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Comment by katbyte | Hacker News Reader

Scared of guns or not, they seem to be willing to put "guns" before lives. children's lives. Unwilling to make even the smallest compromise to prevent mass shootings like so many other countries have.

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It feels like gun-owners in the US hav made lots of compromises about weapon ownership. I feel like saying otherwise is dishonest.

To be honest, many potential murders sacrifice themselves so much that I can live safely. I really should have thanked them for not killing me.

There are plenty that think any compromise is anti 2A. And the amount of compromise is wildly dependent on state.

This is my point - people are dying. Lots of people. Children. And your response is “we’ve made enough compromises NO MORE! Let them continue to die” because your gun is more important then 100s of children's lives each year.

1000 kids a year die because of cars, are you putting cars before kids lives by not outlawing them?

We have many laws and regulation in place to lower children MV deaths. This includes things like seat belt, booster seat, child seat expiration and couple zones, and rollover protection.

The fact of the matter is that

“The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age. Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group. From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (suicide, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5% — more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population.”

So outlawing vehicles is not proposed but laws, and regulation to control risk appears to be effective.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

And with all of those laws and regulation, still 1000 kids a year die. So, again, why are we choosing cars over kids lives?

Well, we aren't. We are applying cost benefit analysis, which is subjective. Society agrees pretty uniformly that motor vehicles are worth the risk. It's the same with guns, there just isn't as much of a consensus. Some people thing the risk is worth it, others don't.

If you frame it as a binary right and wrong based on your own risk tolerance rather than making genuine arguments for certain trade offs you aren't having a good faith conversation, which is what I was satirizing.

I agree, further to this line of thinking I’m not really seeing how widespread adoption of arms by the general public has as many benefits as private vehicle ownership. Apart from environmental externalities, we know the cost for one is higher in terms of strict mortality… to that end shouldn’t the social utility of fire arms be higher? I can use my car to get my kids to school at least.

Perhaps we go in on a startup to modify the AR platform to distribute COVID tests or vaccines?

> I’m not really seeing how widespread adoption of arms by the general public has as many benefits as private vehicle ownership.

If you listen to gun fanatics, the benefits of widespread arms ownership is a government scared to overstep. How much that is worth to you depends on how much you worry about the government infringing on your rights, and how much you think guns being around prevent that.

I personally subscribe to that ideology to a degree (not full tilt, but somewhat). The US has the oldest constitution, and that's arguably only possible if the federal government hasn't pissed us all off too much :P

I never said outlaw, I said compromise. Are school speed zones not a thing in America? Child seats? Speed limits? Cross walks? School crossing guards? All the other steps taken to make cars and the roads around schools and playgrounds safer?

We all recognize cars are dangerous and there are laws and regulations to combat that.

We gain massive societal benefit from the existence of cars, what equally large societal benefit is gained from the easy availability of firearms?

Well they said nothing of entirely outlawing guns, but yes a lot of people put cars before kids’ lives and I would like to see that change.

No one is driving SUVs down elementary school hall ways

So it's only bad if kids die in school? If the same number of kids were killed every year by gun violence, but there weren't any school shootings, then there wouldn't need to be any change?

No of course there still needs to be a change. Your comparison falls apart because there isn't a epidemic of targeted violence against children using cars, while there is with guns.

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