The Economist posted this anti-gun graphic on their Facebook page. As TTAG tipster MM pointed out, “What if America got rid of all cars? Or carbs? Or candy? Or swimming pools? Or sharp corners?” Not that America could get rid of its guns; there are at least 300 million of them out there, somewhere, and they’re not what you’d call a highly perishable item. Even if America did, somehow, disappear all its firearms, the forces that lead to these stats – mostly drug-related gang banging – wouldn’t disappear. In short, as the Brits say, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.
best comment on there:
Sam Robertson “Get rid of guns”
Yeah, like how we got rid of drugs?
They also forgot to mention the appearance of flying rainbow colored unicorns that sh1t gold nuggets. That’s just as likely as confiscating 300 million guns.
it’s almost as stupid as the war on terror, bike that can even exist you can fight a country, you can fight enemy soldiers but to take on a noun war. and just so I don’t get a hater I am pro military and pro anti terrorism but I guess I’m really anti-bs!
Wouldn’t it be safer to just get rid of people who would commit suicide???
That’s what’s really dangerous. Suicide takes the life of one, murder suicide is an unlimited proposition, and doesn’t need a gun.
I’m interested in protecting the people who are interested in their own tomorrow, so that there might be a possibility of them being interested in MY tomorrow, and my kids’ tomorrow, and your tomorrow. . .
Anyway, that’s going to require ‘guns’. If you don’t think so, you are a dumb POS, and I am not interested in your today.
I agree with you 100 percent! and statistics prove that people wanting to harm or kill themselves do so whether they have a firearm or a rope or a tall building or bridge to dive off of. if you look at the number of people that kill themselves in New York City vs Florida per hundred thousand people the number in New York City is much higher. now I know all the haters are going to say New York City is a lot different from Florida yeah but the bottom line is there is a hell of a lot more guns in Florida then in New York City! And if you plan on hurting yourself if one option isn’t available you’re just going to move on to the next its not like just because you don’t have a gun available to you you’re not going to kill yourself thinking that way is friggin ridiculous!
Lol. We’d also get rid of 150,000 to 1.3million defensive gun uses, most of which thwart violence without a shot. Speaking of shots, part of the 12,000 deaths and 84,300 injuries includes bad guys getting shot by police and civilian defenders.
Isn’t it interesting that only in America we include justified police shootings in our “gun violence” statistics. As far as I know no other country does that. It’s like when President Obama says we have a prison population problem that other “civilized” country’s like China and North Korea don’t have, and then you look at their number of executions vs the Connecticut Supreme Court putting an injunction on the death penalty yesterday..
nevermind those statistics, what about the four hundred and fifty thousand people every year that died from Dr making mistakes. you think you have a gun death problem you have nothing compared to the doctors that make mistakes and caused the deaths of almost a half a million people per year. never mind the how much money that cost with lawsuits, and malpractice insurance rates. and pain and suffering to the families that are left behind. so called gun violence has nothing on this country’s problem with medical care! get freaking real!
What if England got rid of the Economist? Billions of brain cells saved!
I got rid of The Economist, and I don’t miss it at all.
Eh, they’re still sore about that whole revolutionary war thing. Of course they want us to disarm, lol. They lost.
Get rid of doctors. They kill and maim more people in America than guns do.
Yes, they do — and by at least 10 to 1. And that only takes into account malpractice, when the “conventional wisdom” of doctors may kill even more people than their other screw-ups with a knife, medication or other activities.
The left complains about the NRA, when it should be complaining about a true force for evil, the AMA.
What if we got rid of Liberal ideology? think of how many lives we would save and how much money we would save.
in 2008 Dr killed 47,000 people there abouts. in 2014 they killed four hundred and fifty thousand plus people. what has changed? I’ll tell you Obamacare has forced so many doctors to use nurse practitioners to handle their patient load because it has tripled and sometimes quadrupled. Now instead of being treated by a doctor you’re being treated by a nurse and then she’s real and all of her findings to the doctor via the email Internet. that’s the kind of quality care you get with Obamacare. A bunch of people running around that don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. I’ve seen this personally and had to deal with it on a personal basis. Since 1978 I’ve dealt with the disease that I had to be in hospitals in and out my entire life. it’s a freaking nightmare to go to the doctor anymore first off the most the time they don’t even speak English as their first language so there’s a communication breakdown between patient doctor and pharmacist and little mistakes and punctuation kill people when your prescribing medications. that jump in deaths is completely unacceptable but you won’t hear the Obama administration talk anything about how many people there Obama Care program has murdered. they’re a bunch of hypocrites. they’re using genocide on the poor that can afford decent medical coverage and on the disease and sick people of our country. and last time I checked our constitutional rights are just as equal as any healthy person. It’s a travesty of justice and we should talk more about this in detail on this board aka site.
If somehow, guns were magically eliminated, the criminals would just start making them themselves. of course if they were only eliminated in the US, they would start pouring in from our “friends” across our southern boarder, and from overseas.
Absolutely correct. You can’t get rid of the concept of firearms, you can only shift manufacturing from domestic industry to overseas and backyard operations.
Heroin is almost exclusively imported into the US. Meth? People make it in their basements. The only thing bans did is shift production.
How many of these deaths are suicides , defensive gun usage and gang or crime related , how many are domestic violence deaths ?
Sure , you may transfer these statistics over to another column but the numbers probably wouldn’t go down much overall .
Number of suicides by hanging , prescription overdoses , drinking poisons increase .
Number of people injured or killed by assaults increase .
Number of people assaulted increases .
Number of people murdered with knives , axes, and baseball bats increase
Number of gang related deaths stay pretty even , methods change .
Number of people in movie theaters and churches killed by crazy people increase as killers change to gasoline and fire .
shoot you all they even include justifiable homicides in that number and justifiable self defense shootings involving police officers in that number if you get killed by a bullet it doesn’t matter how you go into that number category they’re a bunch of lying manipulative ignorant people, who are self serving in their cars for safety! they want us all to live in a rubber room with safety scissors! Lmao
I think we need to get rid of animated guns that shoot completely intact cartridges.
Also, it wasn’t long ago that the 12,000 was 16,000, and between the two firearm ownership has risen.
The lowest estimates by the most non-gun friendly organizations place annual DGUs, including those unreported and with no shots fired, at a MINIMUM of 50,000. That’s well above ALL gun deaths, including suicides.
The math is clear. From a purely cost-benefit POV, guns are beneficial. But of course, rational thought does not hold sway here.
Lets also not forget the context that homicides are trending down yet the amount of firearms is trending up.
What the hell happened to The Economist? This English rag has gone totally left-tard? I remember when they weren’t hard tard…
Ding Ding, yes! You are correct!
Then there’s Forbes. It’s disappearing down the same hole, as far as I’m concerned.
A lot of people seem to make the comparison between Dr. related deaths and gun deaths which is fine but really misses the point I think , I see how it makes somewhat of an analogy so I will throw out a bone to be picked .
What do you think the numbers will look like when the US fully implements it’s plan for preventive care medicine ?
Imagine 2.5 million people killed each year by medicine .
Man , I’ll tell you what , they x-ray you and find a dark spot you’ll die worrying about it if your not careful and if they decide to cut you open to see what it is , 50/50 you’ll see another year .
if America banned death, we could save millions of lives per year!
In some ways it might be nice if we saved lives, however the earth has exceeded it’s capacity to support human life, with any dignity. It gets worse every year. More lives saved, the bigger the footprint, figure it out!
Why does a UK publication care about what we do? It’s not as if US guns are flooding the UK.
What I want to know is where they get that $174 bln figure. That works out to $1.8 million per person shot. Somehow I don’t think so…When you add in all the other ills in this country, the medical industry would be in the trillions…
“34% increase in ALL causes of mortality.” because of doctors advising saturated fats are bad.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/saturated-fats-in-meat-and-dairy-produce-not-as-bad-for-health-as-previously-thought-study-finds-10450663.html
Teflon chemical, C8, is everywhere, in everything and will never go away. Yeah, it causes death, cancer and birth defects.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/
And here we are, talking about violating an inalienable right over 12,000 deaths a year.
You know how you sign all these documents when you go to a hospital absolving them of any wrong doing. I think I’m going to a lawyer and having them write up a document if I have to go to a hospital that they have to sign that if I die of anything other than what I am admitted for they are responsible for any and all expenses and damages, pain and suffering for my family and value of my life based on actuarial expectations of my life. That would be interesting.
Gun fatalities may be cost-effective.
The 1 page summary neglects to provides the cost basis and assumptions. Examples:
Fatal injuries / incident gives $1,552,381 for work loss; $28,741 for medical costs, $10,883 for mental health; $395,221 for criminal justice costs. Plus items like $163,488 in lost tax revenue.
Baffling how one incurs $10K of mental health cost per fatal incident or why it’s separate from medical costs.
Also interesting that *savings* were not determined. Examples: criminal justice savings / dead felon; societal savings / dead felon.
Plugging data into the RAND Corporation’s crime cost model (funded by DOJ), looks like fatally shooting bad guys provides a net economic benefit to society.
Model at http://www.rand.org/jie/centers/quality-policing/cost-of-crime.html
Whats really expensive to our country is the number of bathroom breaks (not joking) and smoke breaks gov’t workers take.
Smokers take 4 15 minute smoke breaks a day (we will assume 50 weeks of work because of holidays). 4×15 = 60 minutes a day = 5 hrs a week x 50 weeks = 250 hrs per year 31 days per year of extra paid leave and almost 10 extra days if you figure in one 10 minute bathroom break!
Though I disagree with them on guns, it is still the best, single, all around news mag
Kind of like Lenin was the best of the Communists….
A problem for all the print mags, is that those literate among their readers jumped ship a decade or more ago. Hence, they’re all stuck trying to cater to various congregations of less than so.
Say, slightly OT here, but relevant in that you have linked Economist’s FakeBook page, and the privacy conscious might like to know your location while “messaging” on FakeBook is known to those who are interested.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2015/08/12/harvard-student-loses-facebook-internship-after-pointing-out-privacy-flaws/zASZFdUjn6PoliUiR9kVHJ/story.html
It’s terrible we have some who spread this brainwashing to the general public. Shock value adverts are seldom accurate and always structured to inflame. Firearms are safe, it’s the operator, 99.999% criminal. The real problem is the Human Being. Can’t recall the last time I saw a dog murder anyone. Get rid of human’s!
Last time I checked, 12,000 was total murders. There were around 9000 murders with guns. So if we banned guns, 3000 people that were killed with blunt objects, knives and hands and feet would still be alive too? Amazing! It sounds like magic!
If we get rid of congress and the president, we would save 18 trillion, 344 billion, 768 million (and counting) dollars of bankruptcy debt. That would be a much better deal.
Dem gunnz killed all dem people on der own. Datz freakin crazy
What if Japan got rid of trains. Suddenly, thousands of people per year would no longer be able to commit suicide by train,,, right?
What if the US got rid of cars, hammers, swimming pools, bathtubs, and stairs too name a few other very dangerous things?
Jay, Don’t forget about getting rid of birth! No other thing can be as closely linked to all kinds of death than Birth! Ooooooppsie! Planned parenthood is hard at work to stop that cause of death.
“America got rid of guns?”
I’m no writer, like our esteemed Mr. Farago and associated wordsmiths… but is that supposed to be a sentence? Question of some sort?
Makes me sorry I already cancelled my subscription.
300,000 deaths per year are caused by obesity, and $190bn a year in medical costs. Just ban fatasses.
I don’t believe the $174 billion figure for a second. That’s $1.75 MILLION per person in medical expenses. I refuse to believe that is accurate. And some of these people are already dead, so no money is spent on them.