More Children Were Shot Dead in 2017 Than On-Duty Police Officers and Military
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
So what the headline is saying, is that being a police officer or a soldier appears to be less than 37 times as dangerous as being a child.
The implication appears to be that this is startlingly low, but how dangerous do people think being a police officer should be, in a world that operated according to reasonable expectations? Would 40 times as dangerous be enough?
Also, we could compare results to other countries, where kids are not legally allowed weapons as well. I was wondering what similar rates are in Canada, but my search skills failed me.
other countries, where kids are not legally allowed weapons as well
15 to 18 year olds tend to obtain a lot of things they should not have, not only guns but other things that are illegal for them, like porn and alcohol, and things that are illegal for anyone to possess, like drugs.
> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
It seems misleading to me to include suicide counts in a headline that says “shot dead”.
Removing suicides, this comes out to 1625 per year. Approximately 900,000 people in total die in the US per year.
What they are describing as an epidemic is in reality 340 deaths per year of under-14s.
For reference, approximately 450 people per year die of acetaminophen (tylenol) poisoning in the US.
The amount of freedom you'd have to take from society is huge.
Perhaps there is also a right to die. If life is torture, and you keep a person alive, then you are torturing them.
Arguing that children "Have a right to die"? This is not something I agree with.
Obviously banning all that other stuff would be ridiculous and no one is proposing that. There is not much freedom lost by keeping gins out of the hands of children though...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...
Statistics are hard when you're really trying to make an argument and discussion of what gets included is very important.
Very few people actually care about finding optimums and cause and effect relationships. Publishing compelling results or results that support emotionally derived positions isn't helpful.
I think I've seen too many of these. My brain starts to say "Are they trying to manipulate me?"
Mind reading + ad hominem
You should probably not criticize the quality of other people's critical thinking.
The founders wanted the population to have irrefutable rights to have weapons of war in order to prevent rule-by-force which was everywhere in their time. Rule by force is everywhere today too and with current leadership trends it is not hard to believe that it could be attempted here again.
In the UK they talk about knives in quite similar ways to how we talk about guns in the US which leads me to think that the problem isn't the tool.
Weapons are power. Power is often used irresponsibly. You can try to eliminate the power or you can try to eliminate the irresponsibility, but it's not so complicated to do the former.
Much of the unprecedented world peace comes from the influence and policies of the US, and much of the stability of the US comes from citizens' power afforded by its fundamental law.
A part of the reason you see so much mass shooting activity in gun free areas is the general likelihood that you won’t encounter someone else with a firearm immediately. Same reason gang activity tends to concentrate instead of fan out.
The trend that bothers me in western society is the almost gleeful willingness to having rights stripped from us that were hard fought for. All for the illusion of safety and civility. As if simply silencing people or disarming people makes the original problem go away instead of just hiding it. It’s unsettling.
You hear this quite a lot. It seems it could be provably true or false, has anyone tried?
No. We're in the middle of a knife crime epidemic, and this is seeing calls to more strictly enforce the ban on sales of knives, or to change the law to prevent pointy knives[1] being sold. The rate of knife crime is seen as a public health emergency and is seen as being deserving of action to tackle it. Our discussion is quite different to the US discussion.
This is so severe you will have heard about it in the US.
How many deaths have caused us to have this national conversation? In a population of 60 million people. Have a guess.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
> 5. What methods of killing are used?
> As in previous years, the most common method of killing for both male and female victims was by a knife or other sharp instrument, with 213 such homicides (37% of the total) recorded in the year ending March 2016 (Appendix Table 2.03). Although the absolute number of homicides committed by knives or sharp instruments has risen from 186 in the previous year, the proportion of homicides committed by this method remains similar (36% for the year ending March 2015).
Replace knife with gun and you have the exact conversation in America. This is what I mean. (I am not talking about the response but the subject and degree of concern about it)
Take away a weapon and people will find something else. Focusing on access to the weapon and not what leads people to kill perpetuates the problem.
My thesis restated. Too many people are blaming the tools people use to empower them to kill, not enough people are talking about the motivations of people who kill and how to help prevent the motives.
If you want people to kill each other less you have to create a more just, open society. You have to alienate people less and make sure everyone can have hope. You have to understand people who hate and empathize with them instead of demonizing them.
You also have to make policy that is driven by thought and reason instead of party-ism, instead of fear, instead of intuitive emotion.
.3% are police officers.
.4% are active duty military.
Nobody accused downvoters of being offended. The comment was addressed to everybody, and wasn't an accusation.
The issue I had with the headline is that it does not appear to be referring to "some arbitrary value", yet it is. Which is why it seemed appropriate to point out what that arbitrary value is.