“We believe that the American public deserve to understand that on the average, guns save 2,191 lives every day.” – Alan Gottleib, founder and Executive Vice President of the Second Amendment Foundation [h/t Guns Save Life]
“We believe that the American public deserve to understand that on the average, guns save 2,191 lives every day.” – Alan Gottleib, founder and Executive Vice President of the Second Amendment Foundation [h/t Guns Save Life]
Somebody tell that to 2Asux who can’t get past the 500 unintentional fatalities each year and still thinks the solution is to ban all guns.
Don’t worry, we have.
They don’t care.
Correct. To people with that blinded mindset 500 lives are SAVED with no guns and because the word saved was used in the sentence there is no possible downside. Besides, the 2,191 lives were not “lives” anyway because they were gun owners to begin with.
Guys, 2Asux isn’t anti-gun in the least. If you were to scour through articles dating almost two years back you would find his handle and pro-gun content accompanying it. He even spoke one time, if I remember correctly, on the nature of his name and the dichotomy of it. Believe me, I know that he can be an unrelenting pain in the ass, but, he basically gave me the thumbs up when I called him out on the real purpose of his postings. He, at this point, has become a hardened troll. Not because he challenges our notions, as he would tell you when we label him such, but, because he says the exact same things in his postings over and over and over again. It’s gotten quite nauseating. He needs to find a better use of his time if he really thinks he helping with the ‘stellar’ level of debating he has resigned to engaging us with. But, remember, 500 accidental deaths and whatnot. BAN EM ALL.
Googling your screen name and “the truth about guns” comes up with pretty much zip.
From that, I hypothesize you are either brand-new to TTAG, or posting under a different screen name than usual for some reason. For instance based on your writing style I could further hypothesize you are in fact 2ASux. If that is indeed the case … Wow, that’s just sad. If not, my apologies.
Not new here. Been reading for several years. New screen name. Nice to make a change ya’ know. Most assuredly not 2Asux. Apology accepted, though hard to after being accused of being 2Asux LOL.
My thoughts exactly. That is 2asux trying to rationalize his trolling. Common tactic.
Googling your screen name and “the truth about guns” comes up with pretty much zip.
It does. But if you use TTAG’s built in search it will produce every article you’ve commented on for the last 2-3 years.
peirsonb: When I try that for, say, my screen name, even in quotes, the list is very heavily populated by articles relating to john Lott. I’m flattered by the comparison, but I’m not him. Google, on the other hand, worked quite well.
I had a long debate in January or February this year about an outright ban of all firearms with 2Asux.
If he is isn’t anti-gun he has a weird way of showing it.
If you guys haven’t figured out 2ASux by now, I don’t know how to help you.
He’s an agent provocateur, who spends a ton of time crafting arguments that you/we should be able to readily counter. He is very much one of the good guys.
“…2Asux still thinks the solution is to ban all guns.”
2Asux thinks the solution is more voluntary, professional, recurring firearms training for all gun owners. Confiscation always lies in the background if all else fails. There is a difference between the two goal posts.
God forbid I should ever “get beyond” 500 unnecessary, negligent, irresponsible deaths from incompetent gun handling. May it be your pleasure to have to meet a family member of one of the 500 you so crassly dismiss as being “statistically insignificant”. (You do realize that you are “statistically insignificant” in the eyes of the person next to you, right?)
If you want to reduce “unnecessary, negligent, irresponsible deaths,” you would do well to campaign against household cleaners within children’s reach, unfenced swimming pools, stairways and electrical outlets, all of which kill more people each year than firearms related negligence.
I don’t give a jolly damn about any other life risk. This blog is about guns, period. Pointing to other risks is merely a weak attempt to say, “Well, that over there is worse, so when you cure cancer and bring world peace we can talk about guns”. Horse puckey. Stay on point. We are talking about gun safety, not life safety. Each life risk is worth its own blog entry (but not another gun blog). Attempting to divert attention from your own responsibility is pretty childish.
Weak sauce 2Asux, weak sauce.
According to the blog page, you issued this recent comment in response to Curtis in IL. Yet the comment referenced one of my inputs. You can imagine my confusion.
I apologize if the presence of your name wasn’t a big enough clue Scooby. Smartphones can be a little finicky at times.
Once the discussion thread reaches 3 levels deep, it’s basically impossible to reply to comments directly via web interface, because they simply don’t have a “Reply” link on them. The only way to do so is if you’re already subscribed to comments on the article, because then you can use the “Reply” link in the notification email – which is always there.
(Well, it’s possible to manually construct a reply URL for any comment, but that is beyond the reach of mere mortals.)
This just goes to show that WordPress sucks for comment-heavy websites, and the powers that be should really find some other, better platform that is more conductive to serious, drawn-out discussions.
2Asux:
“I don’t give a jolly damn about any other life risk. This blog is about guns, period.”
Your callous disregard for human life is duly noted.
You obviously don’t care about actually preventing death or injury, just controlling the instrument used to cause harm.
This blog is about guns, and we discuss many different issues as they come up.
You constantly and doggedly push nothing but negative aspects of guns under the guise of safety, which your aforementioned disregard for human life makes obvious as a weak cover for your deep disdain for legal private firearm ownership (i.e. trolling). When we address the larger issues of violence instead of only “gun violence” and safety instead of only “gun safety,” you scream about misdirection, completely failing to see the larger context which of course is our entire point.
Attempting to cast blame on those not responsible for violence or negligence is pretty childish.
If five people are shot and twenty people fall to their death from terribly maintained walkways, which is the bigger problem?
The original question was why automobile liability insurance is mandatory, and not gun owner liability insurance. Where in that question do you find room for demanding all other sources of accidental death and injury must be considered relevant to gun ownership?
As to my callous dismissal of all other sources of injury and death, it is not me who is fond of painting 500 deaths per year due to negligent gun handling as “statistically insignificant” and worthy of no further discussion. It is all the gun lovers who take that position. If you want to start a blog regarding improving safety for every other source of accidental injury and death, I would gladly support that move, and try to contribute there.
2Asux, the liability insurance question is another thread, and just as irrelevant to this discussion. You push the topic of liability, so we discussed liability. You screamed misdirection, again failing to understand the larger context of liability risk.
If 500 accidental deaths keep you so riveted to gun control, why can you so easily ingore the thousands of accidental deaths by other causes (drowning, falling, medical malpractice, etc.)?
Sheer ignorance?
How do your lungs handle that much sand?
Gun owners constantly work to improve safety programs and training, but people are people and some idiot is always going to find a way to injure or kill themselves or another with any object you can imagine.
You cannot push the topic of liability with guns while ignoring liability (or lack thereof) with every other object on the planet. That, again, is the larger perspective that you so pathologically fail to understand.
Some people are stupid, reckless, and endanger themselves and everyone around them.
Whether they’re using a gun, a car, a chainsaw, a propane torch, a riding lawn mower … the list goes on and on.
We always try to educate and train new shooters, but trying to transfer the responsibility for the negligence of others onto us is blatantly absurd and will not be seriously entertained by anyone with a modicum of sense.
If you honestly want to further the cause of gun safety, the NRA has several courses to train volunteers.
And nukes save 7.13 billion people daily.
Your point?
Not exactly an honest comparison. Guns saving 2,191 different lives during unique events each day is not the same thing as the same 7.13 billion lives being saved over and over again each day because war didn’t break each day.
Point taken. But fuzzy logic is still fuzzy.
It’s not all that fuzzy. A 40 year old has been indirectly saved once every day (14,600 times) by nukes. Most of those 2,191 had never been saved by a gun until they directly were at that moment. Probably never will again.
Characterizing each defensive gun use as a homicide averted is, at most generous, disingenuous.
Everyday people stop crimes against their person with guns, sometimes preventing serious injury or even death. The suggestion that every single incident is a fatality prevented holds precisely zero water under any kind of statistical analysis.
Shame on you Gottlieb. Childish bullshit statements like this make us look stupid.
How many of those failed, less than lethal incidents stopped someone before they could hurt someone else? We will never know.
I was wondering about that too. The studies we have seen in the past say that there are 500,000-3,000,000 DGU’s per year, not restricted to eminent threat of death. That would be 1,369-8,219 per day. His 2,191 per day comes out to 799,715 which is a strange number on the low end. At best he is claiming that 799,715 of the 3,000,000 are genuine life or death DGU’s. That’s 27% assuming the highest estimate is correct. I’m not ready to believe that intended mortality rate without some significant proof that probably doesn’t exist.
Looks like this guy is fudging the numbers in our favor as inaccurately as the anti’s fudge the numbers they report. Not good for our cause.
Looking at the rates for violent crime vs homicides it seems that you are probably correct; he’s probably using some 800,000 DGUs per year estimate and making the false conclusion that every one of those represents a live saved. Using the Uniform Crime Report from 2012, it seems that, if there are 3,000,000 DGUs a year, and each represents a potential violent crime that was stopped (using the UCR’s definition) then approximately 39,000 (~1.3%) of those would have been homicides. That is, roughly, 107 per day.
Yes, weapons due save lives, so aways carry!
How many lives did it save in 1945? How many of those saved went on to have children and so on?..
While he’s not wrong, I’ll never trust Alan again after he pushed for gun control TWICE.
Not to mention the completely unsupportable suggestion that there are over 700K DGUs per year.
DoJ is likely stretching it at 100K per year. 700K would be like we’re living in an action movie.
“Not to mention the completely unsupportable suggestion that there are over 700K DGUs per year.
DoJ is likely stretching it at 100K per year. 700K would be like we’re living in an action movie.”
What? There have been estimates that put DGUS at between 700k a year to 2 million a year for quite a long time. Also, like with the FBI UCR justified homicide stat, I’m pretty sure the DOJ stat is voluntarily reported by LEO agencies. And in a nation of ~350 million how is less than one million DGUs a year like “living in an action movie”?
I’m sorry, there’s no actual science for us to quibble about. The fact is that a few DGUs make the reported news every day. Those very few are the only hard science we have to analyze and extrapolate from.
It’s the nature of something that people see no reason to report, or, have reason not to.
There’s about 13MM licensed concealed carriers as of 2015. That one on 13 has a DGU every year is beyond ludicrous at face value, even counting all the home carriers (150MM) who had to defend themselves.
300-ish per day across the US is a pretty reasonable number, and sustains examination. Let’s even go ~1K per day, so 350-ishK per year. That there would be 1MM, let alone 3MM per year, would have us all living in North STL, or Chicagoland’s Southside.
Gottlieb is but another member of the money grubbing Ruling Class that runs things these days. He is a clone of every local, state and federal politician/lobbyist.
Well…maybe… But he’s got a cute little bow tie. Do you have a cute little bowtie?
https://www.google.com/search?q=alan+gottlieb&biw=414&bih=628&prmd=nvi&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCyfz23ePLAhUCuYMKHaf9B2gQ_AUIBygD
I was unaware of Gottleib’s pushes for gun control. When and what did he push?
I’ve seen the Second Amendment Foundation do far more in courts for 2A rights than the NRA, so I guess I’m just surprised that Gottleib would have helped the gun-grabbers.
Gottlieb (like most people in charge of anything) is a bit of a character, and often more than a bit shady. Convicted felon (taxes) served time in club Fed. The link is a bit long, but rather illustrative of Gottlieb’s bona fides…
http://www.sweetliberty.org/mof.htm
Gottlieb not only backed the Manchin-Toomey federal gun control bill, but a year later he started a completely independent push to ban private sales of firearms nation wide. That was when I ended my SAF membership after years of pushing people to join the SAF.
People who don’t own guns should have to carry mandatory life insurance. They will not defend themselves and why should society or their families have to absorb the financial hardship of their lack of preparation?
That’s an interesting point–including for those not currently supporting others: make it enough to cover costs of funeral, transportation, etc. so that immediate family doesn’t have to foot their bill. Why should we have to pay for their poor choice/unpreparedness?
I don’t think that the number is that high, but it does happen every day.
Even by the lowest estimates of unqualified anti-rights sophists like Hemenway, it’s at least 150 a day.
This out of a nation of ~318 million people, 87 – 124 million of which own or have ready access to guns and spread across 3,172 counties in 50 states, seems a bit low.
Like 16V said above, there’s no way you can claim that guns SAVED 2000 lives in the USA today.
If there were 2000 DGUs each, you can say that guns protected or helped to protect 2000 lives, but to claim that 2000 people are alive because of the daily tally of DGUs is to say that 3/4 of a million people would have died in a year’s time without those DGUs.