• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Quick! While you’re doing numbers, compare the number of times a gun didn’t “solve” that problem vs the number of times a gun was misused and someone died. False-negative vs false-positive. It’s just numbers and not relevant, but see how it goes.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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      1 year ago

      All we can go by are the overall numbers and how often guns are used illegally, either for suicide or offense, and it’s actually surprisingly small.

      There are over 474,000,000 guns in the United States, of all types.

      https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/

      On average, every year, there are 25,000 suicides by gun. 6 out of every 10 gun deaths.

      https://www.everytown.org/issues/gun-suicide/

      25,000 / 474,000,000 = 0.005274%

      So if 25,000 is 6/10 that means the other 4/10 is somewhere around 16,666. (25,000 / 6, *4).

      Of those, a further 800 to 900 are people shot and killed by police.

      https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

      Each death is, individually, a tragedy, but when you’re talking 474 million guns and 330 million people, it’s not a statistically significant number (0.003516% of guns and 0.005050% of people). There are a lot of stupid people out there and IQ is not a barrier to gun ownership.

      If the guns themselves were the sole problem, the number of deaths would be in the millions, not the low thousands.