If you believe Pit Bulls are inherently dangerous animals, & you support BSL to ban them

[Donald Ian Rankin]

153. The Zs are irrelevant, although the Ys are not

When doing a cost-benefit analysis, the relevant thing to compare is "cost to gun owners", not "number of guns".

I submit that putting 5 x 10^7 people to the inconvenience of losing their guns is probably a price worth paying to save e.g. 2x10^4 * lives per year plus many more injuries - you're inconveniencing about two thousand people per life saved per year (*not* "about a thousand people per live saved), and for the vast majority of those the inconvenience will be small.

I submit that putting 10^8ish people to the inconvenience of losing their dogs is not a price worth paying to save 20 lives per year, plus injuries - especially given that the suffering to the average dog owner from losing their dog will be much greater than the suffering to the average dog owner from losing their dog will be far, far greater than the suffering to the average gun owner from losing their gun.



*Obviously, the claim that UK-level gun control would result in a two-thirds fall in gun deaths could be challenged in either direction - my guess is that it's an overestimate in the short term (there will be a lot of guns not handed in initially) and an underestimate in the long term (the ratio of gun deaths in the UK to the US is significantly higher than that), and I'm not confident of either of those. But given that I'm only working to orders of magnitude, it will serve.