Why are people buying the line that this was driven primarily mental illness

[Pholus]

154. Son, you're bringing a knife to a gun fight. You should know better.

To your first worry, the upper end of my estimate was 100 million owners so don't get your knickers so knotted there. Besides at WORST that's just a factor of two. Not a factor of 40.

So let's see what cherry picking you're doing here:

1) Your number is only annually, an obviously incorrect assumption considering that most gun owners partake of the "hobby" for longer durations than just a single year.

2) I didn't see any of these specifics listed in your initial assertion.

3) You still neglect injuries. I guess you can't cherry pick those down quite as nicely.

But I'm feeling generous today. I accept your assertions for now. Even cooking your own numbers you're showing that you exaggerated your initial claim by at least a factor of 40.

See, 99.9999% is saying one in a million. 4,000 out of one hundred million is still 40 per million. Please be more careful. I suggest a good statistics class at some point -- it does wonders for realizing that numbers actually mean things and are not things just to sling like so much BS.

Now about your claim that these odds should be considered only over a single year. That assertion is ridiculous unless you can prove that gun owners voluntarily get rid of their guns after a year. Otherwise you have underestimated the CUMULATIVE effect of the odds.

So let's do this right, hmmmm?

So the odds you DON'T kill someone per annum is 1 - 40/1000000.

That sounds pretty good on it's surface I guess. That's like a
99.996% chance. That's per year of course. And only two orders of magnitude greater than your initial assertion even in your overly restrictive time period.

But that's where the cold equations come in. If you run those odds for
20 years, the net chance you still haven't killed someone is:

(0.99996)^20 = 99.92%.

I said 99.4%, you said 99.9999%. One of us was FAR closer to the truth on that one. And I am playing in your house by your rules on that one.

You have no argument on this. Additionally, I feel that the injury number is a far more important issue since it taxes the health care system to a greater extent. Please feel free to try to cherry pick those numbers down too.