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Comment by Thrymr | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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