General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Suicides involving firearms are fatal 85% of the time, pills less than 3%. [View all]Orrex
(67,108 posts)the actual danger of firearms is still downplayed by gun advocates when having the debate, even here on DU.
You can see it in discussions about a child dying in a locked car in summer time, or about someone drowning in a pool, or about injury due to ingestion of household chemicals. In every single thread on those subjects, a gun advocate will roll out statistics to declare guns to be much safer than a bottle of Windex.
It is reasonable to lump together suicides, accidental deaths and murders by guns when the issue in those cases is the lethality of the weapon. It's also appropriate to discuss the different causes and contributing factors of those fatalities, but as long as guns are claimed to be relatively safe, then I see no reason why we can't discuss gun deaths in the aggregate.