "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing"?

> Is the argument that "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing"?

I believe its actually "people can be killed without assault weapons, therefore restricting assault weapons has no benefit in protecting people from being killed". Which, ultimately, has the same basic kind of error in reasoning as "there are other bad things so we shouldn't tackle this thing", but its not precisely the same argument.

Right, they couple that with "…and it's also a constitutional right that our gov't believed—at the time—was important enough to put a blanket ban on themselves writing laws in the future to limit it."

Other than that, completely like "banning bad things".

It's the substitution problem. The argument (seems to be), "If we ban semi-automatic rifles, that person who wants to kill all those people won't be able to harm anyone."

History has shown us this simply isn't the case. People who want to kill people will kill people with whatever means available. Happy Land, Oklahoma City, etc are just examples of this. I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings.

> I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings.

That's not true, "assault pressure cookers" were banned—especially the scary looking ones. Problem solved!

People who want to kill people will kill people with whatever means available. Happy Land, Oklahoma City, etc are just examples of this.

Does anyone take this argument seriously? This is a genuine question - I find it difficult to understand how that argument seems compelling to anyone?

Of course there are lots of ways to kill people!

The primary use of fertilizer, gasoline and pressure cookers isn't killing. The primary purpose of guns is.

Keep the guns available! I'd rather have someone come after me with a gun than with a pressure cooker or fertilizer bomb:

- The gun can be a symbol conveying intent. Possibly one can negotiate or leave the premises in time. In contrast a pressure cooker in a corner does not immediately tell me that someone is out to get me. That is, I can be surprised more easily by an exploding pressure cooker or fertilizer bomb. At least with the gun I know what's going on.

- Fertilizer, gasoline and pressure cooker bombs do not tend to produce predictable wounds and often produce fatalities. I'm more likely to survive if an angry man shoots me than if he blows me up with a pressure cooker. Also the trauma surgeons have a better chance of stitching me up. Finally I'd rather live the rest of my life with a bullet in my butt than a pressure cooker lid up my ass.

" I didn't see a huge push to ban pressure cookers after the Boston bombings."

You may not have noticed it but they were effectively banned from sale by all retail stores. I was tasked with buying a new pressure cooker not 3 weeks after the Boston bombings and I simply could not find one locally. After visiting all the local retail stores, I finally gave up and ordered one on Amazon.