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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I think we should be given one in school, trained, and make it normal.

The problem is you're right, they are being advertised. Although, what I will say is I don't know a single person who treats them as toys (I live in a pretty rural area, so pretty much everyone has one). Every gun is taken care of and very well managed.

It always amazes me, because I'm one of the few people who refuse to have a gun in my house (might change). People in the bay area (where I lived for two years, before leaving) have absolutely no idea how common and really safe guns are. I think it leads to a lot of fear mongering.

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How can you say guns are safe when so many get killed by them in the U.S.?

To be fair, in the U.S. about the same number of people are killed by cars every year. Most people would generally consider cars to be safe.

(About 60% of gun deaths are suicides, 30% are homicides, and only 10% are accidental. Unlike with car deaths, where almost 100% are accidental.)

Only ~30% of Americans own guns [1]. Almost all Americans use cars. And most people do not consider cars to be safe. The regulation and training to receive a drivers license is also much more extensive than buying a gun.

[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

These are excellent points. I come from a different cultural background than the US (from Brazil), so in principle I wouldn't be opposed to implementing roughly the same criteria currently applied to obtaining a driver's license to obtaining and carrying a gun.

Here, however, guns have been severely restricted for several years, to the point where I believe it has been counter productive. We did see a decrease in accidental gun deaths, but violent crime and murder rates have increased significantly. Unfortunately, from my observation, the potential threat of deadly force is still a necessary deterrent sometimes.

You make a good point, but car use is orders of magnitude higher than gun use, and I would expect accidents to be proportional to use. If guns kill as many as cars with so much less use, it's very scary!

If you compare it to other nations, the statistics are also worrisome:

"Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the U.S. had 82 percent of all gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

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