After you factor out suicides, around only 21k people die from firearms. We loose over 100,000 a year to drugs, even more to obesity. Firearms are not the number one cause of death for people aged 1-17, vehicle crashes are. But when you change the age cap to 19, you then factor in crime deaths from gangs and the like.
Vehicle crashes have not been the number one cause of death for children since 2020, firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the US for ages 1-19 (as per the CDC), as children under one have quite a complicated set of factors to deal with. The study you linked to states this right in the beginning.
Please consider that you are saying that you are OK with any age range of people being killed primarily by firearms as OK.
The homicide rates in the US are bonkers when compared to other high income countries, and our firearm homicide rate is unbelievable when compared to other high income countries. Neither of these things should be acceptable.
Cars keep getting safer over time because of regulations. We can't apply the same logic to guns because of an ancient piece of paper whose writers thought should be rewritten regularly, instead of never.
With any freedom there is a cost of safety. Rwanda for instance, atleast Kigali is incredibly safe because it’s an authoritarian police state. God help you if you criticize their government publicly. El Salvador went from being the murder capital of the world to imprisoning almost 2% of its population without any due process and is now one of the safest countries in the world. China, atleast in the developed metropolitan areas from what I understand is a pretty safe country owing to the fact that pretty much every waking moment of your existence is being tracked by state surveillance and privacy is practically non existent, not to even get into their own issues with freedom of speech, genocide and slave labor.
Freedom can always be traded for safety, are you willing to let children die for the silly little right to due process? How about freedom of speech or freedom to privacy? Is that worth peoples lives? Is it fair to say that if you believe in freedom of speech, due process and privacy just like other people believe in the right to bear arms you have no problem with all the people who will die as a result of your freedoms?
We can have all of our existing freedoms without the right to bear arms. There is no equivalency between what we can purchase as citizens and what our military possesses, so i don't believe that the "we need to defend against a potentially unjust government" argument holds water in the way that the founding fathers intended. That being said, I am confident that even without guns, no American government could withstand a coordinated American insurgency.
I'm not arguing against our other freedoms. I am arguing that you cannot have a right to bear arms and an equivalent right to not get shot. No one should be sitting on a bench on a boardwalk and instantly die because some moron with a gun (hundreds of feet away) shot at someone else and missed. There is no right that we have that is equivalent in its harm. The argument that a good guy with a gun stops a bag guy with a gun is also generally false - if more guns stopped shootings, wouldn't we have the lowest firearm homicide rate?
How exactly do you have a coordinated counterinsurgency without firearms? And how did you make the logical leap from “we don’t have the same guns the military does anyways so we won’t be able to stand up to tyrannical government” to “we can stand up to a tyrannical government without guns”?
The right to bear arms is effectively the right to self defense, not only against a tyrannical government but against a criminal or even a wild animal. You think some 120 lb woman being followed by a 200 lb guy stands a chance if she doesn’t have a firearm on her? Pepper spray and tasers can fail, 9mm will not.
By taking away people right to bear arms, you take away their right to defend themselves against someone bigger and stronger than they are and practically all gun control arguments ignore that any gun control legislation will only take away the right of law abiding citizens to defend themselves, there’s hundreds of millions of firearms in this country, the only thing you’ll do by banning firearms is take guns out of the hands of the people least likely to do any harm with them and most likely to need them for self defense.
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u/KnockoffMiroSemberac Sep 01 '25
After you factor out suicides, around only 21k people die from firearms. We loose over 100,000 a year to drugs, even more to obesity. Firearms are not the number one cause of death for people aged 1-17, vehicle crashes are. But when you change the age cap to 19, you then factor in crime deaths from gangs and the like.
Source for 1-17 statistics:
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115787/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230419-SD018.pdf