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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

You can buy a gun easily enough. However the people who actually do that tend to be enthusiasts who are well trained. To have a loaded gun on your person you need to be well trained in most states.

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Again what do you base this on? I got a concealed carry permit after a 2 hour training class. During this class I had to fire a total of 6 rounds at a target ~15 feet away. I was not given any training on how to use the weapon, only a primer on the laws about when I can shoot someone. At no time did I have to demonstrate that I could safely bring my weapon from concealment to ready without shooting myself in the leg or a bystander. I can guarantee that of the 20 other people in my class, most of them did not meet any definition of "well trained".

"However the people who actually do that tend to be enthusiasts who are well trained" - based on what? You can buy a gun even if you have never fired one before.

Thirty percent of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun, while a larger percentage, 43%, report living in a gun household. - "https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

Is your argument that 43% of US households consist of well trained enthusiasts and the this is a small number?

> At no time did I have to demonstrate that I could safely bring my weapon from concealment to ready without shooting myself in the leg or a bystander.

It's not hard. If you pull the trigger, a bullet comes out (if the safety is off and if there is one in the chamber). So, simply don't pull the trigger until you are ready to fire a bullet. Most (if not all) people that buy guns, you included, understand this basic concept.

It's not like guns require massive amounts of experience to achieve proficiency. It's a simple tool, not a piano.

Pulling the trigger when you need to sounds like a simple problem in theory, but much more complicated in practice.

My uncle told me a story about when he was deployed to Afghanistan there was a designated area by the mess hall you were supposed to use to ensure your sidearm chamber was clear. Every once in a while, there was an accidental discharge and an officer would be seen over there sheepishly holstering their sidearm. My uncle pointed out that it wasn't required that you had to pull the trigger, just that you had to ensure the chamber was empty. My uncle said he never had a single accidental discharge in the 2 years he was there because he simply never pulled the trigger. If you don't pull the trigger, no bullets come out.

Meanwhile, this happens:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/police-off...

And this:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/03/19...

So soldiers trained by the US military would sometimes make mistakes with their weapon resulting in a discharge they were not expecting? Seems like perhaps its not so simple a tool after all...

That's like saying a knife isn't a simple tool since chefs sometimes cut themselves despite being trained to use them.

How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year, the least we can do is treat it with at least the level of respect we give other potentially deadly tools (hardly a piano).

Most gun owners give their gun that level of respect.

Car owners kill far more people than gun owners do not give much respect to how deadly their weapon is.

Car owners kill ~38,000 people a year. Guns kill ~15,000 a year (excluding suicides). There are roughly 20,000 suicides a year via firearm. I would argue that if you compared the number of cars driven on a daily basis in the us vs the number of guns fired, that guns cause far more deaths on a per use basis. Seems like Car owners are far more respectful of their 'weapon' on a per capita basis.

+1, on top of that

Car killing people -> mostly accidents.

Gun killing people -> mostly intentional.

> How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year

Unintentionally? I highly doubt that. I would guess the majority of the tens of thousands of deaths were the result of the gun owner intentionally pulling the trigger, not because they were bumbling around transporting it incorrectly, storing ammo incorrectly, etc.

According to this[1], only 500 people died in 2016 due to gun accidents. The rest were intentional.

[1] https://www.aftermath.com/content/accidental-shooting-deaths...

You do realize that 500 gun deaths alone would make headlines in most other countries?

500 accidents in a country with gun rights and a population of over 300M is nothing. You have like a 1 in a million chance of dying by a gun accident. Even lower if you don't own or use guns. It's a non-problem.

The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Don Diego de la Vega [indicating sword]: Do you know how to use that thing?

Alejandro Murrieta: Yes! The pointy end goes into the other man.

He's parroting NRA talking points.

> You can buy a gun easily enough.

All you need is to know some guy.

> To have a loaded gun on your person you need to be well trained in most states.

All you really need is to grab a loaded gun and conceal it about your person. No paperwork required.

The problem is not guns I think, it's the culture of violence, and fear. Don't Swiss families all have shotguns from the military in their homes?

That's not true. To go from a novice with absolutely no experience with guns to a person with a concealed carry license took one day of a seminar in a southern east coast state.

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