Guns set to surpass the car as america's top killing machine.





Guns kill a lot of young people in the United States. Not just in school shootings or horrific “accidents” between toddlers that tend to garner the most media attention, but in every day shootings in communities around the country that result in the deaths of thousands of children and teenagers.
In 2010, 6,201 young people between the ages of 15 and 24 died by gunfire. Guns were a close second to the leading cause of death among this age group, car accidents, which took the lives of 7,024 young people that year. But, while car accident deaths among young people have been steadily declining over the past decade, gun deaths have remained relatively unchanged. And, as described in a new Center for American Progress report released Friday, if current trends continue, gun deaths will surpass car accident deaths among young people sometime in 2015:[/img]

How can we explain these numbers? For car accident deaths, these numbers represent a significant victory. Deaths of young people as a result of car accidents have dropped dramatically in the last two decades, from a high of more than 12,000 deaths among this age group in 1990. This decline is not an accident: billions of dollars have been spent on public health and safety research to understand motor vehicle accidents and how to prevent them from becoming fatal. This research has resulted in design innovation, changes to cars and roadways, and new laws that have led to a significant and steady decline in such fatalities among all age groups, including young people. There was no silver bullet for reducing vehicular death: airbags, seatbelt laws, anti-lock brakes, better signage, and tough drunk driving laws all contributed to it. But, in combination these measures have saved tens of thousands of American lives.
For guns, these numbers represent an enormous failure. The United States has experienced a dramatic decline in violent crime over the last two decades, yet the rate of gun violence, particularly among young people, has barely moved. Why? We don’t know.

Unfortunately, since the early 1990s, very few public health researchers have been trying to find out. Restrictions on such research imposed by Congress have had a substantial chilling effect, which has resulted in the almost total abandonment of this issue by our nation’s public health research institutions. Without this research, policymakers, legislators, community leaders, and parents are left without much direction regarding how to best protect children and teenagers from gun violence.

As we approach that morbid milestone next year when gun violence kills more American children and teenagers than car accidents, it’s time to start approaching this problem in the same manner as we addressed car accident deaths. We know how to do this –-through a combination of public health research, technological innovation, legislative change, enhanced enforcement, and transforming cultural norms we were able to make motor vehicle transportation safer while at the same time preserving American’s unique car culture. We can do the same thing with gun violence by adopting laws and policies designed to prevent gun deaths while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/gun-deaths-versus-car-deaths/

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/americas-top-killing-machine/384440/

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/22/3320751/gun-deaths-surpass-car-accidents-leading-cause-young-people/

Let's take a moment look at the effect strict motor vehicle laws have had on public safety:



Even with these laws protecting us in place, still we lost 32,719 Americans - enough to fill a football stadium - to car wrecks in 2013.

That number could easily be ten times larger, if we had unscientific morons crafting public safety policy.

In my city over 20,000 have already been injured or killed by cars so far this year (January - June 2015).

I love when naïve libertarians describe their dystopia with absolutely no irony.

An eye for an eye?  Very barbaric, I like it. Takes us ethically back in time nearly 4,000 years to the Hammurabi Code. I take it you are quite devout in your chosen religion?

Actually, my chosen bureaucracy does a great deal to stop that. I'm a Champion level supporting member of Transportation Alternatives.

When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.

We're all brainwashed into one system of thought or another. Careful intellectual self-examination is what separates the wheat from the chaff.

First ignorance, then fear, then hatred, then violence.

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

There is no such thing as the "white race", and breeding will make nearly all human beings mixed race anyway over the next 2-3 generations.

Author nailed it.

People who are going to commit armed robbery in a major city are already operating on the [correct] assumption that 99.9%+ of the people they're robbing are unarmed.

Just like bank robbers, who know the tellers don't have guns under the window. There's a reason major cities have armies of LEOs numbering in the tens of thousands.

Only if CIA/NSA agents were somehow motivated to massively undermine the power of their own government.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/immigrant-pizza-delivery-man-murdered-boy-20-cops-article-1.2062896

This kind of shit happens all the time, nobody cares, poors are expendable and always have been. It's the default logic of our hierarchal civilization.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

There is no World War 3, such a thing is no longer possible with today's technology and politics.

Would you sacrifice hundred of thousands of american lives when there would be no need? Would the population, the troops themselves, and their commanders tolerate this needless waste of life?

This is 2015, anything you can accomplish with men on the ground, you can accomplish with far fewer casualties by using bombs. Sure, bombs cost a lot more money, but they've got their friends printing that.

You can't print human lives, that is a toll which can never be fully obscured or ignored. So onto WW3 we go, and our governments are compelled to avoid spending lives, they will naturally resort to spending money to win a bomb war.

Except a bomb war in 2015 isn't a war, not a winnable one anyway. It's the end of civilization, the only way to win that game is to not play. And everyone in power understands this, so I doubt we'll ever see WW3 unless there's mass famine, due to water shortages for example..

I believe I can address your concern about facts and sources.

The Brady Campaign site about gun violence, a top search result, is fully sourced.

One in three people in the U.S. know someone who has been shot.
On average, 31 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 151 are treated for a gun assault in an emergency room.
Every day on average, 55 people kill themselves with a firearm, and 46 people are shot or killed in an accident with a gun.
The U.S. firearm homicide rate is 20 times higher than the combined rates of 22 countries that are our peers in wealth and population.
A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.

More than one in five U.S. teenagers (ages 14 to 17) report having witnessed a shooting.
An average of seven children and teens under the age of 20 are killed by guns every day.
American children die by guns 11 times as often as children in other high-income countries.
Youth (ages 0 to 19) in the most rural U.S. counties are as likely to die from a gunshot as those living in the most urban counties. Rural children die of more gun suicides and unintentional shooting deaths. Urban children die more often of gun homicides.
Firearm homicide is the second-leading cause of death (after motor vehicle crashes) for young people ages 1-19 in the U.S.
In 2007, more pre-school-aged children (85) were killed by guns than police officers were killed in the line of duty.
Gun Violence is a Drain on U.S. Taxpayers

Medical treatment, criminal justice proceedings, new security precautions, and reductions in quality of life are estimated to cost U.S. citizens $100 billion annually.
The lifetime medical cost for all gun violence victims in the United States is estimated at $2.3 billion, with almost half the costs borne by taxpayers.
Americans Support Universal Background Checks

Nine out of 10 Americans agree that we should have universal background checks, including three out of four NRA members.
Since the Brady Law was initially passed, about 2 million attempts to purchase firearms have been blocked due to a background check. About half of these blocked attempts were by felons.
Unfortunately, our current background check system only applies to about 60% of gun sales, leaving 40% (online sales, purchases at gun shows, etc.) without a background check.

If I can't have my own private arsenal of nukes all this fuss about "rights" is just misguided moralizing bullshit about where everyone draws the line on personal firepower.

We have no rights, only privileges. When push comes to shove rights on a piece of paper don't matter anymore, the only thing that matters is that the government has tanks, Apache helicopters, F16s, and battleships. And you have your shotgun. It's beyond moronic.

If big gubmint really wanted to do you harm, it could. If they really wanted to take your guns, they could already do that right now.

Another reason I hate religion is because believing in a fictitious paradise in an imaginary afterlife holds humanity back from realizing the paradise of sexual promiscuity that is possible here and now, on Earth. This revolution our youth are already beginning to embrace in every city, as year after year marriage loses popularity.

Both are the Wheel. One was invented first.

Litecoin's existence-justifying premise - that bitcoin is "bad for environment" and litecoin is "lighter" is fallacious.

Litecoin has no reason to exist.

The difference between a socialist/anarchist and a libertarian/capitalist ultimately comes down to our differing view of human nature. We know that the universe is indifferent to our suffering, so our civilization ought to be sensitive to it.

As a student of science I hold that Homo Sapiens are neurologically hardwired for empathy and compassion, basically we want to be kind to one another by nature, and it is capitalism culture that poisons us against each other. Because pre-civilization life in Nature was extremely dangerous for primates, it is/was evolutionary advantageous for us to be bonded together extremely closely, a bond reinforced constantly by sexual pleasure from many different mates.

This argument is laid out far more articulately than I can here in Sex At Dawn:



Give it a read and contemplate what our lives could be, if we wanted. Spoiler: more and better orgasms for everyone, far less violent.

Guns were a suitable hobby two hundred years ago, when most of the human population was widely spread across many acres of rural farmland, and many dangerous wild animals were still around.
Guns are not such a good hobby now that the majority of the human population has been concentrated in major cities, and most of the dangerous wild animals have been culled or made extinct.

If you live on a farm with few or no nearby neighbors, sure.

Rational thought. I was raised Christian, I went to Sunday school every Sunday for months, I was taken to church with my parents throughout my childhood. My grandfather was a Deacon in his church, very involved in church matters.

I have been thoroughly exposed to the Bible and Christian thought. I have also been thoroughly exposed to modern philosophy and science. It's simple, really: Ideas fight for the right to exist in my mind, the weaker and less compelling (lack of evidence) ideas do not survive.

This is correct, the majority of murders are acts of passion and overall there is very low recidivism for this crime. Only a small fraction of all murderers are repeat offenders, the kind we call serial killers.

Quoted for wisdom.

Prisoners per 100k people: