In your original comment, you stated:

> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.

The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.

Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.

Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.

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huimang 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Is the context of this discussion unclear to you? Do I need to place conversational guard clauses for you? Or are you just interested in nitpicking? Do I really need to clarify that there are other ways of dying or getting harmed, including other ways of being shot, that have nothing to do with this? Do I have to preface every comment with an obvious disclaimer?

Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to someone, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.

But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.

> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.

Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.

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ElProlactin 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur...

Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?

> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.

The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.

You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".

But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/

Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:

https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/gun-violence-statis...

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huimang 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"?

Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature". Talking about whether or not guns should legally be ownable by citizens is an entirely different discussion.

> Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.

Again, over 349,000,000 people. You do the math. Tons of car accidents, yet the world moves on and literally every adult I know, who doesn't live in Chicago/NYC/[rare place that's walkable + can afford it], drives. Find someone or something to blame for the geography of the country. Are we debating infrastructure now for a country the size of the US?

In any case, it does seem that you are capable of understanding what I meant by the original statement. It seems like all you want is to quibble over slight semantics in phrasing, and lecture someone who actually has lived in the US about how dangerous it really is. Have a day.

	▲	ElProlactin 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature". And a person using a gun to kill someone else is a "random act of god/nature" how exactly? For someone who seems very confident of his knowledge of statistics, here's one for you: ~20-30 people die from lightning strikes in the US every year. Based on the averages, 4-6x that number died due to a gun yesterday alone. I'm an American. Born and raised in one of the largest cities. I know at least half a dozen people who have been robbed at gunpoint, dated a woman who had been terrorized by a gun-nut ex, and one of my closest friends lost his father to suicide. With all due respect, there's nothing more callous than believing that something doesn't impact vast numbers of people (proven by empirical evidence) simply because you apparently haven't experienced it yourself. > Have a day. You sure are pleasant.
	▲	15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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