The chances of meaningful gun legislation either nationally or in more than a handful of states is remote for the foreseeable future. Nor can anyone expect a national public health campaign comparable to the “Friends Don’t Let Friends, Drive Drunk” government effort that played a key role in reducing drunk driving deaths by 50% over the past 30 years.
Ralph Fascitelli
Board president of Washington Ceasefire,
February 26, 2017
Smart guns in police holsters
[Via Say Uncle.
Fascitelli compares gun ownership to drunk drivers? Yes, that’s really what he thinks of you.
So, he wants to talk about accidental death reduction over the last 30+ years? Okay, I’m game. Here is the data I downloaded from the CDC on accidental firearm deaths.
From 1985 to 2015 the total number deaths dropped from 1649 to 489. A decrease of over 70%. And if we look at the death rate instead of total deaths it went from 0.69 to 0.15 per 100,000. That’s a drop of over 78%. And that’s without a government program.
I can’t say that it is cause and effect but the NRA Eddie Eagle program (gun safety for children of any age from pre-school through third grade) was developed in 1988. And there was a big push for more NRA firearms instructors in the mid 1990s.
But don’t expect Fascitelli to want to talk about the successes of the private sector or gun organizations. It’s not about safety. It’s about government control.—Joe]
He’s quite wrong. We do have meaningful gun legislation being passed. For example, NH just passed Constitutional Carry.
Car companies were putting airbags, seatbelts, antilock brakes in cars decades before govt mandated it.
Not so sure about air bags, but I agree with the rest. Air bags were always a rather weird notion, the idea that having explosives in the passenger compartment was a good thing. It appears that it can be, if the pyrotechnicians are competent. Not if they work for Takata.
Death rates suck as a metric for anything involving human injury. There are sooooo many factors between “injured” and “dead” in car accidents, and between “wounded” and “dead in firearm shootings, that a more reliable measure of change is how many accidents with injury there are for cars, and how many shootings total there are.
But what about those injured but didn’t seek medical attention? And those that do seek medical attention (“I bumped my head when I when in the ditch when the road was icy”, or “I got a burned from the cylinder gap flash on my revolver”) how many get reported such they end up in a single database somewhere?
I suspect all stats of this nature will have serious issues.
ACCIDENTAL shootings, yes. Not total shootings.
Unfortunately the numbers for accidental shootings are much softer than for accidental shooting deaths.
Both numbers need to be on that graph.