This costs about $10...and this costs about $10,000

[ConservativeDemocrat]

83. I'm not sure why ...

...you think there are more swimming pools in the U.S. than there are guns. This is untrue. There are considerably more guns in the US than citizens. You can't say remotely the same thing about swimming pools. And if you have one, the chance of a child dying due to it is massively higher than if you happen to have a firearm around. Period. Further, you can exercise reasonable precautions around a pool, and yet still have a child die in one. But even the slightest degree of non-idiocy regarding firearms renders them utterly harmless.

I certainly see why you are choosing "guns taken to the firing range" as your divisor for making an argument about gauging safety. If you don't, your argument falls apart. However going by that logic, we can make guns far more safe, simply by trucking millions of Americans down to a firing range and showing them around. It wouldn't change overall deaths, but it would make the deaths per firing range visit lower. (Let me also explain something else. Ranchers rarely drive to a firing range for fun. Shooting prairie dogs, to keep them from digging holes that cattle can break their legs in, is work; better work than many things you have to do on a ranch, but still work.)

The screaming about guns really comes from two things: 1] those few gun deaths from massacres we has are ripe for media exploitation, which naturally gives people a complete misunderstanding of risks in their day-to-day lives. And 2] It is yet another issue to let urban culturally-liberal Americans feel sanctimonious and superior over their rural brethren.

No news is ever run about the many hundreds of yearly deaths due to unbuckled children, but you can be absolutely assured that if they did, there would be a new "massacre" reported every month. We'd save far more children's lives than outlawing guns, by imposing a mandate of making every single car have to have a car seat built in, whether the buyer had kids or not. But that's not something that makes anyone feel smug about pushing, now is it?

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community