Murder by Rifle vs. Death by Meteor | Hacker News Reader

Murder by Rifle vs. Death by Meteor

charlespetzold.com

45 pointsingve100 comments

On the opposite side, there is some questionable gun math as well. Much of the current political discussion is centered around mass shootings and white supremacist shootings, with the claimed remedy being "lets ban assault weapons". In 9 of 10 gun deaths, the gun involved was a pistol, not a rifle. "Assault" distinction means that fraction of deaths an assault rifle ban would prevent is somewhere less than 10% of all gun deaths - assuming every death was perfectly prevented by this ban.

You are 4x more likely to be shot by the police than a mass shooter, and 40x more likely to be shot by police than a white supremacist.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/08/06/40978688/inslees...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...

The vast majority of gun deaths are suicides. ~4% of gun murders involve rifles. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081

I think gun control is being used by the left much like abortion is used by the right: it is an emotionally charged topic that can rile up the base even though legislative solutions will largely be ineffective.

So a few different things are going on.

Statistics tell one thing. And if we’re reasonable we can reduce unnecessary deaths.

Then besides ordinary reason we have hot-button and politicization and polarization issues. If mr O’Rourke were to say, mass shooters and supremacists are statistically unrewarding lines of attack, people would drop support en masse. People would accuse him of being a supremacist himself and someone who doesn’t care about victims of mass shooters.

And then there is the reality of the second amendment and confiscation.

That said, reasonable people can agree in screening people better and discriminating against certain anti social behaviors, etc.

> That said, reasonable people can agree in screening people better and discriminating against certain anti social behaviors, etc.

Yes, but the concern is the unreasonable people. O’Rourke basically blew away the “reasonable compromise” position by making clear (at least in the eyes of second amendment advocates) that there is an end goal, that end goal is confiscation, and that any compromise is just one step toward that end goal.

That’s true. He was given ample opportunity last night to nuance or walk back his strong response but instead doubled down and insisted he’d basically “make” people turn them in. Pretty much alluding to being ok with having standoffs and shootouts Elliot Ness style, which will not convince any moderates.

Incidentally, it's this exact type of situation that caused the founding fathers to include the second amendment in the first place.

"On April 14, 1775, Gage received instructions from Secretary of State William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, to disarm the rebels..."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Lexington_and_Conco...

For the gun rights people, O'Rourke is just stating what everyone already knew. To illustrate this, there's a lovely 'cake' meme [0] (available in both cartoon and text form!) about how much gun rights have already been eaten away, and every one was sold as a compromise already. At some point, "this is a compromise because it means you get to keep any rights at all" stops being acceptable. (The link itself is from 2017, but the text is from 2010)

> Allow me to explain.

> I hear a lot about "compromise" from your camp ... except, it's not compromise.

> Let's say I have this cake. It is a very nice cake, with "GUN RIGHTS" written across the top in lovely floral icing. Along you come and say, "Give me that cake."

> I say, "No, it's my cake."

> You say, "Let's compromise. Give me half." I respond by asking what I get out of this compromise, and you reply that I get to keep half of my cake.

> Okay, we compromise. Let us call this compromise The National Firearms Act of 1934.

> There I am with my half of the cake, and you walk back up and say, "Give me that cake."

> I say, "No, it's my cake."

> You say, "Let's compromise." What do I get out of this compromise? Why, I get to keep half of what's left of the cake I already own.

> So, we have your compromise -- let us call this one the Gun Control Act of 1968 -- and I'm left holding what is now just a quarter of my cake.

> And I'm sitting in the corner with my quarter piece of cake, and here you come again. You want my cake. Again.

> This time you take several bites -- we'll call this compromise the Clinton Executive Orders -- and I'm left with about a tenth of what has always been MY DAMN CAKE and you've got nine-tenths of it.

> Then we compromised with the Lautenberg Act (nibble, nibble), the HUD/Smith and Wesson agreement (nibble, nibble), the Brady Law (NOM NOM NOM), the School Safety and Law Enforcement Improvement Act (sweet tap-dancing Freyja, my finger!)

> I'm left holding crumbs of what was once a large and satisfying cake, and you're standing there with most of MY CAKE, making anime eyes and whining about being "reasonable", and wondering "why we won't compromise".

> I'm done with being reasonable, and I'm done with compromise. Nothing about gun control in this country has ever been "reasonable" nor a genuine "compromise".

> LawDog

0: https://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/2017/10/gun-rights-cake-...

From a not-US POV, y'all should definitely ban pistols too. I know there's a snowball's chance of doing that, but if you broke the culture of people carrying weapons as a matter of course, you'd also begin to rectify this, as Police no longer had to treat everyone as potentially armed

> You are 4x more likely to be shot by the police than a mass shooter, and 40x more likely to be shot by police than a white supremacist.

Police in the US do not have a duty to protect: many US citizens who live in rural or poor areas essentially only have self-defense means to protect themselves as police response times can be hours if they show up at all.

I'd love for our society to reach a place where all citizens can feel safe without owning guns, but we are such a large country with a lot of racial and economic imbalances remaining - I fear this is quite a long ways off.

> we are such a large country with a lot of racial and economic imbalances remaining

The sheer amount of handguns also won't help people feel safe either. It's a damn intractable problem, a sorta prisoner's dilemma about who disarms first, or if at all.

The whole gun debate is like people talking about how they should ban all the cars and everyone should use public transit.

It makes sense for urban population to think about banning all cars and only using public transit, but it's insane for rural population to consider that. The urban population hasn't owned a car in generations, so it doesn't even make sense to them why anyone would own a car. Most Europeans are urbanites, and have banned cars for over half a century, so they can't make sense why Americans are so hard set on their cars and give weird suggestions about how getting rid of cars vs public transportation is a prisoner's dilemma.

Hah, interesting to see an analogy I've made before to explain different situations.

This is accurate. The US is huge. A lot of European nations could quite literally fit inside of one of our states, with room left over. Hell some could fit inside of Los Angeles county. We're also not ethnically or culturally homogeneous, which are the reasons why we have so many issues that Europeans consider 'solved'.

Police wouldn't be so trigger happy if guns weren't so pervasive.

That's one of my big arguments for banning and confiscating handguns.

No. It’s because they’re trained to be that way

They're trained to be that way because of the prevalence of guns on the street.

Thats probably true.

But it's also probably true that a lot of crooks won't hand over their guns. They aren't afraid to hold drugs, stolen merchandise, etc. They won't worry about hanging onto a gun, especially when it gives them such an advantage in robbery.

I'm pretty sure a good portion of otherwise law-abiding citizens would hang onto their guns, too.

The might still have guns, but even crooks would be less likely to use them because they're less likely to encounter someone else with a gun, making them less likely to have to worry about the first mover advantage in that situation.

For robberies they probably don't even need one, just a sufficiently realistic replica.

You are one and a half times as likely to be killed by someone’s bare hands or feet in the U.S. versus a rifle per the FBI.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

What qualifies as a rifle?

That's a surprisingly nuanced question actually. But most of the nuance comes from edge cases that aren't very common.

According to the ATF: >The term “Rifle” means a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed or redesigned and made or remade to use the energy of the explosive in a fixed metallic cartridge to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.

The term “rifle” means a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed or redesigned and made or remade to use the energy of an explosive to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2012-title18/html...

A rifled bore, for those not familiar with firearms is grooved to impart spin stabilization to the projectile. Pistols also have rifled bores, but are intended to be held in the hand when fired.

Firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, with a rifled barrel minimum of 16" long, and an overall length minimum of 26".

Rifles are defined more by what they AREN'T than what they ARE. "Shoulderable", "rifled barrel", 16", and 26" are the points where the federal government classifies a firearm as something different, such as a shotgun or a handgun.

When its classified by the ATF as a rifle.

I'm 1000% serious, their rules are byzantine (and stupid).

Yup. This image should make it as clear as mud.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0020/5370/1690/files/ar-pi...

IMHO this one is better :)

http://emptormaven.com/img/NFA_Pistol_AOW_SBR.jpg

Haha, that's pretty good!

https://franklinarmory.com/title-1/

This is pretty good too. Its not a rifle, its not a pistol, its "Any Other Weapon" apparently.

This is literally how arbitrary our regulations are. Criminals don't care about regulations, its proven over and over.

He actually links to the 2018 version of the same data (which shows the death toll from hands and feet to be about 2.25x that of rifles), but conveniently ignores that fact.

Well, schools don't have "foot violence" drills, either.

He claims that he heard "somebody" make the meteor claim. Perhaps he did. I've heard a lot of people make a lot of bogus claims over the years.

I suppose writing lengthy blog posts to refute anonymous "somebodies" might be his hobby.

An alternative explanation might be that he went looking for an easily-refuted straw man to advance his political agenda.

Given the implication of his opening line that "gun advocates do not understand statistics and mathematics," this is an excellent example of a straw man.

I'm pretty sure that generalizing from a single anonymous "somebody" to "gun advocates" as a whole does not "demonstrate understanding of statistics and mathematics".

Parent's comment makes more sense if one assumes they are referring to the article.

Ah, so it does.

> Well, schools don't have "foot violence" drills, either.

No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death either. Why? Because you couldn't even if you wanted to. That's a completely illogical line of reasoning.

  No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death, either

"No one ever" is a broad claim. But certainly, killing 8 school kids with a knife or 7 with a cleaver is easy enough -- two examples in two months here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–...

> No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death

It's not a broad claim and not even relavent to your point. But while we're on the subject, we don't have a "mass knifing" or "mass cleaving" problem in America either.

You're also four and a half times more likely to be killed by "Firearms, type not stated" than someone's bare hands or feet, surely some fraction of those are rifles.

Also, a large portion of the gun violence attached to pistols (other than convenience) are suicides. They all get rolled into the same umbrella of "gun violence" and it's difficult to parce out the self inflicted violence from the violence inflicted upon others.

Suicide isn't violence and its ableist to claim otherwise, that statistic mangling needs to stop.

If you dig in, only 2700 homicides a year (including lawful shootings by LEOs) are comitted with firearms, and its dropping due to means other than gun control.

Isn't suicide inherently violent due to the intent to cause permanent harm to oneself?

>its ableist to claim otherwise I don't understand what you mean by this, can you explain?

There should be a newline between "otherwise" and "I", but I don't have enough points to edit.

Its ableist to say that someone's choice to exercise free will is somehow coerced or violent because they suffer from depression and/or pain.

I certainly don't like suicide but I don't get to make that choice for other people.

Police killed 992 people with guns in 2018 - ~37%

Interesting. A bit over 20,000 people complete suicide by firearm in the U.S. per year (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm). Where did FBI find over 50,000 annual bare-hands-or-feet deaths?

"Killed by someone" isn't "killed by yourself", so suicide isn't part of that. Also GP poster is referring to being murdered by someone using a RIFLE, not just someone using a firearm in general.

Interesting.

Cosmos throwing rocks at random vs humans throwing rocks precisely.

One would hope the cosmos was significantly worse at hitting people

Meteors gradually becoming spookily accurate would make interesting premise for a sci fi story.

This blog is somewhat absurd.

Yes, the "hit by a meteor" claim is lame but the other side of things is even more terrible.

If we're actually worried about the things that are going to be likely to kill us -> Drowning, Cars or even being hit by blunt instruments.

> This blog is somewhat absurd.

Assuming you mean this blog post (rather than the whole blog), what's absurd about fact-checking?

> If we're actually worried about the things that are going to be likely to kill us…

The post is a critique of the misuse of statistics. Whatever gun critique you're reacting to, I'm not seeing it.

"What is it about gun advocates and math? Are the deceptions deliberate? Or does the excitement of grasping a sleek stiff tool in one’s hand cause a depletion of cognitive coherence?"

That's more than a narrow critique of a particular statistic. And the success of that narrow criticism does little to support that leading statement, which is a broad smear of a large subculture. So a response that extends beyond the meteor comparison seems appropriate.

I've never heard anyone make the referenced argument. You can find stupid idiots on any side of any issue. Trying to impute the stupid idiots to the entire side of the issue is an entertaining past time, but all heat and no light.

Opportunity cost of banning cars is huge. Opportunity cost of gun control is negligible (as showcased by the rest of the world).

Gun control is the low hanging fruit of death prevention.

Only the criminals get non-DRM 3D printers in the future?

Likely accurate.

People will have to resort to regular metalwork after that.

Or going to Home Depot.

This is getting beat up but it's prescient.

There have already been calls for DRM inclusion on 3D printers and consumer CNC machines. The bans start with objects of violence, i.e. guns and knives. Next it will be to prevent copyright violations. No more printing your own warhammer figurines or Micky Mouse Novelty phone holders. Then we move on to objects of sexual deviance, gotta think of the kiddos. Eventually it leads to the day where you are buying 3D printers that only print from a pre-approved and monitored repository of models. But don't worry, you can upload your owns models to Google-CAD!

Nobody needs a 19 inch long dildo of hate, think of the children! We must save the children!

I think you dont understand the cost of democide. Being disarmed by your govt is a very dangerous position. What do you put as the value of human life ? How about 262 million lives ?

His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.

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

Gun ownership doesn't change that. For example China had no gun control before Mao and it still happened.

So what are the numbers for per capita gun ownership in pre-Mao China? There's no point in saying there's no gun control and then ignoring how many guns are owned by the people.

It depends on what you mean by gun control (full ban vs restrictions), but the opportunity cost of banning firearms is not negligible.

* There is an economic impact (lost revenue for firearm producers, sellers, resellers, ammunition producers, gun ranges, sport associations, hunting groups, accessory producers, etc).

* There is a personal utility cost (enthusiasts, hunters, and sport shooters can't enjoy their hobbies anymore).

* There is a communal cost (those people now have fewer reasons to come together and form groups).

* There is a personal defense cost (citizens and especially at risk groups are less able to defend themselves).

* There is a national defense cost (armed citizens impede invasion).

* There may be a military readiness and recruitment cost.

* There is an increased probability of tyrannical government (armed citizens impede this, I don't know to what degree).

* There are time and legal costs (this will be fought aggressively and take up large amounts of legislator and judicial time which could be spent on other matters). In the US this would require a full constitutional amendment which is by design a non-trivial undertaking.

* There are regulatory costs (someone needs to define and interpret what bans mean).

* There are enforcement costs (all existing firearms would be grandfathered in. To my knowledge there is no legal basis for eminent domain of firearms or seizure of assets that were legally purchased pre-ban. For example, any alcohol purchased before prohibition took effect was still legal to possess and use. Any automatic weapon purchased before the ban on automatic weapons is still legal).

You can argue that it's still a net benefit to ban firearms (and you may be right) but I disagree that there are negligible costs.

> There is an economic impact

Gun control doesn't prevent gun ranges, sport associations, hunting groups, etc - all of these exists in my country (Poland) despite strict gun control. They just have to do more paperwork.

You could just as well argue requiring driving licence destroys car industry and hobbies :)

> There is a personal utility cost

They can, they just have to take an exam, register their guns, and pass some checks.

> communal cost

If anything there's more reason to come together to shoot - because shooting requires permissions so it's harder to organize it separately. There are many shooting contests in Poland (for example one I participated in as a teen - organized by LOK (League of National Defense)).

> personal defense cost

That's what police is for, and looking at the homicide and violence stats from all over the world - the less gun ownership in the population - the safe the country is. This isn't a cost, it's a benefit for personal defense. There's +- 1.5 homicides per 100 000 citizens in Poland. And about 5-10 in USA.

> national defense cost

Armed citizens barely change how hard it is to invade a country. Armies with tanks, planes and missiles doesn't care much about your colt or ar-15. When the government has problem with part of the country - it can just stop supplying it with food, energy and fuel. You'll surrender in a few weeks with no victims :)

> military readiness and recruitment cost

I had shooting lessons at school for 2 years. Among other stuff (first help training, survival lessons, how to behave when there's a missile attack etc). Our country has strict gun control, somehow it didn't prevent it. Many countries with gun control even have mandatory military service :) Training people to use military rifle takes a few weeks anyway.

> increased probability of tyrannical government

Tzar Russia had no gun control, yet it got totalitarian communism in a few years. China before Mao had no gun control and got Mao anyway :)

Gun control changes nothing, because totalitarian regimes arise with popular support, or invade with armies.

Poland after WW2 had lots of firearms in hands of citizens, the biggest resistance in Europe as percentage of population. There was anti-communism resistance fighting till 60s in some cases. Soviets didn't care, most people just wnted them to stop because they were more invconvenient for the populace than for the Russians. At no point were they close to overthrow the government.

> time and legal costs

These are the only realistic ones, and are negligible compared to other things we have to do to prevent similar number of deaths.

> regulatory

If you want to divide legal costs into proper legal and regulatory - sure, whatever, still negligible compared to banning cars or curing cancer.

> enforcement costs

small as well - most people don't do revolutions. We already have state enforce taxes on people, enforcing a few other things as well is easy and in case of gun control - was done in many countries all over the world with next to no problems.

I like how pro-gun Americans raise all these points ignoring that literally 99% of the world did this with good results and no problems. Theory is all nice, but you cannot ignore the reality.

> Opportunity cost of gun control is negligible (as showcased by the rest of the world).

I don't call 100 million people murdered by their own governments within living memory "negligible".

People routinely "forget" the death toll of Communism/Statism because its very inconvenient.

And also because that all happened far away, and that would surely never happen here in the Land of the Free™, right?

That's not to say that a modern military couldn't and wouldn't curbstomp a bunch of civilians with small arms in this day and age, but an armed civilian is at least slightly harder to tyrannically subjugate than an unarmed one.

The 2nd Amendment is valuable because F35s, tanks, and helicopter gunships are useless for fighting an armed citizenry.

Say a President uses the military to fight US civilians on US soil. He and anyone else involved in the plot would preside over a country not worth ruling. Because all their friends and family would be kidnapped and murdered by lunchtime.

People in USA have no idea how authoritharian/totalitarian regimes happen, so they imagine such absurd scenarios.

Totalitarian regimes start as democratic state with huge popular support for big changes in law. They slowly change law stretching some laws beyond recognition, but still preserving popular support by mass spending, finding external or internal public enemies.

Before the country as a whole decide it's enough - it's far past the time for a revolution. Half of your friends support the authoritharian government and work actively to enforce it.

You clearly don’t know the worldview of Republicans, most of whom own guns. Many are ready to defend the Republic against all enemies - foreign and domestic. Gun ownership is an inoculation against totalitarianism.

So far you seem to be a pessimistic outlier without solutions. This attitude is easily exploited by authoritarians.

What stops them from becoming plain old authoritarian supporters with guns?

They wouldn't defend anyone if coopted well enough.

Attribute virtue, even more so Democratic virtue to such a huge chunk of population sounds extremely naive.

And your plan is to disarm those with Democratic virtues? That's not internally consistent.

You clearly don’t know gun owning Republicans. They will defend the Republic. Including from totalitarians.

You’re off in the rhubarb hallucinating about “Democratic virtue” which is a meaningless term and unrelated to a Republic based on laws.

I know the worldview of republicans. I see how they introduce "Patriot act" and remove personal liberties to fight fringe threats.

They are much more likely to become authoritarian than to defend you from them :) May I remind you they are currently building a wall on the border and keeping children in concentration camps?

You are proving my point because you are confusing the D.C. establishment with the people.

You simply don’t know Republicans. If any are on this site they are chuckling at your comment.

I digress. You seem interested in the southern border. The wall is currently made of tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers. Border walls are normal all around the world because they work.

As for children in Obama cages, everyone agrees this is wrong. This is why a wall is so important - there won’t be any illegal crossers to detain.

Indeed, the US Government has never unjustly imprisoned nor killed anyone... (this is sarcasm)

The same people who yell "ACAB" for some reason request that the government's jackbooted thugs step on their necks harder.

Gun control and widespread gun ownership changes nothing regarding totalitarian states. Poland after WW2 had lots of weapons in circulation. There was big anti-communist resistance. Some of them fought till 60s.

They achieved nothing and even the average citizen had enough of them few years in. They were only making life harder, stealing stuff to survive and causing property damage, and had no chances to win vs the army with tanks, aeroplanes, mines, and supply chains.

Now it's even more absurd. People pretending gun ownership protects them from totalitarianism are deluded.

Hardly. It does almost nothing and this has been studied and has been continually ignored because the hysteria machine needs something to grind against.

>>Gun control is the low hanging fruit of death prevention.

Given the recent millions who have died in genocides, it make sense to arm citizens in order to prevent death.

Yep! spot on.

A disarmed citizenry (AKA the militia in the US bill of rights) is vulnerable to tyranny.

Poland before WW2 had lenient gun control laws, and lots of illegal arms (it was where WW1 and 1920 anti-soviet war was fought).

It changed nothing, because you can't fight tanks and professional army with pistols. Besides when people were rounded up for camps they didn't knew they will die, it happened gradually.

You might want to look at what happened to the US in Vietnam...

Opportunity cost of gun control is huge for marginalized groups which cannot count on timely police response, or in worse cases, police response may increase chances of lethality.

See recent news on Atatiana Jefferson.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/13/20912212/atatiana-...

Why do gun control advocates never discuss disarming the police?

Because you can't disarm police while every criminal has a gun.

But, since every criminal will still have a gun (or near enough for police to claim such), that just means you can never disarm police.

Countries disarmed criminals with introducing gun control. It's not hard.

Criminals are rational beings - if there's minimal chance that the victim has a gun, and doing the same crime with a gun means much longer sentence, and you don't need the gun anyway - then criminals won't take guns with them, it would be stupid for them to continue using guns.

So if we make it easier for criminals to take the things we spent our life working to obtain. We are better off ?

You do realize theft is essentially stealing the part of your life you spent working for that thing ?

They catch them later anyway. Much better if they steal your stuff and go to the jail, than if you start a firefight and people get injured or dead?

How much you carry on you - 1000 USD? How much to fix perforated lungs? Will they even fix it completely?

The best solution to theft is to let it happen and retrieve the stolen goods later. Turning a theft into murder is the worst possible solution.

BTW Crime is less common in countries with gun control than in USA (admitedly - that's probably only partially caused by gun laws, much more important is the absurd lack of basic public services).

> The best solution to theft is to let it happen and retrieve the stolen goods later.

Just wondering - is the best solution to rape also to just "let it happen and deal with the rapist later"?

> BTW Crime is less common in countries with gun control than in USA (admitedly - that's probably only partially caused by gun laws, much more important is the absurd lack of basic public services).

Pretty sure that's a lie, or at the very least there are countries with strict gun control that are far worse than the US. Most of Central America, for instance.

> Just wondering - is the best solution to rape also to just "let it happen and deal with the rapist later"?

You're responding to someone who calls self-defense "murder", so I think the answer is rather obvious here.

There's a famous joke, about the Quaker standing at the head of his stairs at night, holding a rifle. Says to the thief in the room below "Friend, I wouldn't harm you for the world, but you're standing right where I'm about to fire this rifle."

Who's to blame for theft-turning-to-shooting?

Who cares about blame if 2 people die when they could both live?

> Why do gun control advocates never discuss disarming the police?

Of course you disarm the police. Police in Poland shoots less than 100 bullets a year (in action). Most don't even carry a gun, because there's no point in day-to-day service.

  likely to kill us -> Drowning

More children under 3 drown in buckets than are killed by rifles of all types (not just AWs).

I don't understand why advocates for gun ownership need always be painted as crazy or having some kind of bizarre inadequacy that necessitates gun ownership rather than something reasonable and logical.

The 2nd Amendment protects the rights of the people. It enables the populace to stand up to it's government and loudly say 'you work for us.' It's ideological.

Liberty comes at a cost. If you are free, you are free to succeed as well as fail. If you are free to own guns, you accept that there are those out there who will misuse this. It's part of the system. There are better ways to solve the problem than just taking away guns. We can try to solve the root of these problems. The people who are against so called 'assault rifles' end up supporting measures that will be essentially ineffective at solving any of the actual problems.

This is not unique to people who are anti-gun, but it is still foolish. Always putting band-aids on problems rather than fixing the root causes because it's easier to do a band-aid solution.

As a side note, firearms as self defense are an indispensable tool. For example, I for one support The Pink Pistols, which advocates for the gun ownership of marginalized LGBT groups.

I really identify with this article because I often have the feeling that if only people were just a little bit better at basic napkin-math probability, we'd avoid a lot of incredibly stupid discussions.

Great, right the way up to the ‘this is why schools don’t have meteor drills’ punchline.

School shooter drills are dangerous and damaging theater, and even though Guns are more likely to kill you than meteors, still are not justified.

Yes. What would really "demonstrate an understanding of statistics and mathematics" would be recognizing that death by mass school shooting and death by meteor are both extremely rare causes of death, and that spending school time on either is likely not a productive use of that time.

I mean, some schools spend more time on that stuff than they do on earthquake, tornado, or fire drills. On top of that, and as you seem to suggest, the "training" is almost uniformly very, very bad.

The (sometimes unannounced) murder drills make more sense if one assumes they have a different purpose.

Such as what, scaring students into obedience?

If so, then where's the opposition? It's completely unethical.

I never see statistic for simply "being shot", it's always about death, being shot is horrible even if you don't die... death is obviously a subset, so I wonder how large the full set is.

Need to include defensive use to have any relevancy. In addition to that number, often the knowledge that someone has effective means of self defense will prevent a criminal from attempting action.

https://www.xkcd.com/406/

I'd rather read about hash collision versus hit by meteor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com